Confessions of 2 Dinosaurs E-Book

Thomas Andersen

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 273

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

This book makes you street-smart, with only a bit of academia! Two dinosaurs of marketing describe their careers in automotive, food, household goods, jewellery, cosmetics and TV Home Shopping. They give useful advice for young professionals how the business world works in stories from the marketing and sales frontier and in textbook chapters.

Leseprobe

Thomas Andersen studied business administration with a focus on marketing and organization at the Free University of Berlin and wrote his master thesis on comparative advertising.

After a career in marketing and sales in the confectionery, household goods, cheese and cosmetics industries, he founded his startup consultancy Andersen Marketing KG in Berlin in 2004.

He is a passionate networker, coach and mentor for startups and since 2005 a lecturer at the HTW Berlin for marketing and soft skills.

Thomas lives in Berlin/Germany and enjoys the multinational startup scene. He can be reached at [email protected].

He is the author of the chapters Apprenticeship, Confectionery, Household Goods, French Cheese, Cosmetics, Startup Consulting, Marketing, Team Management, Positioning, Timing, Behavioral Economics, Innovations, Diversity, Cooperations and Networking.

Sal Hatteea is a highly experienced business leader and senior advisor with a strong marketing and strategy execution background. He has been CEO of two international companies and non-executive director and chairman of several organizations in different sectors in Europe and the USA.

He founded his own consultancy and later sold it to a US company where he was the European CEO. He is now an independent consultant and has been a speaker at several marketing seminars and has given video link presentations to international companies providing strategic guidance on marketing and innovation.

Sal lives in Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK. He can be reached at [email protected].

He is the author of the chapters In the Beginning, FMCG, Automotive, Jewellery, TV Home Shopping, Consulting CEOs, Focus on Customer.

We co-wrote Branding, Selling, Hiring, Leadership, Strategy, Meetings and The Interview.

Table of Contents

Preface

In the beginning

Apprenticeships and Interns

Confectionery

FMCG – Going the extra mile

Automotive – adding value

Household Goods

French Cheese

Jewellery

Cosmetics

TV Home Shopping

Consulting Startups

Consulting CEOs

Strategy

Marketing

Team Management

Positioning

Focus on the customer

Branding

Selling

Hiring

Timing

Behavioral Economics

Leadership

Diversity

Cooperations and Networking

Negotiations

Meetings

The interview

Sources and Recommendations

Preface

We authors met virtually at Lunchclub1 in 2022 and had such fruitful and exhilarating discussions each month that we decided to write this book. It will be a mixture of wild tales from the frontline by two dedicated marketers and textbook advice for the next generation of freshmen and freshwomen2 in business.

We are both consultants after long careers in business. So, we will be telling you stories from a variety of industries but as lecturers we also intend to cut out the lessons of our stories in a box below or in between.

This is a journey through the last few decades to illustrate how management thinking and marketing have changed. Some of the stories may sound amusing and unreal in today's world, just as today's thinking may seem amusing to those a few decades from now. We have come a long way since Henry Ford said, "You can have a car in any color you want, as long as it is black!"

Management, sales and marketing are constantly evolving because the target is always moving and the messages and techniques must be fine-tuned or they will miss. It is like launching a rocket to the moon and not fine-tuning its course during the journey - it will miss the target no matter how accurately you have calculated the trajectory because both the earth and the moon are moving.

Business schools teach the latest management and marketing theory, but what they don't teach is how to be street-smart, because they can't - that comes from years of experience of running organizations, making good and bad decisions and tweaking the messages to hit the target.

Through our storytelling, we want to inspire readers from all business backgrounds to think outside the box and enjoy lateral thinking about business challenges. With our textbook-like lectures on various operational and leadership topics, we want to shine a light on our teaching experience.

There is also an interview at the end of the book between the two of us, which is exuberantly frank.

Now, dear reader, if you are brave enough to accompany us into the fight at the frontiers of marketing and sales - start reading!

