| 1.2 Demand Director
27. Marketing Policy | |
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| 12.27. Marketing Policy: | | 1. As a policy, the organisation structure does not include a marketing or sales function. Education is offered to informed and educated customers to help with their buying cycle. | | 2. Evidence has demonstrated that a disruptive customer centric business does not have a requirement for Marketing Manager or a Sales Manager. Marketing is an outmoded concept when customers were so nieve and uneducated that they could be sold to. | | 3. As a policy, the organisation does not have a product, does not have a brand and does not have a logo. The mission is to work for others. A product, brand or logo could only confuse that mission. Its not about our organisation and our business, its all about the customers organisation and business. | | 4. By design, the organisation is secure for at least the next three generations - so marketing and sales is an avoidable overhead. Many companies are hierarchically structured and waiting to be sold to the highest bidder by the owner. |
| 2. Brand and Logo: | | 1. When the organisation had a brand and a logo that brand took priority in the eyes of the customers brand and logo. By eliminating the brand and logo, all focus can be given to the customer, the customers brand and the customers logo. | | 2. Only the customer is imporant and the educated customer wants our organisation to be an invisible part of the customers organisation. It took time to eliminate the product and simply help the customer with a service. It took even longer to eliminate the brand and logo so the organisation could meld with the customers organisation. |
| 3. Graphics: | | 1. The organisation has its own graphics workshop in that one thing that many companies get wrong is the graphics. Many companies need help with graphics because it is not just a subjective decision about what looks nice, its also a complex technical presentation. | | 2. Too many times, what look nice is just the glitter of an idea that takes a lot of technical skill and experience to make it into a practical marketing tool. The average company may not have the knowledge that a nice looking logo may not be suitable to be used as a marketing tool. | | 3. The technical questions to ask about any logo is how many colours, how much meta data is needed to reproduce the logo and what backgrounds can be used. While a mega-byte logo may look nice, it could never be used as an effective marketing tool. | | 4. The brand and logo reflect the core values of the company and where the logo is grossly oversised, then it may suggest the company is grossly oversised. Where the brand logo includes a mass of funkie colours, then it may suggest the the company is a funkie business. Yes the quality of the brand logo says everything about the company - it is a presentation of the companies core values. |
| 4. Presentation: | | 1. The logo is presented to the prospect and customer as an advertisement of the companies core values. Where that logo is a mega-byte presentation of bespoke fonts with funkie colours, then its safe to say the company is about presentation over content. Where that logo is a short sharp presentation with simple lines, then its safe to say the company is about content over presentation. | | 2. The BBC logo is a classic representation of content over presentation. The Virgin logo is a classic representation of presentation over content, but perhaps that is what Virgin brand want to sell. | | 3. Every buspoke application web page is optimised to about 2000 characters as a reasonable balance of rapid downtime with interesting content. As the size of a web page increases, download wait time increases and the cost of data transfer increases - the cusomer pays more and has to wait longer for each transaction. Evidence shows that the customer will not wait for more than 0.7 seconds and will not pay data transfer costs when more than 250,000 characters are beging downloaded. | | 4. In the good old days when the company paid all network costs and staff did not care about waiting for a massive transaction to be downloaded, then massive logos may have gone unnoticed. Now more than 50% of people process emails on their mobile where massive logos cause download delays and cost the person data trasnfer fees. The majority of people will have switched off the display of emil graphics so massive logos do not cause an increase in costs and a delay to the download. | | 5. The effect is that massive logos are never viewed, they have been eliminated by the customer and so the marketing message is lost. |
| 5. Simplicity: | | 1. It is an unfortunate fact the good design is simple design, but simplicity is very complex to achieve. It is easy and cheap to design a massive complex logo, but it is hard and expensive to design a small simple logo. | | 2. Facebook, Linkedin, Youtube, Twitter, etc., have taken the time to design simple logos that can be sprinkled into content without increasing download times. Good logos actually get used a lot and do a great marketing job. Massive logos are simply blocked and do a poor marketing job. | | 3. Any Marketing Director who dreams up a new campaign to spend a fortune with their favourite marketing company that involves a new logo with new colour theme must be able to prove the cost justification and held to account. The Marketing Director who simplifies the corporate image and starts working in partnership with customers will find it much easier to cost justify their worth to the company. | | 4. The world has changed. Once upon a time, nieve customers could be sold to. Today the customer is well informed, can do the research and wants to buy when they have assembled all the facts. The customer centric company simply have to be part of the customer research network that provides information rapidly as needed. Brand logos may no longer be as cost effective as older Marketing Directors may imagine. | | 5. The motor trade is rapidly evolving from people owning their own vehicle to people renting a vehicle upon demand - the trend is generically known as UBER. The UBER logo is a black square containing the letters UBER in white - a two colour theme that is very very simple. In the same way that LYFT, GRAB, OLA and CABIFY have very simple logos that have a size of 2,000 character in contrast with poor logos with a size of 1,000,000 characters. |
| 6. Trends: | | 1. It is proposed that Marketing and Sales is being replaced with Education via social media. Every company that intends to survive for the long term has a powerful social media capability and a much reduced marketing and sales capability. | | 2. Disruptive customer focused businesses network on social media to provide factual advice to people who are researching in preparation to buying. People will buy when they are ready while thay blank out sales tricks and marketing gimics. Marketing has a job to educate, to advise and to work with the customer so when the customer is ready to make a buying decision, the customer knows they have the right information to make that decision. | | 3. A business twitter account that accumulates a very large number of followers has done all the sales it will ever need to do - customer will buy when they are show the web site to register their requirement. The brand was critical to the product era, but is much less important in the current service era - every product must become a service. The logo was critical in the good old days when people made an gut-feeling decision based on advertising with a logo, but todays customers are better informed, able to do their own research and able to buy when they choose without any pretty logo to help. | | 4. While advanced long term organisations no longer need a brand and logo, many other organisations will continue with a simple brand and logo as a reminder of how marketing was done in the good old days. Some companies that still dwell on when Britain was great and exploited its empire, still imagine that a brand and logo are what makes their company great and gives them the right to exploit its workers. Fortunatly such hierarchical companies will be bought and merged to weed out such obsolete ways of working, by rich customer centric companies with much higher levels of productivity and much lower levels of overheads. | | 5. The future will prove if the social media trend will replace the marketing and sales role. In the days of products, a logo could represent the product such as OMO or OXO. In the era of services, a pretty logo to represent a service may not be cost effective. It would be foolish to imagine that a logo could represent each bespoke brokerage application service without confusing customers as to the purpose of the logo. |
| Document Control: | | 1. Document Title: Marketing Policy. | | 2. Reference: 160010. | | 3. Keywords: ITIL Marketing Policy, Brand and Logo. | | 4. Description: ITIL Organisation structure does not have a marketing and sales capability. | | 5. Privacy: Public education service as a benefit to humanity. | | 6. Issued: 13 Feb 2014. | | 7. Edition: 2.2. |
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