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Discuss this article (1 Comments)Bean counter marketing
by Alexander McNabb on Wednesday, 21 March 2007
Somewhat in the same vein as Hilaire Belloc's Economics for Helen, here is my potted guide to the language of corporate marketing for one's non-corporate (and, in my case, witheringly-disinterested-in-corporate) partner.
Given that your objective is to eat dinner, then let us suppose your strategy is to make beans on toast. Your scope of work in this case is extended to the buying of beans and bread because there are none in the inventory. So, in this instance, your tactics are to buy beans from the supermarket, bring them home and then cook beans and toast, serving one on top of the other.
Buttered, preferably. We might not be eating lavishly here, but there's no point skimping.
The project would have been simpler had there been resources available to hand, but it's manageable and, because the vendor's close by, there's a minimal T&E (or transport and entertainment) overhead.
The vendor, in this case, is the supermarket and we can safely assume that they're a box shifter rather than a solutions provider. A solutions provider would tape the beans, bread and butter together with a pan into a single 'integrated beans on toast solution'. If they added some lessons in making great beans on toast, they'd be into the services business. If they had a website with that information, they'd be integrating distance learning as a seamless element of the total customer focused services-based solution.
The CSF, or critical success factor, involved is the timely and safe securing of a supply of beans and bread. Without these, we are nowhere. There are two SLAs, or service level agreements, involved. One is a safe and well-executed trip to the supermarket, for which the deliverables are beans and bread and the other is to cook them without setting fire to the house, for which the deliverables are beans on toast.
You will see that one deliverable meets the objective but depends on a subsidiary deliverable. So we can now build a timeline, which will let us manage and resource the project. Resource allocations here would likely be 'I'll go to the supermarket, you cook the beans'. A consultant would write you a shopping list and a recipe then leave you to work it out for yourself, of course.
We also have a cash requirement for which we'll have to requisition funds from accounts. In this case, rather than make two trips to the supermarket (one to get a quote, the other to close the deal and take delivery) we'll make a budget allocation and agree to rebook any under-spend. If we're smart, we'll overbudget, keep the whole budget allocation and book the differential against a white invoice so that we can keep it for the 'going out with the boys tonight' project that we're anticipating may come through soon.
Otherwise we'd lose the budget. And that would never do.
READERS' COMMENTS
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Beans on Toast
Posted by Keefieboy on Saturday 23 June 2007 at 01:00 UAE time
Nothing to do with the article, which was hugely amusing: all to do with the advert in the RH sidebar which was... irritating and it followed me all the way down the article. It's still doing it now. Please let the ads - especially animated ones - just stay at the top of the page. You might think you are adding value for your client. I think otherwise.
Posted by Keefieboy on Saturday 23 June 2007 at 01:00 UAE time
Nothing to do with the article, which was hugely amusing: all to do with the advert in the RH sidebar which was... irritating and it followed me all the way down the article. It's still doing it now. Please let the ads - especially animated ones - just stay at the top of the page. You might think you are adding value for your client. I think otherwise.
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