The Joy of Marketing part II

Some naughty and troublesome souls have suggested that my last post presented marketing people in a very bad light.

It is further insinuated that I then paid a gratuitous compliment to our own marketing team in a desperate attempt to claw back the lost goodwill.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Our team are consummate professionals and always willing to get into the spirit of any occasion,witch often involves dressing up.

If you want to see more, head for Blenheim Palace tomorrow for Ghosts in the Gardens….

Scary…

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The joy of marketing

What is the right collective noun for a group of marketing people?

I pose the question having spent an enjoyable day with ALVA (the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions) at their annual conference, a gathering mostly comprised of representatives of the marketing teams of the afore-mentioned venues.

Collective nouns fascinate me – my favourite examples include:

• A corps of anatomists
• A conjunction of grammarians
• A clique of photographers
• An aggregate of geologists
• A brace of orthodontists
• etc

So, what is the bond that binds marketing people? Does it give me a clue for their rightful collective noun? They are certainly an extremely positive bunch.  That is pretty much a requirement of the job.  In that respect, they represent a complete opposite to my own profession, in which appreciation of risk (ok, outright pessimism) is an invaluable attribute. So it is probably natural that I would feel slightly bemused having spent significant time in their company.

I am probably not on my own – I can fully understand Sir Alan Sugar’s perspective on marketing (“I've written books on advertising... cheque books”).  Yet, before I choose a collective noun, I have to accept that this is a year in which “they” have been right and I have been completely wrong.

I thought, given the economic backdrop, that 2009 would be a year of retreat for visitor attractions. Short term, it clearly wasn’t so.  More than 3/4 of ALVA members reported growth in 2009 and almost all of that was done with reduced marketing budgets.  The only significant falls come from known external factors – some Liverpool attractions have seen falls from a 2008 high driven by their status as European City of Culture.  “Stay-cation” was one of the buzzwords though, as Alan Love from BDRC pointed out, it has been less a question of people cancelling treks abroad and booking weeks in Scarborough, and more a question of people not holidaying at all – instead taking more local days out. I didn’t expect that so, there it is, I was wrong. I am one of a “sum” of accountants (not a “snooze” of accountants, as one unkind soul suggested…) who were too pessimistic.

To a last man/woman, our marketing rivals see only a possibility of growth next year. Can this be true? I would estimate that the average impact of stay-cation has been +15% this year. That seems to be a fair consensus and means that, if an attraction did less than that, they underperformed.  The marketing team for anyone who did more than that deserves credit.

But will stay-cation endure? There seem to be three possibilities:

1. life gets worse.  People stop going out.  Stay-cation dies.
2. life gets better.  People go to find the sun.  Stay-cation dies. (but we may make up some visitors elsewhere)
3. life stays where it is. People do the same things.  Stay-cation lives.  Hurray! (but no further growth)

I could bore you all (unless you are part of the snooze) on the reasons why things might well get worse out there in the greater economy.  But, you’re lucky – I don’t have to. I only have to point out that, as with 2009, there is a measurable risk of either points 1 or 2 happening. If either one happens, we have to brace ourselves for a dramatic downturn in visitor numbers and any marketing plans (indeed any expenditure plans) should be built to recognise that possibility. 

Listening to the folks at the ALVA conference, this was clearly not the case, with the exception of the publicly-funded museums where the economic dynamic is different (free entry for all but the prospect of the government axe falling on their expenditure budgets means that they have to contemplate what they would do with cuts of 10% or more).

So, should my chosen collective noun for marketing people recognise “short-sightedness”? (A blur of marketers?)Well, that would be a bit daft of me given my predictive accuracy of the last year.    People in glass houses etc.

It was notable that the biggest murmur of appreciation came when the National Trust’s  successful decision to ramp up marketing spend in 2009 was highlighted as if it was the model for all of us. Get real! They have a very different attitude to risk from the rest of us for very good reason.  A single bad decision on marketing (or anything frankly) is not going to bankrupt NT.  Or result in enforced redundancies.  That simply isn’t the case for the rest of us. They will have been incredibly rigorous in their decision-making process but their risk profile is just different.

