REACH – DANCE A GREAT DANCE

In August 2014 I was invited to give an inaugural CrowdShed talk on the subject of ‘Reach’. The talk popped into my head again recently as I was thinking about the productive confluence of vision x opportunity x focus.

It’s a glorious set of messages to reshare now.

For cultural context, it was the week of a wonderful supermoon, and the suicide of Robin Williams.

Video for watchers below, and the transcript for readers is just underneath. Happy viewing/reading.

 

I had the privilege of being asked several weeks ago by Steve Moore to speak on the topic of Longing, which funnily enough I had planned out within about 10 minutes of agreeing to do it. A couple of weeks ago, the brief changed to ‘Reach’ and that made me think about the intersection and difference in those two thoughts.

Longing seems emotional and unsatisfying and passive, doesn’t it?

Whereas ‘reach’ seems alive and active. What I love about the thought of reach is that it’s both the act of striving for a desired outcome or destination, as well as the actual arrival at it. “We reach for our dream. We reach our dream.”

My background is a blend of entrepreneur and commercial brand marketer. I have worked on six start-ups and several global brands like PayPal, Gumtree, Mills & Boon. I’m currently CEO of my seventh and (I’m an idiot) eighth start-ups right now.

As a marketer you might expect me to talk about Reach in the context of consumer campaigns or market penetration.

But mixing brand marketing into my leadership and strategy role is challenging enough in my day job. Never mind the fact that this week almost my entire team are on holiday. Which means my workload is challenging.

So, forgive me if I don’t take the obvious route with the brief of Reach today – frankly, I’m relishing the time here, far away from reaching customers and suppliers.

Given how stretched I am at the moment, I decided to communicate my experience of Reach in the form of 12 minutes of Interpretive Dance [fling arms around for a bit].

Not really 🙂

The pictures here are of Sylvie Guillem. Without a doubt in my mind the greatest living dancer.

Despite my own dancing skills I am a huge fan of ballet and contemporary dance, the exceptional physical and emotional reach of dancers and dance makes my heart soar and relaxes my mind. The exceptional endeavour of artists reaches into us and inspires us.

Sylvie has been much on my mind lately because she and Russell Maliphant performed Push for the last time in London a couple of weeks ago. They’re stopping Push because she is 49 and Russell is 53. He lifts and carries, lifts and carries, lifts and carries her for 8 minutes at the start of the pas de deux. It’s amazing what heights of achievement and longevity the truly determined can Reach.

I’m reminded of Martin Sorrell. Has everyone here heard of WPP? Did you know Sorrell was 41 when he took the reins of a company called Wire & Plastic Products? And 42 when he started buying up the big ad agencies. He reached an age when most would consider their career direction to be set. Not Martin Sorrell. He was just getting started.

We can do anything we want. At any stage in life. Today you’re the youngest you’ll ever be. Why not Reach for the stars? You might get a supermoon.

In my case, at this moment in my career, reaching for the stars means founding and growing businesses.

I want to make consumers fall in love with us and I want our team to be driven to reach their highest potential. My end goal is happy customers and a happy team. I’ll come back to reaching a state of happiness at the end.

I applied the concept of Reach to entrepreneurial life. I’m going to talk about reaching inside yourself. Reaching out. And reaching goals and what all that means.

Reach inside yourself for your own resources.

Find out how strong you can be.

Find out how much work you can eat up.

How much revenue you can make for the company.

How many deals you can do.

How happy you can get your team.

Unless you push yourself to reach the farthest farthest point – you’ll never know what you’re capable of. Only in extremis and adversity do we really reach inside ourselves to plumb our own resources.

I encourage everyone here to remind themselves to reach inside and find out more about themselves and their own resources. Whether by running a marathon, a soup kitchen, a company or something else.

Reaching out and accepting support and help.

In the past I’ve been terrible at asking for help. I’ve always felt it was a sign of weakness.

I’m getting better at it. The more I reach out and ask for help, the more it comes to fortify me and my objectives.

This afternoon I bumped into my business partner’s father-in-law. He lives around the corner from me. He has managed a huge food service procurement business for 25 years. A good person to talk to. You’d think I’d be round there most weeks, wouldn’t you? I should be reaching out more to someone who’s so clearly on my side and lives under a minute away.

