It is with much sadness that we bid a fond farewell to Harvey Lawrence. In a little over 15 months his blog has received nearly 3,000 visits, or about 10 every working day. If nothing else that’s a great measure of consistency.  I am pleased to say that I will be formally taking over as the voice of The Naked Chief blog - as myself - from this point forward...

When we first launched our corporate blog we wanted it to be a little different. To that end we created a persona, a fictitious CEO, and named him Harvey. It has been Harvey’s job to ensure transparency in our plans for growth and general industry commentary that we would not otherwise put through our newsletter. It has worked extremely well.

So why change? Right from the start The Naked Chief has prompted comment either in meetings with clients, people I meet at briefings, or even phone calls and emails from journalists saying, “Peter, I can’t quote a persona!” And that was OK. We realized that to be the case but that wasn’t our immediate intention. But now as we move in to our next phase of growth I felt it important to impeach the persona and build a more direct voice.

So how did the persona angle work out? Is the fact that we have retired Harvey a reflection on our perceptions of the usefulness of personas? Absolutely not. In fact, CA’s US marketing arm have adopted and transformed a persona project we helped their local ANZ (Melbourne) marketing arm develop last year. It’s great to see those things come to life and be valued at the big end of the industry.

With Harvey retired to a picture frame on my office wall, with his career stats proudly displayed under a dashing silhouette, he will serve as a reminder for us to remain accountable to the notion of transparency in business process and client engagement. The Naked Chief will continue to be based on contributions from key members of our team, and it is our hope that it will continue to grow as a talking head for our local industry.

Cheers
Peter