Monday, September 26, 2016

Your Expected Contribution

Help Me, Piggy
This past week saw two interesting and seemingly unrelated events in my life that are merging in my mind.

The first was an interesting exercise with my teams and HR department at the day job, with the promise and actual delivery of personal insights as to how we are all seen by co-workers, in terms of the kinds of energy, strategies and modes of working.

My natural way of thinking for this kind of thing is to compare it to horoscopes (why yes -- I am perceptive! That's so interesting and unique to the sub-set of people born in this month of the year!), and to disregard what is told as nothing I didn't already know... but when you get under the hood and really consider what is said, there was real value in the process and exercise. (There's also the relatively tender matter of how much of this you will want to share, and with who. Knowledge is power, after all. Not always nicely used power...)

What was intriguing to me wasn't the specific points, but how it jibes with what the day job expects. It's a different role than what I bring to consulting, or parenting, or being a husband. Limiting my energy to my known role may limit how I'm seen, and make it seem like I'm holding something back, and not delivering the full contribution.

Which leads me to Saturday's activity, which was taking my eldest daughter, a high school junior, to her fifth different college visit. (No need to specify which one, as I'm not sure it's going to be in her final consideration set, but it was a fine presentation and pitch.)

What was especially valuable in this session was the publicization of a calculator Web site that estimates your EFC -- expected family contribution -- for when your child gets accepted to a school. This number takes your tax return, assets and current financial situation to bear to determine the student's level of aid, .

It is, as you might imagine, a daunting and sobering number, no matter how long you have kept this goal in mind. Making this number isn't going to be easy, and might require some significant need to leave my comfort zone -- either through pushing the consulting billing to higher levels, doing more to step up monetization of content, cutting expenses in ways we haven't been willing to do, or maybe even just adding formal second and third jobs. Setting our child up for a lesser educational experience than what my wife and I were able to achieve is just a non-starter, and expecting our kid to just achieve all goals through aid packages or exceptional debt acceptance is similarly unacceptable.

For the moment, we've got time to make some moves, but not nearly as much as we used to. We know we're not alone in this concern, as it's kind of the signature worry of the age. Maybe political change might make the situation better, too, but again, not something you can count on.

Your expected contribution.

I had no idea that phrase could seem so loaded, really...

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Monday, September 19, 2016

Consulting With Teeth

Words To Consult By
My wife is many things; a mom, an instructor, and an unstoppable force. But what fuels all of that is curiosity. She wants to know how things work, how they could work better, and isn't afraid to ask. She also plays a harp, and has done so for decades.

(Don't worry, this is all leading to marketing and advertising later. Stay with me.)

So this weekend, with her main harp starting to act up with some minor aches and pains -- buzzing on a couple of strings, minor cosmetic issues, and some concerns over recent string breakage due to a faulty tuner -- we needed to bring it in for some TLC. Which put us in close contact with an extremely specialized consulting experience, which is the world of a harp regulator.

There probably aren't more than a few dozen people who are qualified to do this work in the entirety of the United States, honestly. The person we met and contracted to do the work on my wife's harp is a classically-trained musician who found herself in the field due to a chance encounter with the master craftsman who made harps for the most famous company in the field. She then received extensive training with the instrument, all the way down to a full deconstruction and re-assembly of an instrument that costs more than many cars on the road. A full-sized harp can have literally hundreds of distinct parts and pieces, and has strong mechanical pressure on it. It's far from a simple machine, and to find someone with the ear to know what they are doing, plus the patience to get the tech right, is a very rare combination.

Since my wife is also technically inclined, and finds how harps work to be fascinating, she then asked a question that I'm very familiar with, from my time as a marketing and advertising consultant. "Do you think I could learn how to do this myself?"

The question wasn't meant meant in malice, or to diminish the professionalism of the technician, or her skill set. It was just a question without an agenda. We also weren't trying to negotiate for price, or considering anything other than using the tech; her payday was in no jeopardy. But she answered it with the best and only possible answer, and it made me smile in the moment, and for hours afterward. (She also said it with a smile, which helped.)

"Well, yes, but it's not easy to get really good at it."

Which is the entire gist of experience, really, and always in the back of my mind when I help a client with copywriting, creative direction, design concepts and the like. Also, I suspect, in the back of the minds of the designers and coding techs that are part of the M&AD family. Sure, we could teach you how to do this work. But we can't teach you how to be, well, us. That takes experience, insight, access to data analytics, and maybe even talent. (Maybe.)

We can, and do, tell clients optimal practices. It's part of the gig in consulting, and especially with new prospects, you need to establish your bona fides. I'm also certain that we've been used for fishing expeditions where a prospect wasn't quite up front in their motivations for taking the call, and weren't ever going to use us for more than surface insights. It's an occupational hazard.

But if you want to do the same level of work that we do, with the same efficiency, turn time, etc.?

You pretty much have to be us.

Which is not easy. Not easy at all.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Monday, September 12, 2016

The Emperor's New Phone Jack

So fine it's like it's not there
I am a much better marketing and advertising professional for having the experience of being a father.

One of my favorite aspects of that role has been reading to my kids at night, which started, of course, with fairy tales.

My kids like magic. Harry Potter and His Dark Materials, and before that, Zagazoo and The BFG. I always tried not to read the same books over and over again, but some times, you have to. There's only a few things that get to the status of all-time favorite.

If you were to ask either of my daughters what their father's favorite story is, they'd be able to tell you in a heartbeat.

"The Emperor's New Clothes."

Not just because it's funny, easily understood, and that it might also be the only one in the classic canon that relates to my professional role. More so, because it teaches an incredibly important lesson for kids (and maybe girls especially), and also to anyone in a corporate setting -- the importance of being able to go against the prevailing wishes of a crowd and hold to, well, what should be common sense.

Or, at least, what might matter to people outside of the room.

You know. Like your actual customers.

Which leads me to pivot to the new iPhone's move to eliminate the headphone jack from the handset, with users now either having to go to wireless earbuds, or to a corded unit that splits off the power dongle. (A dongle that is also, well, easily lost. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

The money quote from this is that Apple considers themselves to be courageous for making the move, in an exceptionally tone-deaf PR moment. But independent of that, we need to just speak to the obvious point which is that ear buds should never cost something like the $159 that the "airBuds" are said to cost... because, well, just about everyone has lost a pair of ear buds or ten over the course of their lives, and that's the only thing that's going through the minds of the people I've talked to about this.

Sure, something has to give to get more power, longer battery life, faster speeds, and the other obvious gains from the new handset. But the plain and simple of the new model is that if the unit came in two flavors -- with and without analog jack -- the vast majority of younger (and most churning) consumers, who operate their units with buds all the time, wouldn't give it up.

They've learned to live with the current speed and battery life. They aren't buying what you are selling as anything more than a price hike, and one that's not exactly, well, courageous.

Especially for a company with growing PR nightmares of tax fraud, child labor, and slowing innovation. Who are sitting on more cash than just about anyone in the world.

A more outward-thinking group, especially one that understands that competitors in the space are ravenous, would get closer to VR, holograms, more customization in voice recognition, etc. Even the simple act of pitching more secure over the ear exercise bud options, or a locator app for lost hardware, would have helped.

Instead, Apple just strips away the headphone jack and tells the world that they are courageous for going naked.

Well, I suppose. The marketplace, as always, will decide. Maybe there's just so many people in the iPhone Empire that naked will be just fine.

But what they call courage?

Might not be quite so echoed by the more direct in the audience.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.