Blog posts tagged Directors' Briefing

Marketing Donut - much longer than an elephant

Baby elephants, like humans, stay in the womb for a long time. But even by elephant standards, the Donut project has been a long time in the making.

The team at BHP have heard me talk about donuts since 1996, when we drew a “donut diagram” to show how we would pull off a seemingly impossible collaboration: 500 experts would help us write 150 briefings for small businesses (SMEs), meanwhile we’d have pre-licensed the content to 80 websites by the day the content was completed — and the whole thing would be funded by sponsorship from 20 leading brands.

Well, we pulled it off and launched on schedule. By the year 2000 we had 250 organisations using the content (the Directors’ Briefing series) on their websites and in their call centres, including major websites like BT and learndirect.

The Marketing Donut is simply a variation of the same model. The website is an extremely focused channel for reaching SMEs with one thing on their minds: marketing.

BHP’s publishing and marketing activities have always been aimed at SME end users, because I find SMEs and the whole challenge of running a business single-handedly (which is the reality for most small businesses) fascinating.

I’ve always admired people who have the guts to run a small business. Having started up BHP and an earlier business (in Tokyo of all places) myself, I know how challenging it is. The point of running your own business is that, while most owner-managers are considerably less well off than we’d be as employees, we enjoy a unique kind of personal freedom that would be hard to put a price on.

Recession or not, 2009 is looking good. At BHP we’ve done loads of projects over the last 17 years, but the Marketing Donut is definitely the coolest and the most exciting.