Bottled for business

Karan Bilimoria is the founder and CEO of one of the fastest growing and most successful beer companies in the UK. From modest beginnings, Cobra Beer has grown into a hugely successful international beer business with 2006 retail sales of £126 million, and a haul of 20 medals at the recent Monde Selection World Quality Awards 2007.

Bilimoria has captured the rise of the "less gassy, extra smooth, premium lager" in his new book Bottled For Business. Here he describes how effective communication plays an essential part in the company's success.

Every leader has their own communication style - what works for you in terms of communication?

It's a combination; written, face-to-face, the phone. So, for example, if I am going through reports, I will scribble notes on them, saying I am not happy with this and this is why, or have a look at this, or I want to know about this, or well done.

Then, wherever I am in the world, I will always conference into meetings. When I am in the country I will try to speak to directly to the various members of the management team individually.

So frequent communication with your management team?

As a chief executive, it is constantly communicating with your team, regardless of where you are in the world. Plus, continually coming up with ideas and feeding them through to the team, so they know that, although they've been allowed to get on with things, you are still very much engaged. It is not a question of, I'll see them at the monthly management meeting and I don't want to hear from them in-between.

I also get minutes of meetings taking place within the company, like the sales team meetings, for example. I will always follow up all the reports from the subsidiaries and the different countries, the reports from the different meetings, and then give feedback. That happens all the time. So people know that I am aware of everything that is going on. It is balancing, letting them get on with it but making it clear that you are absolutely on top of everything.

And I've heard about your famous Friday gather rounds.

Every Friday evening, whoever is in the Head Office at 5.15 - 5.30, I gather everyone around, very informally, convey some things that are happening, major events and developments, do a round-up of what various members of the management team are doing, so, again making people feel involved.

And when we do the Friday gather-rounds, we are not only announcing developments, we are celebrating people's achievements and congratulating them. It might be recognising the individuals who helped make the company's golf day such an outstanding event, presenting birthday cards, usually accompanied by a bottle of champagne or a gift token. I sign all the birthday cards, whatever country the person is based in.

And doing this publicly is important to you?

Yes, you need to communicate publicly when you are happy with something. I learnt this from my father in the Indian Army where he would praise his officers and his team in front of everybody, coming from your leader that gives a lot of confidence and pride.

Telepresent and correct

If any company has a good idea of how companies will communicate over the next decade, both with their customers, and internally, it must be US based networking company Cisco. Founded in 1984, Cisco is the global leader in the networking business, and has played a pivotal role in the growth of the internet. Working with a range of hi-tech partners it implements cutting edge communication technologies, and consequently has a head start in predicting the varying mediums by which people will interact in the future.

Take Cisco's vision of retail banking, as outlined by Philippe Gogniat, a director of Cisco's financial services industry solutions in its European markets. You might imagine a high-tech company would be talking about online banking, and the demise of the retail banking branch. Not so, according to Gogniat, who acknowledges that consumers still crave human interaction in retail environments.

"Business processes, people, and technology, these must all be transformed to bring value banking to customers when they walk into the branch," says Gogniat. "On the customer facing side there needs to be an integrated customer relationship management platform."

The solution outlined by Gogniat is likely to become familiar to most consumers, and not just in banking. At its most basic, it is about using network technology at the heart of a system that combines different communication channels to the consumer. "The network is crucial. It allows services like the ATM, the telephone infrastructure, the call centre, video, to be connected to each other," says Gogniat.

Central to Gogniat's vision of networked communication is telepresence. Forget any preconceived notions, this is the McLaren F1 of video-conferencing, relegating just about anything else into Ford Model T territory. Straight out of the pages of some sci-fi novel it delivers a life size image of the person you are communicating with straight into the room with you.

"You can have a conversation with a high resolution, Dolby stereo, virtual expert advisor, just as if they were there across the table," says Gogniat.

To use Cisco's technical jargon, through technological innovation in providing "very high-quality audio and ultra high-definition video at very low latency with limited bandwidth utilisation, telepresence delivers "true life-size images, ultra-high-definition video (both 720p and 1080p), and spatial audio, which creates the dynamics of voices coming directly from the participants".

In other words, it seems like you are talking to a real person in the same room.

Spookily, the quality of the image allows for direct eye contact and all the other essential body language that accompanies human interaction, even though the participants in the dialogue may be thousands of miles away from each other. It may sound like sci-fi, but it is the future of real-time collaborative communication, now there really is no hiding from the boss.

