I’m writing about brands, so why start by talking about sport? It’s because many of us always start by talking about sport. It’s exciting, it’s involving, it matters. In particular, it matters whether you win or lose. It is also overwhelmingly absorbing – in detail and across the board. That’s why so much broadcasting time is dedicated to showing wall-to-wall sport. That’s why it sells newspapers, which we tend to read from back to front.

I wasn’t so immersed in events at Old Trafford last week that I couldn’t dwell on the contrast between the frightening intensity of the battle on the field, and the ‘contest’ between rival shirt sponsors AON and Etihad. Even when Chevrolet take over the United shirts next season, it will be the clubs, not the brands, that fight it out.

Everywhere we read that the consumer is in charge. The era of command and control is over. Instead of consumers being pattern- bombed by advertisers trying to spread awareness and influence purchasing behaviour, the internet and social media sites in particular are inundated by consumers talking up brands – and sometimes slagging them off.

But last week, as bone crunching tackles rained in and the yellow card was repeatedly flashed, it occurred to me that none of this consumer involvement with brands is confrontational, or adversarial, or competitive. It is military parades, not an engagement. It is manifestos, not the hustings. It is on the training grounds, not at the stadium.

It is instructive to look at the language. The experts at brand management in social media use phrases like:

• Social networks can breathe new life into brands by building collaborative relationships with consumers
• Let go – allow consumers to lead the conversation
• Anchor your brand to your core values
• Connect to causes that truly resonate with your organization and its culture
• Don’t just celebrate success. Embrace failures and resolve them in public

Social media marketing has followed conventional marketing in preparing brands for battle. Not leading them into it. Marketing (like R&D) is essentially a headquarters activity, unlike sales, which has traditionally been on the front line.

Maybe this is why marketers have developed such a love for competitive pitches. If you can’t actually watch your brand trading blows with its rivals, at least you can enjoy agencies killing each other for the right to advertise it!

I feel that digital marketing is missing a trick. It would not be hard to devise formats in which brands could slug it out in the ether, with rival supporters baying for blood, and judges championing the contestants as if they were on The Voice or Britain’s Got Talent. It could even work on TV too, which would be even more exciting.

Am I being unfair in suggesting that even on the internet, brand battles are tame compared to sport and other contests? Is it wrong to suggest that today’s brands are too bland for such a gladiatorial age? I am not sure. But it would be well worth looking at something more combative.

And what a brilliant challenge that would be for agencies, who feel that micro-management and over-reliance on pre-testing has blunted their creative claws. For pioneer companies who decide to take the gloves off, and dare to fight toe-to-toe with competitors, the rewards might be mouth-watering.

“You’re a nasty piece of work” was Mair’s now famous put down. This piece is not to endorse that view. Nor is it to echo Boris’s father Stanley or his friend Darius Guppy in mounting a staunch defence of the Mayor of London.

My worry is that we have developed a new bad habit – universal adversarialism. Or to put it less politely, it’s open season for everyone slagging off everyone else. We have an adversarial parliamentary system – which is unlike, for instance, the USA. They seem to have survived without it for nearly 240 years and governed themselves adequately. We have an adversarial legal system. Policing is largely adversarial. Sport is almost entirely adversarial.

As to the ‘Fourth Estate’, both broadcast and print media are increasingly confrontational. Not that that is anything new. Even before he was sent to jail, Oscar Wilde wrote in 1891, ‘In old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralising. Somebody — was it Burke? — called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time no doubt. But at the present moment it is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism.’

Slagging off on TV and radio is of course not confined to editorial pieces. Audience participation shows like Question Time and Any Questions actively encourage members of the public to join in and attack their tribunes and prominent citizens in general. Plays, soaps and movies are packed full of aggression and verbal abuse – echoing no doubt what is happening behind closed doors in hundreds of thousands of households.
I am commenting on a social trend, not advocating censorship. In all relatively free societies from the days of the Greek agora and the Roman Forum down to Cairo’s Tahrir Square last year, there has been a tradition of popular protest. Even under totalitarian regimes brave souls have risked their lives by criticising those in power.

Nor is it wrong to argue and debate. I strongly recommend a book by Susan Scott, an American consultant – Fierce Conversations (Berkeley Trade, 2004) – in which she urges the reader not to shirk difficult debates with everyone in their lives, where necessary, including oneself.

