Tag Archives: international business forum

Marketing – I Must, I Must, I Must

I attended a roundtable discussion yesterday evening organised by the Prague-based International Business Forum (IBF) on the subject of marketing, and especially marketing on a low budget. Low marketing budgets, unfortunately, abound when it comes to the members of the IBF, since most of us are small business owners.

The roundtable was led by the excellent Jo Weaver of JWA. Her theme was that marketing is as essential for most companies as desks, chairs, PCs, and telephones. (Actually, in my view, desks and chairs aren’t essential.)  Marketing can be a website, a business card, a dinner with clients or prospects, a newsletter, a battery of telesales agents, a seminar, an advertisement, a Facebook Page, an article on LinkedIn, a well-crafted press release, a commissioned PR article, or a blog (such as this). She pointed out that the large multinational fast moving consumer goods companies (such as Coca Cola, Procter and Gamble, and Unilever) spend up to 20% of their revenue on marketing. And when times get tough they spend more, not less.

lamppost

Most of us in the room, as Jo pointed out, run or own small businesses, and small companies, unless they’re directed from abroad by larger headquarters offices, are reluctant to spend money on marketing. We’re also inclined to think we can do it ourselves without professional help, and we approach the task without forethought, without consistency, and expect immediate results.

All of this is true. Every company must spend time and money on marketing. Not, in most of our cases, since we’re not selling consumer goods, 20% of our revenue, but probably more than we’re in the habit of spending. Many of us trust to ‘word of mouth’, but that is marketing, too, and we should work hard to make sure that the ‘words of mouth’ that get bandied about are the right ones.

Most of us in the room were also at the helm of companies selling to niche markets, and the larger amongst us have tried marketing of many kinds. My company, LLP Group, resells and develops business software, and provides consulting services to international organisations in Europe and North America. How to reach our market? And where? In the countries in which we have our offices, or in the capitals where our potential clients’ headquarters are based?

And how? Website, obviously (we have four, aimed at different segments of the market), Facebook pages, LinkedIn groups, blogs, Google AdWords campaigns occasionally, sometimes telesales, and so on. Even over many months or years, these have achieved marginal results (or, looking at it another way, they have kept us in business). We might spend more money if we knew how or where it would be effective. Or should we realise that our markets are small and that we are reaching them as effectively as we can? One of yesterday’s participants stressed the need for measurement. He made some good points, but how do you measure the effectiveness with which you are reaching potential customers if your market is a niche market? It’s not obvious.

But there are many easy mistakes to make in marketing, and I always find myself telling a story about our early days in Romania, when our amiable but ultimately crazy managing director (so possessive was he of our subsidiary in Bucharest that eventually he stopped doing what he was told and we had to fire him) complained incessantly that we weren’t allowing him to spend enough on marketing SunSystems.

‘Look,’ he said, as we travelled through the city in his vast and vulgar limousine, ‘our competitor, Scala, has advertisements on every lamppost. Every taxi driver knows about Scala.’

‘And how many taxi drivers are looking for international financial software?’ I asked.

It’s easy to spend too little on marketing. We should all spend more, and we must accept that we will never be entirely sure as to how much of our money is wasted and how much is effective.  But one thing is certain – market towards your customers –  and if your customers aren’t taxi drivers, don’t waste money on telling them a single thing about your products.

 

Teetotal Tedium

I went to an after-work drinks event yesterday at the offices of an international law firm. It was organised by the International Business Forum, which brings together foreign and local business people from all walks of life. It’s a worthy cause. You never know when you might make a useful business contact, and the company is usually stimulating, intelligent and friendly.

business drinks

But I’d forgotten that I’m off the booze, and that you can’t do events like this without a glass of wine in your hand.

I’m actually off all sorts of things, on the orders of my doctor, Dr Babkova, in an attempt to reduce the acid, cholesterol and sugar in my blood, and the intersection of what I’m permitted to eat for all of these conditions contains just a few things such as radish, tomato and fish.

I’m an early arrival and find myself in a room that’s largely empty. I launch myself at a Peruvian man and suddenly I find myself talking about Chile, somewhere I’ve never been, know nothing about, and have no intention of visiting. It’s ‘the Switzerland of South America’, he tells me (mountains? chocolate? clocks? money?), a country that apparently embraced market economics under Pinochet and thereby raised the standard of living of nearly everyone in the country. I squirrel this away for later use, though I dimly remember having exactly the same conversation with the same man at a previous event some weeks ago.

I gate-crash a cluster of people I’ve known for years and we talk about the glacial pace of the legal profession.

‘Effectively a cartel,’ someone says.

‘The last unreformed profession,’ I say, as I always do.

We’re in the company of lawyers, but they don’t seem to demur.

Then I chatter with a man who runs a music bookshop. We talk about the Associated Board Grade Five Theory exam, and about whether an algorithmic approach could be useful for the Grade Seven Theory melody exercise (though how you carry an algorithm into a music theory exam I’m not quite sure). I tell him that my brother Jonathan wrote a Fortran program to generate harmonic progressions, and then, riffing away, I tell him that when we were at school together he also arranged Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring for just oboe and flute.

‘They didn’t ask for an encore,’ I quip.

This isn’t true, and I don’t actually know why I’m saying it. What he actually did was to arrange Stravinsky’s Ragtime for just three instruments, but such is my desperation that I feel the need to stab at something bigger.

My drinking a glass of still water instead of alcohol provides for a few minutes’ conversation as I meander around the room, but I begin to fear I may be repeating myself. In any case, it’s not a topic that catches fire.

An elderly acquaintance stands guard over a bottle of claret at the drinks table. ‘It’s a bottle of quite exceptional quality for an event like this,’ he tells me. He seems to have drunk most of it. I try a tiny splash and agree with him, but this, of course, just makes matters worse.

There’s an explanation for the excellence of the wine. The event, it seems, is sponsored by a French company who have provided champagne, wine and a few plates of fabulous cheese and salami (forbidden to me, of course, but I nibble them nevertheless).

There’s also a quiz – two sides of questions about the Eiffel Tower – and I come joint second with the owner of a university. My prize is a box of macaroons, but of course I’m not allowed to eat them. I hand them round and offer the last one, an enticing white one, to a man whose hair is exactly the colour of the macaroon.

‘I’m offering you this macaroon,’ I tell him, ‘because it’s exactly the colour of your hair.’

He doesn’t seem to mind my saying this, indeed chuckles almost gratefully.

Our hostess tells us she lunched at the British Embassy with a minister called Francis Maude.

‘It was a small lunch,’ she says. ‘Only twelve. The minister asked each of us to name the most annoying impediment to business development in the Czech Republic.’

‘I would have said “More trains”,’ I say.

My friend and former neighbour, an elegant elderly American lady, invites me to a business conference in Lvov.

‘Formerly Poland, and largely Roman Catholic,’ I trot out, as I always do whenever Lvov is mentioned. ‘My friend Tony visited it and found it empty and dull.’

I should really be promoting my business, though, so I chunter around the room muttering ‘MPs’ expenses,’ but to no avail. I long for the fire alarm to go off, or a stripper to have arrived at the wrong address, or even a small murder.

NEVER go to events like this unless you can drink a glass of wine or two. I wonder, in despair, how events like these can possibly work in places like Iran, where alcohol is entirely forbidden. You just can’t do business chit-chat on orange juice or water.