One of the great yoga gurus of our time, Bernie Clark, says in his book – Yin Yoga – that ‘The only difference between being stuck in a rut and being in the groove is loving what we do. If we don’t love what we are doing, we’re in a rut, but if we love what we are doing, we’re in the groove.’ The case perhaps to stop working and start smiling?

This philosophy applies as easily to work life as it does to our free time, both so often compromised by factors beyond our control.

Many organisations start out with a passion but quickly reach a point of stifling admin. The very reason they set up in the first place – and all the excitement that went with that in the early days – challenged by their own success and growth. They get to a stage where they can see it’s unsustainable to keep running with the systems they started with. But, how can they fix those processes in a way that won’t stop their enterprise in its tracks? It’s obvious automation is needed but how to make the leap? Who to partner with? Will they lose their job if they make the wrong decision? How can they protect their precious data from the very people who need to use it?

Our client Access serves the mid-market with BPO software in sectors as varied as charities and education, restaurants and care homes. Their customers’ common need is to free themselves from repetitive, time-consuming tasks. As an example, if you are a charity with twenty thousand fund-raisers on the street all claiming for a daily sandwich and a coffee, how do they expense that? What about a care home’s shift handover paperwork taking an extra hour and a half, who pays for that? How about letting staff get paid immediately for the work they’ve just finished without affecting your payroll system?

The answer is apps. The kind that run just like those you use to bank with, to buy stuff with or turn down your central heating via your phone with. Access’ apps are just like consumer apps but for employees. They enable workers to perform repetitive, micro tasks simply, without bothering managers or messing with the integrity of centrally-held data. It means that everyone gets the freedom to do more of the meaningful work they are employed to do. The work they love and joined the organisation for. The right software can make the difference between being stuck in a rut and really getting into the groove.

The Complete Guide to Yin Yoga Philosophy and Practice, 2nd ed, 2019  – Bernie Clark 

The Access Group is a leading provider of business software to mid-sized UK organisations.  

Nicholas Ricketts is a Director at brand consultancy 1st Objective

This article has also been posted on Linkedin

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Turrell’s work includes the levelling of entire mountains in the Nevada Desert. He bought a volcano in 1979 and created an artwork out of it. He is also known for his ‘skylight’ series of artworks. Rooms open to the elements where you can gaze upwards into the blue – and every other hue of – atmosphere for a truly ethereal experience. There’s one at Houghton Hall in Norfolk.

Turrell’s art at the Pace Gallery conjured a few thoughts on what the act of seeing really is. I mean we don’t think about seeing do we? We certainly take sight for granted. We are stopped in our tracks by beauty – in all its forms – every day but our thoughts are transferred to the object or landscape or person we are looking at. We don’t really think about looking. It made me think that seeing really is an art and looking at art is very rewarding.

These three pieces by Turrell are installations of light. What you see when you look at them, even for a short period of time is astounding. Actually, what you think you see is very tricky to describe. There are colours of course, but they are colours that change and defy definition. Then you start to perceive depth and things that cannot really be logical, such as objects (ovals), made of light and hanging in mid-air. Once you stop your brain from questioning how it is done and settle in, it is an immersive and quite wondrous thing. The humdrum noise of traffic in the street fades and you are lost in the blue – as scuba divers say – not knowing which way is up nor down. And not just blue but every other colour you could possibly imagine.

The Australian art critic Robert Hughes said: ‘The medium of Turrell’s work is perception itself; his art happens behind your eyes, not in front of them.’ So-o-o-o true.

When we think about the ‘art’ of attraction or more to the point how we begin to interact with audiences to bring them to the point of sale, we often use beautiful imagery. As observers (and potential buyers) we learn to not let our eyes linger. We know that a second glance means a commitment of some kind, an indebtedness that the seller – albeit represented by a dumb advertisement – can latch onto. But here is art so ephemeral that you could never really own it like you could own a painting. It’s not trying to sell you anything, it is not boastful, it is not designed to induce longing but merely wonder. And that makes for quite odd feelings.

The ever inventive and changeable artist David Hockney once said that the thing he was most interested in was finding different ways of seeing. And for all his years he’s been trying to capture that notion mostly by showing us flat canvasses of paint. But here you can see something where the question: ‘What is art?’ does not arise. It just exists, it simply is, and you can see it with your own eyes.