Today we talked about the business and I explained that whilst we raise seed funding I’m making decisions that are based not on what’s right for the company but on what’s cheapest. Bless him, he’s given me a zero interest never-ending loan. By reaching out and – yes revealing what I feel to be vulnerability – I don’t want to be judged for this exact moment in time! – one of my problems has gone.

We can be too independent. If we reach out, we’ll find we have plenty of cheerleaders around us who want to reach in.

Reaching beyond your comfort zone. I gave a talk at London Tech Week a couple of months ago. My main topic, funnily enough, was reaching out to consumers. It’s truly surprising to me that many many colleagues would rather hide behind a screen – be it an online survey or a spreadsheet of projections or analytics – instead of talking to real customers.

Go out to market before you’re ready. You’ll feel naked, in fact, you will be naked. There’s nowhere to hide.

But get out there and speak to everyone. Everyone. Know your bullseye target consumers, know your definitely-nots, know why, when, how they might use your business. Reach out to them. They’re human. They will respond to you. By talking to your customers, even casual customers, you will endear them to you and your business. They ‘know’ you. They will be your advocates.

On July 12^th, over a month before I had a product I could show anyone, I launched my company to consumers. We launched Here & Now at the Barnes Fair, which is perfect target market.

There, as well as reaching out and engaging with a perfect audience I learned something.

We worked out who our bullseye target audience is – working mothers and divorced dads – in every case their eyes lit up like Christmas trees when I asked them if they needed help finding and booking awesome things to do locally with children.

Going to our market uncomfortably early will, I think, result in a customer acquisition cost at around £2 to £2.50 instead of the £8 to £12 our competition work to. [Edit: we got it below £1 soon after this – yay!]

Reaching out beyond a comfort zone almost always reaps reward.

There’s great joy in reaching out.

So, what happens when we get to the end?

There are so many unhappy rich people. People say it’s better to be rich and miserable than poor and miserable. Well I’d rather be happy. Wealth and success doesn’t always result in happiness. Robin Williams’s suicide is an awful exemplar.

So I’d say this. I’d say, forget the applause, the wealth and robes of success.

Be happy that you have endorphins racing through your body.

Be happy that you’ve reached your audience’s soul.

And happy that you’re reaching for your own high potential.

Be happy you’ve danced a great dance.

 

*if anyone can help me with photo credits I’d be hugely grateful. Please leave a comment or tweet me @tarabluesky. I’ve lost the original links.

SEEING AROUND CORNERS

Driving back to London from a break in the wilds of North Yorkshire, I pondered that message you sometimes see on wing mirrors, “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” When you’re looking around a corner what you see is always distorted, one way or another.

Frosty landscape from my aunt and uncle’s farm door. Yorkshire. God’s own country, innit.

My previous break was a year ago this month. I went to Sri Lanka. It was my first holiday in two-and-a-half years and I needed it. The last one was hiking and biking the stunning mountains of Andorra in 2013, where I came up with an idea which grew, evolved and eventually became Here & Now, a business I launched and ran with an amazing team until we sold it in May 2016.

Briefly, Here & Now was a tech start-up in the entertainment, leisure and tourism sector. It helped families find awesome things to do all over the UK, and helped those venues market to and attract new paying customers.

We bootstrapped, then raised significant SEIS and EIS funding from incredibly supportive angel investors. With this cash we grew our consumer numbers quickly through marketing and commercial partnerships, launched repeat-revenue subscription-payments for venues across the UK, and developed the user experience to continually improve our percentages.

It looked rosy for raising our next, larger round of funding. But by December 2015 it seemed clear that we couldn’t raise enough to take the business up a level. Tantalisingly, we were offered smaller pots of money at different stages, from existing and new investors and from our technology partner’s parent company. But they added up to month-to-month survival, burning cash whilst holding steady. That felt a lot of failing slowly. The Worst.

Without certainty of much chunkier investment we couldn’t scale up the business. Taking those ad hoc smaller pots of money felt unethical because the numbers told me we wouldn’t generate enough growth and therefore a return for the investors.

