Mum's the word

This week it was reported that there are 2.4 million non-working women in the UK, which opened the floodgates for more debate over the working mum vs. the stay-at-home mum. It also raised concerns about the under-representation of women in business as a result of women taking time out to bring up a family.

As a new mum myself working in a predominantly female industry, which is thriving with driven and ambitious women, I read this report with great interest.

Although there’s fierce debate from both parties, I don’t believe there will ever be a right answer and many will just have to agree to disagree on the matter.

For some women it’s about money, for others the feeling that they are unable to balance a demanding job with family life means lowering their career aspirations, others have the drive and passion to succeed regardless, and there will always be the stay-at-home mums dedicated to looking after their children, choosing this lifestyle over a fulfilling business career.

So does any of this really contribute to the shortfall in women in management positions?

Although there is some truth in this, I was pleased to read that the overwhelming majority of women (74 per cent) felt they had been able to return to their career without affecting family life.

Yes, there are obstacles to overcome along the way – childcare costs and flexible working to name just a couple. Of course it would be great to work from home when you like, but is it really practical and does it pose an unfair bias towards you over those colleagues without children? If you get the work done, does it even matter when and where it’s done?

Well, a lot depends on your employer and your job, but regardless of sector, if you want to succeed in business, having a family should not be a barrier to achieving your goals.

Although some might argue that juggling a hectic family life with a demanding job is bound to impact on productivity and a woman’s ability to progress to the board room, co-ordinating family life around a high profile career means that working mums have to up their game and plan their time precisely, resulting in a more focussed and motivated individual.

With this in mind, the Government’s emphasis is now on encouraging young women to aim high from an early age and for businesses to become more flexible to not only help working mums continue along a successful career path, but also to encourage the development of older women that may have taken a career break to start a family.

While I believe this news is another positive step forward for women in business, it still begs the question that even with more support and guidance, what’s an appropriate level of representation? If our male counterparts are as qualified, then should they be denied the opportunity to succeed in business in order to balance the equality battle?

A working mum’s view

For me, returning to work after having a baby was an opportunity to embrace the change in a positive way. It’s not just the light at the end of the tunnel of the sometimes isolating feelings of new motherhood, but an opportunity to evaluate your priorities and build a solid platform to develop further. Just because you have a family, it doesn’t mean that your career needs to go on hold for the next 18 years!

If anything, it has allowed me to take a step back and look at my career from a different perspective and I actually feel that I am more focussed and engaged than ever before. I’ve come back with a fresh pair of eyes, more creativity and a whole bunch of new ideas not only to help grow our current clients but the business too.

Yes my life has to be run like a military operation but with a little careful planning and preparation, why shouldn’t I carry on my career?

Hannah Dudek
Account Executive

I'm coming off Facebook

Reading an article titled: ‘Is Facebook really dead for young people?’ on prweek.com yesterday afternoon, reminded me of the many occasions I’ve heard chums declare ‘I’m coming off Facebook!’

And I must admit, when my own mother’s friend request popped up in my notifications, it somewhat tarnished its appeal for me.

Undeniably, Facebook is still the centre of the social media ecosystem – with its more than one billion users, who are responsible for 1.13 trillion "likes", 219 billion photos and 17 billion location check-ins (and counting).

But with the rise of image based social media - the likes of Snapchat, Instagram and Keek - it’s a subculture that is evidently more conducive to the U25s lifestyle. We like things to be sleek, smart, quick and visually pleasing to keep us hooked... as our attention spans are dimensioning by the second. Visual stimulus is nothing new; the age old saying “a picture is worth 1000 words” says it all.

When Hunter wellies launched a competition on Instagram it was a huge success, not just because of the overwhelming response, but it successfully started to pave the way for an engaged and connected Hunter wellie wearing community. Hunter could get a crystal clear picture (not metaphorical) into the where, when and what its consumer audience was doing: Priceless.

These platforms are far more compatible with the demands of all things mobile – who doesn’t have a camera on their phone?!

The PR industry is about keeping abreast with new developments and growing trends - finding creative ways to communicate and engage with our target audiences and the opinion formers. As far as I can see, with the increasing demand for all things to be mobile, the growth of visual social media just offers our industry more opportunities to communicate in creative and impactful ways.

