CultureHive€¦ · Web viewI once had a gallery curator tell me that: ‘branding was the work of the Devil, it was a superficial wrapper that was telling lies in order to show

Arts Marketing Association AMA conference 2013 report

Future direction ~ a road map for successAndrew McIntyre, Director – Morris Hargreaves McIntyre

Introduced and chaired by Chris Denton, AMA board member and Consultant.

This session will look at how you review your organisation’s vision and future direction to develop

both art and audience.

Andrew is a founder and principal consultant at Morris Hargreaves McIntyre, the world's leading

audience focus consultancy. He works with forward-thinking arts organisations, both large and

small, in the UK and internationally. In the past five years, Andrew has worked with over thirty

Museum Directors, Artistic Directors and CEOs to guide their organisations through his innovative

Move on Up programme to help them become truly vision-led and audience-focused.

He played a key role in the development of Culture Segments, the first arts sector-specific

segmentation system based on deep-seated cultural values and beliefs rather than just behaviour

and attitudes. Culture Segments has now been widely adopted in the UK, USA, New Zealand,

Australia, Brazil, Germany, Turkey and Israel. Controversially, Andrew is disillusioned by orthodox

arts marketing, deeply suspicious of the rush to impersonal CRM systems and wary of anyone

hailing social media as the cure-all. Andrew is, instead, focused on how we can build genuine,

rich, rewarding human relationships between audience members, artists and our institutions.

Andrew McIntyreIt has been interesting working with arts organisations over the last ten years or so. There’s been

an explosion of consultancy and I’m deeply suspicious of consultancy which is odd as I am a

consultant. What consultants have been doing with arts organisations is all kinds of ‘ings’. Things

like ‘visioning’, ‘branding’ and an awful lot of ‘re-branding’, and then some ‘re-re-branding’.

Strategising has been big and planning is ever present.

[Andrew asked:] Hands up if you’ve been through those kinds of processes in your

organisation, keep your hand up if you’ve been through them more than once and keep them up if

you’ve done them more than twice. What I’m interested in, with all of that input, all of that strategic

thinking is how successful that is for our organisations. I don’t think that there’s a huge amount of

evidence to suggest that it has made that much of a difference to us. Partly because, often when

we’re doing it, we’re doing it to meet somebody else’s agenda. We’re handed down the

framework, have to fill in the boxes and address other people’s strategic objectives, and we’re


rarely allowed to express ourselves. We’re rarely allowed to say what it is that we want to do either

as artists or as institutions as we’ve always got one eye on what the funder is thinking.

I see an awful lot of these documents [Andrew handing out documents] because every time

I work with an organisation I encounter a pile of previous documents and they all start to look the

same. The worst offender in this is ‘the vision’. So, can I ask, can anyone in the room tell me what

their ‘vision statement’ is? How many people know their vision statement and can recite it?

Delegate: Our vision is to be a building that is open all hours, to be a performance venue, meeting

spaces, an opportunity to explore …

Delegate: To be the world’s leading centre for the study of history of art and conservation

Andrew: Thank you. A lot of the time people don’t recognise their own vision statements. At a

conference in New Zealand we took ten of the world’s leading arts organisations’ vision

statements, removed their names, displayed them around the room and gave people the names to

match to the statements. Out of 400 delegates the top score for that quiz was 2 out of 10. Most

people didn’t get anywhere near and one of the things that people said was ‘that they all seem

quite similar’. They’re all ‘world class’ and they’re all innovative, they’re all creative and they’re all

‘reaching everybody’.

This idea that we should create a vision statement of a sentence or two sentences or fifteen

words is a bit like those competitions that you get on the back of cereal packets – can we sum up

the organisation in fifteen words. I get the point of being clear but are we so time-poor that we

can’t read more than one sentence or our brains are so small that we can’t keep more than one

idea going at a time. Our organisations are so important to us, so complex and so nuanced that

wouldn’t we be better writing a side of A4 paper? Wouldn’t we be better to really explain what it is

that we would like to do? Wouldn’t we be better off actually making all of the arguments and

explaining why we are different from the others, how we do it, who we do it for and what difference

we are going to make? We started thinking that there’s got to be a better way and we need a way

which involves more people and allows artistic leaders to fully express themselves rather than

using hackneyed, clichéd arts speak and funder jargon that you’ve read everywhere else.

