Steve Manser

CAPACITY VS. CAPABILITY Antonia Wade bought up an interesting topic in her recent (very good) interview with Jon Evans. On the topic of brand marketers using agencies - she said some buy in capacity and some buy in capability. It might sound obvious - but it’s a really important point and something I think both Agencies and Client-side B2B marketers don’t think enough about. Are you fixing a capacity or a capability problem? For Agencies - this means you need to really think about your positioning. How are you actually helping? Both are fine but you need to be clear. As Chris Wilson used to say - are you a ‘think for me’ or ‘do for me’ agency? For Brand Marketers - what is it you’re actually expecting from your agency and are you sure you’re on the same page? I’ve seen all too many times marketers saying they want the thinking but actually want the doing. They had a capacity not capability issue. I think this was summed up nicely recently by a desiger who said ‘I don’t know if I’m being used to give me design opinion or because the client just can’t use illustrator’

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Driving maritime growth through marketing strategy. The CIM | The Chartered Institute of Marketing define Marketing as follows: “Marketing as the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably” and it's great to see marketing rapidly rise in importance at a senior management level in the 21st century. Marketer's will be aware of the fundamental marketing model the 4P’s, first developed by E. Jerome McCarthy on developing an effective marketing strategy through focussing management activities across Product, Place, Price and Promotion and the subsequent extension of this model by Booms and Bitner who proposed a model of 7 Ps, extended by process, people and physical evidence (brand), as being more applicable for services marketing. An industry where we can actively see the increased importance of marketing strategy and application into tangible actions and results (and I've witnessed first hand over the last 8 years) is the global maritime sector. Especially in it’s goal to drive net zero shipping and decarbonisation across both the 4P and 7P models. Through the development of alternative fuels, energy saving technologies and a focus on driving process improvement, such as the recent study from the UCL Bartlett Energy Institute and UMAS on the energy savings that shipping could achieve through just-in-time arrival, marketing strategies are being applied "identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably" across the whole sector. https://lnkd.in/eKtAHsqk At The MTM Agency working in partnership with in-house senior management and marketing teams we support the P’s of promotion, across web, digital, content, PR, social, film & content and physical evidence, brand development. But also place, driving client expansion to new markets, processes driving marketing effectiveness, digital transformation and e-commerce solutions and people providing additional agile and expert resource through our team of 75 marketing experts. And, now through data science, research, discovery and insights completing the 7P's advising on buyer behaviour, competitor analysis and market conditions to allow adjustments in products and price. Partnering global maritime innovators across alternative fuels The Solent Cluster, energy saving technologies Silverstream Technologies, Ocean Infinity and PPG, process improvement Lloyd's Register OneOcean , Marlink and Inchcape Shipping Services and people through Nautilus International and stakeholder engagement and thought leadership with Lloyd's Register and the International Chamber of Shipping. And with major maritime shows in Europe next year at Ocean Business in April, Nor-Shipping in June and London International Shipping Week 2025 in September, we look forward to partner with all our maritime clients in 2025.  #globalmaritime #decarbonisation #marketingstrategy #integratedmarketingcommunications #netzeroshipping

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Many businesses overlook the value of existing research, rushing to commission new studies instead. Here’s why you should leverage the insights you already have: ▪️ Cost Efficiency: Utilising existing data can save significant research costs. ▪️ Actionable Insights: Previous research often contains valuable insights that can be immediately applied. ▪️ Trend Analysis: Existing data allows for the analysis of trends over time, providing deeper insights. Before commissioning new research, thoroughly analyse your current data to uncover hidden gems that can inform your strategies. For more on maximising existing research, check out the full article below and don’t forget to share your thoughts! https://lnkd.in/epc9itNb #onlinebusiness #research

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Here's a few nuggets from the Kantar Ignite webinar I attended a while back about branding - from Mark Ritson's presentation. His talk was on Relative Differentiation - what your brand needs to achieve to succeed. He says we need to first have a simple relative positioning (ie doesn't need to be unique) that doesn't change with a tight attribute list. Use the 3 C's to get here - something your Customer wants, that your Company can deliver better than the Competition. Then execute it properly by - 🏅 saying fewer things, more often (repeat, repeat, repeat) 🏅 say them to everyone, with better creative 🏅 say them everywhere - not just in ads 🏅 say them for longer - the customer will not get fed up (you wish!) 🏅 say them with distinctiveness 🏅 spend 60% of your marketing budget to say them (as per Binet & Field) You can still watch this presentation - link is in the comments - and I recommend it, Mark Ritson gives good prez. If you want any help developing your brand or marketing strategy, give me a shout. #marketing #brandstrategy