There was clearly a yearning to follow NT’s path, balanced by a knowledge that it probably wasn’t going to happen.

Realism? Well, maybe.  No-one was really going to change their marketing strategy (ourselves included) for next year – there was a feeling that “it” had worked very well. But what if the year’s success really did come down to a stay-cation phenomenon? In that sense, we have not been successful at all.  It is one thing to take share from a static market (good marketing); it is another to simply drift up in a growing market (wasted marketing).

No-one wanted to talk about this.  Like I said, everyone sees only growth next year. So, optimism does seem to be the enduring trait amongst marketing people.

As, I have to say, is talking.  A “gaggle” maybe?

Having said that, looking at our own excellent team (Hannah Payne, Victoria Bellamy and Ulrika Ericson who have achieved 50% growth this year!!! Eat that, NT) are a distinctly sociable bunch so perhaps I should settle on a “bevy” of marketers. That would apply quite fairly to the lovely bunch at ALVA, who in the tradition of all marketers enjoyed the celebratory wine put out for lunch at the conference….. Tell me you didn’t see that pun coming.

Still, I’ve learnt my lesson from last year and from now on I refuse to be too negative:

All copyrights acknowledged and please do go to the Dilbert website for more of these!

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Water, water, everywhere

On Wednesday, I circumnavigated the M25. I’m told that, when it opened, people used to try to complete the circuit in an hour.  I would judge that rather more difficult today.  Anyway, my Honda which passed its 100,000 miles minutes after my last blog is now well past its 101,000 miles.

(I know the above is a rubbish picture but the key point here is that, after complaining two weeks ago about my inability to position pictures using the blogger.com interface anywhere but at the top of the post, I thendiscovered Microsoft Live Writer.  This is a free application which is part of Windows Live and can easily be downloaded from http://download.live.com/writer.  It is a cut-down word processor especially designed for blogging (offline!) but it links easily to your blogging account so that you can easily preview and play with layout just as if you were in something like Word.  Anyway, the above picture is not at the top of the post and nor will the next one be!)

What drove me to such levels of tedium?  (I refer to the M25, not to the geek-speak in the last paragraph. But I understand the possible confusion.)

Well…. for that, I need to tell you a story!

Blenheim Palace Natural Mineral Water is an important business for us.  The water course runs under the Palace and then flows across the estate towards Combe and beyond.  There are actually two water courses (deep down and about 10m apart) under the park.  We use the deeper one as it has a more distinctive taste – the higher one apparently tasted like Hildon!  It is a very stable supply, allowing us to claim the hallowed status of Natural Mineral Water.

The first bottling plant was actually at the Palace.  A wise veteran of the water industry (John Odell) had uncovered the water course and arranged to test it.  He and the Duke quickly went into a partnership which runs to this day.  Initially sold locally, the demand for the  water quickly outstripped the capacity of the plant, so the decision was made to follow the path of the water course and build a better water plant down at Park Farm, in the heart of Blenheim Park.  There, a much larger plant was built to fill glass bottles, and a second line was added to fill the large 19 litre bottles you see on top of commercial water coolers.

With the prestigious bottled water mainly sold into high end hotels and restaurants in London, the business has grown to a much larger size, selling over 2.5 million bottles a year. The local market has grown recently too, as Oxfordshire hotels and restaurants have become more sensitive to the environmental implications of shipping water from Scotland – or even, Lord help us, Fiji!

Blenheim Palace Natural Mineral Water drank in Oxford will not have moved more than ten miles in its life – and unlike mains water, it won’t have been through the human body seven times either. Go to our website for details of suppliers. PLEASE!!

Anyway, when I was appointed as Finance Director back in 2003, John (our CEO) thought it would be very funny to put me in charge of the water business (“oh, don’t worry, you’ll enjoy the P&L responsibility.” Ha!). In the run up to a trustees’ meeting, I have little time to spend on that business so I tend to over-react afterwards and run around to see customers etc.

