Most of new know Bofrost and its delivery vans. Bofrost is a company that has specialized in the delivery of frozen products at home.
They have enjoyed tremendous growth and success.
Here’s a picture I took of their “delivery van” in Venice, Italy. As you can see the company knows how to adapt in order to keep its promises.
I was asking the other day a client’s employee what he thought of the intermediary presentation we gave a few days before . He said he liked it very much because it had brought a fresh new perspective on how the business was understood. He added that a theoretical and scientific viewpoint was very useful.
I must admit I was surprised and a little bit disappointed to heard that IntoTheMinds’ contribution was seen as “scientific”. Although my research activities are clearly academic, I thought our consulting activities were deeply anchored in the practitioner’s world.
When reflecting about this and trying to make sense of this comment I came to following conclusions.
If scientific means “not compromising and not saving on efforts to deliver robust advices and proven results” then yes, we do scientific marketing.
If scientific means “detached from the reality and purely conceptual” then it’s not what we do.
Sometimes I really get the impression that I don’t get understood.
Not long time ago I had a meeting with the marketing manager of a big and renowned Belgian company. I came there to present an innovative consumer behavior-related idea that I had had and that I wanted to test.
It was my first encounter with the marketing manager and I had prepared a very short presentation with some key facts about IntoTheMinds and background information on why the idea was relevant for their business. It was an innovative idea that had the potential to address some behavioral concerns and promised to impact long-term loyalty. This idea was inspired by my own research on customer satisfaction and the more and more tedious link that researchers have been discovering over the last few years. Still it needed to be discussed with practitioners and improved.
During the presentation I already got signals that my message was not going through. Although I was using references to some well-known concepts and was trying to raise my case with figures and hard facts, I was feeling resistance. Quickly the first hurdles were mentioned. Nothing wrong with that. A new idea can never be perfect from the first time and it was there anyway to test its relevancy. What I was not happy with was the attitude of the manager who just stopped thinking about the added value the idea may have for the company. He kept focusing on the first hurdle and never tried to overcome it. This can’t-do mentality disturbs me; very much. What I was also annoyed about was the lack of knowledge of the manager. Basic concepts were not mastered, knowledge of actual and future consumer behavior was missing. We had just no common basis for discussion and under such circumstances one cannot expect an open-minded discussion.
You read it every single day : globalization is threatening our companies, competition has never been so hard, innovation is the key, and so forth and so on. How can companies be innovative if key people just aren’t innovative, curious by nature ? How can innovation be achieved if key people are just not knowledgeable enough to think different and create new forms of value for customers ?
It’s been more than 10 years now that I started doing consulting and after all those years I found a common point between our success stories. The entrepreneurs with whom we worked all wanted to deeply change their way of doing business and of seeing their industry. Sometimes I really wonder if I still want to do advise companies which are not willing to transform themselves. Maybe that’s what I should specialize in: business transformation.
A book was recently published on the kids’ marketing by a marketing researcher (Coralie Damay) and a marketing manager (Sylvie Grassmann). This book was promoted in the June issue of Marketing Magazine, a French magazine targeted at managers, under the form of a 4-page crossed interview of both authors.
Basically I find it a great idea to combine a managerial perspective and an academic perspective when writing a marketing book. Advantages are obvious. Rather than looking only at one face of the coin (either the scientific aspects or the managerial perspective) such a common work certainly allows to enrich the insights offered to the reader.
I was however annoyed by a sentence by Sylvie Grassmann early in the interview:
It seemed interesting to us to have a crossed perspective on this subject with, on the one side the perspective of a theorist (Coralie Damay) and, on the other side, the perspective of a marketing specialist (Sylvie Grassmann).
I find that Sylvie Grassmann overestimates her role.
Marketing is a Science the aim of which is to orientate the company’s strategy in order to create value for the consumers. This value-creation process is deeply anchored in the understanding of the consumer’s behavior. I tend to think that Coralie Damay understands better the antecedents and leviers of this behavior than Sylvie Grassmann does. The latter probably focuses her action on how to leverage and use those leviers within the company for commercial purposes.
I don’t want to start a long explanation on the role of theory within today’s marketing research perspectives. My point is just that this very sentence should have been reformulated the following way:
It seemed interesting to us to have a crossed perspective on this subject with, on the one side the perspective of a marketing specialist (Coralie Damay) and, on the other side, the perspective of a practitioner (Sylvie Grassmann).
For the second year in a row IntoTheMinds will be the marketing and strategy expert of the SME (Small and Medium Enterprises) week which is organized by the Brussels Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BECI) from June, 20th until June, 24th.
On this occasion we will help free of charge SMEs which have problems relating to marketing or strategy.
Our intervention is completely free for those who will ask for an appointment. You can find back on our website an explanation on the reasons underlying our choice to help SMEs without monetary compensation. A video testimony of a participant to the first edition of this event is also included.
You can find all the details on this event by following this link: http://www.beci.be/media/uploads//public/document/183-semaine_de_la_pme_seconde_edition_fr.pdf
IntoTheMinds will consult on Monday, June 20th from 1pm until 6pm. Appointments will take place in the offices of BECI on Avenue Louise 500 in Brussels. Take now an appointment with us by sending an email to solution@beci.be or by calling the local number 02 563 68 56.
The EMAC 2011 is the European Marketing Academics Conference and is held once a year. Its purpose is to bring together all marketing scientists (about 1000 members) to present the current status of their research.
This year it was hosted by the Faculty of Economics of Ljubljana in Slovenia and we were about 750 to attend. And as usual, no professional marketers attended (excepted McKinsey and … IntoTheMinds). I still not understand why practitioners do not attend. Marketing scientists work on problems that will be disseminated and popularized among practitioners only 5 to 10 years after. It is therefore a amazing opportunity for them to learn and try new things and see what may happen in 5 years from now.
Well … it’s good for our clients of course. They will benefit from this knowledge and the others won’t.
We have developped an online assessment tool for the Brussels Enterprise Agency that allows startups to test the pre-requisites of success.
This online assessment is free-of-charge and will allow you to test whether your business venture is at risk or not. Several solutions are proposed depending on the profiles of risk. This tool comes as a complement of the training on market study that we give regularly at the Brussels Enterprise Agency (browse their agenda here)
Our next week’s three posts will all be dedicated to the watch industry. Stay tuned for the first of them on Monday, May 16th at 7am CET. We’ll start with Lange und Söhne, a brand belonging to the Richemont Group and will move to Blancpain (Swatch group) for the next two remaining posts.
