Bella Katz on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn

What I’m reading (and RSS subscribing to) this year:

• The Gates Notes: Bill Gates has this week launched his personal new website The Gates Notes which is, of course, exceptional in many ways. The navigation reminds me of mind flow - an information collective set out in an intuitive way. Includes updates of what the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are working on and sections titled What I’m Thinking About, What I’m Learning, Infrequently Asked Questions.  This is someone who could have spent their early retirement perma-cruising the Bahamas on a 20,000 foot yacht and has instead put money and full time resources behind philanthropy on an immense scale. If I had big charitable donations to make, this is where I’d put the money.
• Freakonomics blog: This is the New York Times blog from journalist and economist (respectively) Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, authors of the bestselling Freakonomics and the new Superfreakonomics. The blog was designed to “keep the conversation going initiated in their books and includes guest contributors from different worlds, whose common connections is the application of data and numbers in unique social contexts.
• Branding Strategy Insider: The comprehensive blog of branding strategists Derrick Daye and Brad VanAuken, with regular contributions from the world’s top marketing specialists such as Mark Ritson, Al Ries, Martin Lindstrom. There’s such an overwhelming supply of marketing reading and”gurus” online that you could simplify things for yourself by reading the articles here once a week.
• Brand New: If you have an interest in corporate and brand identity (AKA logos) this blog gives unbiased reviews of who is doing what, and why it does or doesn’t work. Of course a totally subjective topic, but always with a sharp view and copious comments from copious other readers.
• Marketing Ritson: The website and article archive of marketing expert and ‘International Consultant to many of the World’s Greatest Brands’ Mark Ritson. He is a hilarious and totally brutal writer who isn’t afraid to call out a disaster piece of marketing regardless who it comes from. Harvard Business Review Columnist of the Year 2009.

Whose writing do you read regularly?

Bella Katz on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn

Recently I’ve become a bit obsessed with reading articles from the great marketing minds, old and new. I can pinpoint this down to three specific events that are going on for me right now.

1. My husband is doing his MBA and I’ve had lecturer and subject envy
2. My increased use of Twitter has led me to follow some exceptional people and read excellent articles (and conversely see how much tat it out there masquerading as marketing genius)
3. Working for myself over the last four years has meant I haven’t had a marketing mentor to work with

Banksy - monkey inspiration

For the four years I’ve worked for myself none of the above seemed to matter too much. I even stopped several papers short of completing my marketing Masters because I was fed up at regurgitating the same essay in slightly different ways to essentially the same marketing papers with slightly different titles. Marketing academia and marketing departments felt like they had frozen in time, the case studies were all the same ones from the first edition of the textbooks (Ford, New Coke etc), I felt I could learn a lot more by doing it instead of studying it.

However, a polite distance from marketing departments and a mood of change in the professional world has shaken things up and made them more interesting again. If anything good has come out the recession, for example, it may be that it’s forcing failing companies that had sat back and enjoyed the lucky good times to realise they had no recipe for success. The mediocre achievements of their mediocre execs was pretty much pure fluke.

As a result, I (would like to) believe that Thinking and Learning are making a humble comeback.

There are some true experts out there - individuals and companies - who didn’t get to where they are without constantly learning, applying good judgement and generally being excellent at what they do. Out of the seemingly endless myriad of online information I’ve found a manageable handful of those I admire and I’m going to make reading their articles, watching their presentations and seeing who else they recommend, part of my routine. There’s a lot I can learn from other fields as well as marketing - economics, science, psychology, sales, business etc. My professional resolutions have been made early this year.

Is there anyone you recommend?

Bella Katz on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn

There is a superb BBC show on Australian Foxtel TV Lifestyle every Tuesday at 8.30pm - it’s called Mary Queen of Shops and centres around Mary Portas’ quest to help independent English retailers modernise and thrive.

Before the show, I had never heard of Mary Portas or her Yellow Door agency. I had no idea that she was considered ‘one of the UK’s foremost authorities on retail and brand communication and is credited with turning Harvey Nichols into the modern fashion powerhouse that it is’. Now that I’ve seen her in action, going into small English retailers and opening their eyes to the fierce competition and reality of becoming viable businesses in 2009 and beyond, I think she’s exceptional.