That was one of the things that we set out to do and we’re also thinking about branding –

the frequency with which people are rebranding suggests that branding exercises are often not

getting to the fundamental essence of the organisation. If you have to keep rebranding either your

organisation is in an enormous state of change or the version that you’ve got is not fundamental

and must be to some extent superficial. The brand should really be about your DNA, it shouldn’t

be about some words that you put on a piece of paper forming your visual identity. It’s got to be

about ‘who’ and ‘why’ you are.


When we looked at strategies and plans, two things that struck us were that everything is now a

strategy. The word ‘strategy’ is now attached to everything. Action plans are now strategies, things

that are just policies are now strategies. I don’t know if you find this in your organisation but

organisations now have Strategy Soups, there are fifteen or so strategies and how they all relate

to each other, nobody can explain. If you call your department’s thing a strategy, it’s more

important than if you simply call it a plan. So we have a strategy for everything and the plans all

start to look very ‘Local Authority’. You know the thing; front cover, really energising and warm

words on page 3 that talk about the importance of whatever it is that you do, a few more bits and

then you are into ‘grids’ – probably presented landscape with all the things that are going to

happen, when they are going to happen by, who’s going to do the output, the targets and the

timings etc. You look at page 17 of this plan where there are a lot of worthwhile, plausible and

interesting things happening on page 17 and you think that’s ‘all good stuff’. It’s quite hard

however to work out how it relates to the stuff on page 31, the stuff on page 9 or indeed, the words

on page 3. It’s just that each department has generated a load of stuff and fitted it into the grid, the

grids have been collated and stapled together and there’s our plan! It’s hard to work out where the

brand is, and what it is that we are trying to achieve. I can see what we’re going to deliver, what

the outputs are, but I can’t really see what the outcomes are. And I can’t see how the outcomes

are coherent across the different departments. I can’t see how they’re going to deliver the vision of

the organisation which is actually a 15-word tie-breaker with the words ‘world class’, ‘innovative’

and ‘creative’ in it.

If I want to understand your organisation I actually don’t want any of that stuff, I want you to

explain your organisation. What we found was that people all know what their organisation is – not

just the leaders but the other people that work there are also passionate. It seems however that

the way that we are taught or the way that we’ve learnt to articulate what we do and who we are

doesn’t seem that helpful, we’re constantly revisiting it. Even when there was a plan it didn’t

galvanise the organisation into a single, coherent unit or delivering the big idea. It was just people

getting on with their own thing and at some point, somebody would call them to account for what

they’d put on page 17 and they’d say; ‘yes, we delivered that’.

There seem to be a number of issues for us:

1. Involvement and ownershipWho is writing these things? Is it one person? A very small group of people – the senior

management team? Is it the board? How many organisations are involving everyone in the

organisation in producing it? And I mean everyone. I mean including the cleaner. How


many organisations are getting their casual staff involved? It’ very, very few. I’m sure there

are some best-practice organisations in the room but that’s usually the case. All of these

people are the ones that are actually going to deliver it but if they don’t know what ‘it’ is and

they haven’t had their chance to help articulate it, the chance of them delivering it to people

is actually quite small. You’re cutting out half the brains in the organisation before you start.

When the shiny document arrives, the chances of all those people taking it to heart and

feeling and believing in it are small.

2. Coherence and logic

This is where people understand what all the bits mean but just not in that order. They get it

but they don’t see how it fits together. Often, the objectives are articulated on one page and

the strategies, on another page, don’t seem to fit those objectives. We say that we want to

achieve ‘this’, we have a strategy for ‘that’ but which one delivers what? Often, when you try

to map it all out you find that organisations have articulated objectives but they have no

strategy to deliver some objectives – no wonder we’re not going to achieve it because we

haven’t actually said how we’re going to do it. Each department is going to do a lot of stuff,

and it’s all good stuff but we haven’t said how we’re going to ‘transform all the people of

Sheffield into theatre goers’; we’re just going to do ‘stuff’.

