In the meantime I got very fired up at Incredibleurope - a gathering in Vienna organised by Selma Prodanovic which brought together creatives and social entrepreneurs mostly from inside Europe but actually from round the world. One of the most interesting was Gentry Underwood the head of Knowledge for Ideo the design agency. Ideo's ethnography cardset is one of my prized possessions.  It is a useful credentials deck for Ideo giving one casestudy per card. But the valuable part for me is the itemising card by card of all their user centred ethnographic techniques for solving design problems and generating insights. I talked to Gentry about making another set of cards. For social entrepreneurs. Now people who do this all the time ask Why would you need to do that? Its common sense. But it isn't. Its a combination of experience and hard graft. And a lot of talent. But once you have set yourself the task of understanding how to create and motivate groups then you realise there are a lot of things you can do to help them along. That is going to be the next project on waggledancers. What I propose to do is to set up a few pages where I am going to sketch out some of the tools. Till we have a whole candidate card list. Then we can have a vote about which are the most important. If you have ideas you want to contribut or want to write them up yourself and put them on this site then be my guest. You can read about incredible day 1 and day 2 here.

Criticism ought to be constructive - for their benefit and not just because you didn't get what you were expecting. But I have had difficulty on that front where suppliers have taken great umbrage when I gently pointed out that they could have done better. Perhaps I should have lost my temper and shouted and that would have been all right. But win win means that both need to come out of a conflict situation intact and hopefully improved.

When I have been running a course for researchers to teach them how to generate greater numbers of insights one of the learnings played back to us is the importance of getting a good brief from the client. And this means asking good questions to find out what is going on.  One very large research agency we trained even told us that their takeout from what they had learned from the course was that they were going to write a discussion guide - for the client briefing meeting! Normally the discussion guide is only used to run the fieldwork interviewing research respondents.

By framing the interaction with the client as equally important and insightful as interviewing customers  you will find a valuable new source of information. More than that the way in which you ask questions will partly structure how the project is run. What you doing is constructing a conceptual framework. That's the point.

Here are some good questions to consider:

Who is the ultimate client? What are they expecting?

What have you done in the past? Are you looking for something different?

What do they think they already know?

What do they need to know?

What will they do as a next steps from this project?

What are the consequences of not doing this project?

There's something else which you should always look for. But you usually can't directly ask for. And that is What is the real brief? The one you can't tell us about? It may be personal, political, it may involve a damaging or humiliating admission. By the end of the project you will know it. If you don't it will probably bite you. But you will kick yourself and will gain so much more understanding if you watch for it at the start. There is always an aspect to the brief that the client won't want to talk about. And its the most important bit.

As a rule of thumb the individual will always tell you (not in so many words) but using hesitations and changes in direction. Just as an experienced researcher knows that people don't say what they mean or mean what they say so the same rules apply even at the briefing. Watch for it. I have focussed on the briefing in particular because normally the flow is all the other way.  And even a briefing is a conversation which takes two (baby).

And we start with a question. A hard lesson for marketing people to learn because mostly marketing is used to starting with a budget - and an audience is guaranteed. Which is why we set up long meetings to agree the message and then how we wrap up the message in a creative idea. And so on. This is not normal. Marketing has been like a division of artillery. And it isn't nearly as much about firing communication shells as it used to be. And the rest of the world doesn't work that way. So start with a question - what will engage those you are communicating with? What are they expecting to hear from you? Slightly more risk question - what do they think of you? You are not trying to inform them but to get them moving. And to do that you need to engage. This isn't a party political point about modern advertising. Its a fact of nature for all communication that matters. It was only the concentration of media in the middle of the 20th century that enabled those with a lot of money to ignore their audience and to stream messages at them.  For your closer audiences you will need to think about what they are scripted to do by default.

Its not all bad news - most are paid to produce - they are project driven. So give them the correct inputs and off they'll chug. That's how companies work. It may not be the most effective way of moving your idea along. They may merely transport it to the next stage and ensure it arrives on time.  The idea will be even better if they put some of themselves into it. But recognise by default they may not bother or freel they have permission to do so.  The reason for starting with a question or two is that instead of deciding who has to help and what they need to do you might want to think about the terms of engagement - if they were to do an outstanding job then what would that be like and how can you persaude them to do that. This is why brainstorms get tried a lot even if many of them aren't that effective - because they are capable of creating that sense of participation which draws individuals in.

