This appears to be some way in excess of Steven Hester earnings this year.  Yet no-one is baying for the footballers’ blood.  One famous London team’s performance this season has led some to bemoan the club’s financial prudency and begged for serious money to be spent on expensive players to improve that performance.  Much the same argument is used for high salaries for CEOs who are expected to deliver winning performances.

If a few banks collapsed because they could not attract an effective CEO, we would all be plunged into economic meltdown.  If a couple of football clubs went down the tubes, we’d be sad, but we’d get over it.

If Labour are going to initiate a Parliamentary motion on salaries, perhaps both bankers and footballers should be included.  After all, performance related pay would be easier to calculate for footballers, and might then provide a benchmark for all professions?

I’d vote for the political party that was prepared to fight the issue on this comprehensive basis, as they would be brave indeed.

The time when SMEs need credit is when the banks lending criteria are squeezed to the point of virtual drought. It’s only now the economy is starting to move that banks will once again lend, and even now, not enough. Credit availability is the biggest fueller of economic recovery, but banks will only relax lending criteria once each stage of recovery is seen (retrospectively) to be under way.

Which is chicken, which egg? Why is government not offering SME credit, where banks will not lend? And to a much larger extent than the equity lending being offered through the newly announced Business Growth Fund.

Or is government equally afraid of losses and defaults as the banking system?

If you’re still in the throws of planning and willing to adapt to market movements, this vlog is a must watch.

Enjoy and have a very Merry Christmas and wish you a prosperous New Year!

]]> http://www.lindsellmarketing.com/index.php/we-think/vlog-top-marketing-tips-for-2011/feed 0 http://www.lindsellmarketing.com/index.php/we-think/the-irony-of-social-media http://www.lindsellmarketing.com/index.php/we-think/the-irony-of-social-media#comments Thu, 11 Nov 2010 14:41:51 +0000 Dina Morton http://www.lindsellmarketing.com/?p=686 Social media has become an obsession.  I feel as if the media has gone mad about it, with articles being published here, there and everywhere analysing the ‘power of social media’.  Well I stumbled (via a social media recommend) across a neat little video that explains all this far more effectively than any of the articles or blogs I’ve read, whilst also showing us how it has become the centre of the regular punter’s universe and penetrated every day life.

The central point of this video is how Facebook and the like become all consuming.  Your friendships and relationships are just as digital as they are ‘real’.  The more you use it, the more you propagate it, despite its sometimes negative consequences (queue the girlfriend dumping the central character) .

The one thing that makes this so clever is not actually the video itself but the effect of it.  Bearing in mind the point its making, the irony of producing such an effective video on social media platforms, like this video, is that it will inevitably go viral.  People will pass it on, show their friends, and yes, blog about it. Therefore, I feel really rather cliché for (a) having found this on a social networking site and (b) for doing what I’m about to do – but as it’s so good, have to share with you.  What this does prove however is that video or any other media really does rely on good content and clever concepts for the viral phenomenon to happen.

Watch and enjoy … and if you want to be part of the cliché why not share it too!

Stay tuned for more from the Lindsell team!

If got right, the tagline can be an effective and memorable device that is a true reflection of what your company does and your brand values. If got wrong, it could be the business world’s equivalent of an awful bar-side chat-up line.

While a number of great consumer taglines spring to mind, it seems to be more of a challenge to get it right in the B2B environment and so easy to go off message. Take for example the tagline for IPEX 2010 – the international print exhibition that happens every four years:

Perfect time. Perfect place. One unique opportunity.

This is just a bit too cryptic. It doesn’t tell us what the event is all about. There’s no mention of print or communications anywhere here. One unique opportunity starts to say something but if you didn’t know what IPEX is all about then the audience is left thinking, “One unique opportunity for what …?”

In the B2B world, marketers have the challenge of competing with their consumer counterparts whose brands and products naturally lend themselves to more catchy, funny, or even ‘sexy’ lines. The B2B remit however is more complex and tone will most likely remain businesslike. Yet there’s so much scope for effective tagline creation.

Working with a specialist agency who understands the B2B and vertical landscape is important. A good tagline that reflects your core value proposition and cutting edge principles can often be a perfect springboard for consistent messaging across all your content. And as we all know, “content is king”.