3. Distinctiveness and DNA

There’s a distinct lack of distinctiveness in all of these documents. They could be for

anyone. I could take your name off and put someone else’s name on the top and people

would believe me. Which bit of this is about you, your situation, your organisation, in your

context? The DNA bit is about the ‘truth’. We’ve got to stop it being generic and it has to be

about truth. It has to be about ‘who are we?’ What are we like at our best? What are we

trying to achieve? Not about what the funder wants for us. I’m interested in the genuine

creative ideas of what we want to achieve as organisations. That’s rarely articulated.

4. Purpose and momentumWhen we have these documents, they should galvanise people, they should be about

inspiring people, people should be excited about coming to work because the documents

have described a vision of the future that is truly motivating. People should feel they’re all

working together towards this really worthwhile thing that they’ve helped articulate.

Personally, I don’t see that happening at the moment. I don’t see peoples’ business plans

and forward plans being an inspirational document that you could pull out on a low Friday

afternoon to look at as a reminder of why ‘we’re all here’. It’s more of a burden, more ‘oh

dear, we haven’t achieved what we said we’d achieve’.


EAGER AND ENERGISEDHow are we going to create organisations that are ‘up for it’, organisations that are eager and

energised by this process? It seems to me that most of the visioning, branding, strategising and

planning that we do is a burden and an administrative overhead serving someone else’s agenda –

it’s none of the things that we want it to be. So, how do we change that? While we were doing

some work in New Zealand the arts council in New Zealand said to us; ‘OK then, we’ve taken this

on board, we think that you’re right – what are we going to do about it, how would we do it

differently?’ We had no idea at all.

So we tried to think ‘what would be the opposite of this?’ On a very simple basis we asked

what was wrong and tried to think of a fix. For example; if you’ve got just a small group of people

in a room doing this stuff, why don’t we get everybody in the room? That was our first principle;

‘let’s involve everybody’. We’re going to need meetings like this – a workshop process which is

going to have to be interactive with lots of ‘air time’ for people to debate and to talk and to discuss.

We need the cleaner but we need to sit them next to the artistic director and the chair of the board

and they’ll have a conversation that never happens – we want to ‘collide’ people together.

We then set about the language that is used in ‘visioning’ – what would we do instead of

vision statements? What do organisations that really want to make a difference do – organisations

that really are evangelical and that have a cause? We came to the conclusion that instead of

vision statements, what we need are manifestos. Manifestos are written by people who want to

change the world. Not by people who want to organise them more efficiently. If you look at some

people’s vision statements, what they say is; ‘that we are going to be world class and we are going

to be extremely efficient at doing it’. What does that mean? What we need to ask is; how is the

world going to be different because we are in it? How are we going to change the world? We need

a manifesto on how our organisation is going to change the world. In order to do that perhaps we

need to explain what’s wrong with the world and what we think that we can change about it. What

we think we can fix. What difference we’re going to make. Manifestos seem to be a really good

idea to us.

MORE THAN A PRETTY PICTUREWe needed to find a model of a brand that is actually a working document and ‘not a pretty

picture’. There are loads of brand models that have probably all got some merit but I’ve seen those

brand models that are ‘circles with nice words in’ and you think ‘oh yes, that’s a nice description of

who we are’. Where’s the bit where it says how we’re going to use that to attract people to us?

How are we going to use that to engage people with us? How are we going to use that to make

sure our organisation is effective? How will we use that to recruit great people to come and work


with us and to attract sponsors? I don’t want a brand that is just a ‘nice picture’. I want a brand that

is a tool, I want a brand that we can use as an audit tool to see if what we do now is living up to it

and is a planning tool to help us make our new project ‘on brand’. It has to be some kind of

branding tool that works.