To summarise this post. Communication starts with involving those with whom you're commumicating. The measure of your success is how involved you can make them. Through this week I will post about a number of different audiences - corporate customers or clients as they are often known, suppliers, team members, and bystanders.

So to summarise what we have been looking at this week if you want to create motivation then start with measures don't leave it until someone requires you to produce a business case. That way you can choose measures which are relevant to the project and which will motivate you and those you work with to do their best. And don't forget personal measures as well. If you don't build a culture of measurement which makes a difference to you personally then you will miss a valuable source of motivation.

In recent years there has been more of a focus on an advocacy ladder. In other words how many non users have you got, how many are aware of your product, how many would consider buying it and so on right through to repeat buyers and advocates. By measuring the number in each group and trying to migrate people upt through the levels you have a better impression of the impact of communications.

These are stil soft measures because they depend on self reporting. In other words the person who you are interviewing talking about what they remember. And people are notoriously bad at reporting their own behaviour and attitutes reliably and consistently.  So use with care!

The other major weakness for setting up these kinds of measures to get an impression about the impact of communications is that it is difficult to isolate the effect of a particular advertising campaign. The reason why they are so enthusiastic may be because they use the product a lot not because they have been exposed to a lot of communication material. They won't be able to tell you this! So act with caution. I gave you a list of other kinds of measures back in Waggle 13 so you can see there are plenty to consider as alternatives.

The last soft measure is the netpromoter score - a measure invented by Reicheld - to measure the proportion of people who will recommend your product. If this increases after what ever you are planning then that can often be taken as a useful measure. Even if it is difficult to attribute this increase exclusively to what it was that you did.

This concludes my list of softer measures. I am not negative about them. But I am realistic about how much they can be taken as a measure of communications activity. Famous advertising doesn't in itself drive sales. So it may be that you might do better finding more behavioural type scales instead of measuring that people remember famous campaigns.

The reason for making an assumption or two and attaching a measure or two to them is that reality will be different. But your initial measures because they won't work the way you expected will shape your understanding of what happens. You will actually learn something.

Making predictions and measures and having to justify them at least to yourself is a great way to pull out the assumptions you are working with which no one will ever challenge because you have never articulated them. Set up a measure or two and you will be challenged and you will have to bring out your assumptions to defend yourself. That's why this is so valuable as an exercise. It forces you to make explicit what is implicit and inarticulate. That is hugely valuable. the more you do it the more likely you are to be trading on useful experiences - predictions which start to be borne out by the facts because you learned from experience. So don't be afraid to set a measure and justify your choice. You'll be doing everyone a favour. And you will be taking the first step towards getting valuable experience. 

The point I am making is that this is a huge list of measures. ROI does not begin to cover all of the things you could measure. It is useful in showing how you multiplied your investment but the guarantee of future sales comes from other factors entirely. Here's a chart I used a very long time ago to convince a hardbitten M&S director that he had a major sales opportunity. At that time they measured wine sales by total value. And boasted they killed products in minutes based on the rate of sale. Using observation (on instore security cameras) I was able to find that it was taking up to 15 minutes to buy a single bottle of wine. And using TGI that customers were only buying a quarter of their wine there. It only needs a calculator to demonstrate the impact of the business if customers bought half their wine at M&S.  These measures were simple to obtain but invisible to the cash till.

The measures you select will give the task you set yourselves a particular character. That's why it is so important that you agree up front what you are trying to do and what change you are bringing about. Using a long candidate list of measures also helps to address the kind of project manager or client who wants to win on every single kind of measure. It can't be done - so we have to prioritise the most important measures and may have to leave out some of the others.

For the client who says there is no budget to research anything so we have to stick to financial measures I would still say that there should be a discussion about what constitues success. Otherwise you won't know what you are setting out to do. So agree measures anyway - it makes it easier to then persuade someone to spend some money to see what actually happened.

