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Archive for the ‘Paul Hague’ Category« Previous EntriesThe Net Promoter Score is RubbishThursday, September 22nd, 2011  Paul Hague this week advocates a simple, new metric to measure value. In less than 10 years, the NPS or Net Promoter Score has become familiar jargon in business boardrooms. It is a single metric, a golf handicap score, that leaders can easily understand and which they can use to ruthlessly drive their businesses. The Net Promoter Score is a measure of customer satisfaction and loyalty and who can deny that these two factors are crucial to the success of any business. It is easy to understand and the fact that it requires a simple calculation gives it a sort of scientific kudos. Let us remind ourselves what the Net Promoter Score is. We ask customers one simple question – “How likely is it that you would recommend COMPANY X to a friend or colleague?” The response is recorded on a scale from 0 to 10 and the percentage of companies giving a score of 6 or less is subtracted from the percentage of companies giving a score of 9 or 10. Those in the middle ground giving scores of 7 or 8are ignored. However, the NPS is not without its deficiencies.
We think that the NPS is a good metric but we also recognise that it is dangerous to drive a company on this number alone. The NPS does not measure the value that people attribute to a brand and this must be one of the most important metrics of all. Towards this end we have developed a measure which is fast gaining ground. It is called the Net Value Score or NVS and it measures the value that people attach to a brand or a supplier. Pat Kenny, Vice President Of Corporate Marketing at PPG Industries, said the following about the NVS:
To arrive at the Net Value Score, one simple question needs to be asked:
Using answers to the question, the following steps result in the computation of the NVS:
Calculating The Net Value Score For more information on the Net Value Score, visit http://www.netvaluescore.com/ Marketing Training Courses In ShanghaiFriday, August 19th, 2011  B2B International is pleased to announce the dates of its upcoming training courses in Shanghai: On Thursday, 22 September 2011, we will be running a Market With Intelligence course, and on Friday, 23 September 2011, we will host a course on Value-Based Marketing. As with all our courses, these full-day, hands-on training workshops will enable attendees to not only learn the theory of marketing, but – crucially – to apply the learnings to their own businesses. A brief summary of the course schedules is shown below, but more information can be found here “Shanghai Marketing Training Courses”. To book your place online, please click here.. If you have any questions, please call your nearest B2B International office or email shanghai@b2binternational.com Market with Intelligence – Thursday, September 22, 2011 This course introduces you to the key principles of market research and how research tools can be used to grow your business. Topics covered include: • Introduction to market research Value-Based Marketing – Friday, September 23, 2011 Our value-based marketing workshop explores the key marketing principles and how you can make them work for you, including: • Market intelligence and value-based marketing If I think this, what do you think?Thursday, April 7th, 2011  In this week’s Thursday Night Insight Paul Hague reflects on his thoughts on completing the UK census form.  I have been a market researcher all my life. 40 years in fact. I love the job. It fulfils my intellectual curiosity, it indulges my love of travel, and it satisfies my desire for constant change – and yet I find it really difficult to take part in surveys. In the main I am protected from this by the Market Research Society guidelines that recommend most survey designers screen out the likes of me, knowing that my professional knowledge will bias my answers in some small degree. However, last week I got my come-uppance. I returned home to find 32 pages of questions had thudded onto our welcome mat, with an introductory letter that informed me I would be incarcerated if I didn’t comply. Yippee – it is decennial census time. I looked at this daunting instrument of torture and I couldn’t begin to think how your average 85 year old, single gypsy, now separated from a same-sex relationship, would cope. Fortified by three large glasses of sauvignon blanc, I decided to fill it in online. It was so easy I sailed through, congratulating myself and secure in the knowledge that the analysts who look at these things would be able to see that the time I had taken to complete the questionnaire was a world record. That was until I came to question 43, which asked me how many visitors would be in my house on the 27th March. Since I was pretty certain there wouldn’t be any, I looked for the button to say this and move on. However, there was no such button to tick. It seemed I had to have a visitor on the 27th or I was stuck. I wondered whether Alfie, my 11-year-old boxer, would qualify but I couldn’t see any space for pets and animals in the form. I clearly needed a human visitor and I decided that to get out of the impasse I would invent one (I know, I know – I was risking a jail sentence, but by now I didn’t care). We often do have a couple of elderly relatives stay with us so why couldn’t I imagine that they were on one of their stop overs? In went Rosie’s name to start with, and this prompted a question about her date of birth. I had no idea and this was beginning to look ridiculous. I shouldn’t be making this up and, anyway, the more things I invented, the deeper the hole I dug myself into. It was at this stage that my conscience was pricked and my head cleared slightly so I decided to work out what was going wrong. As I tracked back through the questionnaire, it became clear that in my slightly inebriated state I had incorrectly filled in question H5, which I thought had said how many people will be in the house on the 27th and it had, in fact, asked how many visitors would there be. Since I had answered 2 people, it was quite clear that this was the reason the computer-aided questionnaire was routing me to the visitor question. So, what are my insights from all this? The experience of completing the questionnaire was better than the anticipation of doing so – which I was dreading. However, I found myself wondering about the futility of some of the questions. Surely the census is a head count of the people living in households and not much more. If we need to dig deeper on my thoughts and feelings such as the state of my health right now, or how well I can speak English (??), this is the stuff of sample surveys. Over-complication is a crime and we are over-complicating everything, including the design of our questionnaires. Isn’t it a reflection of the politically correct world that we have to necessitate a special questionnaire for Welsh speakers and weird combinations of answers to which people can say they are British/English, simply British, simply English, British/Welsh, simply Welsh and so on. And please guess how many will actually tick the box that says they are Gypsy or Irish Traveller. Minorities must be looked after in our daily life but, in the case of a census, we should not be designing our process around 0.01% of any population. I know that we have been keeping tabs on our population since the Doomsday book, but the census as we know it in the UK began in 1801. I don’t think anyone will shed any tears over the fact that this is our last one and from now on we will rely on sample surveys. My saving grace is that my completed form will be kept confidential for 100 years. So, unless I tell you, you won’t know that I am a surviving partner from a same-sex civil partnership, living in a holiday home, of any other Black/African/Caribbean/Black British extraction, holding an Irish passport, actively looking for work over the last four weeks and whose main language is British Sign Language. Who wants a better mousetrap?Thursday, October 28th, 2010
In this Thursday night insight Paul Hague looks at the phenomenon of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and argues that “product” isn’t everything. Have you read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo? It’s a great story, there’s no doubt about it, but the story of how the book became a bestseller is even more incredible. Written in his spare time as a hard-working journalist, Stieg Larsson first called it Men Who Hate Women. Having finished his whopping manuscript and without publishing it, he began his second book. When this was finished he wrote his third. And then he had a heart attack and died. Only after his death were the books published.
