Marc Sands podcast transcript
Marc Sands podcast transcript
Speaker key:
CMC: Clare Mitchell Crow
MC: Marty Carroll
MS: Marc Sands
CMC: Hi. I’m Clare Mitchell Crow from Foviance, and welcome to our first …on Customer Experience podcast. This podcast was recorded on November 13th, 2008.
There’s a great deal of talk about customer experience in the business world right now. As traditional sources of differentiation are quickly disappearing, brands are realising that it is the overall customer experience offered that can really set them apart.
For those organisations that can re-orient themselves around the customer, the opportunity is significant – generating customer loyalty, increasing brand equity and advocacy, and capturing market share. But becoming a truly customer-centric organisation is not without its challenges.
The …on Customer Experience podcast series is a set of regular interviews with senior figures from some of the world’s most respected businesses focusing on the strategic importance of customer experience. We’re hoping, through these podcasts, to shed some light on the ways some organisations manage the customer experience.
Today I’m joined by my colleague from Foviance Marty Carroll and by our first guest interviewee: Marc Sands, Director of Marketing for the Guardian News and Media.
Marc, we really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today.
MS: It’s fun to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Customer Experience is an interesting one for us because we are, being a news organisation, you don’t do everything with your customer first in mind. We do everything in terms of reporting and commenting on the news. So we sort of have a foot in two camps I suppose: our customer experience but also the requirement to the product.
CMC: Ok.
MC: Ok. Can you tell us Mark, for the benefit of the people listening, a little bit about your particular background individually, the organisation you work for, The Guardian News and Media, and also your current role and your particular remit.
MS: Alright. Well years and years ago I was at Cambridge. Then I went off and did an MBA. I had no clue what to do after university so I went off and did an MBA, which was boring but useful, and then I spent about seven, eight years working in advertising both in London and in New York. And then I went off to be client side and moved to Granada, London Weekend Television. And out of that was born, and some of your older listeners will know this, was something called ONdigital, which was the first digital terrestrial broadcasting company in the world. And I was one of the founding people of that. And that was a heroic failure, it turned into ITV Digital, but before it all went tits up so to speak I joined the Guardian, which was about nine years ago, as a member of a twelve strong board essentially running what was then largely a newspaper business, but increasingly the focus has changed. And as marketing director, I run all the research of the organisation, all the promotional stuff, all the data marketing and also sponsorship and events. So it’s quite a broad remit.
MC: Excellent. And the brands that you are responsible for within Guardian News and Media?
MS: Anything with the Guardian name on it and anything with an Observer name on it. So whether it is the paper, the different sort of platforms, or it’s mobile or online or the paper, but the brands so to speak of the Guardian and the Observer and their associated platforms.
CMC: Ok, so in terms of the different brands, is there any sort of strategy that covers those different brands, or do you look at them as singular?
MS: You look at both, actually, in a sense that, you’ve got to stand back slightly because the Guardian and the Observer exist to ensure that liberal journalism exists in perpetuity. That’s all we’re here for. And everything we do is about maintaining a liberal perspective, a liberal progressive perspective on the world and ensuring that it is funded forever. So we are an interesting organisation in that sense and unique. So that is our first port of call and ensuring that the audience who is either wanting a liberal perspective or doesn’t know about it but should know about it, gets to hear about it. So that’s what it’s all about.
CMC: So there’s initiatives such as The Common is Free on the website.
MS: Yeah. As an organisation we, we’re obsessed with trying out new things and obsessed with, I mean if you look at our, we tend never to follow the crowd. We tend very rarely to do what everyone else has done. Whether you take the transformation from a tabloid newspaper, or rather from a broadsheet to a tabloid, of course we didn’t go tabloid. We went Berliner, which is the only newspaper in the UK to be Berliner. It’s the hardest decision. The easiest decision is to go tabloid. It’s very simple: you use the same printing presses, you turn the paper the other way around, and you print.