I needed the mental space to work out what to do. So I set off for Sri Lanka, for fifteen days of twice-daily yoga, plentiful reading, good food and sound-of-the-sea-soothed sleeps. Naturally I worked every day for the first ten days.

Cows grazing by my paradise beach, Talalla, Sri Lanka

There’s rarely a big flashing STOP sign in business. It’s subtler and more chimerical than that, annoyingly. Towards the end of the holiday, I had the time and space to think through my company’s position from first principles. Do I believe this business model can be a success? Yes. Do I believe we are the team to do that? Yes. Can we secure the financial resources to do it? Empirical evidence said no.

One of the best pieces of life-enhancing advice I have ever been given is this – it’s never too late to turn back from the wrong road.

With the help of the incredibly clever and inspired finance nous of my long-standing colleague, Joanna Dennis, we sold the business to the parent company of our tech partner, completing the deal in May 2016. Someone, some day will make this business model a huge success. We had seen around a corner, but the timing was wrong. The object in the mirror was closer than it appeared.

It’s a common feature of start-ups. I’m proud to have co-founded Blackwood Distillers, parent of the lovely Blackwoods Gin. It was the world’s first vintage gin, made with hand-picked botanicals gathered each summer in Shetland. This sounds a familiar story for gin-lovers now but at the time it was brand new. No one else had come up with a localised, hand-crafted story for their drink and brand. We were the pioneers. We grew from a standing start in October 2003 into an international business, with energy, belief, commitment – and passionate trade customers and consumers in key markets all over the world. I treasure my old passport from those days. It tells the story of our growth. Every page is splatted with a crowd inky stamps from immigration controls all over the world. But the idea was just a little too early. We saw around the corner and again the object in the mirror was a little closer than it appeared.

Shortly after Blackwoods was sold, five years after we founded the company, to Blavod and then to Distil where it currently resides, I and another colleague were approached by Sam Galsworthy and Fairfax Hall, who wanted to build the first copper pot distillery in London for almost 200 years. There’s nothing like working with people who have already been through what you’re about to embark on, and so we started working on their idea with them.

Blackwood Distillers operated from a kitchen in south London and a ‘but and ben’ in Skellister, Shetland, which we named ‘Peerie Hoose’ (little house in Shetland dialect – it really was tiny).

Peerie Hoose, the day I arrived in Shetland. Naturally in the worst winter they’d had for 9 years.

Sam and Fairfax’s company started in 2009 in the sitting room of a flat in Shepherds Bush. The name of their company, Sipsmith, came about when I thought about the nature of hand-crafting, the history of distilling in London and Fairfax’s family heritage as silversmiths. I loved that ‘smith’ idea and I finally articulated the creative concept as ‘Drinksmith & Still’ in an early investor’s flat in central London. The concept was right, but the ‘drink’ bit seemed too ‘guzzly’ so it was refined and compressed to Sipsmith, and I topped it off with a tonic of a strapline, ‘Independent Spirits’. It’s a really wonderfully defined brand.

Sipsmith’s first distillery was in a small site on Nasmyth Street in Hammersmith, then a larger space in Chiswick with room for a second and then third copper pot still, and a growing team.

And last month a controlling stake in Sipsmith was sold to Beam Suntory, reports valuing the deal at £50 million. A *massive* round of applause for these two phenomenal individuals and their team. Sam and Fairfax, I salute you.

In commerce, seeing around corners is not a perfect science. Like wing mirrors and those round convex mirrors for drivers to see their way clear out of hidden turnings, it isn’t precise and there’s an illusion of time and space. You can see the gap but you have to judge it correctly and adjust your moves. The Sipsmith team saw around the corner, perfectly gauged the proximity of their opportunity and went for it.

If you have the experience, or maybe it’s the trick, of seeing around corners you can see what’s coming up. And if you adjust your position and judgement, you’ll reach your destination.

POLARIZING BRANDS – LOVE THEM OR HATE THEM

As a child in the 1970s, with all the grazes you pick up at friends’ and extended family’s houses, my world divided into Savlon families and Germolene families.

