Every name has meaning. Well, they should anyway... we've not gone down the "Colour + Animal/Fruit" convention that most new brands go with. No offence to Orange Gorilla, if it exists.
But Orter Marketing does have some meaning to it.
The earliest part of my marketing career having to be driven by conventional targets with conventional inputs. Sell X number of advertising slots, generate X amount of revenue, and you may get X amount of bonus if you're lucky.
Though this may have sharpened my skills in negotiating, dealing with objection (lots of that when talking about printed ads), and structuring some complex partnership marketing deals, it wasn't exactly a creative or, maximumally valuable form of"marketing".
I always knew there was something different that could be done in an industry that is so aware of risk and volatility, but seemed to constrain its own creative outlets and tolerance for being a bit bolder and riskier. And that's when it struck me.
Previously, I trained as an accountant. As much as I was fairly decent at it, I was working in an accountancy practice, and constantly working in hindsight for clients. It didn't excite me to see that a gardening company achieved a certain level of profit, and that I was going to tell them how big a bill they were going to get from HMRC. Most importantly, I was bored of talking about what had happened, and that's about it.
That's where the parallel came to my mind.
"Why do we seem to always look backward and internally in this business? There's an entire world out there of things being done better to look at. All we seem to do is benchmark ourselves against ourselves, and we're clearly not pushing the top 1%."
Now, bearing in mind, this isn't really a flawed approach to many things. But, when we're talking about being expansive, differentiating and being numero uno, that's when introspection can only go so far when it's our only source of inspiration or benchmarking.
The idea of a "North Star" is actually quite topical. Corteva have just spun-off VyIor, and the 'North Star' of innovation and moving agriculture forward is reflected in the culture, and somewhat in the name. (Don't get me started on stylised letters)
That belief is something I truly stand by. When you unite people with a vision, whether it's a sports team, a business, a department, or any group, they can clearly work toward something, and usually achieve even more. Planning to achieve that very thing is actually where success is found, and in my approach, I've helped brands reverse-engineer years of their marketing operations, planning, and cultural adaptability to make more of every day they have. Their competitors have the same hours in the day, but don't have that united front.
That's where the performance gap is found.
So when so many are doing things looking at the past in a backwards way (Retro), look forward, and work backwards from there... and you'll achieve even more (Orter).
Simply put, flip things on their head, and you might just outperform everyone else around you.
Email me if you want to get more out of your marketing - tom@ortermarketing.com