Berliner required an entire re-look at everything about the newspaper, from how you write it, how you lay it out, and essentially we wanted to maintain certain standards in journalism, which was why we went to a Berliner shape rather than a tabloid. But it was born out of the fact that the broadsheet shape is a bit passed its sell-by-date. And if you invented a newspaper today, you’d never have it as a broadsheet. It’s that shape for various taxation reasons in the late nineteenth century and makes no sense at all now. Now this is about customer experience. Broadsheet is about as far removed from the customer experience as a positive as is imaginable. So form, functionality needs to be made very cleverly. And the whole project of the Berliner was about ensuring journalistic standards, but in a way that the customer or the reader would find appropriate to present day times, which is how we ended up with that shape.
MC: Mark, so you went to the Berliner format back in 2005 with the Guardian, and in 2006 for the Observer. A lot of time has passed since then. The Independent and the Times went for a different format which is more around tabloid. How would you rate your success in that time that has gone by since. Has it made an improvement?
MS: If I go back to why we are here, we are here to ensure that we produce a certain type of journalism. If you look at it from a commercial point of view, from a ‘how many newspapers do we sell’ in relation to ‘is it more or less than we used to’ or ‘is the rate of decline or the rate of growth the same’, all newspapers are, they are about the same actually. The Independent is fairing a lot worse now than it was then. We’re not, the Times is not, the Telegraph is having a torrid time. So from a purely sales point of view, I’d argue we are slightly ahead of the market but not in a way that distinguishes us. But ahead of the market.
With regard to the type of journalism that we do, if you look at the Times when it was a broadsheet and look at the Times now, it is unrecognisable. They are not the same paper. Stories are shorter, headlines are shoutier, and it’s a totally different customer experience. If you look at the Guardian, you would argue it’s exactly the same customer experience but in a format that’s appropriate to the present day. And there’s a word that exists here, which is called ‘here to for’, which is a principle that we operate in the Guardian, which is, be exactly the same as you were before, but in whatever the appropriate means is in the present day. Now, all the others newspapers, if you look at the Independent, the Independent again, it basically is the Daily Mail of the left. It shrieks, it shouts. When the Independent first started it said, we won’t do that, we won’t cover Royal stories. It had certain principles. It’s all gone, and the tabloid format has only sped up, frankly, its down market route, because tabloid means down market, and there is no question about it. That’s why people go that shape. And we have remained the same journalistically, in fact I’d argue much better and much stronger. And whilst everyone else is shipping down market, we are essentially, actually maintaining a certain level of intellectual standard, which I think is core to the Guardian.
MC: Ok. Now, you were suggesting that the broadsheet, it just wasn’t fitting for the modern age for various legacy reasons, but was there any customer research or were you relying really on gut feel at the time that the broadsheet just wasn’t meeting readers’ needs?
MS: I would love to say that there was no research and it was just gut. That’s not true. We did tonnes of research. I mean, we did research, both qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative, you know, you don’t have to talk to that many people to realise that there is an issue. The degree of the issue you can validate by talking to hundreds of thousands, which we did, quantitatively.
So we found a very clear picture emerged, which we knew was there anyway, because we were working simply a long time and you know. But you don’t make a decision of such huge financial demands on the basis of just a hunch. So you do it on the basis of intuition backed up or contradicted by research, in which case you wouldn’t do it. But in this case, it was. The industry knew there was a problem, and you need to find, with the help of research, with the help of talking to your customers, actually what the best solution is for your brand. And the best solution for our brand is different to that adopted by others.
MC: Did you disenfranchise any of your audience through that decision?
MS: We were obsessed with not doing that, and we were obsessed with not pissing off the central base of Guardian readership because they are, frankly, the most important people to us. The people that buy the Guardian newspaper six days a week, and hopefully the Observer on the seventh day, are the people we’ve got to take the greatest care of. And that was the bull’s eye audience who absolutely do not want a tabloid newspaper, and they do not want Guardian journalistic standards to slip, and they either intuitively knew or were fearful that if you went tabloid, you would go down that route. And that is the audience we spoke to most.
MC: What other innovations do you see in the industry on the back of that one, that will change the user experience with regard to your particular industry? I know you were talking at the Forrester Consumer Marketing forum that the media industry’s in a privileged position in that it can innovate very quickly and make mistakes quickly. Can you talk more about those innovations?