Now, bear in mind that I am a simple Northern boy.  In the North, cities have a centre.  They’re not too big.  You can get around them fairly easily.

Bear something else in mind.  My knowledge of London is pretty lousy too. I may have worked there for six years but that only taught me where Canary Wharf, Oxford Street, Paddington and Marylebone are. I still think London is laid out exactly like a tube map.  And (fatally in this context) I have no idea where London starts and stops.

My plan was to visit two very important London business partners for our water business.  The first was Casa Julia, a wonderful Italian wholesaler which distributes a lot of our water into London.  The second was Love Water, a water cooler company supplying cooler water into London and the Southern Home Counties.

How hard could it be to visit two customers in London in one day.  Hell, I’d be back in time to do some work in the afternoon.

It was only as I checked my routes on Google Maps that I began to see the problem.  It turns out that the London which Casa Julia is based in is Braintree, Essex.  And it further turned out that the London Love Water was based in was…wait for it… London Gatwick.

It turns out that these two Londons are not exactly close to each other….

Come to think of it, they are not exactly near London either.

But it was a great trip nonetheless.  Casa Julia was a fascinating visit, which I undertook with our sales manager Bernie Drewell.  Enzo, who runs it, is a giant of a man who has patiently built up a wonderful operation over 30+ years.  Their site has a slight mirage quality to it, rising up beautifully out of an industrial estate

 

Yes this really is their warehouse! And they have built a mirror image opposite.  They are growing very quickly and working very hard to grow our business too, for which we are very grateful.  Their reputation among London hotels is very strong and they are treasured partners.  More than that, they insisted we join them for a light lunch and managed to produce delicious gluten free bread for sandwiches. I think I love them!

Love Water is a water cooler company in which we have made a sizeable investment, backing Nick Swan who we have known (and traded with) for many years.  He does not have beautiful offices but he does have a superb track record and, like the Casa Julia team, possesses great integrity – not always a given in any industry.

Thanks to guys like these, we will continue to grow this important business which is led by the completely inimitable Trevor Rawden. There are many photos which I could publish of this colourful man.  But don’t worry, Trevor, your secrets are safe with me (well, and everybody else too). I will confine myself to this showing Trevor and some of his team celebrating a recent contract win…… Luckily, we just happened to have a camera to hand to capture this spontaneous moment.

Our sales effort is led by Bernie Drewell and Alan Smith, an unstoppable combination who could write the manual on selling.  Where they get their stamina from I do not know but they keep Trevor and his team very busy!

We are very blessed in this business with the quality of partners we have and, as with all of our businesses, we try always to be great partners too. We know that, wherever our water goes, there also goes our name and reputation.  That is something we feel very relaxed about, due to the quality of our team, our product and our partners.

And that is why I was still smiling as I completed my circumnavigation (well, that plus the fact that United had just taken the lead against CSKA Moscow…..).

PS my challenge for next time is to work out how to wrap text around the photos :)

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I've just realised - I'm a FAT accountant

LORRY HITS PALACE SCANDAL - see end of blog for the exclusive story

Fairly disastrous meeting with my GP today. Apparently the reason I have chronic indigestion isn't anything external and dramatic like an ulcer, or even my blatant disregard of my gluten intolerance (how was I supposed to know that pizza had gluten, anyway?).

Oh no. Much, much worse.

According to HIM, I am overweight. Yes, this discomfort may in fact be MY OWN FAULT.

I am pretty sure that I was not overweight after doing the Blenheim Triathlon. In fact, without wishing to blow my own trumpet, I think I was in pretty good shape. I almost had a six-pack (I have one now, but without the plastic thingy that holds it all together). My tummy didn't flop over my trousers when I sat in the car. (Ooh, we'll come back to my car later.) I even ate healthy salads from Hampers pretty much every day, in a virtuous "my body is my temple" kind of way. And, of course, running and cycling everyday covers a whole lot of dietary sins.

Like before, I emerged from my early June triathlon determined to maintain this healthy state. Five seconds later, I decided to modify it slightly. After all, I had been good and trained every night for several months. Really, I deserved a treat, and what harm could a few evenings in front of the TV eating some cake do? Besides, training every night was very mean to my wife.

