After the Lane4 Conference on 11th, last week I was at the CIPD Annual Conference in Manchester. I have been to the conference most years since joining Lane4 just over 5 years ago. On one level it was a little sad to see the accompanying Exhibition this year – probably around 50% of the size of the event at its height. We are definitely seeing a market-place in transition. Jim Collins was discussing ‘How the Mighty Fall’ in the plenary session. Quite.
On one level I could take consolation from the fact that there were far fewer outplacement providers than recruitment providers unlike the HR Director Event in January. However, this time recruitment solutions were mostly delivering the search process online. James Caan was sharing ideas around how to maximise your online recruitment search. Ironically for an HR exhibition, it did a good job of communicating a feeling of ‘commodity trading’ people.
Against this fairly depressing backdrop, Wil James from Lane4 did a cracking job talking through the TUI Travel (Thomson and First Choice) merger integration process with Jacky Simmonds, TUI Travel’s Group HR Director. This was anything but a transactional piece of change management, as I will come back to.
Beyond the Lane4 session, the highlight for me was probably seeing an introduction of the CIPD’s ‘Next Generation HR’ work shared by the likes of BT and Nationwide. This picks up among other things on an emerging trend towards the blending of HR and marketing functions. To quote Andrea Cartright from Nationwide
“Over the past six months you might as well have called me a marketer. I have been wholly immersed in the marketing team redeveloping what the Nationwide brand is going to look like.”
This is a much needed development which our thinking and work in the sponsorship space plays directly into.
It was ironic given this to see that the latest CIPD report published is ‘The impact of Mergers and Acquisitions on the Employer Brand’.
http://www.cipd.co.uk/subjects/corpstrtgy/empbrand/_impact_employer_brand_summary.htm
While I think CIPD’s approach in the Next Generation piece is laudable, personally I think the notion of creating an approach for an employer brand is complete nonsense. Your company’s brand is simply the way people (employee or customer) talk about your organisation. If the HR and Marketing Directors are doing their job well, employees and customers are able to engage in a personal dialogue with your brand. If they are doing their job excellently, this results in positive word of mouth and referral. It is simply impossible to paint a different picture for employees than customers.
To this point, in the Lane4 / TUI session Jacky talked compellingly with strong supporting data about the pride with which TUI employees (whether they originated with TUI or First Choice) now talk about their organisation to friends and family. A caring and empathetically managed change process created more external ambassadors than a thousand pieces of stilted internal communications or 30 second television ads would have done. Each business has just one brand. HR and Marketing and both its custodians. Perhaps in five years time the empty stands at the CIPD Event will be filled by Martin Sorrell from WPP and his swathe of marketing agencies.
It’s been a few days now since our Client Conference, ‘From Fragile to Agile’ on Armistice Day, 11th November. It was our fifth year, and our client feedback is suggesting it was our best yet.
We try to schedule the day in such a way as to offer our clients the chance to design their own day. What continues to amaze me year-after-year is the sheer variety in the individual schedules which people select. Even clients who I think know personally very well!
For example, I was part of a session on the subject of the parallels between the London 1948 and 2012 Games with Rob Clarke, the Head of HR Operations from London Organising Committee for Olympic and Paralympic Games. Rob and I spoke at the same time as our clients from CRH shared their approach to investing in leadership development in a building products sector in the eye of the economic storm, and Mark Richardson with Greg Searle (both from Lane4) talking from personal experience about maintaining self belief under times of intense personal pressure and media scrutiny. It would be hard to find a more varied set of subjects, even for Lane4!
This blend also relates to how we position Lane4’s offer in the market-place. We aim to offer a hybrid of a world class leadership development consultancy (CRH). Our approach is driven from personal insight and experience (Mark and Greg) coupled with cutting edge research which marries both our understanding of elite performance in sport and business (Rob and I).