Then we asked; ‘how are we going to fix that 31-page business plan or forward plan with all

of these bits in it?’ We tried to draw a summary of it on a white board and what we realised was

that we were drawing a ‘family tree’. We were saying; ‘this is what we’re trying to achieve, that’s

the objective, and how are we going to achieve that? Well, look on page 14 there’s a strategy

there and that might be the one to achieve that objective. What we realised was that there were

strategies in there that were serving no objective and objectives that had no strategies. Also, some

of them were called ‘aims’, ‘goals’, ‘strategic aspirations’ and all kinds of different language. We

started drawing this ‘family tree’, where you; ‘do this by doing this by doing this and the reason that

you were doing that was in order to fulfil that strategy to achieve that objective to serve this

mission to achieve that vision’.

So, we started to create a logic model which is just like a strategy tree – a family tree. When

you do that it is quite scary as you suddenly realise that all your strategies are over one side of the

tree and there’s nothing on the other side or you’ve got a load of strategies with no objective or

they have objectives but you haven’t articulated what they are – and actually they might be core to

your organisation. We decided that we needed a name for it and as we were sitting in a café,

Curtis Mayfield’s track Move on Up came on the radio and we thought we’d take that as the name

for this model. We now say that it is the only organisational development programme in the world

that has its own Curtis Mayfield theme tune.

[Distributing hand outs] I didn’t want to do a Power Point presentation for this so I’ve dug out some

bits and pieces that we’ve done for clients for you to take a look at and I’ve got some hand-outs

that are real-world examples of things.

You can probably tell that we like to be a bit irreverent and if you turn to the first page

inside; ‘How do you become unequivocally artistically led (which is what we think we should be)

but unequivocally audience focused?’ We don’t think that we should ask the audience what they

want and give it to them but we think that we should find ways to engage the audience with the

amazing artistic vision that our organisations’ have. So we started with ‘how not to do it’ and there

are four things that we’re advocating in how not to do it:

1. Marketing (!)I don’t think that the marketing department can lead the organisational change, it just

doesn’t work.


2. (you can’t do it) from the top downThe senior management can’t simply have a meeting, come out and say that they’ve

decided the organisation has to change and ‘here it is’.

3. Management consultants… cannot do it for you. When I do it, all I am doing is facilitating. I think that organisations

are brilliant and I think they all know exactly what it is that they want, they just haven’t

articulated it yet. I make sure that they know I’m just there to ‘stick Post-it’s on the wall’. It’s

the organisations themselves that change themselves.

4. (you can’t do it) by business planning Business planning will just bog you down with budgets etc. You need to have actual

thinking time.

You can read through the hand outs in your own time but download Insight Required from our

website. It is an argument for what makes a successful 21st century arts organisation. In there you

will find the ‘7 pillars of audience focus’ – the things that we think successful arts organisations

have in common:

Vision-led

Brand-driven

Inter-disciplinary

Outcome-oriented

Insight-guided

Interactively-engaged

Personalised

Successful organisations seem to have more of this than unsuccessful organisations. If you keep

going through there you’ll find a completed score card and you’ll come to a ‘brand model’. We’re

going to look at a couple of examples and see if we can create brand models that are useful to us

and that actually earn their keep. There is also an example of a strategy tree which is trying to

map all of the organisations ‘bits’, its vision and its objectives and its strategies etc.

MANIFESTO EXCERCISEWhat I’d like to do now is to start with the idea of manifesto. Keynote speaker at last year’s

conference; Andy McKim, from Theatre Passe Muraille, Canada, is a force of nature. A very

emotional guy who is inspirational to me and this is his manifesto for Theatre Passe Muraille

[Andrew handing out manifestos]. I’d like you to mark up the bits that make you want to work for

him and perhaps any bits that you don’t like. It would be good if you can find some bits that mean

http://www.a-m-a.co.uk/uploads/Conference2013/report/TPM_Manifesto.pdf

http://www.lateralthinkers.com/resources/Comment/insightrequired-final.pdf


something to you. It’s a particular style of manifesto – almost like a stream of consciousness it is

from the heart and straight onto the page.

[Please now talk to your neighbours the things that jumped off the page for you.]

Andrew: What are the things that are jumping

off the page at you?

