Maureen McDonagh, E-Commerce Director, Nectar

Is the past an indicator for success in the future?

The question that keeps me awake at night is will the risk pay off or will I fail? I have a huge passion for digital, media and technology and before I began my current role at Nectar I worked for News International. I am sure most of you are drawing breath right now but up until a few years ago it was thought of as a leader in its industry and very much an innovator. I remember being in many meetings where it was the News International way for new start-ups to be grilled by the M&A department to find out if it was worthy of investing and one thing always struck me, NI was a risk taker and would take chances in times of uncertainty and was not afraid of failing. Yes it has made many poor decisions along the way but looking back I didn’t appreciate how unique it is to take risks in our industry. 

These days most companies are struggling to keep up in the digital space rather than setting the pace. It’s easy to set the pace if you have deep financial pockets you may say but that doesn’t explain why small companies enter the market and succeed? They see an opportunity and run with it, they take bold risks and understand future trends for the larger companies to be left behind and realise the threat after the nimble company has succeeded.

Organisations today need to take time out to experiment more but with budgets slashed in our current climate it’s hard to justify this. However, those that are willing to take risks will benefit in the future.

It struck me that I needed to go back to taking risks when I completed the Leadership Course at Harvard Business School. The course put into perspective how successful companies large or small are sustainable in our current economic climate, one key driver is to keep moving with the times and take small risks and experiment with the confidence that one will work out and not to be afraid of failure. We had one amazing thought leader called Clay Christenson who challenged the idea that we need to stop chasing our short term profits that we are all guilty of in today’s climate but instead to forfeit this to nurture our long tail for the longer term gain.  In order to be sustainable we need to challenge the current model and look to spend time disrupting the model. We need to look ahead to the future, we cannot rely on what has happened in the past as an indicator it will be successful going forward.

To overcome this we need to experiment. With the fast pace of all our lives we need to ask several key questions in times of uncertainty. Instead of jumping on the bandwagon and doing every new technological fad we need to ask can it work for our business? Does it address our customer needs? Does the market size justify the resource? At what cost and what is our future return? Does our culture foster taking risks?

Armed with all these facts, how do I process them? For me it always goes back to the customer. We need to listen to the customer and understand what they want. A classic example of a company challenging and disrupting the current model is the daily deals phenomena. Who would have thought that email would be front of mind again for marketers and break all the rules of engagement by sending it every day and have little relevancy? These days we are so time poor it shows that people want information now and in short sound bites but how would we have thought to do this? We need to listen to our customers and experiment with what they are telling us. If we communicate with our users on email but they only have 5 seconds to read it why are we sending them streams of content? Let’s give the customer what the customer wants and open our eyes to what they are doing. Daily deals is Twitter in an email and we need to understand how our consumers are absorbing information and join up our classic marketing methods with the right channel for our customers and not use each in isolation or chase channels that are not relevant to us.

This is one topic we will be discussing for our new Multi-Channel Marketing course with the IDM in October and letting delegates know the mistakes we have made along the way but also what we have learned to put into practice for the future.

It is an exciting and challenging times and I for one am going to stop losing sleep by asking myself will the risk pay off? I am going to put my thoughts into action so watch this space at Nectar.com!