MS: I think the big shout in news on paper has happened. I think we will finesse it and play with it and things will change, but on the margins, essentially we’ve made our play. That play is a Berliner product and we have, you know, I would be very surprised, commercially it’s proven successful, so I would be very surprised if we made a huge leap again within the next decade. As I said we will finesse around the edges, we will play with it, but the big shout has happened.
The innovation that I think you are referring to will all now be online, where I think what is amazing is the Guardian that was started in, whatever, 1821, for years it was a print-based product. It was pictures, it was static pictures and lots of words. Now, the Guardian, there’s this weird thing where it’s become, how do you represent the Guardian aurally? How do you represent the Guardian visually? If you go to our website now, there’s, we’re podcasting on every conceivable subject. We are, in fact I think behind the BBC, we are the second largest producer in the UK of oral content online. And also the moving image. We now have a division called Guardian Films which is essentially a news division, a news moving image division. And they have produced a lot of content for us and for other news organisations such as, you know, Channel 4 News or ITN. Where we, where the Guardian brand has stretched into other areas, of which I’d say the moving image and, you know, the spoken word is where we’re developing most at the moment, without letting go of the written word. But you find yourself … for a hundred and eighty years or so it was all about paper ink; it isn’t anymore. Paper ink is still the lion’s share of what we do. But in, come back in twenty years time and it won’t be. I’ll be amazed if it was.
So there is a huge transition to be made between where we’re at now and the delivery of news online. And with the exponential growth of broadband, you find that the written word is fine, but actually people want the spoken word and visual stuff. So that is the biggest change, and actually we’re moving to a new building in a month’s time, and we’re currently on 25 floors in seven buildings, and to be an integrated news operations, it’s a joke. We make it work, but it’s bloody hard. We move to the new place, we’re on four floors, everyone in the same building, and I suppose at the centre of it is a new multimedia suite. Now the multimedia suite looks like Hollywood, and you walk in there and someone from ten years ago would not believe that they are in a newspaper organisation because at best you might get a printing press downstairs (they’re actually not downstairs, they’re in another part of London and in Manchester), but now there’s this whole multimedia suite, which is like walking into a studio in Soho in London and having your commercials made. It’s extraordinary. And that will be used 24 hours a day in the production of new content. So in terms of transition, I think that is of a magnitude that was what we thought at the time was a transition from broadsheet to Berliner.
MC: Ok. Mark you seem to have a really good grip on what the brand is of the Guardian and the Observer and so on, but how do you manage the translation of that brand into the user experience across the different consumption channels that you have, particularly as they’re growing all of the time?
MS: I think media brands are different to other brands, and I could be wrong, but I think they are and I’ve worked across a few. And here’s the weird thing about a good media brand, is that it will always be more interesting than its own marketing. Once you know that, that means that you shouldn’t try to create things, vehicles to carry you. We don’t need little furry animals, haha funny funny commercials. You need to be governed by the content; you need to be governed by your principals and the content because marketing is about amplification. It’s not about the creation of something. Most brands don’t mean anything, and the skill of marketing is to pour meaning into them. That’s what they do. Kit Kat means nothing. It’s become, it’s meant a lot now because over 50 years they’ve said relentlessly it’s about, you know, the 11 o’clock break with a cup of tea, take a break, have a Kit Kat. So in my mind they’ve filled, but it’s not. It’s a wafer biscuit, but they’ve tipped fantastic meaning into it and all credit to them.
We don’t have to do that because the meaning is all there, both in why we’re on the planet, i.e. to ensure that liberal journalism exists in perpetuity, not a very interesting message, or to say, ‘Hello we’ve got a piece today about such and such’. Well, tell people you’ve got a piece about such and such in a way that is clear, and they understand it’s there. So there is a bit of restraint in the marketing that we do. And my own feelings with a media brand, I don’t want people to know where the content ends and the marketing begins, and I’m obsessed with that. So anything we do, I don’t want people to think, ‘Oh that wizzo marketing department did that’. I want them just to think, ‘Oh it comes from the Guardian’, and most newspapers or media brands I don’t think do that.