James Turrell: The Materiality of Light – Pace Gallery, London runs until 27 March 2020.

Nicholas Ricketts is a Director at brand consultancy 1stObjective

Featured Image: © James Turrell, courtesy Pace Gallery Photo: Damian Griffiths, courtesy Pace Gallery

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Creative with iterative messages in multiple formats can be tiresome to keep a check on after each round of amends or studio changes. The more familiar you become with the text, the less you notice the surface errors. It is all too easy to lose focus and to miss things, especially as deadlines get tight.

1^st Objective’s in-house proofreading and subediting service lets you sleep easy. We check, double-check and triple-check as well as emend and polish, no matter where your campaign is created.

Good proofreading is like good health- you don’t notice it when you have it, you notice it when you don’t.

And, did you spot the typo in the triangle?

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Many fast-growing companies – and especially in the tech sector – don’t hang around growing organically. They drive through the hockey-stick growth curve via a rapid series of acquisitions. Investors usually demand it and are often the facilitators and introducers in such unions. But after the excitement – and often secrecy – of getting the deal done, it is left to internal staff in marketing and sales to pick up the loose ends and knit them together.

Obviously you want to indoctrinate new staff into your company and make them feel at home. A‘Welcome Aboard’ toolkit should include a guide to the brand they are joining to get them off to a good start. But products may not be so easy to fit together.

Your product marketing teams will bring these products into the fold, form them into your product suites or solutions and rationalise the propositions to show the added value. But, at the same time, these teams are often cash-strapped and must justify every penny of spend. Depending on the metrics you run, the marketing dollars they use up may need to correspond directly to lead generation. This can be a toughie in the early days and diminish or dilute overall results. Not to mention the distraction, no matter how welcome the new acquisition is.

So what’s the answer? Just like newly-weds in life, there are always a lot of expenses to cover. That’s why giving your brand new partner a dowry, a lump of money to be used purely to smooth the integration, is a good idea. Set against the cost of the purchase, this budget will be negligible in the scheme of things, but make for far more successful and frictionless marriages.

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Back in the day, web pages were ranked by Google using keywords. Nowadays they are ranked by ‘entity’, which describes the content of the page and its relevance. The best programmatic agencies now use a blended system of keywords and entities and then qualify each page by context. When it comes to a campaign, these pages are then filtered by relevance. Again, until this was automated, checking these pages for relevance was labour–intensive, and meant opening individual URLs and reading the content. As these pages are now read and subsequently ranked by relevance in an automated fashion, machine-learning comes into play. But, rather than narrow-down and target audiences which makes the pool smaller, these machines can heuristically do the opposite, and search out like-minded people to grow your audience.

At a recent event run by the boffins at Illuma, it became clear that people’s propensities to buy stuff on the internet can rarely be categorised by their historical data. It’s about catching them at that moment in time when they are ready to make a decision, however impulsive that may be. But how? You can see why serving them ads from a site they’ve just browsed can become so overt and annoying. John’s just been looking at suitcases, so he’s then served ads for the cases he’s viewed on every site he then goes to. These subsequent pages he’s viewing can be so irrelevant contextually to buying a suitcase that the ads stick out a mile. Most punters find this creepy if not downright intrusive. Plus there are the privacy issues around the use of cookies and GDPR which will only become stronger in time. Browsers like iOS and Chrome are already ahead of the curve in adopting this compliance.

Illuma (other programmatic agencies are available) use what they call a ‘nearest neighbours’ system to scale reach. Counter-intuitively, by ignoring all historic data and trends, which may well be out of date and can only serve to narrow audiences, they look at which pages individuals are actively looking at in real time. For instance, Rachel could be buying insurance but she’s been distracted and is looking at a yoga site, so that’s where they serve the insurance ad. By then targeting other individuals simultaneously reading similar yoga pages, they can then scale the campaign in real time. Illuma have proved that when individuals are reading similar pages at the very same time, there is a propensity for them to act in a very similar way.

This really turns things on their head. Instead of going after your existing base and trying to create referrals you can find like-minded people under the radar. Not only that but also you can be seen on pages not cluttered by competitors or others that may be distressful to your brand.

It makes so much sense when you think about it. Rachel, in a moment of concentration, on a yoga site that she trusts, is then presented with an ad for the very thing she has tasked herself to buy…insurance. And many of her peer group are too. Instantaneous and action-oriented, it avoids all the pitfalls of intent-focused search and content-based approaches.