Delegate: ‘joyful’

Andrew: It’s not a word you hear that often

Delegate: ‘taking a risk’ and using that as a

benchmark

Andrew: Theatre Passe Muraille recoil at the

word ‘sustainability’. They hate it. They say that

sustainable is about keeping everything the

same. The word that they like and I think we should adopt this en masse, is ‘resilient’. Resilient is

‘able to bend and move and swim. Sustainable is; ‘we plant ourselves here and we try to withstand

the forces’.

There was a five-page draft of it but this is Andy’s own edit. I offered the staff and board the

chance to sub-edit this further but after discussing it they decided that it was perfect on the

grounds that ‘this is Andy’. We could probably tighten it up and the sub-editors among you are

probably itching to set about it but there is a richness in here and we could be in danger of editing

Andy out of it, we could turn it into something that lacks character. It’s not appropriate for every

organisation to do it in this style but those of you who saw him speak last year will know that ‘this

is him’ – I can hear him when I read this.

It is a relatively small organisation and it is about the leadership of that organisation. I said

before about inclusivity but we didn’t create a democracy, we didn’t say; ‘let’s all vote for what

goes in here’. We said let’s listen to everybody, everyone have a go, but actually what we want to

do is to create a context to inform the leader. Andy is the leader and what’s interesting and

something that I’ve seen in lots of organisations, is that once the leader nails their colours to the

mast and is personal about it – people love it – even those who don’t quite agree with what’s being

said because they know what it is, they know where it is that they’re heading even if they can’t

then define themselves in relation to it. What they hate is some corporate document that’s a bit

generic and they can’t quite discern where the leader is going with it. In the end, arts organisations

are best when artistic leaders are given time, room and space to create. They might choose to do

that in conjunction with all kinds of people but we could quite easily end up with ‘death by

committee’. All the best ones that I’ve seen are hugely personal. What’s interesting sometimes is

that after having had the opening workshop where everyone expresses it, amazingly, people look


at it and go; ‘oh yes, that’s what we were saying!’ They find enough of themselves in it along with

the personal voice and it all melds together and has an energy for the company. The board at

TPM said ‘that’s what I’ve been trying to explain to people for five years but didn’t have the script

for it’.

Delegate: It’s almost like they’re saying ‘get over yourself – get over it, stop using the jargon’.

There is jargon in here and some long words but it’s not that political jargon that we’re ‘supposed’

to be using. It’s just passion and why you get into it in the first place.

Andrew: It’s connecting, tapping into that source. It also takes huge courage to write this down

and publish it so that your peer group can read it. It takes enormous artistic confidence. People

are so worried about what the peer group are going to think.

Delegate: It’s a really enjoyable read and reminded me of a political speech. It is written in a very

discursive speech style. The thing that worried me though as it comes to this rousing conclusion

that just stops short of ‘you’ll never take our freedom!’ is that if you took our copies away, and

asked everybody in half an hour what was in it, I’m not sure that people would remember the clear

messages long term

Andrew: I think that might be what the brand is for. The brand is a way of distilling this down so it

is almost describing the same thing but using a difference medium. I think that if you are in the

organisation or connected to it, this is reflecting against your experience of it rather than it being

‘some theatre in Canada that you’ve not been to’.

The thing is, now that we’ve got this, we can do the brand easily. If we started with a blank

flip chart we’d be really lost.

Delegate: I think it’s really interesting that TPM comes from a radical, hippy position at the end of

the 1960s, early 70s, what Andy went in to do was to rescue the organisation which, having

survived for a long time, was in danger of ‘losing the plot’ a bit. I wonder if some other

institutionalised arts organisations could necessarily write this kind of manifesto about themselves

honestly in terms of the fact that the audience and others have to experience their brand as it

really is. I think that TPM does deliver this, it’s great to write it down and in a sense it’s not a

challenging thing to do.

