An interview with Peter Fisk
Interview by Alistair Craven
Peter Fisk is a highly experienced marketer who has spent many years working for the likes of British Airways, American Express, Coca Cola, and Microsoft. In January 2006, Business Strategy Review identified him as one of the leading new business thinkers. He is currently a partner of The Foundation, the innovative customer consulting firm.
Fisk has served as the CEO of the world’s largest professional marketing organization, the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM). In this role he became recognized as a leader and commentator on marketing worldwide. Representing over 60,000 marketers in 130 countries, he challenged existing perceptions of marketing and championed new practices and standards. He writes and speaks regularly on all aspects of marketing and has authored over 50 papers published around the world. He is also co-author of the FT Handbook of Management and The Complete CEO.
Peter’s new book Marketing Genius (Wiley, 2006) describes how a more left and right-brain approach to business can achieve extraordinary results. It takes a look at what today’s businesses can learn from Einstein and Picasso, and their modern contemporaries such as Steve Jobs and Philippe Starck.
Hello, and welcome to Management First. According to your website, your book Marketing Genius applies the left- and right-brain genius of Einstein and Picasso to the challenges of marketing, brands and innovation. Why have you chosen this approach?
Peter Fisk:
From the vision of Apple to the insight of Zara, the passion of Nike and entrepreneurship of JetBlue, the community building of My Space and thrill of Agent Provocateur, today’s leading brands think and act differently.
Customer insight and creativity are important, but must be combined with the analytical and commercial rigour that drives strategy, innovation and profitable growth.
The “genius” of business today lies in resolving a number of different paradoxes: the ability to connect outside and inside; markets and business; customers and shareholders; creativity and analysis; promises and reality; today and tomorrow.
Today’s leading business and marketing leaders have much to learn from both Einstein and Picasso, one who started with mathematical rigour then thought creatively, the other who was generally mad, but still embraced the theory of his practice.
“Genius” is about seeing things differently, then having the belief to do different things.
In recent years business has favoured a highly analytical, logical, measured approach. Indeed our obsession with left-brain precision, has perhaps led us to forget our right-brain imagination – to see the bigger picture, to make connections and instinctive judgements. We need both – wider vision and disciplined focus, radical creativity and rigorous metrics – recognizing that creating exceptional value for customers is the only sustainable way of delivering superior returns to shareholders. This is what the book Marketing Genius is all about, and what my company – the strategic innovation firm, The Foundation – is currently helping leading brands like Marks & Spencer, Volkswagen and O2 to achieve with significant impact on customers and performance.
You have said that too many businesses are obsessed with their inside – how to do what they do better. What is the root cause of this? Peter Fisk:
Too many businesses are obsessed with their inside – how to do what they do better, reduce their cost base, automate their processes – rather than their outside. This important but limiting preoccupation – plus the blinkers of
functional silos and industry conventions – means that businesses often miss what matters most.
Similarly, the obsession with more data, more analysis, more measurement, and more process leaves little space for intuition, creativity and the bigger picture. We look to employ people who are masters of the spreadsheet, rather than for their different skills and experiences. It is a recipe by which companies will converge to sameness, for incrementalism, and ultimately for irrelevance. Ask Kodak, the market leader in photographic film for many decades, who within a handful of years found that their market had disappeared, swallowed up by alien digital worlds led by the likes of Sony and HP. They had not even been on their radar screen, until it was too late.
What’s the root cause? Blinkered thinking, obsession with the short-term, fear of challenging the status quo, inertia and plain simple laziness. The best opportunities and biggest challenges are outside, not inside. Market change and its implications are often discontinuous, requiring more significant responses. They should be the starting point of any business strategy rather than a consequence. Market-thinking should be at the heart of decision making, and market-thinkers at the heart of business.
Apple watched the market for music fragment and blur into chaos, as new technologies disrupted the industry model and consumers began to rebel, new entrants challenged the economics and old formats quickly became obsolete. Apple brought together an innovative solution in the form of hardware and software – iPod and iTunes – to offer a way through this turmoil, to redefine the industry dynamics with a compelling and profitable solution.
You suggest that in order for companies to enjoy more success they should strive to build dialogue with customers on their terms, in their time and place, rather than product-push, mass-market campaigns. What are some of the ways in which organizations can do this?
Peter Fisk:
An “outside-in” approach to business starts with the market. A market strategy – defining where and how to compete, and what to do for short and long-term commercial success – must sit at the core of a business decision-making framework. This requires fundamental choices, about which markets to focus on, and how to be positioned within them – less about legacy and capability, more about opportunity and customers.