MC: Ok. How do you understand how people are consuming your content today?
MS: Lots of ways. We have, interestingly, we’ve just set up a, it’s a source of much frustration actually. Because, as you can imagine in this organisation, there’s lots of opinion, there’s lots of nuance, there’s lots of ‘I think this, you think that, let’s have an argument and work it out,’ bit of that goes on. Quite a lot of research actually. And I think the most interesting thing we’ve developed in the last five or six years has been, we’ve created a thing called ‘Navigator’, which is a panel of 36,000 Guardian and Observer readers who’ve opted in, who said, ‘Yeah, ask me questions and I’ll happily answer’. And they are segmented across different types of usage patterns. It can be seven days a week, you know, in love with the internet, podcast, everything, or they can be people who just come on a Monday to try and find a job. So we’ve got basically 36,000, and we now, in the last six months, have started talking to them a lot, and it’s fantastic! Because it takes away some of the prejudices, the guesswork inside the organisation, which by the way I happen to think is largely right, but you better validate it, or have it questioned. So we have this group of 36,000 who we talk to a lot, and we do lots of regular research, as you’d imagine. But the problem with a lot of that research is it’s very ponderous and slow, and that’s really frustrating. So to go to the editor and say, ‘Yeah, we can ask such and such question about such and such, but I’ll give the answer in six weeks’, it’s a bit of a, this industry’s faster than that. You get the answer in three days, you’re off and running, and so that’s how we’ve tended to operate, so we’re asking more questions of our readership than I think we ever have done before.
MC: So you understand through that panel then presumably if someone is reading the Guardian newspaper daily, whether they are also using the web, what proportion of people are and so on. So you understand that journey.
MS: Absolutely. We understand from a usage point of view how our readers online or on paper are either allied to one or other platform or frankly integrate them all. And increasingly the Guardian reader is integrating across the piece.
MC: We talked about an innovation a little while ago. The likes of the Sony eReader and the Amazon Kindle, what role do you think they are going to play in shaping the industry?
MS: I think they will play the most enormous role. I don’t know that, but in the same way that the iPod has basically turned the music business on its head, my sense is no single thing will do that in the way that an iPod has done, but I think they will all cause some form of change. Funnily enough, I was in New York about three weeks ago, and I was on the subway, and a woman next to me was reading on a, I think it was a Sony eReader, a book. And I’ve seen them at work and I’ve seen people using them, but I’ve never seen someone use it in real life. And she was on the subway reading it, and I think she thought I was mad and rude and I didn’t mean to. I was with my children, I said, ‘I’m not a nutter, these are my children, but could you tell me what’s it like reading a book on that machine on the subway?’ And she did and she was perfectly relaxed with the experience of reading it. So my sense is it will change a little. I mean the thing that will, the thing that everyone’s waiting for and is in all the sort of sci-fi things about newspapers is a bit of paper that’s made of plastic that you can upload your newspaper onto, and you can fold it and put it in your pocket. Now I don’t know if that will ever exist, but I’ve seen various prototypes like that, and my guess is that will happen. And you upload it every day, because there’s something about the reader experience of reading a newspaper, the experience of touching and flipping a page, that is lost in the current way in which people consume their media online or on the mobile, and that’s a real issue.
Now watching this woman on the subway in New York read from her Kindle or Sony eReader, I think it was the Sony machine, was that it felt like reading a book, and that’s what she was very comfortable with. It wasn’t like reading a small screen on a computer or a little hand-held, even how big an iPod is, which is great but it’s still not big enough, and the page turned and it was terrific, and I think you’ve got to retain those sorts of things. And once you can do that, then I think they will change our business significantly and more to the good.
MC: Good. And your G24 proposition is one step on the way there?
MS: No. G24 was, you know, it goes back to the innovation front. We will, as a management team here we tend to cautiously say ‘yes’ to most things, rather than saying ‘no’. Saying ‘no’ is just, you know, you may have to say ‘no’ in the end, but at the start of the conversation, give it a cautious ‘yes’ and then see where it gets you, and if it gets you to ‘no’ then fine.