Interestingly when choosing their day, our clients spread themselves almost exactly evenly between the three sessions. No one area of our positioning or approach is more important than the other. We have the priviledge of working with a brand which sits at the intersection of these areas. It’s really gratifying to know our clients really valued the day. Roll on 2010!
I recently spent a weekend in Bolton and was lucky enough to get to 2 sporting events – World Cup Cycling at Manchester Velodrome, and Bolton versus Chelsea at the Reebok Stadium. It is interesting to reflect on differences in the spectator experience.
Cycling offered a full day’s entertainment for £15 per person. In the breaks in the cycling action I was able to walk the concourses to find 4 different food options (two of which were relatively healthy), experience four different sponsor products (one of which involving a 200m sprint on exercise bikes, and my very narrow but ultimately glorious victory against a 14-year-old!), join British Cycling, buy some gear and get some advice from a British Cycling coach as well as some free guides to cycling in the Manchester area. We even left during the intermission and popped to the ASDA next door to grab some nibbles.
Chelsea was somewhat different as an experience. We had a cracking view at Bolton, and it was a very good game (for a Chelsea supporter). The bar and betting shop in the stand was in full flow before the game and during it. My only real exposure to sponsor product was the smartly-done advertising in the toilets and the betting stand itself run by Bolton’s shirt sponsor. The television screens showed highlights at half time – but only of the highlights of Bolton’s best chances. The stadium was only three quarters full at the beginning, and half full at the final whistle.
The intent of this post is not simply to criticise football as a spectator sport. The experience at Bolton was absolutely what I would expect from a relatively modest Premier League ground where ticket revenues are only one part of the economic model, far behind domestic and international TV rights. Equally, the World Cup Cycling was exactly what I would expect from a sport on the up three years out from the Olympic Games where participation is the key to sustained success in the UK beyond 2012. The point, though, is that only once this weekend did I feel valued as a customer.
On the same weekend, UK Sport announced there would be a world class sporting event in the UK every two weeks between now and the Olympic and Paralympic Games. This is the window for British spectator sporting interest to broaden out beyond football. Based on this weekend’s experience, I think there is a real chance of this happening. Not once did anyone at Bolton thank me for coming.
If I had another spare weekend in Manchester, I would be taking my young son to another cycling meet rather than one of the 5 local football teams. It would cost me less to do this than buy two half time burgers at the football. I wonder whether it is a sign of the times that I saw ticket touts at the cycling, but not the football!
Useful insight in the papers over the last few days of current performance and prospects for the retail industry in the UK. It was interesting to read about Westfield – the new high end shopping complex built in Shepherds Bush. Westfield’s UK Managing Director suggests the first three months of their year had been ‘very scary’….but cites some impressive evidence that performance has stabilised. The SVP of Louis Vuitton says their performance has ‘surpassed all expectations’.
Elsewhere, PwC’s retail director is quoted as suggesting that the middle ground of retail is becoming increasingly tough. A good example would seem to be the off licence trade – First Quench having gone into administration just last week. At the premium end, the wine clubs and consultancy-based propositions of Majestic reign supreme, and at the volume end of the market the economies of scale which Sainsbury’s, Tesco et all can achieve simply cannot be matched. Hence very tough trading conditions for those caught in the middle.
I believe we are seeing exactly the same thing in the learning and development market. In our experience the requirement for senior executive alignment and development is as high as we have ever known. Just like alcoholic retailers, quality, breadth of offer and credible experience are no longer a competitive advantage at this level – they are a given.
There is also a significant shake-out happening in the development market at middle and junior management (which I would very loosely describe as beyond the top 500 in a FTSE business). We are hearing words like ‘flight to demonstrable quality’ and ‘evidence-based value for money’ from our clients – and rightly so. For too long our industry has been oversupplied and, to be frank, a little lazy. Which feels a good description of the shelves on my last trip to Oddbins.
It is not easy of course, but this recession will be the best thing that has happened to our industry when we emerge at the other side of our V (or W!) shape.
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