I worry about the way adversarialism is delivered. My concern is that from children upwards we are all starting to see confrontation as the default setting, rudeness as a stock in trade, and aggression as a natural way to debate. You see it in road rage. You even see it on pavements and in the Tube. Watch a junior football, rugby or cricket match. I am not sure what is worse – the language and demeanour of the kids, or that of their parents on the touchline or boundary.

I am dedicated to helping everyone make better decisions. That is why I wrote my book Decide, and why I am now hard at work on its successor. The crucial cauldron for decision making by teams and organisations is the endless series of meetings they all rely on. Meetings are at the same time the most frustrating part of decision making (because they seldom produce any decision whatsoever), and the best hope, because decision making is precisely what the meeting was designed to achieve.

But check out your friendly local meeting. Is the atmosphere collegiate? Is the language calm and urbane? You must be joking. Inevitably confrontation now dogs the meeting as it threatens to poison the rest of our life. And because confrontation is unconstructive, it impedes debate and reduces the chance of arriving at a decision.

I say it is time to blow a whistle, to sound a warning, to call a halt to the slagging off. If we can achieve any progress in this direction, we will start to see that we can make far more progress by debating and discussing in what we used to call a civilised fashion.

And then, Mr Mair, calling someone a “nasty piece of work” will say more (and not in a nice way) about the slagger, and less about the slagged.

So deciding to write a book encouraging strangers from the dangerous outside world to take a major life skill seriously, and get better at it was a bit of a departure. What on earth made me do it?

Years of first-hand experience of the choosing/selection process at AAI had given me some unique insights into what works with marketing and management teams, and what is most unlikely to. For an even longer period – going back to my experiences at AC Nielsen and Pritchard Wood & Partners (my first agency, where account planning was invented) in the 1960s – I had been involved in the implications of predicting and understanding the way consumers make decisions about this brand and that.

But I was keen to understand more about decision making on a wider front. We all juggle our lives, so decision-making is a crucial skill in everything from choosing a career to choosing a partner, from deciding on a house to deciding on a holiday. I recognised that my personal track record as a decider was distinctly average. So I started reading voraciously to make sure I understood where the established experts – academics, the consultants and the behavioural economics populists – were coming from.

Then I blogged about decision making. Relentlessly. Before delivering the manuscript of Decide, I had blogged no less than 75,000 words on www.makingbetterdecisionsbetter.com in a year. I wrote about decision making per se, but also about decisions in all the fields that interest me from politics to marketing, from sport to the media. I wrote about brilliant decisions and bad decisions. I wrote about things that made me laugh, and things that made me cry with frustration.

The blogging gave me a platform, but the interviews with ‘great deciders’ gave me priceless inputs. My debt to this inspiring group of individuals is immense. I learned so much from these people – not least how generous they were prepared to be in sharing experiences and ideas, as well as giving me their time.

As I in turn share the anecdotes, examples and learnings with you in the course of the book, you will spot inevitable differences between how famous achievers choose and decide. But I am confident you will also see the similarities and common factors. For many of the people I interviewed, dreams and ambitions arrived at a very early age – often before the tenth birthday. They were able to explain to me how important these influences had been. Several of the ‘great deciders’ have also had – later in life – the courage to make radical life changes, often for far more hours, and far less money. My interviewees all could identify the particular opportunity, challenge or problem that prompted a really big decision. Almost all gave gut feel as their main driver in making decisions, having gone through looking at options and assessing risks. The interviews gave me a profound respect for their determination. One can’t fail to be impressed not just by their decisions, but by the way they made those decisions.

Let me summarise the key learnings that came out of my research, the interviews, and the soul-searching and analysis that followed:

• Decision making isn’t easy, but it’s possible – and important – to get better at it
• Logic and rationality is a good place to start, but gut feel, emotion, instinct are indispensable drivers
• It is highly instructive to understand the common threads that conspire to make decisions fail, but knowing what won’t work is no guarantee that you can get it right yourself
• To do that, it’s vital to take on board three key factors:
1. The time available for making the decision
2. The personality profiles of the people involved and the implications of that on teamwork
3. The fact that identifying and realising opportunities is a far higher order skill than mere problem-solving
• Making a decision is one thing. Communicating it in the best way is crucial
• Implementation is in the end what determines how good the decision was.

I am a great believer in the third journey of life. That’s the privileged time when having learned all you can (Journey #1), and having been hired and paid for what you know (Journey #2), you are in a position to share knowledge and help others. In the end I wrote Decide to encourage others to become better deciders.

Because making difficult decisions is one of the crucial tests for any decision taker, I thought it might be helpful to share the story.

