Contrary to everything we’ve been taught to believe, new research suggests that money can, in fact, buy happiness.

However, before you all rush out to max out your credit cards on self-indulgences, I should tell you that the research shows that joy does not stem from buying ourselves fast cars and designer watches. Rather, as HBR’s recent blog post highlights, it comes by spending our hard earned cash on others. In a series of experiments, researchers found that asking people to spend money on others — from giving to charity to buying gifts for friends and family — reliably made them happier than spending that same money on themselves.

Google have been putting this theory into practice with their innovative bonus scheme, in which employees can nominate each other to receive a $150 bonus. Although not a life-changing sum of money, the emotional payoff of this symbolic act of giving is sky high.

So it seems worth thinking how peer-to-peer giving can be incorporated into your workplace culture, to keep your people happy.

A recent survey from Pitney Bowes showed that while 87% of SMEs recognise that marketing increases sales, the average SME only executes around 39% of its planned marketing activity. When I read this, I was not very surprised. This is something we frequently encounter with companies; it’s all very well putting a marketing plan together, but seeing it through is quite another matter.

Running or working for an SME is hard work.  Often, employees will wear many hats, and there just aren’t enough hours in the day to achieve everything you want to. In an effort to deliver on product or service, marketing is often the thing that falls by the wayside.

However, we know from experience that true and lasting marketing success comes from developing a marketing plan and seeing it through consistently. If you do this, your business will grow.

Of course plans may need to change, and you should allow for some flexibility and agility (we tend to follow the 80:20 rule, i.e 80% of your activity is planned, 20% is responsive and agile). However the systematic drive to achieving your objectives, following a formal plan, is a sure way to maximise ROI from investment in marketing.

So how can you manage this process when time, money and people are scarce? Here are a few tips:

• Make sure your marketing plan is realistic and achievable. Devote plenty of time to considering what is attainable within your budget and ask your people how much time they can spend helping the business achieve its marketing goals.

• Break your plan into specific actions and tasks, assign each task to a person, and give them a deadline.  Assign one person to overseeing the whole plan, and ensuring that each person completes their set activities.

• Celebrate small wins as you go along. When a milestone is achieved – share the success. If you meet a target, let everyone know and thank the people who got you there. This will keep your people inspired and motivated to keep pursuing the plan, even when it gets hard.

• Finally, keep at it! It won’t be easy but it will be worth it. And like anything, the more systematic and consistent you can be, the easier it will get.

Charterhouse’s latest research report ‘Back to Creativity,’ predicts an increasing trend of marketing executives seeking ‘back up’ from third party agencies. As numbers of in-house marketing personnel drop despite a recent explosion in numbers of media channels, 67% of marketing executives say they are now expected to combat rising work loads with shrinking resources. This has led to over 50% seeking outside help in the form of marketing agencies.

However, the introduction of agencies often forces executives to manage the co-ordination of the relationship, leaving little time for adding creative. Charterhouse provide these key factors to ensure marketeers remain marketeers:

1. Sharing through good communication
2. Empower junior employees and standardise approval processes
3. Closer inter-departmental relationships
4. Continual appraisals
5. Being realistic about budget
6. Digitise the administration

A great blog from Seth Godin popped into my inbox this morning. Its subject was frequency. Specifically, we know that frequent communications of the same message to your target market increases the chance of converting them to take action, but we also know that hammering the same message over and over again will bore and annoy many people.

As Godin says,

The most indisputable truth of outbound marketing: Frequency improves compliance…The curse, of course, is that the best members of your audience, the ones who are listening the most carefully, have to be bored/annoyed at the messages that show up after they take action.

There are no easy answers to this challenge. Yes, frequency is annoying, but it’s also effective.

One way to try and deal with it is to use the wealth of insight we now have at our fingertips to get a feel for your audience as you communicate with them. Data from newsletters, social media monitoring, web analytics, and of course, cold, hard sales, should give you a feel for when the benefits of frequency are starting to be outweighed by the boredom or disengagement it is creating. It can also help you understand your audiences better, so that you can gauge where their tolerance level for frequency might be, and what you can do to mitigate its negative effect.

According to Nicholas Diakopoulos, in his blog post on hbr.org, data visualization works best when we’re happy.

Anyone who must present information in a visual way — from designers to managers — is at the mercy of the ever-changing attention spans of their audience. As numerous psychological studies have shown, our moods have a big impact on the ways we process information; the happier we are, the less likely we are to make reading errors, for example. So the key to getting your message across, in theory, is to prime your audience with positive feelings — warm colors on the page, a lighthearted joke in person. Of course, emotional manipulation has its limits. Balance, in other words, is key.

In their report, Disruptive Technologies: advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy, the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) assesses the potential reach and scope, as well as the potential economic impact and disruption of major rapidly advancing technology areas. They identify 12 technology areas with the potential for massive impact on how people live and work, and on industries and economies. They have also attempted to quantify the potential economic impact of each technology across a set of promising applications in 2025.

The MGI identify three key things – speed, range of impact, and potential scale of economic value, which are represented in the report as follows:-

The technology is rapidly advancing or experiencing breakthroughs. Disruptive technologies typically demonstrate a rapid rate of change in capabilities in terms of price/performance relative to substitutes and alternative approaches, or they experience breakthroughs that drive accelerated rates of change or discontinuous capability improvements.
The potential scope of impact is broad. To be economically disruptive, a technology must have broad reach.
Significant economic value could be affected. An economically disruptive technology must have the potential to create massive economic impact.

The 12 technologies are: –

1. Economic impact is potentially disruptive. Technologies that matter have the potential to dramatically change the status quo.
2. Mobile Internet: Increasingly inexpensive and capable mobile computing devices and Internet connectivity.
3. Automation of knowledge work: Intelligent software systems that can perform knowledge work tasks involving unstructured commands and subtle judgments.
4. Internet of Things: Networks of low-cost sensors and actuators for data collection, monitoring, decision making, and process optimisation.
5. Cloud technology: Use of computer hardware and software resources delivered over a network or the Internet, often as a service.
6. Advanced robotics: Increasingly capable robots with enhanced senses, dexterity, and intelligence used to automate tasks or augment humans.
7. Autonomous and near-autonomous vehicles: Vehicles that can navigate and operate with reduced or no human intervention.
8. Next-generation genomics: Fast, low-cost gene sequencing, advanced big data analytics, and synthetic biology (“writing” DNA).
9. Energy storage: Devices or systems that store energy for later use, including batteries.
10. 3D printing: Additive manufacturing techniques to create objects by printing layers of material based on digital models.
11. Advanced materials: Materials designed to have superior characteristics (e.g., strength, weight, conductivity) or functionality.
12. Advanced oil and gas exploration and recovery: Exploration and recovery techniques that make extraction of unconventional oil and gas economical.
13. Renewable energy: Generation of electricity from renewable sources with reduced harmful climate impact.

Came across the Manifesto for Agile Software Development in the Thinking Digitally report by Stylus (full disclosure: a client of Make Happy). Interesting how both the manifesto itself and the principles behind it ring true for a better way for working in general.

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left (in bold) more.

And the principles behind the manifesto:

• Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
• Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
• Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
• Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
• Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
• The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
• Working software is the primary measure of progress.
• Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
• Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
• Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
• The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
• At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.