Sal and Thomas

1https://lunchclub.com/home

2 In the following, we will use the masculine form, but of course, we mean all genders.

In the beginning

It's amazing to think how far technology has come in the last 50 years. From the early days of mainframe computers and punched cards to the present day of smartphones and cloud computing, we've seen incredible advances in computing power and accessibility.

So, back to when I began studying engineering at UCLA in 1965. There were no pocket calculators because they hadn't been invented; there were no personal computers for the same reason. What we had was a scientific computer, the IBM1620, which used core memory, which had to be cleared every time another user wanted to use it.

The IBM 1620 was a state-of-the-art computer in its day, but it would be considered primitive by today's standards. It had a memory of just 20,000 digits, and it could only run one program at a time. The input and output devices were also very slow and limited.

Input was punched cards or tape, and output was a slow and very loud teletype printer. The language used was FORTRAN II, a scientific language perfect for engineering, and the programs had to be punched on 80- column punched cards or paper tape, which we had to punch ourselves, and the deck had to be kept in the right order. If we ever dropped the deck, the task of putting it back in the right order was tedious.

Essentially, we had to load the deck of cards of the FORTRAN II compiler, followed by our program deck, and after the computations, the results would be printed out on what was called music paper. It was slow, but that was the technology at the time, so it was state of the art. Today's portable scientific calculators are more powerful than the IBM1620 of that time! Below is the IBM1620 console, an 80-column punch card and a punch card reader/writer.

Since pocket calculators had not yet been invented, we had to use a "slide rule", which was called a mechanical analog computer and consisted of three parts and was about 10 inches long:

Frame or base - two linear strips of equal length held parallel with a gap between them.

Slider - a central strip interlocked with the frame that could move longitudinally relative to the frame.

Runner or glass - an outer sliding piece with a hairline, also known as a "cursor".

Most readers will not know what these are, but they were very accurate to two decimal places, and the third could be intelligently guessed. With a slide rule, you could do almost all the calculations that are possible with today's pocket calculators. Of course, they were much slower, but that was all that was available at the time, and we got by, and all the engineering students knew how to use them very effectively.

Today, we have smartphones that are 1000 times more powerful than the IBM 1620, and we can access them anywhere in the world. We can run multiple programs simultaneously, and we have access to a vast amount of information and data.

The advances in technology have had a profound impact on our lives. We can now communicate with people all over the world in real time, we can access information at our fingertips, and we can automate tasks that used to be done manually.

It's hard to imagine what the future holds for technology, but I'm sure it will be even more amazing than what we have today.

This is the background of how we were educated in the second half of the 1960s. All of this has happened in my working life, although not in most of yours, and this may seem strange to you, but it is relatively recent.

As I share my work experiences, I will try to equate them with today's management thinking, although they were not necessarily thought of in those terms at the time, but the lessons learnt are what are important, because even though the thinking may have been different than today, the goals were the same then as they are now.

Before I started my career in 1970, I knew exactly where I wanted to be and the timeline to get there. I wanted to be an officer (director) of a major company before the age of 40 and then the CEO. In my 20’s, I didn't know how to get there or even in which industry, but at least I knew my goal and I achieved it three years early.

It is very important to know what you want to achieve and by when. Otherwise, you allow someone else to take control of your career and it may not be where you want it to go. You don't need to be specific about the company, but you do need to be specific about the role. How else can you plan your path?

You never go to a train station and ask the ticket agent to give you a ticket to where he thinks you should go, do you? You know exactly where you want to go and you get the right ticket, but you don't always use the same logic in your career. And then you wonder why you are sometimes unhappy. Many people get on the wrong train and never realize their potential; don't be one of them.

Marketing starts with your ability to market yourself - if you can't do that, how can you successfully market your employer's products or services? Yet most people don't start their careers thinking about what they can do for their employer, but what their employer can do for them. This is the wrong approach. What employers are looking for are people who can help them achieve their goals.

