Scorecards

We have Scorecards at work. They used to be called Balanced Scorecards but I guess senior management decided that was too fluffy.

So now we have just Scorecards and they are used in our performance reviews. However not everyone in the company actually has a Scorecard... Maybe that's why they took the word "balanced" away.

Duct Tape and Dreams

Duct tape. Wow. Ingenious invention. One of the best. AND it needs no marketing dollars behind it to sell it's benefits. Imagination rules when it comes to duct tape.

Today with duct tape I was able to:

1) mark out a 150 square METRE booth space
2) sketch out demo locations within the space using different colors of duct tape
3) have the key stakeholders walk through the space and visualize our uber-expensive demonstration at an upcoming world exhibition

All with a few dozen rolls of duct tape.

No technology. No graphics. Just duct tape, a good marketing plan, a spiel and a little imagination. And now... an approved budget.

Poof!

Sound of Traffic

Traffic. I was stuck in traffic this morning. It's somewhat ironic that I commute in a car... on my own... when I work for a "people transportation" company. Anyway that's not the point. The point is that I was hanging out in my car - not moving - and on the radio in rapid succession was a series of commercials with jingles from popular music from the eighties.

Crikey. I'm getting old.

When I was growing up, I remember my mom and dad commenting on ad jingles that used music from "their time." Is there an acceptable period of time that passes when music that was "cool" becomes nostalgic and can be used to promote the latest gadget, cola or insurance company? What is the time frame?

The Price of Whine

I'm a bit of a wine fanatic. My husband thankfully shares this passion. (It's so nice to be married to someone who prefers wine over beer. There's just something so much more romantic about that.)

One wine we discovered a couple of years ago still remains our favorite and we drink it on a regular (perhaps too regular?) basis. The local store knows it's "our brand" and always makes sure to keep enough of it on hand for us. (That's just one of the benefits of living in a small town.) They also started recommending it to others and the bottles regularly fly off the shelves.

But lately we've watched the price of this wine steadily climb. First by 15 cents, then another 5 cents, then 20 cents. Within the last year alone the price of this wine went up by nearly 50 cents. Over the past three or four years a whole $2. Still chump change so why am I whining about the price of wine?

It's the principle of the thing. This wine is starting to leave a bad taste in our mouths - figuratively, not literally speaking - because we feel like we are being nickled and dimed to death. So tonight when I go to pick up some red I just might reach for something else.

Field of Dreams

This is the mug that sits on my desk. It’s a Field of Dreams mug from Dyersville, Iowa. Most would assume that I’m a fan of the movie. Actually I can’t stand it. But I really, really love this mug.

I wash it out by hand every day. It never goes into the kitchen cupboard at work for fear that it might fall into someone else’s hands. I smile every time the hot liquid I pour in to it makes the baseball players magically appear from the cornstalks. I smile even more as the players fade away again as the liquid cools.

So why am I obsessed with a mug for a movie I never liked? It’s quite simple really. This mug represents victory.

You see this mug was a “giveaway” chosen by a business unit manager located in our new Iowa office that made my life a living hell at work. I’m in charge of our company’s brand; the look, the feel, the emotion. Iowa Guy didn’t like that. He was new and wanted his own sandbox.

So I was shell-shocked the first time he pulled out cartons full of mugs, baseball bats and baseballs from Field of Dreams at a customer event. “What does baseball and Field of Dreams have to do with our company or our industry?” I asked him. His response was that he thought they were cool and showed customers that we were just “friendly folks from Iowa.” That would be all well and good perhaps if our US headquarters was in Iowa, but it’s not. It’s in Arizona.

Little did I know that that was just the beginning. Over the next year-and-a-half Iowa Guy was given free reign to do whatever he wanted despite my protests that he was bastardizing our brand. I was told he was in charge of a new high risk initiative for the company and that they needed to give “him some rope to get things done” even if it meant doing things a little differently than before.

He made up his own marketing material, ignored corporate colors, created his own tagline and just generally went amuck. And then one day … he didn’t deliver to plan on the initiative.

Someone high up on the totem pole later on told me that Iowa Guy was so busy trying to change our brand and marketing strategy that he forgot to take care of our customers. We weren’t delivering. Ouch.

That’s when the rope tightened. A company re-org was done and I got to issue a press release reaffirming our commitment to the initiative and announcing that… in related news… Iowa Guy was “retiring.”

Later on that day I pulled out the Field of Dreams mug from my collection of Iowa Guy’s brand bastardizing paraphernalia. It made me smile. I felt like I had won. And as I filled up the mug with hot tea and saw the baseball players emerge from the cornstalks, it made me smile some more.

Two hours later I had identified and located the many pieces of marketing material Iowa Guy had ever touched and had a plan of attack to reverse the damage. By this time my tea had gone cold. All the baseball players had faded back into the cornstalks from which they came. Hmmm… just like Iowa Guy.

Yup. It’s my favourite mug.