Fascinating, don’t you think?

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Not so for Francois and his team at Capital Bread who deliver their artisanal product to London’s top restaurants and hotels. In a year they have gone from zero to 40,000 pieces of bread a week.

For their Michelin-starred clientele, choosing a bread supplier is a serious decision. Quality is what they guarantee their diners. It may be only bread, but it has to be right.

We came up with their name and a strong, no-nonsense brand look to go with it. It’s a dynamic and clean look that encompasses their quality, reliability and round the clock service.

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Alliteratively named authors Malcolm McDonald and Mike Meldrum have split the tasks and functions of marketing into 60 bite-sized topics. These topics are usefully sectioned into seven groups for ease of navigation.

The content is accurate and insightful, if a little dry, and some of the terminology I found a little old hat. Do we really use the term ‘internet marketing’ anymore and do we really need that topic opened by a description of what the Internet is? Sometimes I felt I was reading an updated version of an older textbook.

The book’s role is to be self-educative. Relaying that knowledge – and presenting it persuasively to colleagues – would be greatly aided by some simple examples of how others have done it. The inclusion of mini case studies to illustrate each topic would have relieved the seriousness of the text. And, while there are examples, they’re not really anecdotally interesting enough to convince a high-level audience or useful in reinforcing strategy at board level with non-marketers.

Interestingly, the authors allude to how confused many senior managers are by the role of marketing within their organisations. However, no practical advice is given on how to deal with prejudice from senior management or position the value of marketing so that it shares an equal place at the budget table. This is more than a little teasing for any embattled marketing person because it can be a major obstacle to their career progression.

‘The Complete Marketer’ is a great start towards further reading beyond the textbook methodologies it describes. Its ascetic approach must be augmented by getting to know your customers – including your consumers internally – and what your competition is doing to woo them away.

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Simple and usable –
web, mobile and interaction design

by Giles Colborne
208pp, New Riders

I’m with simple

Like Steve Krug’s seminal ‘Don’t Make Me Think’, this book is a slim volume, and rightly so for a primer on how to eschew obfuscation and deliver more from less.

But while Krug’s book was full of humorous ‘aha’ moments, Giles Colborne’s ‘Simple and Usable’ takes a more forensic view of user expectations and perceptions. In this sense, it shows just how far online marketing has matured in the 11 years since Krug’s book was published in its first edition, but equally, how so little has changed in our understanding of the way people buy, behave and interact online.

Colborne splits the task of creating simplicity – and, in so doing, enhancing usability in web design – into four strategies entitled Remove, Organise, Hide and Replace. To illustrate how this works he redesigns a physical item we’re all familiar with, the DVD remote.

This immediately hits the right tone.  It seems developers can’t help themselves adding more features or bells and whistles that work against user immersion in the online world. This is probably because of a disconnect between specifiers, designers and developers. While most savvy online retailers have usually got the user experience nailed, their aspirations for online behaviour is controlled by branding and routes to market. But, in the B2B world, the call-to-action is not so pointed nor obvious.

Reading Colborne’s words about complexity I was reminded of those terrible PowerPoint presentations we’ve all sat through where the amount of data on each slide was almost a firing offence. Many sites still overcomplicate or frustrate your flow, forcing you to make unnecessary choices, more importantly, working against their own business objectives.

Colborne distinguishes between different types of user, breaking them down into Experts, Willing Adopters and Mainstreamers, and describing their attitude to technology and the motivations that drive them. He provides anecdotal examples from the likes of Apple and Pixar, and the way these companies think laterally about the user experience.

It’s clear that putting yourself in the user’s POV is key but users don’t buy on intuition alone, you still have to lead them to make the decisions you want them to make. Simple enough you’d think, but where the book shines is in telling you how to do that – in a clean way – without appearing condescending or controlling. Colborne manages to make his points with a lightness of touch that can be directly applied online.

‘Simple and Usable’ is required reading for anyone involved in – or interested in – web design and usability, and that’s pretty much anyone with a browser at the end of a broadband connection. I read it in one sitting and just let Colborne’s engaging – and unarguably persuasive – prose flow into me.

This tightly written, insightful book will get you thinking about your own site, and the sites of your customers. But, more than that, it might even lead you to simplify a lot more in your business interactions, whether they are with partners, suppliers or customers.

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