An outside-in brand defines what it does for customer, rather than what it does itself. Outside-in Outside-innovation starts by redefOutside-inOutside-ing context before considering products and services. Outside-in communication is less about blanket campaigns, more about customer-initiated dialogues. Outside-in channels are no longer an extended arm of suppliers, but trusted agents of customers. Outside-in relationships are more based on communities than transactions.
Amazon, for example, uses its intelligence and imagination to anticipate and meet the needs of each customer. Not only did Jeff Bezos and his expeditionary marketers seize the new “whitespace” by leveraging virtual technologies and physical delivery, but they harnessed customer power, fundamentally doing business on customer terms, and doing it profitably. In the next 5 years we will see a fundamental shift from conventional “push” advertising that tries to sell every customer the same product in the same way at the same time, to much more ambient “pull” media which build ideas in people’s minds. This background-like positioning establishes the brand ready for when customers want to search and buy, supported by a range of more interactive media through which the customer can choose to connect on their terms.
You have said that most of us in the western world typically have everything that we need so our wants are more emotional and unarticulated. What are the implications of this for today’s marketers?
Peter Fisk:
In a western world of fulfilled needs, marketers need to work smarter to explore what customers would like or love, rather than just what they functionally need. On one side, this is about more sophisticated learning techniques – understanding people’s emotional triggers, observing their actual behaviours, changing their attitudes and perceptions – whilst on the other side it is about having the insight, creativity and boldness to create new solutions.
This is not about that age old accusation thrown at marketing of “selling people what they don’t want” but about understanding how to solve customers’ problems, or enhance their lives, better.
Big opportunity areas would include:
• Health-driven nutrition, lifestyle support, and well-being
• Technically converging solutions in communications
• More ethical and environmentally-sourced products
• “Now” experiences for the affluent, youthful 55+ baby boomers
• Low cost alternatives, redefining value, for lower income groups
• More effective work practices, virtual, collaborative and flexible
• Stronger aesthetic, design solutions fusing function and form
And perhaps the biggest of all, tapping into the so-called “bottom of the pyramid” – the enormous growth markets of China, India, Russia and Brazil. Although this too needs insight and imagination, to create solutions that are relevant and responsible, rather than naively seeking to impose Western values and global sameness.
According to one of your articles, customers are “more informed and less tolerant. Gone is the day when we fit into a well-defined segment, or adhere to average market research statistics.” Given these observations, can there ever be such a thing as customer loyalty?
Peter Fisk:
Yes. Customers are looking for brands (and companies, products and people represented by them) that they can trust and hang onto in a fast changing, confusing and intimidating world.
“The obsession with more
data, more analysis, more
measurement, and more
process leaves little space
for intuition, creativity and
the bigger picture. We look
to employ people who are
masters of the
spreadsheet, rather than
for their different skills and
experiences. It is a recipe
by which companies will
converge to sameness, for
incrementalism, and
ultimately for irrelevance.”
However, this trust must be earned through much more than a database-driven, sales-driving CRM
programme. Companies cannot force customers to have relationships with them, and indeed people have become wise to the more crass “points mean prizes” or even “points mean pennies off” initiatives. Look at the early day successes of AirMiles, and the struggle of Nectar; the loyalty to more personalized services like First Direct, rather than big banks like Barclays. The direct marketing campaign that results in an automated phone call telling you that you’ve won a free holiday, has probably destroyed more trust than anything, and is probably the laziest, unprofessional form of marketing.
People build relationships with people like them – customers with customers – who have similar aspirations (so attracted to a similar brand values), and similar practical needs (products and services). We naturally gravitate to people like ourselves. And as society becomes more fragmented, new types of communities emerge, often based around a particular issue and interest (e.g. new baby, football, downloadable music, politics). Brands can facilitate rather than drive such communities (Huggies, Coca Cola, BBC, Private Eye etc). As such people grow loyal to each other, this loyalty also rubs off on the community-enabling brand too.
Neuroscientists have found that consumers typically choose which brand to buy within 2.6 seconds. If, then, choosing a brand seems such an impulsive affair, can gigantic marketing budgets and intensively planned marketing campaigns really be justified?
Peter Fisk:
The brain is an incredibly complicated device, but we can draw some parallels to the brain sat in the back of our computers. The ROM stores information in the background, which can be tapped into when required and built over time. The RAM is more of a temporary place for information as it is used to support the work in hand.
Brand building – the long-term development of a strong idea, positioned carefully in the market, relevant to certain audiences, and with an increasingly positive reputation – needs to be carefully built over time in the consumer’s ROM, their background memory. We do this by ensuring that a brand has a strong sense of purpose aspirationally and functionally, clear differentiation from competitors, and relevance and empathy with its customers.