Andrew: The thing that I’m handing out for reference is about Historiska – the Sweden National

History Museum. They couldn’t be more different to TPM – they are an arm of the state, their

employees are Civil Servants. They had a new director who is part of the new generation of

younger women directors that are actually trying to shake the sector up a bit and she’s trying to

turn this from a branch of the civil service into an institution with a soul. Effectively, what she has

done is to define the role of this institution as the corner stone of Swedish democracy. Her

argument is that democracy is made up of active citizens, empowered citizens and if you want to

http://www.historiska.se/home/


take that further, citizens are empowered and inspired to change society. So actually, democracy

is about giving people the power to change the democracy that you are in. Her argument is that

the Swedish National History Museum is a history of how people have changed society. If you go

into this museum you will find out that it is possible for groups and individuals to change society,

and, how they did it. This should give you not only the inspiration but the tools to then go and do it

yourself. It is basically making you into a citizen. So, what’s really interesting is that; here is an arm

of the Swedish state empowering people to change the Swedish state which is kind of subversive.

She says that there isn’t one single true version of Swedish history which is almost heresy in some

museum circles in Sweden because this has been such a clamped down institution. You’ll see

that this is numbered (referring to the hand out), there are seven clauses to it, it is very clear in

what it is stating. It isn’t Andy’s stream of consciousness. This is; ‘here are the seven reasons that

we are going to do this’. I just wanted to give you a contrast to Andy’s because institutions will do it

in their own image. I am not saying; ‘here’s the template – fill it in’ I’m saying; ‘express yourself’

and I will work with people to help them do that.

The people who I think have been most inspired by these manifestos have been the arts

council funding officers – they are pleased to see an organisation being exciting and not simply

filling out their forms and ticking their boxes but ones that they can also get excited about them

and want to fund. People don’t come into arts council funding jobs to push paper around – they

come because they want to work with arts organisations.

When we’re in workshops with cleaners etc. we generate a whole load of ideas and people

have to take the things off the wall and turn them into statements about the organisation.

Then we make them take out all of the language that they’ve heard before, all of the language that

they’ve ever seen in a funding application etc. And so we try to make it quirky or personal or funny

and it’s amazing because you are in a room full of creative people and they are having a ball really

expressing it. We talk about being distinctive and that unique voice really comes out in a way that

it doesn’t normally.

[Andrew in response to delegate question unclear on the recording:] I think that the organisation

writes the kind of document that suits that kind of organisation and it may be that there are people

in there that don’t get it and maybe that’s the point at which they decide whether they want to be a

part of that organisation or not.

It’s interesting to see the energy that these things release. That document suits its

organisation. The Historiska one was delivered to a formal meeting of all of the staff and they were

absolutely amazed by it because no one had ever said before what the organisation was for and

they found that it was written in their style.


We start off writing it for ourselves because actually, we never do that, we never write anything for

ourselves, we’re always writing it for somebody and second guessing what it is that they want us

to say. Actually writing a document where we say; ‘this is what we think’ almost all of the

organisations that have done this have found the outside world falls into step with them because

there are few arts organisations who are that clear about who they are and what they want. If

everyone knows what they’re doing and it is very clear then people will want to fund, sponsor or

support what they’re doing. The brand that we’ve done is like DNA, it is more fundamental than the

outward facing elements. It should be true for the staff, it should be true for the sponsor and for

anyone who connects with the organisation. It’s about DNA and what we are like in every context;

recruiting new staff, dealing with suppliers. Historiska said; ‘this is what we’re like when we’re

processing our invoices’ and the accounts department were going; ‘yes, this is the brand!’ They

were finding their internal processes within the brand come to work thinking that they are

delivering the brand and living the brand in the accounts department. It’s not just something that

the curators or the marketing department do, it’s what we all do, it is who we are.

Delegate: I’m really interested in this idea that arts organisations aren’t clear about what it is that

they want or what it is that they do.

Andrew: I think that arts organisations absolutely know that stuff but I think that what they don’t

have are great ways to articulate it, either to each other or to other people. You can see it in

action, you can see them delivering it – we work in organisations full of amazing people doing

amazing things and if you get them all together in a room it is full of possibilities and why

consultants need to take on the role of sticking the Post Its to the wall because the people who

work in the organisations know it and I just help them to articulate it. I’m never bored and I never

see the same thing twice. From a generic fog emerge these amazing, distinctive organisations

with these voices that are compelling and hugely magnetic.