Let me give you an example in sales because it is easier to relate to sales, although this applies to any job in an organization. Many years ago, I was the sales and marketing director of a consulting firm and hired salespeople. The one question I always asked was "where do you see yourself in the next 3-5 years? In every case I got banal answers like "I want to go as far as I can." What does that mean? Or, "I want to be the sales manager or director" or even "I want to be the CEO."

They had ignored the fact that I was hiring salespeople, and the only answer that would have got them the job on the spot was never given to me. The answer I wanted to hear was, "I want to be the best salesperson your company has ever had," but no one ever said it. That is the essence of marketing - fulfilling the customer's need - simple and very effective, but they thought of themselves and not of what I wanted.

Effective communication, both verbal and written, is vital in marketing yourself and the products or services of your employer. Clear and persuasive communication helps build trust and credibility.

Both of us authors will use real life examples to show you how you can be a better marketer if you want to be. In my case, it was a stepping stone to the ultimate goal of being a CEO, but it was a necessary stage to go through.

What is marketing and why is it so important

Peter Drucker, the grandfather of modern marketing, said that a company has only two basic functions, marketing and innovation - everything else is a cost. Marketing and innovation produce results, and he went on to say that the goal of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits and sells itself, and the goal is to make selling unnecessary.

One of the best examples of this is Apple under Steve Jobs. What were they if not a marketing and innovation company? Of course, they had to have all the other disciplines, but it is marketing and innovation that made them the most valuable company at the time. The same can be said for Tesla, which is valued higher than Toyota, the largest car manufacturer in the world.

What does all this have to do with my career? Having decided where I wanted to be before I was 40, I had to plan a route and get on the right train. At that time, in 1970, when I started my career, I knew that most CEOs of larger companies came up through the marketing or finance route, but I had little interest in finance other than to understand it and use it to make profits.

I also knew that information technology was going to play a very big role in marketing because it would allow for instant analysis with easily changed variables to answer the "what if" questions. Those were the days before PCs and spreadsheets, and there were no commercial databases for the mainframes of the day.

So, I decided that I needed to learn a lot of what technology could do and have the disciplines of marketing and technology in one head and with that in mind I applied for a job in the FMCG sector at Quaker Oats.

“A company has only two basic functions, marketing and innovation. (…) The goal of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits and sells itself, so that it makes selling unnecessary.” (Peter Drucker)

Marketing starts with your ability to market yourself.

What employers are looking for are people who can help them achieve their goals.

Apprenticeships and Interns

My first job after high school and before university: Commis de Rang in our local Holiday Inn Hotel, the lowest rank in the service staff. I earned - believe it or not - 1.25 DM (= 50 US Cent) per hour and served coffee and breakfast in the morning and our small lunch menu to the few guests at noon. My working hours were from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. every day - in the hot summer of 1976, when all my classmates were chilling out at our local lake in their swimming trunks, while I had to run around in my tight work outfit.

But after all those years of learning and schooling, I wanted to do something real and join the work force to learn what it was like to work at the bottom of the ladder.

And I have never regretted that experience! I learned the hard way what teamwork, exploitation, solidarity, mean-spirited bosses and customer orientation really mean.

I will always remember one case of unexpected improvisation. Once we had our Minister of Economics and his entourage of bodyguards and staff as our guests. That very morning, our two huge coffee machines broke down and could not be repaired all of a sudden. We did not know how to make coffee for so many people. Then a new recruit, Mr. Shabangu from Swaziland, showed up and ordered our cooks to fill two boiling kettles with water and to heat them up. Then he took raw coffee beans, poured them into huge jute bags, hung them into the hot water and pounded them with a huge wooden stick. "This is how we make coffee at home!" he told us.

We waiters rushed to the taps of the kettles with our little insulated coffee pots and nervously served them to our guests outside. "The best coffee I have ever tasted!" the minister told me. We were happy, our guests were happy, and Mr. Shabangu got a well-deserved reward for his improvisational talent.