By July 2012 AAI had been advising clients on finding new agencies as a specialist consultant for exactly 24 years. AAI had an established reputation across many countries as a state of the art facilitator of agency pitches. Running pitches was roughly 75% of our revenue stream, and our methodology was well known and accepted by advertisers and agencies alike as the default setting. Rival consulting practices and numerous advertisers across the globe had followed our lead.

Yet we made the announcement that we were no longer prepared to handle pitch assignments if it involved agencies giving away creative work for free. Why make that change, when we had been closely involved in organising such contests for many years?

First, and importantly, I emphasise in my book Decide (to be published by Kogan Page in February) how vital it is to make formal choices by establishing robust criteria, and sticking to them. At the outset of a pitch, all our clients work with us on deciding which boxes the agency of their dreams needs to tick (the criteria and sub-criteria). No client in our experience has ever been brazen enough to stipulate that their agency choice should be based largely on which agency provides the most plausible free campaign in the shortest number of days!

Secondly, we recognised that there had been a significant and continuous slippage from what was the custom 30/40 years ago – agencies offering just an indication of a possible solution – to effectively providing complete free campaigns.

We were also influenced by four salient facts:

1. The first is the research carried out by the ISBA/IPA steering group (of which I was a member) on the Good Pitch initiative: only one in five of the campaign ideas that win pitches ever runs for real. That means four out of five fall through clients changing their minds, or at the research hurdle. And that’s just the winning agency’s idea. If six agencies make speculative creative presentations, five of those ideas are destined for oblivion anyway.
2. Academic evidence is clear that picking a winner from exceptional candidates is a demanding and specialist skill, which requires both strict criteria setting and a healthy dose of gut feel. The AAI casebook – over 24 years – shows no correlation between the ability to create instant magic and forging productive long-term relationships. Some agencies are particularly successful at winning pitches. Others have an enviable record at long term stewardship. We can find no evidence of a link.
3. We researched a wide spectrum of other professionals (including lawyers, accountants, management consultants, architects, surgeons and consultants), also service providers as diverse as defence contractors, caterers, and kitchen designers. No one gives away IP, or offers for free what they should be selling
4. We believe that the movement to raise ethical standards in public life (politicians, media owners, company chiefs, bankers) is unstoppable. We have spoken to several senior marketers who would prefer a less lavish, more practical and more effective way of finding new agencies.
There is a strong case for marketers, procurement professionals and agencies to try something different: a pitch process that is:
• Faster (target 5/6 weeks maximum), much less expensive for everyone, with fewer agencies involved
• Dependent not upon final presentations of speculative creative work, but creative work done for the agencies’ clients (with results), reputation, track record, people, fit and strategic alignment

We called our new process Mutual Decision™. The name reflects the fact that there are two decisions at the end of every pitch: the client’s to appoint a new agency, and the agency’s to take on a new client.

Mutual Decision™ is designed to be a far more effective way of forming a productive long term partnership, because it is based on mutually relevant criteria, not one side putting the other through a creative beauty parade, largely to the exclusion of more important considerations. It also provides for two other vital elements of any professional partnership – a proper induction period, and ongoing – and two-way – evaluation of the quality of the relationship, and the productivity engendered.

It was a difficult decision to change our business model so fundamentally. But for me, having just written a book on making better decisions in a better way, it would have been even more challenging to carry on recommending an agency selection system that is not only costly and time-consuming, but also relatively ineffective and ethically questionable.

But let’s knock one urban myth on the head from the outset: the one about the railways being under the control of private companies. It’s certainly true that the train operating companies (TOCs) own assets like rolling stock and the power units that move them around the rail network, publish timetables, charge customers and pay wages. But control? Forget it. The UK rail industry is very firmly regulated, and is effectively controlled by the Government. None of the TOCs can run even one service without Network Rail. And Network Rail is a statutory corporation, with no shareholders. The Government has the right to make any changes to the company, including taking it into state ownership.

The Government also manages the whole industry through the Office of Rail Regulation (ORR). ORR is responsible for economic and safety management, through a Board, which reports to the Secretary of State for Transport. ORR has the final say in fare structure. Also they negotiate with the Treasury on what proportion of investment is paid for by the Government, and what by the rail traveller. The UK rail industry has significantly less subsidy than in other countries.