THE 7 PILLARS OF AUDIENCE FOCUS Vision-led

This is what I’ve been talking about with the manifesto. Vision articulates not just what you do

but why you do it, who you are for and what you want the impact of this to be.

Brand-drivenYou have distilled your brand DNA, you’ve not simply said that you are ‘independent, maverick

and purple’ – you’ve actually said what it is that drives the organisation.

Inter-disciplinaryYou don’t work in silos. It means that almost everything the organisation does is a project and

for each of these projects you create cross-disciplinary teams that cross fertilise. I worked with


an opera company in Scandinavia who had a system where people who had a great idea or

needed something would mention it to their supervisor, it would go to the team meeting and

they would delegate the manager to go to the senior management team meeting where they

would say to the other department head; ‘my department needs this’. The other department

head would go to the management meeting of that department, would then feed back to the

team meeting and then on down to the supervisor who would go to the person who wanted the

something or had the great idea and say ‘no!’

What we instituted were ways of making the organisation work in a different way where

people could just ask for what they wanted and they would say ‘yes’. The more of this that we

can do, the more the organisation becomes highly effective. We partly did that by creating

work projects in which we included the ‘people you have to have’ but also deliberately included

the unusual suspects. In time we got those people to lead the project or to be the project

manager and that resulted in some people moving departments. These organisations are

tapping into that talent

Outcome-orientedInstead of saying ‘this is what we do or this is what we will produce’ you say ‘this is the

difference that what we do is going to make and we’re going to measure that difference’. I

worked with a museum recently who stated: ‘we’ve had 5,000 school children through our

doors’. I asked; ‘OK, but what did they get out of it, are 4,800 of them never going to come

back because of this?’ In which case it is a disaster – a de-marketing, audience development

nightmare or are they actually inspired and they’re begging their parents to bring them back

next weekend? Which is it and how do we know? If we say what the difference we’re going to

make is we are more likely to make that difference rather than just hope that if somebody says

‘what difference does it make?’ the answer is; ‘well, you know, I think that we’ve probably done

this …’.

Insight-guidedYou are using insight data be it soft or hard or quant or qual. But in everything that you are

doing you are listening, measuring, monitoring – not just guessing. You are able to prove

things.

Interactively-engagedIt’s about reaching out and engaging – not doing it ‘at’ the audience, ‘to’ them or even ‘for’

them but you are doing it with them or maybe even ‘by’ them. You are allowing people into

your process and you are allowing them to have an input to what you do

Personalisation ‘Can they have your organisation their way?’ As Burger King once said.


The Seven Pillars of Audience Focus: scorecard (Find a clearer-to-read basis for the 7 Pillars Scorecard on page 6 of Insight Required)

The top line is an explanation of the value statement that your organisation would subscribe to if

it were ‘like that’. In the white boxes we invite people to put a score between 1 and 10. On the

second line going across there are the features of an organisation that is ‘like that’. We then have

three statements of practice – the way that we behave.

You can then average the column scores and you can add them all up across and add them to the

following spider diagrams or radar charts. We got people to do it individually, and then in their

departmental teams say what they’d put for each…some argument / discussion followed as they

realised they had different scores. Each department would then do their ‘departmental score’

together and then we compared departments – front of house say that they’re incredibly

‘interactively engaged’, but they would, as they’re greeting people all of the time! The curators

agree and marketing thinks that they’re incredibly ‘outcome oriented’ but no one else does – this

could show four different organisations but they are teams all within the same organisation:

http://www.lateralthinkers.com/resources/Comment/insightrequired-final.pdf


How do we negotiate between these departments to say; ‘ok, why do you think that deserves such

a high score because we just don’t get that? Either nobody is sharing it with us or we’re really not

that good and you are living in a dream world!’ Going back to the score chart – when things are a

9 or a 10 it’s brilliant, let’s keep doing that but if it’s a 7 or and 8, we need to say; ‘OK, that’s quite

good, how do we get it to a 9?’ and put some actions down. If it’s a 5 or a 6 we might need to look

at re-designing or re-thinking that because it’s not really working and if it’s scoring less than 5 then

it’s not working and we should probably question why do we do it and ask could we stop doing it

and go back to the drawing board.