G24 was a, came out of an ability, as we’re changing our news operation system here, to actually update the news live and print it on paper. It’s half a solution to something but I’m not quite sure, and it won’t exist in a year’s time, 2 year’s time, but it’s helped our learning in terms of understanding. I mean it might exist, but it’s a moderately successful product, but it costs us nothing and there is a constituency who like it. But certainly isn’t the silver bullet solution to whatever our problem is.
CMC: You talked about the Navigator and the panel of users you’ve got. Have you been in touch with them about their mobile use of your content and how they digest your Berliner content?
MS: Uh no, but we’re just about to, funnily enough, because every year mobile is the big thing, ok? And every year, and it never is, ok? But it’s clearly about to be at some point, and whether it’s this year or next year, it’s going to happen. So we have a mobile group here who are working on it, and my guess is very soon we will be talking to our Navigator group about how they, how and if they use their mobile for consumption of news. Because at the moment, there clearly is news consumption. It’s not on the scale yet that it is elsewhere, but I think, you know, things like the development of the iPhone have changed a lot of that.
CMC: Yeah. For me, mobile also encompasses podcasts, I guess, in some shape or form because those devices are emerging, so you’re finding people are having either.
MS: Yeah, and with an iPhone you can have it all. They’re not of that scale yet, but it’s clear the way the world’s going, and we’ll be in that game absolutely, but we’re less advanced than we possibly should be.
CMC: Your offices will make you make that step up?
MS: They will, no they will because it will suddenly, it will be, the technology, which is understood by not the majority here but a significant minority, will become a majority game, I think.
MC: Would you say that Guardian News and Media competes on the basis of the user experience it offers, Mark, against your competitors?
MS: I don’t think I understand what you mean. I think it competes on the basis, does it compete on user experience? Intellectually? Yes. Practically? No. I mean, the Berliner does, but in a small way, but in a, intellectually yes.
MC: Ok. If you take the example of guardian.co.uk, the website’s got lots of content. My understanding is that people are using a lot of the content that’s even a month old. So there’s a huge repository there of information. The ability to, or allowing people to navigate that content with ease and find the information that’s important to them is key, presumably, to your audience?
MS: It is, and if you look at our website a year ago, we’ve just been through an 18 month process which we called R2, which is the new platform for the web, and it was all about what you’re saying. Before then, it was almost impossible to find anything that wasn’t that day or that week. It’s now incredibly straight forward. And we also have the whole social network side of it through Plug, which allows discourse between readers. It means that the basis of the website as it currently stands is exactly as you say about the user experience, about ease of navigation, ease of knowing where you are, and ease of trying to get to a place.
MC: Yeah ok. And the example then from the print edition, if you take the Observer on Sunday, do you understand how people use that, what supplements they read, in what order and so on? And what that user experience is like?
MS: We do, we do, and interestingly the development of the Observer monthly magazines, which no one else has copied and they’ve been, I mean, nothing is single-handily responsible for the reversal of fortunes, but you could argue that the Sport mag, the Food mag, the Woman mag, and now the Music mag have been responsible for the turnaround in the Observer’s fortunes in the last three or four years, and they were built around certainly user demand. And then I think the magazines, in terms of an experience, were like no other magazine in the weekend newspaper market. So in that sense they were both differentiated, and people, from an experiential point of view, welcome their presence. There is no question about that.
MC: And you said they were different to all the others. In what ways?
MS: Because they’re monthlies. They’re monthlies and they’re about one subject. Magazines generally in newspapers are generalists. So if you think of your Saturday magazine or your Sunday magazine, it’s a general romp through loveliness whether it’s gardening or cooking or, you know, if it’s not it might be the war in Iraq, which is less lovely, but you know what I mean. This was about one subject. In the case of Sport, we knew that Sport will appeal not exclusively but by in large to men, therefore you could argue excluding half your readership. That’s true. But that magazine was created. We then found out it’s a much more generalist read, but it says, ‘Hello I’m Sport’, and we know that there’s a Pavlovian response between some people and sport, and if there’s a sports mag they’ll buy it. And that meant that you could target particular audiences, and as we rolled them all out, Food, Sport, Music and Observer Woman, all appeal to slightly different audiences, so the notion of just being a generalist in everything you do, actually maybe wasn’t right.