Sorry about the lesson – but this is an interesting case, and the background is important. Let’s do the rest by numbers:
1. There appears to be a paradox – ten years of increased prices, and still passenger numbers are rising. What does that tell us? The demand side for rail travel in general and commuting in particular continues to be strong. Surprising? Not really. The rail service in the UK has improved steadily in both reliability and comfort – apart from peak rush hour services, and more people than ever rely on trains to get them to work
2. There are numerous other examples of goods and services where – even in an economic downturn – demand is strong despite increased prices
3. Does this mean that price elasticity doesn’t apply to rail fares? Can the TOCs increase prices for ever with no fall off in demand? Almost certainly not – but we are not there yet
4. What about the TOCs investing in much needed improvements to rolling stock and the stations they own? Do they need to increase prices to achieve future customer satisfaction? Yes, they do, given Government regulation, and subsidy at less than 40%. It absolutely makes sense to do it while negative price elasticity still applies
5. So why were the 24 TOCs and their joint body ATOC so apologetic and defensive when they announced the average increase in season tickets of 4.2%? Heaven knows. No commuter relishes paying more, but in the current climate of cuts it is obvious that increasing the level of rail subsidy is not an option for the Government
6. Wouldn’t it have been possible to explain the reasons for investing in the future, with the Government sharing the pain with the travelling public. Of course it would. This piece has done it in less than 600 words
7. HS2? Now you’re talking dirty!

Organisations that supply services to big client companies (especially agencies) frequently complain about that they see as mean procurement departments. ‘They beat us up on price’. ‘They make us jump through all sorts of hoops’. ‘They impose tough payment terms on us’.

I’ve been known to say the same sort of thing myself!

But there’s a big truth out there: procurement’s job is to buy raw materials, goods and services for their company, and to do it selfishly. That’s because we all buy selfishly. We want things on our terms, at the lowest possible price, provided the quality is OK. The language is littered with sayings and aphorisms to underline this point.

“They are so desperate for the business, they’ll drop the price in the end”
“Never pay more than you have to”.

But the buyer can be sceptical too.

“No such a thing as a free lunch”.
“Pay peanuts, get monkeys”.

It is unrealistic to expect your commercial equation to defy the laws of gravity – whether you are an agency seeking a higher fee, or if you are trying to sell your house in a depressed market. Buyers will be buyers. But the other side of the coin is rather less obvious. If you want to be a success in sales, you can’t sell selfishly. If you sell what you want to sell, at the price you want to get, on the terms you insist on, you are likely to have very limited success.

That’s because we have to sell generously. We need to work out what people want to buy. We have to allow people to choose. We must get the pricing right. We are obliged to offer terms the buyer will accept.

Yet so often, we come across ungenerous sellers:
• The take it or leave it mentality
• Agencies that tell the client there’s only one creative solution, only one photographer, only one director
• Inflexible media deals, that aren’t deals, precisely because they are inflexible
• The used car that’s too pricey, or the house seller that won’t drop their price

Selfish buying demands generous selling. Hard-nosed buying makes sense. Hard-nosed selling makes none. Unless you are very tough – or very, very good.

Consultants and advisers are queuing up offering to solve the problems
that management and internal teams are wrestling with. Before long there will
be more hot desks at Regus than work stations in company offices.
Communications agencies seem to be multiplying as production levels of
problem-solving ideas soar.

Is it the destiny of the developed world to identify problems, and solve
them?

I hope not. And really believe it is not the way to go. Problem solving
is plumbing by another name. The higher order activity is to spot opportunities
and realise them.

Opportunities are the gateway to innovation and growth. When I
interviewed high achievers for my forthcoming book Decide (to be published by Kogan Page in February), they all told me about the opportunities that helped to change their lives. Many about the opportunity they saw to change the lives of others. A solved problem, unless it gives rise
to an equal and opposite opportunity is a closed box or a finished crossword. A
realised opportunity is a launch pad.

As we all look for a better 2013, let’s change focus. The priority is not
to fight to be allowed to tackle problems which, in the majority of cases, have
been defined by others. The challenge is to look for opportunities which we can
capitalise upon ourselves, or help others to bring to fruition.

Now there are so many more activity areas: sponsorship, digital, content, events, guerrilla, buzz, social and so on. Is ‘Marketing Communications’ the correct cover-all. Or can we make a case for using the word ‘Advertising’ – albeit in an expanded and differentiated context. That’s what the late great Steve Jobs thought. He reckoned that anything the brand did was advertising.

If you are promoting a brand, an organisation or a cause, that’s advertising in a real sense. The collateral vocabulary supports that view. We are admen or adwomen, working in adland, making ads – not adverts please. We have paid our admission fees. We are addicted to our way of life. We are fuelled by adrenalin. It all adds up.