As for Facebook, there’s no doubt that its future is safe for the short term, always developing ways to be more intrinsic, I’m sure Zuckerberg has something up his sleeve to keep Facebook at the forefront.

Alex Underwood
Account Executive

Buying into the high street

My nan’s right - the high street isn’t what it used to be.

Of course she’s not the only one to think this, with her opinion being shared, debated and echoed by retail experts, the media and general public as the boom of online sales and out-of-town shopping impacts on our traditional shopping destinations.

The demise of the likes of Woollies (am I showing my age now?), HMV and Jessops has left an often eerie gap on many a high street, and is a sight that we - the Target team – are all too familiar with as we visit towns as part of our work for Specsavers.

Fortunately, this rather sorry state hasn’t impacted on the largest privately owned opticians in the world. As we go to see the 140 stores spanning an area from Street in Somerset up to Spalding in Lincolnshire to discuss PR, we are comforted and encouraged by the bustling stores and busy staff. Here is a business that appears to be bucking the retail trend.

But it’s not plain sailing - there’s stiff competition from online, high street and supermarket offerings, and so the demands and challenges on individual stores are more prevalent than ever.

So how do they succeed?  Yes, it helps that the product demands a visit to store (if you want your specs professionally fitted), but securing sales and maintaining loyalty doesn’t happen automatically.  A vital element is engagement – engendering support with their local communities to enhance reputation.

PR helps to build these links, working with and supporting the local community, sharing positive news and offering insight and advice.  From arranging school visits, securing local sponsorship deals, fundraising for local causes or offering children high visibility vests, there’s a raft of tactics that will support your community relations.

It might not be rocket science, but is certainly a lesson that many other multi-site retailers could learn from and it’s right up their street!

Sam Kandiyali

Director

Leader of the pack

This week I’ve been thinking about what really makes a good leader in today’s dizzying speed of digital.
And that’s when it hit me – BAM!

Our client BAM is the UK’s leading student media sales agency and has been connecting brands with the student market for more than 15 years, with founder Tim Bodenham at the helm.

So what makes them so good? Well, the proof is in the pizza...

BAM carried out some research last year for its first BAM Freshers Report. Surveying more than 1,000 students at a selection of 20 university freshers’ fairs, the report gave voice to the students in attendance, while providing brands with a realistic indication of activities that this young audience welcomes. Now that’s what I call going the extra mile.

Survey said

Students rated dough doting Domino’s as the top commercial stall with the best freebies – a factor not to be underestimated, as an overwhelming 60% of students admitted it was the lure of freebies that attracted them to the fair and they hope to see a rise in attendance from food outlets at future fairs.

Through carrying out surveys to spill the student beans on what works, and continuously meeting with media suppliers to build new and existing business relationships, BAM always strives to ensure it remains ahead of the competition.

What’s more, despite the prevalence of social networking, BAM truly believes in the power of face-to-face marketing at university events because unlike other traditional marketing methods, it becomes part of the student experience, instead of interrupting it.

At Target, we work with BAM to communicate the company’s big and bold achievements, allowing brands to understand how to reap the rewards from a market that has an estimated spending power of more than £15.5 billion.

It’s certainly an exciting time for us to be working with a company that connects brands such as KitKat, Kelloggs and Cath Kidston with the student market. We’re sure most 18-24 year olds in higher education are also pretty pleased!

Zainab Rahman
Account Executive

Community relations

Gloucester Rugby CEO Stephen Vaughan, ADEY Managing Director Kelvin Stevens, Gloucester’s Mike Tindall
and ADEY Marketing Director Haimish Mead unveil the club’s new shirt at Kingsholm Stadium.

I think it would be fair to say that one of our clients has had a particularly good week: on Wednesday, ADEY Professional Heating Solutions was announced as the new primary sponsor of Gloucester Rugby Club.

At Target Towers, ourselves a Gloucestershire-based company, we were bursting with pride to see Mike Tindall holding the newly sponsored Cherry and White’s shirt aloft next to ADEY MD Kelvin Stevens and Marketing Director Haimish Mead. Yet what pleased me the most was to hear GRFC’s CEO Stephen Vaughan say that ADEY being a local business undoubtedly helped them to win the bid.

See, we should never underestimate the power of local relationships. They can bring big dividends.
Over the past couple of years particularly, we’ve been helping our clients to create and nurture community relationships on the ground, wherever they’re based. For one large retail client especially, local relationships are literally life or death.