MC: Ok, that’s interesting. Now Guardian News and Media is part of a much larger group, which is Guardian Media Group. How much information do you share across the business with regards to consumer insight, changing habits and trends and so on?
MS: Increasingly more and more. And that’s been a pattern that’s developed over the last two or three years. I mean, the other companies within the group are, well recently: Emap, Autotrader, Smooth Radio and a whole series of other radio stations around, and a lot of regional newspapers. Increasingly, certainly between Emap from the B2B side and our own commercial operation where it’s B2B, there’s a lot more interchange, but they’ve just joined the party about six, nine months ago. Autotrader, I mean there’s less commonality between the two, but in terms of, what’s been interesting is, my equivalent at Autotrader, that we have shared a lot of data about not necessarily the audiences, because they’re different, but the marketing skills and marketing things that you might do, because frankly in this world we’re all making it up as we go along, because there’s frequently no precedent, because it’s changing so much, that if you’ve got people who are confronted with the same issues but don’t have the NDA or privacy issues and are happy to share it with you, that’s a very useful forum to have.
MC: Yeah ok. Alright, I just wanted to ask you, Mark, what might be interesting is to talk about the relationship between user experience and financial success, or brand experience and financial success. Do you have an opinion on that?
MS: Yeah. I think, let’s go from the brand bit if you don’t mind, I think there are four great newspaper brands, and that’s the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Mail, despite it being the most pernicious loathsome thing, and lastly the Sun, which is, you know, well it’s the Sun. What they do fantastically well, all four of them, is they understand their audiences incredibly well, and if you talk to anyone of those four newspapers, they will give you a fantastic description of who they’re writing to and for. If you ask people at the Times or the Independent or the Daily Mirror, I don’t think they’ve got any idea who they’re writing for. Whereas those four know exactly who they’re writing for and that’s what makes them great newspapers, because they understand their community brilliantly. And much as, you know, I might loath the Daily Mail, I think that they’re fantastic at what they do. You know, they put the fear of God every day into their audience, and their audience want that, and they know that, and they do it brilliantly. And they make you feel, you wake up, you’re terrified every morning if you read the Mail, but they get it. And that, the Sun does it a different way, and the Daily Telegraph does it a different way, but they know their audience brilliantly, and that’s why those four are the ones that have made the most money in the past, it’s difficult times at the moment, and will make the most money in the future and likely succeed more than any of the others.
MC: That’s great. Finally just want to ask you, who do you think offers great customer experiences? What other brands out there or organizations?
MS: That’s a good question. I mean, if the definition of delivering on an, on the promise, which I suppose then means you’re buying into a certain experience, then I think some are clearly terrific. You might not like the experience, but you know what you’re getting and you’re not surprised by it, or you’re positively surprised. I’m forever surprised and delighted the rare time I go to Mc Donald’s, bizarrely, and I think it delivers fantastically on its customer promise. And I must have it about four or six times a year, and every time I have it, I’m excited about the prospect of it and I’m completely fulfilled having it, even though it’s a slightly guilty secret. I think Greggs the bakers delivers a brilliant customer experience. I think Ryanair delivers a fantastic customer experience: there are, it’s going to be shit, you know it’s going to be shit, but it’s going to get you there, and that’s what you bought into. If you don’t want it to be like that, go somewhere else.
I think Virgin Airways is a fantastic customer experience. Even if you’re flying economy, I think they look after you properly and treat you like an adult. I recently flew to New York and we had a fantastic, hilarious bloke on the microphone who was some Irish guy who just, he was camp as Christmas, funny as hell and wonderful, and he just went off on one on the microphone. That’s a bit of a risk, but it’s not. Had that happened at British Airways … It worked and everyone loved him. He was fantastic. And he almost got a big, when we got to New York, he got a big round of applause. We thought he was wonderful. And that was about, now other, British Airways, you’d probably be fined for doing that on British Airways, which is fine because that’s how British Airways operate. But the Virgin thing gave that man the latitude to say the things he said and it was wonderful. So I think, I think it’s just about a certain level of honesty on delivering on what you say you’re going to deliver. I think others are, you know, I mean banks frustrate the hell out of me because they seem to promise everything and it’s rarely delivered. So it’s just about, you know, it’s the age old thing: despite all the marketing words and language around it, it’s like if you say you’re going to give me this, give me that. And if you say you’re going to behave like this, behave like that. And that’s all you can ask for, and I think in some categories it’s harder than others. But it’s not about being up market, down market, side market whatever. It’s just about saying, if you’re going to do it, do it. And I think the ones I’ve said do that.
