What you want to achieve through the lens

What is really driving you? Today? This month? This year? Have grand ambitions and goals eroded to survival or keeping what you've got. Brands and people can easily lose their way when the conditions are difficult and the direction forward is hard to see. The irony is that tougher times demand even greater clarity and vision; a firmer grip on what's most important versus what's noise and a distraction.

Is your agency helping you achieve focus or adding to the fog? Are they helping you prioritise where to invest and where to cut? Do they bring a clear perspective or just more information?

Why not try adopting the attributes of a great SLR camera in the way you think. Zoom out to put things in context and literally see the big picture. Then zoom in to see and appreciate the detail. What view or depth of field feels right for you in making this decision or undertaking this piece of work? Do you need more light and illumination or do you need to act fast to capture the moment? Is there a way to automate this decision or should it always be on manual? If you made an album of your best decisions or the things you are most proud of - what would you include? Is there a common theme or narrative?

Sometimes achieving greater focus means thinking about focusing itself a little more.

Desktop photos and the inner world

Has anyone done an ethnographic study of the desktop photos on peoples' PCs and laptops? I'm sure that they'd reveal a lot about: an individual's deepest interests, mindset, how they want to be seen, how they see themselves, how technologically sophisticated they are. Do they use an anonymous downloaded desktop wallpaper or a personal photo? It would bring a whole new meaning to desktop research. Why the fascination with making your desktop a full bleed window on somewhere else? Your last holiday, gig, party, the Microsoft deep green hill somewhere far away. Well this is my desktop photo. Make of it what you will.

Marketing and the art of conversation

The celebrated professor, historian and philosopher, Theodore Zeldin was on the Radio 4 Today programme last Friday extolling the virtues of proper serious conversation designed to discover what other people really think. He has sponsored a 'Feast of Conversation' weekend to encourage complete strangers to talk through a menu of conversation topics over a meal. The intention is to get well beyond small talk into big topics like: aspirations, anxieties, fears, desires, hope and despair.

Could this be applied to brands and the way they understand the individuals who buy from them or don't. Should brand managers or advertising planners sit down for a meal with customers or prospects and run through just such a conversation menu. It has the potential to reveal considerably more than the average "depth" interview and provides the ability to come at consumer motivations, attitudes and behaviours from quite oblique angles, which as the leading economist John Kay maintains in his new book, may well be the best way to find winning solutions. Food for thought. Quite literally in this instance.

The psychology of online consumer behaviour needs more attention

Over 1.5bn people across the world now regularly use the internet. UK shoppers alone spent over £13billion online in Q408. As a marketing media the internet is eclipsing all comers. Given all of this isn’t it rather odd that there is no Wiki entry for ‘Online Consumer Psychology’ yet, no authoritative website on the subject and just one academic text dealing with the topic that assembles papers delivered at a conference in 2001 (decades ago in the web world!).

Why is this? Well, perhaps too few marketers, brand managers and their agencies have been asking just that question - Why? Much, if not all, of the focus has been on quantitatively monitoring and measuring online behaviour and transactional data. The standard web metrics are great for understanding ‘where’ and ‘how much’, a lot less great in helping us understand ‘who’ and most crucially ‘why’. Marketing and advertising are increasingly behind the curve of online consumer behaviour, in part at least because they haven’t fully understood the psychological drivers, attitudes and motivations that underlie these behaviours.

Successfully predicting online consumer behaviour and creating sustainable competitive advantages from this knowledge demands that the psychology of online consumer behaviour gets more attention. The brands that give this attention are the most likely prosper when the economy picks up.

Now more than ever brands need to create their own recovery

Last month the newly established Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) reduced UK growth projections right through to 2014 and George Osborne delivered his emergency austerity budget; both served to confirm that businesses in the private sector will have to create their own recovery.

Quite rightly many businesses will look to their marketing agencies and suppliers to help them define strategies and tactics that can drive forward their recovery, helping them to take market share whilst other brands are still looking inwards or very tentatively feeling their way out. But how well equipped are these agencies to offer the deep-seated and highly integrated marketing strategies that will be required to germinate and nurture sustainable growth in the face of rising unemployment, pay freezes, new taxes and fragile demand.

I think that there are 10 steps that client businesses should be taking right now to create their own recovery and they should be working with agencies that can successfully deliver all of them together, tightly joined up.

My 10 Steps to create your own recovery are:

1. Identify and target your most far-sighted, confident and economically insulated customers and prospects, as they will lead sales growth in many categories.
2. Dynamically refresh your targeting and segmentation models to reflect new market realities and drivers - don't let them lose their predictive power and efficacy due to changed conditions and behaviours.
3. Dramatically improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your paid search (PPC) activity by understanding the true value of every click and thereby free up budget to invest in boosting recovery.
4. Sensitively commercialise your use of social media channels rather than see it as a soft R&D investment - or your competitors will get there before you.
5. Locate and convert pockets of stronger demand without sacrificing service quality, by tapping into flexible outsourced telesales expertise - don't wait to rebuild your headcount and internal call capacity, it'll be too late.
6. Maximise revenues from existing customers by integrating multiple online and offline data feeds to optimise customer contact in real time.
7. Retain your existing customers more successfully by "lab testing" potential improvements to the customer journey or revised sales processes without having to disentangle existing infrastructures.
8. Get the most you can from your test and learn strategies, which become ever more important in tough and changing times like these. Make sure that they are well prioritised, statistically robust and use strong forecasting tools so that outcomes can be called early and acted upon.
9. Build a standing online research community to feed your thinking about emerging consumer mind states and how these should influence engagement strategies.
10. Make sure that throughout everything you monitor precisely the right metrics to evaluate and predict your own recovery and not just that of the sector or the UK economy at large.

It is the brands that sow the right seeds, in the right places, that will see green shoots grow into enhanced market share or leadership. Few agencies are equipped to look at things as deeply as is required or join the implementation up as tightly as is needed - make sure that your's is one of them.