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"If you're told to do something, even if we know it's the right thing to do, the healthy thing to do, it's not something that humans are very good at doing. So if brands want to close the sustainability Say-Do gap they need to make it easy for us to take action with them, rather than just telling us what to do." Thank you Tam Hussey for a brilliant masterclass in how marketing can be used more effectively to close the Say-Do gap and create more sustainable behaviours. In yesterday's You're MarketingKind session Tam shared four important reasons why businesses should be allocating budget to take sustainable action: 1) The status quo is no longer feasible - extreme weather and flooding is already impacting many businesses in the UK and conditions will only get worse 2) Avoid greenwashing and greenhushing by doing something meaningful 3) Protect brand loyalty - 88% of people want brands to help them take action 4) Avoid the risk running foul of regulation and litigation Tam explained that to successfully change behaviours we have to make it easy for people to participate, use social pressure to reinforce and it has to be done at the right time and place. And she mentioned many great examples of businesses that are doing this well including REI's Opt Outside campaign, which sees them close their stores on Black Friday and help their staff and customers to go enjoy the outdoors. You can get a sense of the session from the short clip below and I promise to share the full replay later this week. It was wonderful to see and hear from members as well. Thank you for joining Bhagyashree (Shree) Chunekar Minter Dial Zak Gottlieb Louise Brent Neil Linford-Relph Dave Bennett Apoorva Ramchandran Roy Sandbach OBE Alan Thompson Nikki Paine Martina Doherty Jennifer Browne Laura Kerr Peter Harrison Paul Tredwell Jenny Barrett Kirstie David

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👍🏼 How To Create A Winning Whisky Brand (or any other). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > 1 Minute Read + Free Story School Registration < Branding is complicated enough. These three key foundations will get you sorted...  ✅ 1️⃣ - A brand idea that connects with your audience. Brands are more than a paintbox of colours and fonts. Brands that genuinely connect share an understanding of what they're about. What idea inspires your brand design to resonate and connect with your audience?  ✅ 2️⃣ - Design to blend out, not in. Most branding, especially FMCG, falls into the trap of design to fit the category. As a result, the product blends in because it tries to fit in, and marketers want to reduce risk. Truth is, blending in is fraught with risk. Following design trends amplifies this by using the same or similar design treatments. Blend out and stand out in your category by bringing the unexpected. The trick is, though, to do it in a way that you don't confuse and lose the consumer, so they still get what your product is about.  ✅ 3️⃣ - Design a conversation, not a look and feel. Use design to bring to life your product's unique attributes in a way that gets people to ask themselves, 'That's interesting. What's this about? Once you have their attention, you've won half the battle of being purchased. Brand design that is idea-based and creates a conversation is a marketer's dream, making it easier to create engaging on-brand advertising. 👀 > See how we created the Eden Whisky brand: https://lnkd.in/gQkPbxCN 💬 > Need to help with your brand? Book a time to chat here: https://lnkd.in/gCz-AspY 🔖 > Want to learn more about conversion storytelling? Story School is a place to learn and practically apply the art and craft of commercial storytelling. Register for your free access to the Conversion Story masterclass: https://lnkd.in/g-Rvy4cR #branding #brandstory #packagingdesign #branddesign #storyandbrand The Distillers Institute (Australia)

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Launching a Meta ad campaign? Don’t jump to conclusions on Day 1! Meta’s ad strategy often shifts spending after a few days, meaning initial results can change significantly. Let your ads run, test different formats (especially video!), and allow Meta to optimise. Here’s why patience pays off in ad performance. Mel Eilers is an experienced Meta marketer, helping product brands maximise their sales and leads through Facebook ads and chat funnels. As well as working with ecommerce brands to scale their sales through ads, Mel is also known as the 'Manychat queen' - helping businesses to personalise their connection with followers through Manychat automations, helping to boost reach and engagement, leading to higher conversion rates through a seamless customer journey. #MetaAds #FacebookAds #InstagramAds

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The quote from my recent project: "product X has not gotten better over the years, no brand has yet shown an increase in the quality of Y (main ingredient)" NDA prevents me from disclosing the category. But how tired I am from year to year, from project to project, hearing how people complain about the quality of the product; and at the same time, hearing from marketing the unwillingness to read consumer input about the product in the reports, because it is not something they can influence And here is Mark Ritson again with 100% hit on a painful professional topic. Thank you, Professor! 'If there is one thing I have learned from a thousand customers discussing a hundred different products it’s that the things a company thinks are small are, from a consumer perspective, big. And the grand improvements the company is spending bazillions on are probably of little significance. Finding out from the source what needs to be fixed or changed and then getting it done is the quiet product work of proper marketers. Even if all the credit eventually goes to production or the product marketing team' #simplyfeel #humaninsights #qualitativeresearch #facetofacemrx