We were a family of the gentler-smelling Savlon. To me, that alien medical-smelling pink Germolene was never quite the homely soothing I wanted, however kindly applied by friends’ parents.

(BTW, the Germolene smell is mainly oil of wintergreen, and phenol which you’ll recognise in TCP and very peaty whiskies like Ardbeg or Bruichladdich.)

I had this clear idea that you were either a Savlon family or a Germolene family but never both. But both antiseptic creams did much the same job, so what was that about?

The other day, as I put some Savlon, AKA Magic Cream, on a mysteriously throbbing toe (it helped) I decided to put my childhood theory to the test as an adult. I put a poll up on Twitter.

When you were a child and fell over, which antiseptic cream did your family use? Thank you. Please RT.

— Tara Benson (@tarabluesky) November 28, 2016

Turns out I wasn’t far wrong with my childhood theory – only 18 of the 361 respondents (5%) used both brands.

That got me thinking about brands that polarize consumers. The polarizing attributes of a brand and the people you associate with them, the way they speak to us and the words they use, the advertising and PR they produce. The products and their polarizing smell, colour and packaging and the psychological associations they evoke.

I think (but not 100% certain) it was Gary Hamel who talked to me, early in my career, about companies that deliberately set themselves up in opposition to another – usually a larger and more established incumbent. This is in part to set out their stall as definitively ‘not like the other’. I remember also discussing its strategic cousin – deliberately polarizing consumers so they self-select and more strongly identify with the company’s brand and advocate its products.

Both techniques use polarization to define and build their brand, and attract attention.

(Gary Hamel founded Strategos, in the late 1990s. I met him on a flying visit and heard him speak when his team were working with my team at the merging insurance giants of Commercial Union, General Accident and Norwich Union, now unified as Aviva. Strategos helped us develop our ideas into what became an early business incubator, SiliconWharf, which resourced and encouraged the company’s hottest talent to launch and scale finance- and insurance-related start-ups from within the company. What we now call FinTech. Looking back I see how much thanks I owe to Gary Hamel and Strategos for that intense skunkworks project experience.)

Back to brands that polarize.

One of the most famous examples of one company pitching itself against an incumbent giant was Virgin Atlantic and its PR and legal battle against British Airways’ dirty tricks in the 1990s. You can read about the dirty tricks campaign here, here and here. It’s an extraordinary story.

No doubt Richard Branson would have struggled to resource his win without the commercial strength of his other Virgin businesses; his airline was tiny compared to BA. But in winning his public and righteous fight against such a huge and devious opposition, the Virgin Atlantic brand was cemented into our consciousness as the brave and meritorious upstart alternative.

That win, and the continuing strikingly confident ‘join us, we’re glorious winners’ theme of its advertising (featuring the gorgeous staff and their gorgeous designer uniforms) made the Virgin Atlantic brand. And just like Savlon v Germolene, with Virgin or BA you generally favour one or the other.

More recently, there’s Apple versus Android. Again often defined by legal battles, although these days they’re rather more esoteric patent disputes. Whilst many of us have an iPad but use an Android phone, vanishingly few of us switch from iPhone to Android, and increasingly fewer switch from Android to iPhone. You’re either one or the other. Some might say it’s a style (iPhone) over substance (Android) thing. The truth is, iPhones aren’t that awesome as phones. But the gorgeousness of the brand and the beauty of Apple’s physical product design blows away the many many phone brands using Google’s arguably superior Android operating system. Whatever, you’re generally one or the other.

Marmite took brand polarization to new heights with its enduring Love It Or Hate It advertising.

Here, as with all the greatest brands, the creative message started with the product which I and millions of others love, but maybe you and millions of others detest. So clever to boldly say, “You’re either with us or against us but not both.”

Newer brands have adopted this polarizing strategy too, to huge effect.

Brewdog, the Scottish craft beer company, brilliantly and notoriously positioned themselves, with awesome product and punk Visit postattitude, against the boring, patronising drinks industry. I’ve had first-hand dealings with that inert, self-interested patriarchy as co-founder of Blackwood’s Gin in the early noughties. The struggle is real. I judged the Bartender Awards in Australia several years ago and was gobsmacked to witness corporate bullying like this. And I wish I’d had the chutzpah to write this riposte to the Portman Group.