‘Local’ has been a dirty word for far too long, killing off our newspapers and slowly strangling our high streets. However, as I read an article in the Nuneaton News about a group of retailers banding together with the local community to ‘save their town’, I realised I’d recently read a few similar stories in the local media of other towns.

So, maybe the tide is turning as many surviving ‘local’ newspapers report on ‘local’ campaigns by ‘local’ businesses trying to breathe new life into their ‘local’ towns.

I for one hope this sea of change continues all around the country. For us here at Target, I know it’s great to be a part of a local success story that’s reaching national audiences, from a garden shed to The Shed and beyond!

Rachel Meagher
Account Director

Time for a new perspective

The last couple of weeks have presented two blinding examples of the benefits to be gained by making time to attain new perspectives about our businesses.

Working with clients that are innovating and growing at a pace is very exciting. One such Target client is defying the challenging market trends experienced by so many parts of the UK’s heating industry to consolidate its market leading position, and achieve growth year on year.

Making a hugely ambitious marketing plan work in an orchestrated, coherent and effective manner requires a strong team – and a marketing director who understands the value of bringing the full strength of that team together to pause, share and create together.

We’re great collaborators at Target, so getting together with in-house departments, multi-disciplinary teams and partner agencies is second nature to us. Taking a day out to reflect on recent activity, market position, business objectives and to power up our imaginations to conceive of new solutions is invariably time well spent.

But it’s not just when developing award winning PR strategies for clients that we feel the benefit of making time to stop, stand back and view challenges from a different vantage point. It’s true of our own business development too.

I’m proud to be among a group of MDs and business owners to be taking our first steps towards a new type of Masters Degree, through a partnership between leadership development experts QuoLux and the renowned Lancaster University Management School (LUMS).

Having participated in an exceptional ten-month leadership and business development programme, called LEAD, the experience we’ve gained within our own businesses can now be formally assessed and awarded a Post Graduate Certificate in Professional Practice (Leadership Learning) – which we can build on subsequently to gain a Masters. To be honest, while writing for business is second nature to me, it’s been a long while since I faced the rigour of academic assessment.

Masters level learning is about being open, challenging, critical and reflective.  It’s about trying out new perspectives. That requires a bit of time, but the beauty of this unique programme is that it’s time spent on my business, not on abstractions or distractions.

In our busy lives, time, deadlines and demands seem to wield power over us. Far from ‘making time’ (which suggests at least some element of us calling the shots in this process of time creation), we are instead buffeted from pillar to post trying to keep up with time and its megalomaniac tendencies.

Making time to view your own business practice through new perspectives is a revelation, and a process that I can recommend.

Sarah Bryars
Chief Executive

Monkey business

I wasn’t expecting to learn about chimps at the last World Class Development Programme squad session I went to.  Speak to riders to glean PR opportunities and watch beautiful horses – yes, but not discuss primates.

And yet when I returned to the office the next day I was energised by what I’d learnt and quickly shared my chimp anecdotes with the rest of the team.  They thought I’d gone ape...

The discussion of chimps came up during the World Class sports psychiatry session, where athlete case studies including Ronnie O’Sullivan, Sir Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton were used to discuss the theory of Steve Peter’s Chimp Paradox.  That is that the brain has a rational ‘human’ part and an emotional rash ‘chimp’ part (plus another part which stores all our information and experiences).

Managing the chimp, it appears, is key to success.  The riders discussed how their unruly chimps could impact on their competition results, with mine in particular seeming to run riot ahead of the dressage phase – to the extent that he seems to spur my horse’s chimp into devastating action  too (I’m not quite sure why I’ve referred to my chimp as a male...)

Sir Martin Sorrell has also taken note of Peter’s theory claiming that people in advertising could benefit from disengaging the emotional side of their brain and not being chimps.  But I’m not sure that PR professionals would benefit from quite such dramatic action.

Yes, while we don’t want our chimp to run riot to the detriment of our thought processes, presentations, internal communications or crisis handling (and ultimately the success of our businesses), we do still need to retain that emotive insight, which our chimps provide, as it’s so important in our communications industry.

Understanding our clients, target audiences and competitors requires humanity and emotional intelligence – and we need our chimps, albeit carefully under control, to do this.

Samantha Kandiyali
Director