MC: That’s really interesting Mark. Two points I’d like to pick up on: in our introduction, we talked about differentiation on the basis of the user experience. I think your particular experience with Virgin, there was a value add offering there that wouldn’t necessarily be in the rule book, but it’s kind of in keeping with the Virgin brand that sets them apart. Would you agree?
MS: Absolutely, totally because functionally, they’re basically the same as anyone else. I mean, actually I’ve got two kids and they always want to go on Virgin because they’ve got more films on it, but on some BA planes you’ve got the same little sort of audio/video system or whatever, so I don’t think that’s it. What differentiates them is, as you say, the bit that’s not in the rule book, but, and I’ve thought about long and hard what he was talking about, and he was being very very funny, this guy, to maybe 300 people in our aeroplane. I was thinking what if some people object to that because, you know, he wasn’t being inappropriate, he was just being hilariously funny. What if some people thought that made them nervous about flying because it wasn’t that sort of, you know, crosscheck, doors closed, doors to manual whatever. I mean he said all that, but, you know, and a load of other stuff. And I wonder what they would have thought, and I think they would be fine because I think, in buying into the Virgin brand, that’s what, it’s not what you expect, but if you get it, that’s part of the bonus ball. And he made me feel very warm about Virgin.
MC: Good. The other point I wanted to make, when we ask people the question I asked you, a lot of people talk about premium brands, and what was interesting is you talked about brands that aren’t necessarily premium brands, that we all think about the Apples of this world and so on.
MS: Well Apple’s a terrible example. I think they’re absolutely, I’ve gone through, look, ok I mean here in my office, right, this is the sound of clacking iPods [metallic noise] that have broken, ok? There’s two here and there’s another two at home. They don’t deliver. They break after a year, less so now, but this is an example of not, and it depends where you are in the world of Apple. If you talk to Mac operators, Mac people, they’re in love with it. You talk to these people, and this is, sorry I’m looking at the iPod again, it’s a bloody nightmare.
CMC: He’s holding up his two old iPods.
MS: And I’ve got a new one here somewhere which is great, and it hasn’t broken so I’m feeling warm to them again, but in their case, the functional brilliance of it overcomes the failings of it. But only just now because, and now they seem to have worked it out, and they don’t break down one week after the guarantee is over, and it’s a lot better. But I think that’s a poor example, actually, because, and if you go online, the amount of people who are furious with Apple for, but it’s a brilliant brand and everything they’ve invested in the brand means that they’ve overcome that.
MC: It’s almost like a halo effect.
MS: Absolutely, and of course you know they’re brilliant and they’ll get it right, but my sense is a lot of people out there who have, who, I don’t think it delivers entirely on its brand experience, you know. I think it does from a, it’s amazing functionally, but I think it’s taken some time to get to a point where you can say that the total delivery is right.
MC: Yeah, ok. And what was really interesting is the brands you actually mentioned are ones who do exactly what you said, is they understand their audience very very well, and they know what their particular needs are.
MS: Yeah, which I think is completely what it’s about. And it doesn’t matter if you’re up market, down market brand, you know, a newspaper, a chocolate bar. I mean, when I choose something, we have a trolley that comes around at work twice a day, and you’ve got a pick of everything. And it’s weird because I don’t just want a lump of chocolate. You’ve got, it depends on my mood, and some deliver on the mood and some don’t. And you know, it’s the same with all the choices, and the ones that deliver, time and time again you just go back and back. So I just think it’s about delivering on the promise, which is sort of, it was ever thus.