Measure at the start. Then here's the next counterintuitive thing. Measure something personal that has an impact on you. Another reason we don't like measuring things is that we are supposed to measure big important things. Like money. And as we shall see one of the problems with ROI is that it is a measure no one really relates to.  Hardly anyone gets out of bed and says I must get down to the office to improve the ROI by 10 points any more than they go to the office to raise the share price. Because it isn't in their job description.

Whenever I finish a piece of training these are the questions that I ask people to think about What I'm going to stop doing. Something big I'm going to do differently. Something simple I'm going to change. And the final key question. How will I know when its working?

If I work with that group again and have the time to set up a preliminary exercise then I will ask them to bring in photos or images of the changes that took place following the actions they have taken. This is a powerful way to reinforce change and to make sure that people have indeed made changes or noticed changes in their working practices. One time I did it I got photos of PR spreads that would never have happened without the decisions taken in the previous workshop, stock ordering systems which saved hours of waiting on the phone, and empty shelves as products started to fly off them.

This may seem far too local for those who want to set up big measures. But teams can will progress faster if team members understand what's in it for them and whether it is working or not. There is no point committing to big goals if the team members can't see how they personall will contribute and progress toward the goal. There do of course have to be bigger goals and deadlines but the personal measures are powerful because they are set by the individual who is best placed and motivated to achieve them.

Motivation that it is indeed worth getting. And will make a difference to the work they are doing. Motivation that they will pass on the information to others - so others will go looking as well. You may be getting bemused about what 'it' is. Well it could be an insight into the customer. It could be a strategy - a way of engaging with customers. But we want them to own it and not be doing us a favour.

The first aspect of motivation I am going to start off with is measurement. Which probably surprises you. Usually we don't think about measurement until we get to the end of a project and need some justification for raising a budget for the next project. Or we may be hoping that nobody remembers to ask so we get away without measuring at all. Trouble with these approaches is that measurement is for someone else (often in finance) - and that we don't expect it to tell us anything. We also have a problem with expecting that any set of measures needs to be 100% accurate - where don't have enough information or we aren't sure what to measure we back away. 

Actually you can measure just about anything. And you can measure in any way you like. If you measure up front them it shapes how you go about a task - the measurement helps to create the motivation. The other great thing about measuring up frount is that it is speculative - you are guesssing what is going to happen. When you actually get around to doing something then it is likely to be different. By comparing what really happened with what you expected to happen you learn.  And you are in a position to optimise. If you don't know how you think you will do then how do you know if you can do any better?

If the finance people aren't going to ask about their ROI until itsnearly all over then by starting so early you have carte blanche to set whatever measures you like.  You might want to measure how much time or work or money is likely to be saved by using this insight or by following this strategy. If it isn't going to make any difference then why bother doing it? So start with measures - in this coming week we are going to look at some of the things you can measure.

How does this translate into marketing? Well plainly put the one who sells the most products may not be as profitable as one of the competitors who lag behind them. The first to market may have an advantage or may be driving the category and allowing other brands profit for far less effort. The Wii was last to market but outsold the Xbox 360 and the Playstation by virtue of being more playable, cheaper to make and cheaper to write games from. It has forced its technically superior competitors to lower their prices. And it is more profitable.

I started to think about this more deeply when I used a positioning exercise - something I am going to show you in a little while. While working with a publisher. I was trying to move the brand in question as far away from its competitors as I could using propositions to move it. But the publisher was much more interested in which other titles a particular title was alongside. Its the pack of titles that helps to sell an individual title. That's why when there is a runaway best seller like the Da Vinci code or Harry Potter then other authors and titles are brought in to generate additional sales. They don't get anywhere by themselves. Its the company you keep that positions you for success.

Where in the category a brand positions itself is very important. Brands say different things about themselves to position themselves differently with the category. To reposition themselves brands say something different to encourage customesr to position them somewhere else in the category. That's the difference between a proposition and a positioning. A proposition is what you say to persuade someone to position or reposition your brand.

We've come a long way this week using the idea of a category. Its an important one because there is too much thinking about products and brands by themselves in isolation from customers in competitors who are almost always working in the environment of the category. Category thinking is an essential tool for the waggledancer who uses holistic system thinking as the starting point before considering where to make advantage for the specific brand.