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A lot of brands don't realise how messed up their MMM is. Here are some tell tale signs: 1. Your media contribution doesn't budge much, even though your tactics have. Both at channel level, or overall brand level. 2. Your spend has scaled significantly, but your contribution hasn't. 3. Lower funnel channels are not showing relatively higher ROIs vs UF channels. MMMs tend to favor DR metrics usually, and these short term ROIs are usually higher. 4. Has your media contribution evolved if your Spend: Revenue ratio has? If you have been looking at the same numbers for years, its easy to believe that reality. But sometimes, it helps to get an outsider's perspective on the benchmarks and industry to see, where we stand in our MMMix. Thoughts? #mmm #marketingmix Naavics

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Brand strategy training for small businesses owners and marketers 👀 🎯 👉My 6-week Brand Strategy Masterclass with Simulator kicks off again in November. 👇 Pound-for-pound, it’s the best online training available for anyone responsible for growing a smaller brand, and there are currently seats available in my virtual classroom for a few Norfolk brands. What's involved? ✅ On-demand modules for essential strategic tools and techniques. ✅ Live Q&A sessions to dig deeper into topics and sector nuances. ✅ Experience the world’s most advanced brand strategy simulator. My Masterclass is the pinnacle of everything I’ve learnt over the last 20 years as a brand strategy consultant and has been exclusively designed for marketers and business owners trying to grow a smaller brand. 👉 Key learnings: ✅ How to grow a brand using my strategic roadmap. ✅ How to diagnose and measure a brand’s health. ✅ How to segment a market and guide targeting. ✅ How to build a custom funnel and set strategic objectives. ✅ How to position a brand through relative differentiation. ✅ How to manage marketing tactics with a strategic compass. 👉 Become a certified BrandPRO My Masterclass training culminates with the chance to test and perfect newfound skills inside the world’s most advanced brand strategy simulator, as used by leading MBA business schools worldwide, including Mark Ritson’s mini-MBA in Brand Management. 🎯 📈 👉 Course numbers are strictly limited, so, if you know a business owner or a marketer who want to build their brand strategy skills, please ask them to visit my masterclass page and register their interest for FREE. 👈 Registrations received before 2nd October can access an exclusive early bird price, thereafter the course will be £395+vat per person. Norfolk Chambers of Commerce New Anglia Growth Hub Norfolk County Economic Development Broadland District Council Norwich Business School Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) NWES Ltd New Anglia Local Enterprise Partnership Candy Richards Nova Fairbank Norfolk Women's Marketing Network Toast Networking Norwich Norwich Business School Norwich Business Improvement District (BID) VisitNorfolk Victor Ling Shameem Golamy Norfolk Director Magazine NAAME Brandland

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What can marketing learn from the Kendrick vs Drake beef? 1. The speed of distribution ⚡️ Eazy E took a year to respond Dr Dre and Nas took a year to reply to Jay-Z. In contrast, Kendrick dropped 4 tracks in a week. The same is true with annual marketing plans – they lack the flexibility to meet the changing needs of an increasingly dynamic and uncertain world. 2. Co-creating and remixing 🔥 The audience aren’t passive spectators – simply choosing sides. They can jump in and get involved in the action. The tracks have been dubbed into Chinese and 1000s of people have remixed Metro Boomin’s “BBL Drizzy” hoping to win the beat and $10,000 in cash. Brands can no longer produce one-way communications and hope to engage with communities. You need to create space for people to contribute. 3. Post-commentary Culture 🗣 The post-event commentary is equally as important as the live event. The Kendrick-Drake beef has produced millions of Reddit forums, YouTube reactions and TikTok skits where people can keep the conversation going. The same is happening with sports, movies and other interests. People love listening and contributing to the conversation. This is why podcasting is continuing to grow in popularity.