The publishing of his books is another incredible story. The rights to the books in the UK, where it began its huge success, were bought by Quercus, a small and unknown backstreet publisher. The owner of Quercus became so desperate to shift copies he gave them away to people in parks and he planted dozens on the back seats of taxis and on tube trains. Today Quercus has moved to luxurious offices in Bloomsbury Square, and its revenues trebled to £15m in the first six months of 2010 on the back of the Larsson phenomenon. So what can we learn from this? It seems to me there are at least five lessons:
My insight today is that we should always take care to put as much emphasis on the other parts of the marketing mix as the product itself. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that, If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap, than his neighbour, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door. I am not so sure that The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo would have had such a large path beaten to its door without a little bit of marketing help. The Importance of VoiceFriday, August 20th, 2010 In this week’s Thursday Night Insight, Paul Hague considers the importance of “voice” and how it can be your most important asset… “Good morning from the flight deck. This is your captain speaking.” I can’t help looking up from my John Grisham novel and admiring the dulcet tones of Capt. Bill Jones. I am on a Continental flight from Newark to Manchester although it could be from anywhere to anywhere. All captains sound different but they all sound the same. They seem to exude the same confidence and assurance that we passengers are looking for on a flight and yet the only thing they manage to tell us is what time we will arrive and that it will be raining in Manchester when we get there. It got me thinking. Is it genuine confidence that is being communicated by Bill Jones’ voice or am I being influenced by his seniority and his position? He sounds more authoritative than the chief steward but maybe that’s because I know that he is the captain and have conferred status and authority to him. Now the point of my introduction is not to be obsequious to airline captains but to get us thinking about something that is crucially important in shaping our view of people. In fact, a search on the Internet suggests that the voice, its intonation and its delivery accounts for 40% of the impression that we make on someone we meet for the first time. If this is true, it is massively important. Forget worrying about your height, the size of your nose, your sticking-out ears and your hairdo. What matters is what you say and how you say it. When you think about it, there must be some truth in this. Obama has a wonderful speaking voice. So had Churchill and, God forbid, so did Mister Hitler. And what does a wonderful voice mean? It means (I think) that it communicates your strength of personality, your enthusiasm and your authority. It gives a clue as to your upbringing through your accent, to your confidence as a person, and to your intelligence. Forget being six feet tall with dark wavy hair and a dimple in your chin (and that’s only the females) – you could be let down immediately you open your mouth if you sound like Kenneth Williams. All very interesting you might think but what has this got to do with a business blog? I was reading in the Financial Times today about one of Italy’s richest entrepreneurs – Enrico Preziosi. My interest was aroused when I read the story of his transformation from a street hawker of toys bought from China to a €1 billion turnover, fully integrated business, which is now the fifth largest toy company in the world. Apparently his success is all down to his voice. To be more precise it is down to his company’s voice. A few years ago, when he ran a fledgling company, he learned that Mattel and Hasbro, the two leading toy companies, spent all their advertising money in October and November, just prior to the Christmas buying season. Preziosi used his relatively small advertising budget to run a television campaign in every month outside this period. In other words, he bought “share of voice” and achieved it by choosing months when he would be heard and not swamped by those who could shout louder. Of course, voice is not just about being loud and being heard; it is also about communicating the right message. Preziosi knows a thing or two about this. “About every five years toys change completely,” he says. “If you want to stay stable in the market you have to be trendy. In 1978, girls still played with dolls when they were aged 14. Now if I gave my daughter, aged 11, a doll, she would throw it out of the window.” You have to be right on message to resonate with your fickle and ever demanding audience. Working out the importance of voice to a customer or potential customer is not easy. I said earlier that 40% of the impression we make on people when we first meet them is due to our voice rather than our appearance. Let us assume that this figure is roughly right for business introductions. What if the impression we make for our companies is achieved in a similar way, as with Preziosi’s company, by our voice – as measured by the impression left by our sales people, our signage, our logos, our adverts, websites and the like. I leave you with a very important question – are you getting your share? « Previous Entries |
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