Similarly, crime fiction publisher Fahrenheit Press are exponents of the ‘this is who we are: you’ll either love us or you’ll hate us’ strategy, inspired by the founder’s punk roots and attitude. Communicating primarily through Twitter and email, the tone is of a gang mentality – you’re either with us or against us. It pays off. Fahrenheit only published their first book (of over 50 to date) in October 2015, but their style and substance have already made a disproportionately huge impact on the publishing industry, attracting and publishing big-name authors and launching newly discovered authors into readers’ hands with equal attention and confidence.

What all these brands achieve, with their polarizing brand strategies, is to create commercial value where there is none, and/or build value faster than most. Clever. They sustain it by sticking to their authentic values and principles. Even as success alters their P&L their attitude, marketing and positioning stay true. The brand associations in consumers’ minds become sub-conscious over time and we either love them or hate them – but we definitely know which one. There’s no ‘meh’ about these brands.

I’ve only named brands that I love in this post, but then I’m a lover not a hater. And in a weird sort of way it winds us back to the very beginning – two brands, Savlon and Germolene, owned respectively by ICI and Beechams in the 1970s. Despite being owned by these behemoths, the amusing and nostalgic replies to the Twitter poll clearly show the place these two brands have in our hearts and our memories.

Still love the smell of it Germolene to this day – stung like hell but you knew it was doing good

— Kev Grumpysaurus T Brown (@merimaat) November 28, 2016

https://twitter.com/demerarabird/status/803342406368247808

I’m quite impressed that my naïve childhood observation-based theory was spot on. The impact of a brand that embeds deep and lasting memories and feelings of love (or hate) is a powerful force. For consumers it becomes part of our identity; for the companies a sustainable source of growth.

PS I read this wonderful article recently, about childhood memories and how they shape us, even after we’ve forgotten them, by Erika Hayasaki. It’s absolutely fascinating.

PPS Big thanks to the 361 people who voted, the 27 people who retweeted it, and the 29 people who replied with their stories. I’m mightily tempted to write about that ‘pain is good’ thing that was so common in the 70s – remember neat TCP dabbed on with a cotton wool ball? Check out the replies (by clicking on the poll tweet near the top of this article) if you want to wallow in such memories as Dettol baths.

THIS STUFF MATTERS

 

I accidentally caught the TalkTalk ‘This Stuff Matters’ ad on TV yesterday evening. I’m a committed pause/FF TV watcher but this one leapt out at me, made me stop, rewind and replay. It’s a fly-on-the-wall/day-in-the-life story of a family who live at 9 Merwick Street, Somewhereorother. It was filmed over two weeks by unmanned cameras. It features both spilt milk and crying, though not at the same time. Take a look if you haven’t seen it yet.

I love it.

Why?

It’s authentic. It’s actual TalkTalk customers doing everyday at-home stuff like watching TV, mucking around on social media, texting, phoning. Mum probably had make-up on when she might not normally, but no one can stay constantly conscious of hidden cameras for two weeks. The edit of unscripted cameos feel real – because they are real. What comes through is genuine love, mischief, mishaps, laughter.

TalkTalk is an ISP so normally, you know, Y::A::W::N. Media, phone and social media technology is so integrated into normal life that we never marvel or appreciate it. The tone of the ad is TalkTalk’s surprise and spontaneous recognition at how much all their tech-supporting infrastructure matters to everyday life. This ‘surprise’ is a bit of advertising sophistication, of course. But the fact remains – it’s still true that tech makes our social world go around, and therefore the message is heart-warming. This brand recognises its value in customers’ lives, and reminds the rest of us too. I wonder what they’ll do with this insight, beyond the ad campaign?

Companies that recognise what makes their brands, products and services matter most to their customers are surprisingly rare. Often the job of identifying exactly why customers value them and what they could be proud of, is outsourced to agencies. In this case the excellent Chi & Partners, long-term agency for TalkTalk. But shouldn’t this job be innate to companies themselves? Actually part of their core business? Shouldn’t it form part of the function, part of the brief, to every department in the company?

