Cambridge Marketing College, annual dinner: 14 Jul 11

3 years ago when I started this blog one of my first posts (click here) was about attending the Cambridge Marketing College’s annual dinner. The dinner itself ends with the annual lecture and there have been some impressive guest lecturers over the years.

This year’s dinner was again at St John’s and the lecturer was Kevin Bishop who glories in the job title of ‘Vice President of Brand System and Workforce Enablement for IBM Worldwide’. Kevin is an IBM veteran but being in Cambridge was a return home, Kevin took a degree in Natural Sciences at the university.

However: important matters first, how was the dinner?

The evening had a good start. The sun was shining and we were able to enjoy pre-dinner drinks without sheltering from the rain which seems to be the usual practice at theses events. And dinner itself was pretty good. You can eat well at the Cambridge colleges but they also offer lower price options and then all you get is chicken and college claret. But the Marketing College had spec’d up and dinner was good.

The gravadlax was fine (OK don’t expect good gravadlax in the UK, see my previous blogpost) and that was followed by excellent lamb (a canon of lamb). Desert was a range of interesting cheeses, although the waiters were a little miserly with the portions, and a bowl of fruit. There was also a plate of excellent truffles with the inevitably mediocre coffee. And the wines were good too; I seem to recall a decent chardonnay followed by an equally decent cabernet sauvignon. Pretty safe but neither was of the ‘college’ variety.

Kevin spoke of the ‘new’ future of marketing being an update on the very first lecture which was simply on the ‘future of marketing’ given by Philip Kotler no less. The lecture was spirited and engaging, Kevin could certainly speak for Britain, but perhaps disappointing. He talked about the fundamentals that will underpin marketing in the days of social media. And what disappointed me is not that the fundamentals are not important, just that they are not new and that social media etc simply increase their importance.

These two fundamentals are ‘authenticity’ and ‘advocacy’.

Authenticity is about your brand as your want it to be being rooted in corporate character. If it’s not you will fail (brand dissonance; click here for a related post on my business blog). Kevin quoted Abraham Lincoln ‘Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing’ which is very apposite.

Advocacy is about your customers (and other stakeholders) representing you and selling for you. Nothing new again; I’ve got slides of the ‘customer ladder’ in which leads go through the journey of becoming customers and then advocates. What Kevin did reveal however was the process within the stakeholder whereby he/she goes from belief to action to confidence to advocacy.

The big issue though which Kevin highlighted is that social media etc accelerate the spread of information and that ‘bad branding’ can be fatal much more quickly and ‘good advocacy’ can be leveraged with little hard investment. Kevin put all of this into a solid IBM context which made it all the more credible.

Click here for an interesting interview with Kevin on the subject of brands at Interbrand.