In 1978, while studying business administration, I was able to do a one-month internship in Volkswagen's PR department. The decisive advice from a senior employee there was: "Young man, never start your career in this corporate jungle. There are too many wild animals. Better come back when you are in your 50s, excel on your experience and look forward to a good pension!"

Other than that, I can only advise young people at the beginning of their career to do something real, either an apprenticeship or an internship or even a longer stay abroad. There are many work & travel programs to choose from, but you can also apply for a craftsman job (we need them more than ever!) or a dual study program, where you split your time into half studying and half working in a company. The advantage: the company knows you before you graduate and, in most cases, will hire you full time after graduation.

I also promote the mandatory year of social service for teens and tweens after their last year of school. This gives you an insight into social areas that you normally only see when you are old, disabled or injured - and you are forced to train some empathy.

More abstractly, before you try to start a startup or go freelance, you should definitely spend some time working in a company or scale-up to experience the business world as an employee. And learn enough no-go’s that you will never do as a future leader.

Getting your hands dirty in an industry where your career could land, or just to train empathy or customer focus, is crucial for your future leadership mindset and behavior.

Confectionery

Ferrero

Directly after my university studies I started my career at the German branch of the confectionery giant FERRERO in Frankfurt am Main. After an interview and a one-day assessment center, they chose me and 4 others out of over 600 applicants to be marketing trainees.

So, I had to go through different departments for a year - the first 3 months were in sales. They told me that a credible salesman never wears a full beard because the customer would subliminally think he had something to hide. So, I shaved off the black beard I had worn all through my student years in Berlin.

Nevertheless, I learned a lot about the normal merchandising tasks that a salesperson has to perform, including of course FIFO (first in first out) sorting of the best before products on the shelf. In fact, this was so deeply ingrained in my store checking habits that years later, an Italian teacher in Rome who saw me doing it said: "Thomas, tu ai un deformazione professionale!" (You have a professional deformation!).

When I joined the marketing department, one of my first days was in the kinder group. I was invited to a small meeting of the product manager, group product manager and advertising counsel to discuss a new storyboard for Kinderschokolade. The board was spread out across the table, with the text for each scene printed below the scene graphics.

Immediately, under the impression of these texts, it burst out of me: "This is way too complicated! This is marketing jargon and not the language of our target group!" What I did not know was that they wanted me to sit back and watch their elaborate discussion about the nuances of this storyboard that the group head and the Ad Council had been working on for several months...

If looks could kill, I would have died right then and there! After a short pause, the group head yelled at me: "Who do you think you are? 50 years of advertising experience have created this board, and now you greenhorn is going to tell us what is wrong?"

I nevertheless suggested a better introductory line and some shorter sentences, but was soon pushed out of the room. I never expected that. At university, if you were invited to a round table, everyone was asked for their opinion. The group leader even wanted to fire me afterwards, but my mentor, another group leader, protected me and told him about “juvenile impulses that just needed to be channeled better”.

End of story: they chose my suggested title and some of my shortened, straight-to-the-point sentences for the final version of that TV spot - without ever mentioning it to me. But, of course, I should have asked whether my opinion was wanted, and then put my criticism in the form of a tentative question, instead of slamming down the texts presented to me.

The Group Head that protected me was a former officer of the German Bundeswehr and treated his team a bit like that. In the mornings, when he set the daily tasks, he often called me into his office and yelled: "Andersen! Come in, sit down, shut up!" But he had a soft core. We often had lunch together outside and talked about many things. His team of product managers gave him a hard time because he could draw great sketches but was a week on strategic issues.

After two years he quit, and my new boss was the very group head who wanted to fire me as an intern. He promoted me from Marketing Assistant to Junior Product Manager, but after bringing on three new Product Managers and playing Interim Product Manager for a year at Kinderüberraschung, he still did not promote me to Product Manager. Maybe because I spoke Italian better than he did, even though he bragged about his great Latinum (which I also had).