If it’s not, and it rarely is, it helps to have someone or a team either already native or willing to go native, to uncover and enliven the authentic bits of the business’s brand.

It’s brand rebirth midwifery. It requires determination, compassion, energy, intellect, learning and the rolling-up of sleeves.

I’ve done both – been native and gone native. I co-founded one of the first wave of new gins, in 2003. Blackwood’s Gin, ultimately sold to Distil Plc, was born authentic – admittedly because there wasn’t any money in our start-up for anything fancy. We couldn’t even afford the cost of running the labelling machine at the bottlers (where they put the gin into our bottles, seal them, and usually add the blinking labels). For the first batch, we hand-labelled every single bottle, overnight, before selling direct to consumers at shows all over the UK. That unwelcome sleep-deprivation reaped huge commercial reward – we sold loads which meant we could afford to treat ourselves to the labelling machine for the next batch. But the unintended authenticity of that hand-labelling wasn’t the heart of our gin’s brand, that was just a bit of start-up back-story.

It was this – the botanicals that we distilled into Blackwood’s Gin were hand-picked in Shetland. An annual hand-harvest of natural botanicals from this stunning, fresh, remote and wholly unique county of Scotland. The ratio of the different botanicals varied depending on what flourished best in each unpredictable Shetland summer. It was the world’s first ‘vintage’ gin.

Me and the Shetland fog, ‘summer’ 2006 © Martin Hunt

The amazing view from the Shetland office © Tara Benson

Shetland irises for the botanical orris root © Tara Benson

This was our product and brand story. With it we sold our gin to consumers at shows; and to retailers including Sainsburys, Tesco and Co-Op; and to trade and wholesale partners around the world. For example our simple authentic story accelerated us from zero to a joint venture with Fosters Group (now CUB) in Australia and New Zealand within six months, and to UK Trade & Industry New British Exporter of the Year just 15 months after launching.

Authenticity that started with the brand, and resulted in exceptional sales.

Later I fell in love with Gumtree. I went native to create their first ever UK-wide ad campaign to celebrate their tenth birthday in 2010. I discovered a much-loved business that had grown so quickly and so far that it definitely knew what it did, but not why it did it. ‘Online classifieds’ doesn’t set the pulse racing, does it?

I talked to the team, the amazing and brilliant team. The geeks, the producers, customer services, marketers, sales. It wasn’t a huge team at that point, still fitting on one floor of one building on the much-loved eBay campus. It was one of the sales team (I think Murray Phillipson, now at Sovrn) who when I asked him his pitch to his clients said, “Gumtree is everyone’s local noticeboard.” Ahhhhhhh – got it! Suddenly, and from right there inside the company – where it had always been, waiting to be uncovered – was the meaning, usefulness and common language for the brand. Easy to comprehend. We all know why we’d use a local noticeboard.

As the idea developed, we decided to cast the campaign from the team at Gumtree which visually bolstered the authenticity in our message. Here’s a PDF of the full set of London tube ads, featuring teammates gumtree-tube-cards-2010.

The aim of the campaign was to persuade lapsed users to consider Gumtree again, and to bring new buyers and sellers to the brand. The commercial result was that we reached over two million live listings for the first time ever, providing a massive revenue boost. (Gumtree has rebranded since, in 2016.)

All three brands – TalkTalk, Blackwood’s Gin and Gumtree – identified their authentic soul. From the outside it’s seemingly effortless because it all rings true, it all comes from an authentic place within the businesses. This gives the companies permission to speak to consumers in a way that glossy productions often can’t. Maybe the shine of high-gloss blinds us a bit?

All three companies were brave and visionary enough to highlight authentic elements of their brands to deliver a commercial objective. TalkTalk to recover trust following a data breach. Blackwood’s Gin to become a fast-growing challenger brand. Gumtree to deliver a step-change in sales revenue.

As ‘authenticity’ continues to develop from being a brand buzzword into a recognised and valuable business asset, the cleverer companies look within themselves and to their customers to uncover ways to unleash latent value and create new and true commercial opportunities.

This stuff matters.