Consumer choice?

When it comes to influencing the consumer, companies are far too savvy than to rely on just the conversation and body language of the sales representative, customer service manager, or in plain language the person who tries to sell you stuff.

As well as the persuasive art of salesmanship companies are waging a subliminal war of surreptitious influence upon consumers, using a range of stimuli, both visual, aural and olfactory. Consumers, for their part, are barely aware of the subtle ways in which they are steered this way and that as they exercise their "free choice".

On the comparatively innocuous side there is the use of colour, for example. Ever wondered why New York cabs are yellow, along with the majority of pencils sold in the US - because various studies have shown that yellow is the easiest colour to spot.

Then there is the use of sound. Walk down a major shopping thoroughfare, like London's Oxford Street, and it is like pitching up at some strange shopping music festival. The noise pollution leaking from the various stores is unavoidable. It's the same when you go for a night out, pop into a bar in central London and there is the inevitable music again. Yet this modern day smog of retailing music smothering the consumer is not without purpose.

There are a number of studies on the effect of music on the consumer and the results, although not well publicised, are somewhat disturbing. Take one recent study, which aimed to discover what effects, if any, the tempo or type of music played in a store had on spending. The researchers discovered that, when slow background music was played in a supermarket, consumers slowed down their shopping by 15 per cent, and this led to store customers increasing spending by almost one third. As to what type of music is most useful from the retailer's perspective, in terms of promoting greater spending the results were, in order of most money spent, classical, pop, easy listening and silence. Although, no doubt, Richard Strauss' tone poems and Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries would produce different results, generally speaking classical music playing in stores makes us spend more money-without us realising.

And it doesn't stop at music. Companies have begun to use smell as part of their arsenal of retailing weapons. The alluring smell of freshly baked bread is used to create a more pleasant atmosphere in supermarkets, although following its use on countless property reality television shows to enhance the prospects of a sale, more people are wise to its psychological effects. More recently, though, LG Electronics signalled the way forward in product smells, by using a chocolate fragrance in the packaging for its LG Chocolate mobile phones. It's got to be better than the smell of warm plastic.

This is just the tip of sensory assault on consumers. With their vast R&D budgets, large corporations are likely to stay one step ahead of the hapless consumer in the influencing of in-store decision making. So just remember the next time you have that sudden urge to make a carefree impulse purchase-it may not be so impulsive after all.

Are you connected?

Just when you thought you had got to grips with "working the room", handing out business cards and mastering small talk, along comes a whole new e-take on networking.

Social networking, a term used to describe a broad swathe of online networking tools, is no longer a fringe internet activity. It is almost impossible to escape social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, now the media has picked up on their popularity. Plus you may have noticed the occasional email from a friend, colleague, acquaintance, or even a stranger, inviting you to join their online network.

While fresh faced adolescents flock to the likes of MySpace and Bebo, professional networkers use websites like LinkedIn and Ecademy for furthering their business interests and careers. The trick is, understanding social networking and knowing how to use it effectively. Social networking can help find a job, boost sales, and make connections with new clients.

"Social networks are powerful tools for people, connecting them to an audience of like-minded people across the globe, who share the same goals," says Penny Power, co-founder of Ecademy, a social business network for business professionals. "The objective for users is to get known for what they are expert in, and what they can contribute. Building their business, career and personal brand is the main objective."

All kinds of professional benefits await; providing that is, budding online networkers learn a new set of rules.

Power offers some tips on using social networks, among them: ensure the first 25 words of your profile reflect what you want to appear on Google; understand the value of random connections - being too targeted reduces opportunities; build relationships, not just a list of contacts; and don't sell, spam, abuse, embarrass, bully, or use a fake name.

Another experienced online networker, Marjan Bolmeijer, a CEO Coach, and CEO of Change-Leaders.com, also offers some wise words of advice. Bolmeijer is well aware of what works and what doesn't in the world of social networking; she has one of the largest networks of LinkedIn's eight million plus users.

Bolmeijer offers some social networking basics. "Never change you phone number, or your email address, put your email address next your name, and put as much information about yourself in your profile as possible," she says.

She also emphasizes the need to maintain your network over time, and not to let it become passive, thus negating the point of building the network. Finally, cautions Bolmeijer, remember your online actions have a very wide impact. "Don't mess up," says Bolmeijer. "Bad news travels fast through your network."