What we generate is a lot of actions that say; ‘if we were to do these things – we would be

more like this’. That set of actions could be simple things that we could implement on Monday or it

could be things that we could do with a capital grant of £5million. This is a way for change action

to be generated by the teams that deliver and presented to the management to say; ‘organise

that’, rather than the management deciding what the change is and then trying to persuade the


relevant staff to adopt it. So, take it away, photocopy it and have a go.

THE BEAUTIFUL TRUTHThe structure here is: ‘things that you would find in a brand’. I think there are some weaknesses in

this model (diagram below) but there are also many strengths and there are lots of different ways

of doing it. In the middle is the brand essence – the big idea (beautiful truth). I once had a

gallery curator tell me that: ‘branding was the work of the Devil, it was a superficial wrapper that

was telling lies in order to show your best face to the world’ but I said: ‘no, when I use the word

‘brand’ I mean the exact opposite – it’s your DNA, it’s what you stand for, it’s what you believe in,

it’s your best, it’s achievable aspiration. She said: ‘so, you’re telling me that it’s not an ugly lie, it is

the beautiful truth’ – hence that written in the middle triangle.

On the outside you’ve got key brand value – what you believe. What is the big belief

system that makes you want to do what you do? There’s also the key brand personality – what you are like. It is about relationship, it is about what kind of a personification do you have, what

kind of relationship do you have with people – are you aloof or informal and welcoming? And


finally there’s the key brand benefit (promise) – what they get – what do you get if you come to

work here, if you come to visit us? What are we promising?

Those things are structural, they hold the brand up and then we have the three coloured triangles:

You populate the green triangle with all of the things about your brand that will attract people

because after all – that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to attract attention, interest, visitors,

staff, partners, funders and anyone and everyone needs to be attracted to our brand. This is our

brand magnetism, how visible we are on the radar. Simply attracting people though is not enough

as they might just come for one visit and then never come back so what we need to do is engage

them and that’s about process and experience. What is it that you do that makes people want to

come back again? So, the green triangle is about; ‘how easy is it to get in’, the orange triangle is

about ‘how easy is it to leave’. The blue ‘impact or influence’ triangle is internal – what is it about

us that make us successful? What are the drivers that make us have an impact? You can see two

examples in your packs of how people have populated that with their own ‘stuff’ (below):



They’ve come from the workshops, from the manifesto, from all kinds of places but these people

have tried to populate it with stuff that says; ‘this is what makes us attractive, this is what makes us

engaging. What people are then doing is bringing it into their real teams, the people who do ‘real’

stuff in the organisation and saying; ‘let’s take for example, the arrival experience at the front desk

or let’s take how we do our brochure or let’s take the way we pay invoices’ and have a look at

these things and ask; ‘do we live up to this’? If you do live up to it then give yourself a pat on the

back, if it’s a 7 or 8 work out how to make it 9, if it is 5 or 6 we really need to rethink this and we’re

generating a whole load of actions on how we could be more ‘on brand’, truer to ourselves, more

like us at our best. Because people have populated this with the stuff that matters to them they

have had it as their computer screen saver, they are pulling it out in meetings, people are saying;

‘this new project – does it really do ‘this’? How can we make it more like that? Is our school’s

programme actually challenging or is it ‘what we’ve always done’? It’s not a blue print, it’s a way to

test yourself and populate with the things that you ‘are like when you’re at your best’.

My time is up but I hope that what I’ve tried to do is to take the stuff of corporate

management that has invaded our sector and to ask; ‘is there a way we could reinvent this that is

more in keeping with us, more like the way that we would work? How would a creative

organisation do this?’

Documents

CultureHive€¦ · Web viewI once had a gallery curator tell me that: ‘branding was the work of the Devil, it was a superficial wrapper that was telling lies in order to show