Last week I attended the annual Marketing Forum, which is a 3-day event out on a cruise ship - a match-making exercise of sorts where clients and suppliers meet for a good shindig and hopefully come away with tons of lucrative business and plenty of useful contacts. This was a first for me so I didn’t know quite what to expect – part of me was quite wary at the prospect of people pitching at me for three solid days with no obvious escape in sight – you are pretty trapped in a cruise ship. Equally the three days were peppered with seminars and various key-note speeches, some more interesting than others.
The worst seminar I attended was by a lady who calls herself an image consultant. This I regretted almost immediately after walking into the room, but being a good citizen and a representative of my company I had to be polite and sat down. Why did I choose this subject? Good question. The blurb explaining the seminar talked a lot about the people being the real brand of an organisation, the advocates, if you like and this I agree with. A lot of business is conducted primarily by people with people so how your staff is perceived has a big impact on how your company is perceived. In my opinion a lot of this has to do with motivation and people genuinely believing they are doing something worth while – so mistakenly I assumed this is what the seminar would be about. How to breathe fire into your colleagues and co-workers to stop the fait accompli and get people passionate about companies and the strategy ahead.
How wrong was I. Unfortunately the seminar was all about telling people how to dress, classifying people into ‘clowns’, ‘hermit crabs’ and ‘wet lettuces’ and promoting your own ‘personal brand’. Ok there are things to be said about dressing well and dealing with issues of personal hygiene, but once you have polished the surface you are still stuck with the person within. Shallow personality make-overs won’t fix the fact that if you aren’t happy, productive and feeling empowered and fulfilled – your company won’t exactly reach to the stars either. What was particularly grating to sit through was her way of skimming through issues of personality: you should APPEAR to have honesty, integrity and knowledge – what’s wrong with BEING honest and knowledgeable I wonder. Talking about people, personalities and perception in terms of personal branding makes it sound like you apply a veneer of polish on top of a dysfunctional product where what you see is actually not what you get at all – the inflated ‘advertising campaign’ is nothing but hot air. I can see how this is popular with companies though – send your people on a course like this to polish off the rough edges and avoid dealing with the bigger issues of motivation, silo-like structures that promote herd-like behaviour and antique command-and-control culture. Organisational transformation is infinitely more difficult (but ultimately more rewarding both for people and for profit margins) than simply telling people what type of collar best compliments their face.
Perception can in fact work against you completely as I learnt today accidentally reading the news. The BBC reports of a study carried out by Dr. Ian Walker of Bath University, which proves that people who wear a bicycle helmet are in fact more accident prone than those who don’t. Sounds completely contrary doesn’t it? The explanation seems to lie in perception – if you wear a helmet, motorists feel more confident passing you closer than they would when you don’t wear one. And better still, if you wear a wig and look like a woman, they give you the biggest space of all on the road. Why? Because female cyclists are rarer on the roads and are perceived as more ‘erratic’ riders than lycra-clad road warriors. How ironic. So forget my racing kit and cycle shorts, next time I’m going out in a skirt and wig with a wicker basket on the front.
Joking aside, I have actually found that once I invested in a racing bike I get more ‘respect’ on the road from motorists who are less inclined to cut me up because they reckon I’m going faster than your average Sunday cyclist. This is good, and also they give me way rather than squeezing me to the side of the road. On a race bike I have no problems whatsoever keeping up with traffic and often being a lot faster than it because of all the traffic jams, but I must say that this finding about helmets does make me laugh. Dr. Watson does point out though that for low-speed impacts, helmets are very useful and thus kids should definitely be wearing them – but then I think any motorist or even pedestrian is paranoid about hurting anybody’s children.