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Simon Collard posts are always interesting. But the one entitled ‘things it's worth your agency measuring outside of a normal P&L Balance Sheet report’ was especially, because it stimulated such a lively debate amongst the numerous commentators who recommended a plethora of KPIs. Who knew there’s so many ways of measuring an agency’s success! What intrigued me were the suggestions for measuring #agencyproductivity (which I agree with) via #timesheets (which I don't agree with). Why? Time-sheets work well for professional services firms like lawyers, accountants and management consultants, but induces thinking amongst SLTs in agencies that’s detrimental to their success. This suggests the more people they employ, the more income they’ll receive with the magic number of 1600 uppermost in their heads; that’s the number of billable hours each person could be charged out to clients annually. (2,200 hours for US law firms but their staff sleep under their desks). That system worked fine when staff were prepared to be paid for 37.5 hrs/week but worked 50-60hrs, salary expectations were low and the chances of passing on costs to clients were relatively high. Today, recruitment policies include unlimited holidays, four-day weeks, paid sabbaticals and a benign attitude towards absence from work, which means agencies struggle to sell as many billable hours as they did. Add to this high wage growth inflation and the ‘dampening’ effects of procurement departments on agency pricing and it's clear that an agency’s profitability will suffer as well as its productivity. The better metric for measuring agency productivity is Net Revenue Per Employee (NRPE) with a target of £100,000 per head/pa. Why? Because it induces a different thought process amongst SLTs as in, ‘how can we do more with less’? This isn’t code for recreating a Victorian sweatshop. It’s about challenging the SLTs to ask themselves; can we use technology strategically? Which parts of our agency can we outsource to 3rd parties? Which services do clients value the most and will pay a premium for? Which are our most - and least - profitable services? And how do we employ fewer stars rather than lots of average ones? Yes, managing stars with their super-sized egos and high salary expectations is hard. But so is the latter, who require more supervision. And yes, two employees can bill twice as much as just one, so could generate 2x income, but not all staff are billable, and clients baulk at paying hourly rates for junior staff who are clearly learning at their expense. When comparing two agencies with the same fee income but one employing half as many staff, which is the most profitable? In this case, they can maintain their competitive advantage, as the increased profitability can be re-invested in paying top dollar salaries, plus bonuses and other perks that enable the agency to keep attracting and keeping superstars. Not so much a virtuous circle as a lucrative one.  

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Confidence Whatever you may ‘think’… you wouldn’t do quite as much as you do… if it weren’t for… ‘confidence’…. Confidence is the feeling or belief that one can rely on someone or something… It’s a form trust… "We had every confidence in the staff…" Or… “I had every ‘confidence’ in the place where I work… that I would be fine…” I don’t think as many people feel that way as perhaps they once did… According to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey… 23% of adults between the ages of 18 and 34 who have never been married… are unsure if they want children… and 18% say they just don't want any... 23%… Almost a quarter of a generation… This is an increase from 2018 to 2021… when the percentage of nonparents under 50 who said they were "not too likely" or "not likely at all" to have kids rose from 16% to 21%… and 21% to 23%… respectively… The survey also found that 69% of adults in this age group who have never been married would like to get married at some point… whereas… 8% simply do not want to get married… Why are these numbers so disturbingly high? It doesn’t take Einstein to imagine that increasingly… The barrier between marriage and having children… has a lot to do with… ‘confidence’… Some sense that things in one’s life will be stable enough to take the enormous step towards commitments that bind you to things much larger than yourself… The courage… As a ’culture’… we seem to have drifted into a state of such instability… that nearly a quarter of the next generation… just no longer have faith in the future… It’s too precarious… It t be a fear of war… or violence of some sort… But simple job stability It’s more often stated as a reason… Technology… Innovation… disruption… change… Those dazzling qualities that we all marvel at… Are thrilled to see… constantly arriving… and “making life better...” Just happen to also be discouraging the next generation of the our species… Just happen to be dousing our… ‘confidence’… Resulting in a generation that simply doesn’t have faith… or just can’t trust… that bringing children into the world would be a great idea… Who would? Every time you turn around… companies are being gobbled up by one another… technologies are destroying systems… And although new systems come along to replace them… those too are quickly made redundant… It’s a merry-go-round… Just one where the speed has accelerated so much that people are now flying off of it… The rapid succession of technologies obviously favor an elite few… craving billions in new wealth… Again… for a few… But for the majority… It’s a world of uncertainty… Hence… the ’confidence deficit’… Confidence comes from the Latin… ‘confidere’… "to have full trust or reliance….” ‘Con’… or ‘com’… meaning… “together… or… with one another…“ + ‘fidere’… "to trust… rely… confide… be true…” There is little certainty when bringing life into the world… Add uncertainty to one’s own prospects… And you get to 23%…

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Calling all marketers! Our next event (free, with breakfast included!!) is next week at the fantastic Brockholes Nature Reserve near Preston! If you're interested in measurement, analytics (and basically making sure you look good in front of the board) then you simply must join us. We have brilliant finely honed content from my colleagues, Sean Dwyer, Tom Morton and Phil McDowell. Registration link in comments #marketing #analytics

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Oh yessss.......that's the spot. Is your media in the sweet spot? JKO call the point at which the cost of targeting via a channel balances the acceptable level of wastage, a brands sweet spot. Media is simple, when done properly. Maximise reach of your audience at effective frequency. Yes, you can now be super targeted across traditional channels, and we are for brands that have a very narrow audience. But just because you could, doesn't mean you should. Too many brands are paying too much for targeted media and they simply don't need to. Be in your sweet spot. Be as targeted as you need to be, ensuring your reaching your audience as cost effectively as possible. You might need to accept some bleed in to other audiences, but you won't need to accept higher costs and a diminished overall reach. JKO: Media Done Properly #jko #growth #ifajobsworthdoing #marketing #media #advertising

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