I’m a marketer but not a retail marketer and I now have even more appreciation for those who understand the retail space at Mary’s level. Intuitively we all know which shops “work” for us based simply on where we love to shop, our handful of favourites. Now I’m understanding the science behind the scenes - everything from the art of merchandising a window to arranging clothes on a rack in a way that encourages buyers to visualise entire outfits. From the store flow and use of space that guides you from section to section, to the skill of brilliant buyers who can forward plan a season and translate often out there styles from the catwalk to every day customers’ every day lives.

I imagine now more than ever retail fashion is really feeling the recession pinch. Driving around Melbourne, a city that prides itself on its little boutiques and independent retailers, the For Lease signs are appearing in the windows of those quirky shops that I wondered about i.e., wondered how they survived and made money. Well, they often don’t survive.

I’ve been surprised from this show how out of touch some (many?) small independent retail owners are with 1) fashion, 2) customers and 3) the business of retail.

I mean basic stuff, like never hitting the streets and talking to or looking at what your target customers are wearing. Never going through magazines and seeing what’s in style, what your store needs to sell, what’s coming up in the next season. Having no clue as to why your stuffy, dingy store with hideously outdated stuff in the windows doesn’t draw people in. 

And I don’t know why I’m surprised at this, because it happens with a small number of all our clients I’m sure, but some retail owners just can’t handle honest advice and put up fierce resistance to change. These may be the same store owners who are about to lose their house, partner and livelihood because for the last 12 months they’ve turned over a measly average of $50 a day in sales.

That defensive obstinance may be ok if you’re a raging success with a fail-safe business formula but when you’re one step away from bankruptcy it’s time to listen to what experts have to say. Anyway, in most cases the reason businesses are a raging success is because they have leadership that is always looking ahead and asking questions, even when times are great.

Mary Portas’ next television series in the UK looks - very relevantly - at the Charity Sector. Not surprisingly those musty dens are also feeling the pain as people hold on to their old clothes and donations of decent stock dwindle.

Bella Katz on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn

Being online can distract and pull you in so many directions  - new articles, new gurus, new thinking - that you can forget to return to equally, if not more important learnings from the masters.

With the over abundance of information coming via social media, I’ve had a real nostalgia for true learning from experts in their field who arrived there after many years of experience and achievement.

Several interesting articles and authors I’m learning from

• Harvard Business Review April 09 exceptional article by John Quelch on How to Market in a Downturn
• Back in 2002 David Maister looked at How to Restore Optimism in a Down Period

This article by Carl Bialik from the Wall Street Journal also gives a nice cynical perspective of the whole false guru thing as a result of our trust in rankings and lists.

Bella Katz on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn

I signed up to Twitter at the end of 2007 after my husband read a story about it in the Economist. At the time, we were the only two people that we knew using it so, as proud as we were of being such early adopters, there wasn’t a hell of a lot of relevance to it in our/my life. Not socially and not professionally.

Instead, I went down the Facebook path and just really embraced it. Facebook was (and is) a brilliant way to stay in touch with friends all over the world, you can have a flick through their photos and catch up with their lives in little pieces rather than having to find time to write long arduous catch up emails or even more alien, long phone calls. (Do people even have long phone calls with friends any more?)

In product lifecyle terms I don’t consider myself an innovator, someone who jumps on a new technology as soon as it surfaces, I’m probably more like a late early adopter. I love technology when people I trust and respect are also using it, but I’m not that fussed about being the first to do it.

So I’m happily Facebooking away to my friends, I’ve worked out all the little nerdy tricks of it even, synching it with my BlackBerry, uploading photos as and when they happen, ignoring and purging long lost “friends” and generally creating my own happy little community. I’m thinking yeah, I’m in with this social media thing and I’m 34, so what do you think of that that little Gen Yers - I’m right there with you.

And of course always having one marketing eye open I can see that it’s a great medium for clients to communicate differently, more personally and regularly with their customers. (Some clients. Not all. Only those that genuinely have an interesting thing to say on a regular basis.)

Meanwhile, in the background the Twitter thing is murmuring away, but out of some unspoken solidarity I still feel it’s a choice between that and Facebook and choose to ignore it. I have a friend, Michelle Matthews, publisher of Deck of Secrets (@secretshq) who is a very early adopter and has been responsible for getting me excited about everything from digital cameras to mp3 players to BlackBerrys and she has been using Twitter for a really long time. I still didn’t buy it… But I was feeling a bit less obstinate and I started following @miafreedman whose newspapar columns and blog I always liked.

Then I went to a seminar by a friend and colleague @robhartnett and talked to other business owners using Twitter, @jasewatson, @sammutimer, @leisahartnett and felt like a stubborn old dinosaur.