I have a very simple example from a workshop I ran a number of years ago for the management team of a major jewellery brand. We made a list of competitors and put it on a map. In other words we mapped the category as we saw it.  The names on that map were quite predictable - all names of famous and substantial jewellery brands.  But then in a subsequent exercise I asked a different question. I asked people to talk about the jewellery they owned, where they had got it from and what it meant to them. At which point i found that some bought from street markets, some had had jewellery handed down by family members which had huge emotional resonance for them. None of this had been mentioned when mapping the jewellery category. The jewellery category which can be easily mapped by ripping ads out of magazines. And these were the same people who were creating and selling jewellery for others!

There is the world as the marketers would like it to be. And there is the world as customer see it. Very different. Actually marketers need to have both to avoid making basic errors. The best marketers bring the two worlds together to create competitive advantage because they tap into the real world and wants and needs of their customers which are still stronger than the strongest aspirations marketers try to foist upon them.

A waggledancing technique I am going to return to is interviewing the client organisation. Which tells you as much about a market as interviewing the customers. But I am going to leave that for now.

The greatest exponents of category marketing are to be found in Japan. Relentless is a terrific read if you can get hold of it which introduce the Japanese take on marketing. One memorable metaphor is the carrying of a Shinto shrine which is carried on the shoulders of devotees. The authors of Relentless say the customer is king and is carried on the shoulders of the brands which form the category.  One of the reasons why Japanese brands took over the west as fast as they did was that they didn't do what all their western competitors did and slug it out brand by brand. They marketed in swarms saying very similar things about their products. Office equipment is a particularly good example. The brands tended to promote the same new product features at the same time. Meaning that sales were proportionate to their market share. No one tried to outgun the others. And the consequence was that the market became educated on the new features because all the brands chose the same feature.  There is an apocryphal story that a Japanese company launched a pure orange juice on to the market and was forced to withdraw it because they had a unique advantage which disadvantaged their competitors! You may regard this as the worst example of a cartel. But this kind of thinking enabled Japanese products to become world leaders faster than any other companies until the arrival of the internet.

Adam Morgan's great book Eat the big fish is a modern western example of category thinking. Which is a reminder that a smaller company with less resources can outperform a much larger better resourced competitor. By differentiating a smaller nimble competitor helps to grow the category. Private label products create tougher competition and keep pricing under control. Manufacturer brands can't walk away becuase they need the distribution power of the retailers to sell in sufficient quantities though often it is only through the swings and roundabouts of price promotions that allow them to do so.  Brand leaders find that they have to look not to their own advantage but for the benefit of the entire category. They can't go it alone.  This is more than because of antitrust legislation. Overly powerful brands become deeply unpopular because they are less accountable and start to behave as if they are less accountable.  Which is why Microsoft is still frantically trying to reinvent itself as the flock of speedboats Nathan Myrvold talked about once. Internally this is how they see themselves but externally Microsoft has developed an image problem which is why they are suggesting that Windows 7 is your idea!

The dotcom boom of the late 1990s saw a stream of entrepreneurs with startup funding heading for ad agencies with the idea that if they put their product out there then it would become a market leader - without understanding that if you don't have an established marketplace then you have to make one. Without that there is no market to be leader of. And it became very evident that many of these startup web ventures solved problems which did not fit any established market category which meant there was no way to explain what the product was and why it was a benefit. Without a category it took usually at least 10 minutes to explain what it was the product did. And this was to an agency audience - sympathetic - keen to make a living promoting whatever it was that this web startup represented. And the entrepreneur would expect that the advertising agency would find a creative idea so compelling that a 10 minute explanation could be reduced to seconds. It couldn't be done. The most important task for a startup is to define the category and only then to go on to explain where the product fits within the category. Why it is better and what it will do for the customer, Try it. Try to explain what a product is and does without reference to a category. Language disappears.

So it has 4 legs, is furry, has a pouch, has a beak like a duck. Sounds like it comes from Australia.. or the Galapagos..

This is just as important when you go and ask real people about products. Because the categories they use aren't necessarily the ones the marketers dreams up. One of the main roles of marketing is to do some educating so customers stay with the categories the brand managers would prefer them to have. Or to think of the market using a new framework which will make the market entrant feel more relevant and the established products look less relevant. But what ever happens don't try to do it without a category.