I booked a well-deserved holiday this month and conducted all of my destination research online. How antiquated the thought of browsing through dog-eared brochures in a High St. travel agency now feels. Online I was able to search on price and location, view videos of possible accommodation, read reviews from other travellers – everything but dip a toe in the pool.

However, one common niggle kept distracting me like a persistent Mediterranean mosquito. Too many websites offered inadequate translations.

The language choice would be given – click the union jack for an English version. But once clicked, the resulting text read as if written by a Spanish waiter who’d learned English from touring stag parties. And that was just the French websites!

I have no doubt that many UK holiday companies are just as poor in this respect as their European counterparts. In fact, I wonder how many even offer a translation? And yet, in a world made smaller by faster, cheaper travel, what price this fudging of the language issue? How much lost business results?

Badly written English certainly made me feel less confident about spending my money with the holiday operators in question. I imagine foreign tourists feel the same about the English equivalents. At a time when every business is fighting tooth and nail for market share, surely it’s not too much trouble to find a native-language speaker to check and double-check text?

Once again, it all comes down to content. You might have the finest product known to man. But if the words you use to describe it are poor, your sales will undoubtedly suffer.

Now, where did I put those Speedos…

This must be welcome news indeed for News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch, who would have begun to feel just a little alone on a very high limb after announcing last August that his newspapers were planning to start charging for content.

But now The New York Times, arguably the most famous and influential daily newspaper in the United States, has said it is formulating plans to introduce a system in 2011 that will provide readers with a limited amount of free content and then start charging them.

Now that the NYT has weighed in, both Murdoch and the New York paper’s proprietors, the Ochs Sulzberger family, will be hoping desperately that others in the industry will follow suit.

Since buying The Wall Street Journal in 2007, Murdoch has warmed to the business paper’s highly successful paid-content web model but his News Corp has yet to take any concrete steps to roll it out to its other newspaper brands, which include the New York Post and The Times and The Sun in the UK.

Nonetheless, Murdoch has clearly signalled what just about everybody in the media and marketing industry already knew: that newspapers are haemorrhaging readers and are failing to migrate advertising revenues to their sister web brands.

This is a fundamental problem for the industry. With more people – particularly younger readers – turning to the web for their daily dose of news and information, as well as content that informs and helps them in their working lives, newspaper brands have to make their online operations start to pay. And they have been singularly unsuccessful at doing this.

Unfortunately, a decade of free newspaper launches, the emergence of Google and loads of free online content available on websites run by the media owners themselves have conditioned the great mass of readers consuming daily news to believe that content is a free commodity – water from a well that they should be able to dip into and drink from any time they want at no cost.

Of course, as Murdoch himself has pointed out, there is a great cost to producing useful and credible content. To start, for each article there is the digging, the research, the filtering of information, the interviewing of sources, the checking of facts and the distillation of all this material into a digestible story. That all takes a great many man-hours put in by trained, professional journalists.

That has to be paid for and online advertising is just not cutting it as far as revenues go, so Murdoch, the Ochs Sulzbergers and most likely a number of other bigtime newspaper publishers are looking at the paid subscription model as a possible salvation.

The trouble is they need everyone in the newspaper business everywhere to buy into the idea of charging for content – and of their own accord, as anti-trust authorities won’t like them to hold a big board meeting like a bunch of James Bond villains and decide to cut off free content collectively.

If readers can simply click onto another site or search through Google and get very similar content for free, then those that are charging will find themselves with very few readers very quickly. And in the UK there is the prickly issue of the BBC website, which has its own remit and the license fee – and certainly does not seem to be positioning itself to charge for content any time soon.

Of course, many in the industry will worry that ultimately readers won’t pay for content anyway. It is one thing to get the investment community and financially motivated individuals to pay for access to the business coverage in the online archives of The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, but will they pay for general news, human interest stories, sports, or arts and entertainment?

It remains a leap of faith – and a big gamble – for the newspaper owners that go for the paid online model. A media brand that starts charging for content risks completely eroding a following on the internet that it would have spent years building. But with online ad revenues coming up short while the newspapers shed readers and advertisers on the print side, do the owners really have any choice at this point?