From a business point of view, I was always in charge of TicTac, the smallest but most international of Ferrero's products (except for my interim period for the Surprise Egg). Other countries like Australia or the USA lived on it.

So, my reuniones (meetings) with my product management colleagues in Turin and Alba were always a great pleasure for me, because here I got the respect I never got at home.

Nevertheless, being the marketing person in charge of a brand at Ferrero put you in the position of being the entrepreneur of that brand, meaning that operational decisions within your budget were made by you. If you went to another department, to market research, to purchasing, even to our production site, they all fulfilled your marketing needs as well and as fast as they could. I never experienced that again in the companies that followed: we call it marketing-driven.

One day, the production manager from Cork, Ireland, who was responsible for the production and filling of the Tic Tac boxes, showed up in Frankfurt. We met by chance in the purchasing department, sat down for 20 minutes, and saved at least DM 300,000 a year by shortening the length of the banderole and making other changes that optimized his production runs without compromising the appearance of the product.

Such "Fayol bridges" were very rare in those days and would normally have been forbidden if I had formally requested such a meeting. But as the product manager responsible for Tic Tac, I was the right person for him to decide.

Another day in the purchasing department, the supplier of our green plastic Tic Tac dispensers showed up. The dispenser tree was delivered with every order, only to be thrown away when it was sold out. A huge plastic waste! Since the ricarica system (deliver only boxes to fill shelves or permanent dispensers) was not implemented, I did my best to reduce plastic by cutting out unnecessary parts of the dispenser tree and making the whole thing lighter - the so-called soft kill option. We saved 15 tons of plastic per year...

The highlight of my time at Ferrero was, of course, my one-week-long business trip to the USA.

It happened like this: The General Manager of Ferrero USA, Dr. A., visited our German subsidiary to convince my Marketing Director to reposition TicTac in Germany (as the lead country for Europe) as a problem solver for adults and no longer as a candy for children. During the meeting in Frankfurt - in Italian, of course - my MD showed him everything we had done for TicTac in Germany, including some special in-store placements for which he could not find the images. Listening in silence, I pulled out the missing images from my well-prepared product documentation and said: "E questo, Signore G.!" He said: "Justo, grazie!" - Then he looked at me and said in utter amazement: "You are a devil! Why did you understand us so well?" My American friend answered for me: "Capisce tutto, tutto!" (He understands everything!).

So, it turned out that my Italian lessons in Cortona and Rome were not wasted. I took them during my vacation and they were reluctantly reimbursed by my group head.

Dr. A. urged my MD to let me study the U.S. repositioning at his headquarters in New York, but the final decision rested with my group head as my direct boss. Until 3 days before the planned flight he did not agree to my trip, then after another phone call from Dr. A. he relented and gave his okay.

Ferrero was smart enough to send Dr. K., a young lawyer from the Ferrero legal department, with me to check all the labels and maybe some text translations of the American benchmark. So, we also spent a day in a huge law firm in Washington D.C., where they explained to us how difficult it is to establish a foreign brand in the American market against all the powerful incumbents like Velamint, Lifesavers or Altoids - especially with a comparative advertising campaign (by the way: comparative advertising, although forbidden in Germany at the time, was the topic of my one-year diploma´s thesis at the Free University of Berlin). TicTac was much smaller than the competition, and since all of them were made of almost 100% sugar, TicTac naturally had fewer calories than the others with 8 or 10.

Of course, TicTac USA were sued by the market leader and had to water their spot down a bit - but the main slogan remained: "One and a half calories for one and a half hours of breath freshness!” After a short waltz with Dr. K. ("You can't translate that directly as breath freshness, that has to be relativized! But okay, you can round up the numbers.") I coined the German slogan that survived for at least the next 5 years: “Mit 2 Kalorien 2 Stunden TicTac-Frische" (With 2 calories 2 hours of TicTac freshness). Even nowadays some folks can remember that slogan in Germany.