So look, to make a potentially long and rambling story short(er), over the last few weeks I have finally reactiveated that 2007 account of mine and started getting into Twitter. Even just two weeks ago I was asking friends what was so good about it and wondering whether I had anything of interest to say to strangers who may choose to follow me. I mean, on Facebook I know my friends are dead keen to know I painted a bedroom feature wall in Tuscan Gold, but on Twitter I’m not so sure… As a very positive consequence, it has brought me back into actively searching out interesting articles, people and information again - and that can only be a good thing.

I’m still a bit nervous about getting drawn into 24 hour conversations and of talking nonsense to that audience I don’t know personally, you do put yourself out there when you go down this path, but hey, you can always turn it off when you’ve had enough.

What are the good things about it?

- It gets you reading and finding out about new ideas, new websites, new businesses, new stuff
- It makes you communicate concisely, no waffling on, 140 characters to be exact
- It puts you in touch with people and therefore ideas you may otherwise never have known
- It makes you want to say interesting things
- It’s different to any form of communication you may have had in the past
- It could be here to stay, so you may just have to bite the bullet and get involved

PS. I must apologise to the first non friend on Twitter who tried to follow me and who I duly blocked - sorry about that. I get it now.

PPS. I even feel like a bit of a fossil writing an article about it because there are people out there already on to the next thing and I’m only just here.

Follow me on Twitter @bellakatz - I may have something interesting to say soon.

Bella Katz on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn

For a number of small New Zealand companies, breaking into the Australian market is a necessary next step in taking the business to that other level. I’ve worked with a number of fantastic little businesses whose passionate owners, the ‘creative entrepreneur’ types or ‘two sisters with an idea’, have had great success in NZ and are not sure where to begin in marketing to Australia.

New Zealanders and Australians are very close culturally and geographically and the populations tend to pretty much blend in (ignoring the obvious jokes we make about one another) but there are definite differences when it comes to launching new products or services. Australian buyers require a lot more nurturing to take an interest in your business.New Zealand has long been a fierce supporter of its own creative talent and the NZ brand.(A quick word about the NZ brand: when an entire country gets behind its own innovative image, when the government introduces and believes in its strapline ‘New Zealand New Thinking’, that can only be good thing.)

I have to say it, chic and slick sales materials really do go a long way, and that’s true whether you’re in the skincare business, the fashion business or the accounting business. When you’re the new company trying to carve out a niche customer following and excite people, it pays to look sophisticated in your presentation.

This means investing some initial dollars and working with a good designer to create a great looking brand that can be carried across all your sales materials. Even if you’re a one man band. (Especially if you’re a one man band.) These are not costs in the tens of thousands, you may strike it lucky with a particularly good designer who can do great work for several thousand dollars, maybe even a few hundred.

Once you have the right materials that best represent your business – a quality booklet that showcases your business and products in depth, a top-level summary that can be left behind as a reminder, samples that can be distributed to the right people, materials that support the future sales force or excite distributors, a website that reinforces the professionalism of your business – then you can start nurturing the right contacts.

A few reminder points for the small New Zealand company about to embark on an Australian marketing tour:

1. Be confident you have the best materials that showcase your product or service to potential buyers – unless you have a REALLY good home printer and a background in design, don’t even go there. Get this all designed and printed professionally.
2. Do some research into your Australian market (it’s amazing what business info you can get after a few hours on Google).
3. Develop a contact list of the key people and places you need to speak with (Google - again, a gem of info).
4. Make contact and appointments before leaving the country. You may be surprised at just how often a seemingly small design store gets solicited with products and how much they hate being dropped in on. (If you, like me, are not a fan of cold calling, email is always a good option for contacting people. They come to it in their own time, when they’re good and ready, and in the mood.)
5. Have your emailable materials ready to go as follow up. Again, a professional slick pdf booklet made with computer-viewing in mind i.e. visual and not pages and pages of words.
6. If you weren’t able to meet in person, follow up again by snail mail – send samples of your products and, again, those materials to leave behind. It’s still a treat to get a parcel in the mail, especially if you’re trying to generate publicity through magazines and the recipients of your samples are often 22-year old PR girls who love a freebie product.
7. And of course, don’t be put off by the rejection. If you have a good product and good story, nurture those contacts on a quarterly basis and keep them informed as your business develops.

I find for small companies with minimal budgets and time, PR may well be the best way to go.