Roll on four months. Oh dear, I have adopted some very bad habits. I came slightly unstuck four weeks ago. I had been dropping my daughter off at school then heading to Starbuck's in Summertown and having a quick breakfast of coffee and a gluten-free chocolate brownie. You see, in my mind, "gluten free" equals "healthy". I had neatly screened out that fact that this gluten-free chocolate brownie was not actually sugar-free. Or chocolate free.

Anyway, by chance my wife and I had headed into Summertown at the weekend. She fancied a latte and a break so in we went. The girl at the counter smiled.

"Black decaf Americano to drink in, is it?" she said. Cue poisonous look from She Who Must Be Obeyed as realisation slowly dawned on her that this may not be my first visit...

That is, of course, the heart of all the problems. I have equated "gluten-free" with "healthy" for the last four months. e.g. Cadbury's Dairy Milk is in fact gluten free. Therefore, it is healthy.

Therefore, whenever I eat I now get chronic indigestion (except, annoyingly, when I eat either salad or, yes, you guessed it, Starbuck's gluten-free chocolate brownie). This biological ignorance is mainly due to my very poor science education - I didn't go much beyond the amoeba and do not have a clue what a protein is. Yes, Mr Potter, are you reading this? Are you proud?

Anyway, I haven't been back to Starbuck's recently.

I have had no sympathy whatsoever from the accounts team downstairs or the rest of the Estate Office. At least the team in Hampers have taken to waving salad boxes at me as I go in to dissuade me from choosing worse options.

Our property director has suggested regular runs around the lake which is more useful. Not as nice as chocolate, though. And, to be fair, he did egg me on to buy two meals from the chip shop yesterday, so he is probably feeling EXTREMELY GUILTY now he realises the pain I endured on his behalf.

My recovery, once I have let go of my GP's throat, will clearly have to be exercise-led since I lack will-power. Which means more Blenheim staff laughing at me as I run around the lake. I'm told I run like a girl, anyway.

Drifting on - mention of lake made me think of the Dam repairs up at the cascades - but our wonderful Dam repair people have managed to plant 35,986 bulbs around the top of the Dam. They are so cost-conscious that someone actually counted. Marvellous work but I am puzzled at how they did it. I only mention it because it seemed like a good idea two weeks ago to buy a bag of 200 mixed bulbs from Homebase. I have a fancy bulb-planter (a bit like a spade but it cuts a circular divot and pulls it out so that you can drop a bulb in the bottom then drop the divot on the top). The ground outside my house was so hard that I could not get a single bulb in. I accept that one reason I chose accountancy was my extreme physical incompetence in other areas but that was not the only reason for my failure. The ground was ludicrously hard. So I clearly need to find out how they did it before taking on the job again. Maybe the rain over the last few days has softened things a bit.

Anyway, I am stopping this blog now because my excellent never-goes-wrong car - a nine-year-old Honda Accord with a strangely-bent aerial - has reached 99991 miles. I am determined to be watching the dashboard as it flicks over to 100,000. Obviously watching the magic moment would be a bit dangerous on the A34 so I am going off now to drive around the Estate very slowly. It would be extra magic to photograph the moment although that would probably be impossible.

However hard you try, you could never catch that kind of moment. Although, one poor delivery driver driving through our main Hensington Gate in a large lorry might beg to differ. We got a report that a lorry (unknown) had managed to come through the gate so close to the big stone pillar that he had caught the "sticky-out" stone that caps the top. That's probably not the right name for it but I bet that is what the 18th century builders called it. Anyway, he was asked if it was him "wot did it". Believing he was on safe ground denying liability (and probably feeling a bit of a fool for aiming so badly), he proclaimed his innocence.

I mean, who would be so lucky as to take a photo at that exact moment? What would the odds of that be?

If I was any good at this, I would say the answer is at the foot of the page. But as I can't seem to put the photo at the bottom, the answer strangely enough is at the top of the page.

Yes the white thing to the right is a large piece of gate column obeying the laws of gravity.

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