The reason I think strategists need to get involved with the business of motivation and communication is because strategy does not belong to the individual but to the group.  The strategist is consequently better placed to brief and motivate that group and to ensure that the groups stays on track. the manager on the other hand is concerned with process and delivery - often to an external client. The organising of the people and systems is what management is about. The strategist on the other hand needs to concern themselves with the direction and momentum of the idea. Because you can have a team of people working at full tilt and making good use of the time. They are making something.  But its drifting off strategy. In the days when the strategist or planner as they are known in advertising agencies used to set up the creative direction using a creatve brief - it was customary to be a lot less invovled as the advertising was made and distributed. But if optimisation is part of strategy then there really is no excuse for not being involved. The strategist needs to think about how they can improve the focus and effectiveness of the idea as it is being executed. I would suggest that this also is the job of the strategist not the job of the manager.

You probably haven't noticed but more and more of the job titles in the workplace are not to do with things or processes. They are for intangibles. There was a time of course when an employee did everything. Before they were specialised. And when they were the departments usually corresponded to bits of the production process. But now there are all sorts of non productive job titles. Which are really important. Because quality and extra value comes from the intangibles so we need people who can do that.  Sttrategy is one of them. 50 years ago the only companies who had people with strategy in their job title were large oil companies who used them to work out where to find the next batch of oil. And which companies to buy next. Marketing departments had managers not strategists. Now there are strategists everywhere.

I have already commented on the problem with the strategy word. Intellectual, abstract and often used by people who don't mean it - who have no intention of focussin on onething but want to sound important. So there are people with strategy in their title who don't do strategy at all. There are a lot who don't have strategy who are brilliant strategists. As I said its about the intangibles. Being effective is more difficult thani it has ever been because if your job is about intangibles you can't judge your performance by the number of widgets you produced because chances are that was in somebody else's job description and you need to prove you made a difference over and above their contribution. Tough eh?  I just want to encourage you that the fact that strategy is going everywhere to all sorts of companies is a sign that it is needed. It isn't just a sales function to bamboozle customers into buying. It is there because management has enough to think about without having the pressure of working out what the strategy is and sticking to it. There's a company to run.

But if you are reading this and are interested in the idea behind waggledancers you will also be aware that I think there is a lot more to this than choosing the right strategy. You have to take everybody else with you. Because strategy is an intangible job and strategies almost always leaving something out which people would really rather was left in when you say what you think there are going to be those who don't understand and those who actually disagree. That's when your job as a waggledancer begins.

This first week has been a bit of ground clearing to explain about strategy. Next week we start to turn towards waggledancing proper. And start to look at Location the first big skill. - you have to find the good stuff before you have a hope of persuading anybody else that they might want to go and get some too.

I've put a couple of examples on the graphic. The first being the innovation curve which shows how typically a successful product is introduced and the proportion of the population who buy it. At the start its hardly anybody. At the end it can be almost everybody. So the key is to identify who is going to buy your product first. These are often a group called Early Adopters who love anything new and are prepared to pay a premium for it.  By the time you get to the middle of the population then it has become a mass market product. Probably by this time you will have competitors entering the market forcing prices down. But note how it is an S shaped curve not a diagonal line. It doesn't travel straight. Which means that at the start those buying it will be a tiny minority. But that doesn't make the product a failure. It just means that if you try to talk to everybody you are wasting most of your money. Because most people aren't ready yet. 

I turn next to Pareto's 20/80 law which is really a rule of thumb. What it is useful for is reminding us that 80% of sales are frequently accountly for by 20% of customers. The book All Consumers are Not Equal by Garth Hallberg demonstrates this will real retail data over and over again. So again if you talk to everyone actually you will lose out.

I come finally to the internet rule of thumb that 90% of web surfers browse. 9% link or comment on other people's posts and that only 1% get around to creating anything and posting it online. Which is a reminder that there is no average internet user. At least not anyone who has left a mark.

These types of discontinuity become second nature if you are a stratety person but if you aren't then it is a habit worth calculating. If I had to choose a minority of people to target who would they be. The age of mass marketing is over. Because even if you have the money to talk to everybody they are deluged with so much communication that they probably won't pay attention. So find someone who will or someone who might if you found a way to be relevant.