Pi-Consulting

Here’s an example from Pi’s archive of case-histories.

Young people in Spain mix their spirits with Coca-Cola when they’re out for the evening. The Coke remains the same, but what booze goes in it can be very different.

A leading international Scotch Whisky brand (and Pi client) was deeply concerned that young drinkers in Spain were migrating from Whisky to Rum as their mixer …sometimes in the middle of an evening! Yet no-one could explain why.

Pi’s consumer insight research team ran the Pi-Charts. We looked at three groups:

1. Whisky only mixers
2. Rum only mixers
3. Whisky OR rum, depending on their mood

The analysis examined everything from demographics to lifestyle and leisure, and homed in on attitudinal data about fun and pleasure.

So what was the key differentiator between Groups 2/3 and Group 1?

The rum drinkers turned out to be Salsa music freaks!

Key insights always tell you something about consumers. But sometimes they have surprisingly little to do directly with your product.

In that Whisky/Rum case, it was something cultural: young Spanish drinkers with an urge to dance had a romantic notion about Salsa music and warm Caribbean imagery. All the Whisky brand had to do was change the soundtrack behind their commercials, and the defectors started thinking differently about putting Scotch in their Coke!

At the risk of seeming immodest, Pi had done it again.

MORAL: Pi says “keep an open mind, and let your curiosity run free. Beware of analyses, segmentations etc. which only talk about your product; you may miss the key insight altogether. Try Pi-ChartsTM instead!”.

The heads-up (cc-everyone) from the SVP HR EMEA put it so well. This is what it said:

“Pre the organizational transformation process, the absence of a sustainable enhancement model was occasioning situations including low involvement from collaborators, lack of agile systems for ongoing people development, an elevated incident index, and high rotation in our operations. Via a new organizational transformational model, we homologated ongoing enhancement systems related to productivity, in parallel with our corporate vision: Global-class process-centered flexible plants focused on business results with motivated multi-capable people for exceeding consumers’ expectations. Tracking of process advance was optimally leveraged via technical and human diagnosis.”

Great, eh? Terrific. Splendid. Yeah! Everyone clear?

Actually no, ninety-nine and counting percent of us are not clear at all. For those of you who (like the writer) need a translation of the above incomprehensible gibberish into real English, it actually means “Our workers were getting bored, sloppy and demotivated. After a few accidents, absenteeism rose and people started leaving. We fixed the problems, boosted morale, and the business got noticeably better.”

Okay, try this one: “An opportunity was identified to make [Company X] part of the authority-mandated solution for the increasing obesity issue in the country. By directly contributing to the introduction of new ethical norms, [Company X] has reaffirmed its commitment to the health of its consumers and to the development of responsible citizens and conscientious consumers”. Translation: “To avoid nasty legislation, we’re voluntarily telling people our food products contain quite a lot of sugar and they should eat less of them to avoid getting fat”.

As manufacturing companies never cease to tell us, in that particularly plummy tone they adopt when they feel pleased with themselves, “Here at PDQCorp” (or wherever ) “The Consumer Is King”. Try to find a trading company today that does NOT claim to be “customer-centric in everything we do”. But, dear corplings, eager beavers and apparatchiks, if you are really going to “put consumers at the center of your world”, you are going to have to learn to talk like them, rather than addressing the mirror in a language only you can understand.

I speak as someone who spends his life going through strategies, mission statements, “holistic global platforms”, “must-win battle plans” and the like from some of our planet’s largest corporations. It can get depressing, and remarkably samey. My sympathetic daughter recently gave me a rubber stamp bearing the legend “Complete And Utter Bullshit”, with a little red ink-pad to go with it. I have to confess that I apply it, in the privacy of my upstairs office, with depressing frequency on the upper right-hand corner of high-flown documents and briefs that cross my desk.

Call them CorpSpeak. Why express yourself clearly and simply, the thinking goes, when you can vastly impress your underlings (and probably yourself) with sonorous jargon-filled sentences like ”Our growth algorithm continues to be predicated on specific, tangible and aggressive initiatives for building on our CSD and NCB portfolio”. (Or, for simpletons like you and me, “We make money selling soft drinks”).

The curious thing is that so many companies think they have found a unique and infallible way of describing the world — or perhaps more accurately “their world”. Admittedly the acronyms seem to be different (but less so than you’d imagine) from company to company. But the twaddle and verbosity seem numbingly the same.

Not only is CorpSpeak a barrier against effective communication. It rapidly becomes a barrier against thought itself. By insisting that every aspect of our wonderfully and maddeningly complex human world can be encapsulated in an acronym or a jargon word, meaning itself soon becomes irretrievably lost. You hear the sentence. You think you understood it. But then you’re scratching your head, wondering if you really did. Trust me, in many cases there wasn’t much there to understand.

Pi, as a consumer insight company, is in the explaining business. We think the same should be true of everyone who makes a living by marketing products and services, (which, for heaven’s sake, is mostly common sense, not rocket-science). In today’s post, Pi wishes to strike a blow for clarity, comprehension and the KISS Principle: “Keep It Simple, Stupid!”.

We would go further. Any corporate utterance containing any of the words “excellence”, “paradigm”, “empowerment”, “innovative” (oh, really?) or “seamless” have a better-than-even chance of being complete-and-utter-b/s.