Come the moment in the shopping aisle when the consumer needs to make a choice, we need to ensure that our brand is quickly and foremost accessible from the ROM, to bring it forwards into the consumers foreground, RAM if you will. It is
then best positioned to drive emotional preference and physical behaviour. What makes a brand easy to access from background to foreground is its simplicity of message, its strength of empathy, its logical and emotional offer. It also needs to be catchy – which is why we explore the idea of memes, and their particular relevance to proposition design and communication structuring, in the book.
According to Andy Owen – Managing Director of a leading international marketing consultancy with over 22 years' experience – Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is “a waste of time and money as has already been well proven in its very short existence.” How would you react to this?
Peter Fisk:
It depends what you do with it. Installing a CRM system is unlikely to do much for your business, unless it is accompanied by much more.
Amazon uses customer knowledge to learn about customers through every interaction, to personalize offers and communication. Tesco has a very successful database-enabled programme that profiles, understands and anticipates customer needs and wants, British Airways have survived a torrid decade in the airline industry because of the loyalty built up with its key business travellers. And the lifetime value of these customers (and indeed their future profit potential) is likely to far outstrip the capital investments required to generate them.
But such initiatives require far more than an IT solution. From a relationship-driving strategy and segmentation to the right propositions and prioritization, more personal experiences and empathy to aligned management and metrics. CRM is a business model, not a software package.
From your research, which companies are your personal favourites for their innovative and memorable approaches to marketing?
Peter Fisk:
Nike – because there is unbelievable passion for sporting excellence in every person at Nike’s World Campus at Beaverton, Oregon. Phil Knight, a passionate athlete turned accountant turned creative marketer is the man who turned a $35 swoosh into a $12 billion business.
Google – because, in a complex world, customers need to start somewhere, and most marketing activities today start with a customer’s Google. Power has fundamentally transferred to
customers, with little space in an “outside in” world for traditional campaigns and distributors. Jones Soda – because, as its founder of the maverick soft-drinks upstart himself admits, “nobody needs or wants my shit … but they love it”. Marketers need to be more radical and bold to stand out from the crowd. Check out their flavours (Turkey and Gravy, anybody?) and labels too.
You can read more of my favourite brands, and track them as they develop further by visiting my website at www.MarketingGeniusLive.com
If you were asked, what three key pieces of advice would you offer the marketing managers reading this interview?
Peter Fisk:
Marketers are the people who can most naturally achieve this new balance – to connect customers and business, to embrace creativity and analysis, to see the future and act on it today. They have the natural “outside in” perspective and talents to lead the business.
Marketers should be the most important, influential and inspiring professionals within the business today. Yet for too long, their capabilities have remained organizationally isolated, focused on tactical, functional deliverables, making a marginal contribution rather than the engine of growth and value creation. Businesses cannot survive in today’s markets like this.
Businesses need marketers and marketing more than ever, to step up to the challenges of market complexity and intense competition, to be the creative and commercial driving force, and to embrace customers and innovation across the whole organization. Marketing is the engine of sustainable growth and long-term value creation. Marketing must drive strategic direction and aligned delivery, both a stronger function and an essential mindset for business. However this requires marketers willing to change, to step up to the challenge. There has never been a more exciting time for marketing, or to be a marketer. It’s time for marketing to take centre stage.
Finally, what interests you outside of your professional life, and why?
Peter Fisk:
What hopefully comes across in the book and this interview is my great passion for marketing;
both in terms of the activity and how its practices can contribute enormous value to customers and business, but also for marketers – professionals who I believe have the most to offer companies today. But that requires marketers to have the confidence to stretch themselves, challenge their conventions, take more risks personally and organizationally, and work in new ways.
That’s why I took on the role of CEO of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, recognizing the importance of reframing marketing’s capabilities, perception and performance for the 21st Century business, it’s what I spend my time talking about with companies and at conferences around the world, and that’s why I wrote the book.
Outside of work my great passion is for athletics – who is the highest, fastest, strongest? I have run track to marathon since the age of 10 years old. Indeed once you first experience the feeling of winning – like I did in an early school 1500m race, its hard to let go of the search for it. I’m also a great supporter of Newcastle United, the best football club in the world. But most important is my family – my wife and two young daughters give me the energy and inspiration to do so much more, and keep my feet on the ground!
And I’m currently researching and writing my next book – about growth through innovation. In particular it will focus on how to embrace the untapped opportunity of technology-enabled networks, social responsibility in the form of ethics and environment, and the new forms of starting points and signposting which customers seek in a complex, changing world. So if you have a great insight or case study, let me know by e-mailing [email protected]
