Volume 21: Exclusive reading for your Power Hour

1. Oh, how far the mightiest of minds have fallen.

Tl;dr: When exactly did HBR get this dumb?

There’s the Harvard Business Review magazine, the gold standard of business strategy, notoriously hard to get published in, rigorous in its editing standards, and requiring deep research and evidence to prove your theories. And then there’s HBR.org, the magazine’s dumb as rocks Internet cousin.

Searching for some meaningful and useful advisory content on what’s going on out there that I could share, I figured HBR would be a good spot to look, but nope. What I found are the same self-promoters you find on LinkedIn, but wrapped in the faux credibility of HBR drag. Just take a look at this check-list of asinine, dumbed down, and utterly non-strategic advice masquerading as “Brand Marketing Through the Coronavirus Crisis” from the Ernst & Young Global Advisory Leader for Media & Entertainment and Americas Marketing Consulting Leader.

(Note: If EY are currently advising you on marketing strategy, I strongly advise you to look elsewhere. If they’re advising you on job titles…run.)

It’s pretty clear that in order to drive more online traffic, HBR has precipitously dropped its editorial standards by placing more emphasis on the position of the person writing the article rather than the value of the article itself. In the long term, this is likely to be highly brand-dilutive to HBR, but in the immediate term, it demonstrates that fancy job titles and brilliant strategic thinking rarely coincide.

2. Contrary to HBR checklists, strategy matters more than ever when resources are scarce.

Tl;dr: Time for marketers to step up and think strategically.

The best strategy definition I ever heard was at business school, where my professor stated that strategy is resource allocation: With infinite resources, there’s no need for strategy, we just try everything and pick what works best. But since no-one has infinite resources, we need strategy to define the things we will do that are the most likely to create success with the scarce resources we have.

As the current crisis segues into a recession, or perhaps more likely, a depression, resources will become increasingly scarce for almost all companies. This means resource allocation (strategy) becomes more important than ever.

Unlike the folks over at HBR.org, Faris Yakob just wrote an excellent article postulating that “strategy converts uncertainty to risk,” which is a compelling observation. While uncertainty is un-managable, risks are managed by businesses all the time, and different businesses with different appetites and situations will make different decisions when faced with essentially the same evidence.

For anyone looking at how to market moving forward, this might be a helpful way to think about it. Instead of the “spend more at all times” nonsense, develop a strategy aimed at applying your scarce resources against the risks you’re most willing to take. This means having a robust conversation within your organization about the risks you face, their dimensions, and the true appetite the organization bears. If you can be clear on how you intend to allocate resources relative to risk, there’s a good chance you’ll come out ahead of others who are still wallowing in uncertainty.

3. Fake your followers: The surefire path to the land of influencer marketing riches.

Tl;dr: Let’s apply some first grade arithmetic to influencer marketing.

Over the past few years, as eyeballs have shifted from formal channels like TV to informal channels like social media, influencer marketing has exploded. Starting with celebrities like the Kardashians hawking products to their millions of social media followers for money, it’s now expanded to include a slew of people across every conceivable niche. In 2019 influencer marketing was estimated to be an $8 billion industry, with 2020 growth expected to bring this to $15 billion. (Although the current crisis is likely to dent in that figure somewhat)

The problem? Not only is there a lack of good information to guide marketers on whether or not this stuff actually works, it’s also incredibly cheap and exceptionally easy to utterly fake how influential you really are.

Now, I’m sure there are no influencers out there who’ve ever been tempted to do this, but let’s walk through some numbers. Based on a research study, $114,000 spent on click-farms buys you 4,000,000 fake followers. One million each on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. This might seem like a lot of money until you realize that a single sponsored post by an influencer with 1m followers on a single channel costs around $25,000, which means payback in a little over 5 posts and profitability in just 6.

And while I’m sure no wanna-be influencer has ever been tempted by such enticing profit potential (except my 12-year-old who wants to know where he can borrow $114,000), it is interesting to note that 15% of all influencer followers are believed to be fake. Which does suggest that maybe, kinda, somehow these people are being tempted to make their numbers up after all…

4. Power Hour: These idiots just tried to re-brand your lunch-break.

Tl;dr: It’s now your away-from-computer time for to-do list making, apparently.

One of the unintended consequences of working from home has been the intrusion of productivity into every available hour. While dragged out commutes have disappeared, back to back Zoom meetings now overlap with desperate attempts to educate our children, creating a bizarre kind of Groundhog Day exhaustion where we’re constantly checking our calendars just to see what day it is.

So, the explosion of “lunch and learn” webinars like this one from the Bullshit Factory AKA Hubspot, really does make you want to scream in frustration. Clearly they’re paying zero attention at all to what’s going on. Nobody wants a lunch and learn playdate when they don’t have time for lunch.

But as tone-deaf as the lunch and learn crowd have been, they don’t hold a candle in comparison to the idiots over at meal delivery service “JUST EAT” who decided to fix the problem, without a hint of irony, by telling their employees they now have a “Power Hour” where they can step away from their computers, eat lunch, hang with their families, or write their to-do list. WTF.

Let’s just break this down for a second. Work intrudes on people’s ability to eat lunch, so rather than just say “take a break, have lunch” they re-branded lunch as some kind of completely newly invented benefit. Huh?

Daft as this might be, it isn’t the best part. The best part is the rationalization from their Chief People Officer that the “Power Hour” is “another way we continue to “Brilliantly enhance the lives of Just Eaters everywhere.””

You literally cannot make this stuff up.