Back home - since no ad agency was hired for such a small product - I cut the 30-second US spot (https://youtu.be/PQtfnfr4V38) into 20-second and 7-second spots, wrote the German text relatively lip-synchronously, and had it voicemastered at Tonstudio Walldorf. My MD and the Ad Council said, "Okay, you can do that, but the 7 seconder is totally unnecessary!"

After waiting 6 months (and getting headhunter calls nearly every day), I went to my boss and told him I quit. "You will never get another job in the whole nutrition market!" he shouted...

Not even a month after I quit, my TicTac spot was on public TV for five years, last year my 7-second spot alone (sometimes at the beginning and end of each ad block).

Never make critical remarks in a situation where you don't know who has a skin in the game of the object you have to judge. Leaders don't applaud being told they're wrong in front of a team, even when they are.

If you let your freshman make his own experiences with constant communication with his boss, he will have a better chance to excel in his job.

And always try to use his outside view of things while he is still new in the company, without beating him up for thinking outside the mainstream. Smooth onboarding is the key to smart knowledge transfer.

Don't torture yourself if you can't win. There are many more opportunities to show your talents. Especially in the war for talent right now!

Ludwig Schokolade

After 3 years in the household goods industry, I lost my heart to sweets again and joined Ludwig Schokolade (yes, the owner was the famous art patron Prof. Peter Ludwig) in Aachen. My title was Group Product Manager (GPM) Trade Brands and I was actually doing packaging marketing: converting Ludwig's supermarket brands into trade brands for discounters.

Then one day my key account manager for ALDI came and told me that Aldi wanted chocolate bars like those from Mars for their new UK branch of 10 stores near Birmingham. We were lucky enough to have a newly recruited R&D manager from Mars South Africa who had all the Mars recipes in his head. He started a pilot series of Mars, Snickers and Raider look-alikes (a Bounty-me too we had already developed) and we showed them to the confectionery buyer, along with packaging mock-ups that Aldi had given us in advance, complete with logo and labeling. He was fascinated, the taste was just like the original! At that meeting, I told him that it would be very uneconomical for us to produce the quantity for only 10 stores, to run production for a few minutes just for those few boxes.

He said, okay, he would show our samples to the German district managers to see if they could expand the distribution area (a declaration in German and even a sell-by date was already in the plan). All hands were up, the buyer told us afterwards. And so, Ludwig had to invest in a second production line for chocolate bars to meet the demand of Aldi South together with UK. Even our export department (under the name Salut and of course with a different packaging design) used the bars to sell them abroad.

What made my job at Ludwig difficult was that no product testing or innovation was accepted unless it was the Marketing & Sales Director's idea ("not invented here" is the classic saying). So, together with another GPM (he was responsible for the Sacher chocolates, which unfortunately flopped), I had come up with a new chocolate packaging that we thought could have been a real merchandising rocket: "Werner Schokolade" with illustrations from the then very popular comic book and movie "Werner", with humorous texts on the packaging and the comic book character "Werner" as a promotional figure on the front. We even had contact with the creator of the comic, Rötger Feldmann, and he was fascinated by the idea. But like I said - MD said no way, and our impetus was killed.

This was followed by the arrival of a controller as managing director, who always saw marketing expenses as an unnecessary cost, not as an investment in the future of the brand. He eliminated the GPM level, so I had to leave along with many of my colleagues.

To illustrate his mindset: on a visit to our chocolate factory in Saarlouis, he observed some production workers just standing there, overlooking the machines and the regular workers. He was annoyed to see them "doing nothing," so he fired the entire master level, against the strong warnings of the production site manager - with the result that all the production machines ran sour within two months, and he had to pay for expensive repairs and rehire the master level at higher wages.

He also withdrew a company car from a colleague 2 days after he had a stroke. Living in a small town, his wife was unable to do her shopping or take him to the doctor without a taxi.

CSR – not relevant to him!