Mar 28, 2010 | Branding, Management, Marketing
Building a brand is a “one bit at a time” exercise.
Most aspiring brand managers look at Coke, Google, Microsoft, the local leader in their market, and think about how they can take them on, and win.
The process is useful, but the reality is that you can’t do it in one big bang, it is one brick at a time.
There are many metaphors, I like thinking about the process as a bike race. You need to be in there and fit, and have the support team all pulling for you, there will be ups and downs, opportunities to go faster downhill, and hills you have to really work at to get over, but over the distance, you if build up momentum, experience, consistency, manage the risks and take the opportunities, you may earn a place in the peloton, and if you are good enough, and your timing is right, you can get to the stage finish first. Then, there is just tomorrow.
Building a brand is similar.
Mar 28, 2010 | Management, Sales
The only way to win is to attack, you can prevent being beaten by defense, but as any football coach knows, defense will not win.
Same in business, you need to understand your strengths and weaknesses compared to the opposition, and exploit the strengths, whilst covering for the weaknesses.
Having an intimate understanding of the key customers, those who will spread the word of your product or service is as good as having the opposition playbook
The only way to get a crystal clear picture of the oppositions position is to experiment, continually ask the questions of them by experimenting, testing, & understanding their response, be restless, and inquisitive, probe, analyse, question, form and test hypothesis. Sounds a bit like the scientific method, and continuous improvement.
Mar 25, 2010 | Social Media
As a young bloke, I was given a “XY” graph that had “urgent, not urgent, important, not important” on the axes as a personal management tool.
I was advised to concentrate my effort on the “Important, not urgent” quadrant, as those are the things that will make the real difference, add the sustainable value, and told that things in the “urgent not important” quadrant are the ones would absorb all the time if allowed, and it would take only personal discipline to manage the allocation of time, and expectations of others.
Now we have a myriad of new distractions in the urgent but not important (but perhaps compelling?) quartile, the mass of stuff on the net, and the social applications to absorb our time, the task has multiplied, perhaps by logarithmic rates.
Tom Fishburne, as usual, collects the problem into one “iprocrastinate” cartoon. Lovely.
Mar 24, 2010 | Personal Rant
Listening to the PM and Opposition leader the other day, “debating” the future of health care in this country, I felt a bit woozy.
One of the biggest items in the budget, and certainly the item of huge interest to most Australians, and what do we get, nothing but more of the same crap!
The PM’s scheme to take some greater control over expenditure is doomed to failure, even if he could get the states to agree, how can a pack of weenies in Canberra deliver hugely complicated system like health; would you like a pink bat with that?
The opposition is determined to be a policy free zone, OK, this tactic has won elections in the past, but health is too important to be a political pissing contest.
The real challenge is to go back to basics, strip away the layers of vested interest, from all in the game, and redesign it from the ground up, with the only objective to build an infrastructure to deliver patient outcomes into the long term.
Over time, the vested interests, bureaucracies & bureaucrats, doctors, nurses, private investors, equipment and consumables suppliers, employees and their unions, the list goes on, have all taken positions that have narrowed the options of sensible management of the system for patient outcomes, a bit like the plaque build-up in the arteries leading to the heart, and the heart of the system is in real trouble. Each action taken to protect a small bit of turf anywhere in the system reduces the opportunity of the whole system to grow and innovate, it is a sacrifice of the potential for greater good on the alter of self interest.
One bit at a time, the system has become narrow, brittle, inefficient, and ineffective, just like that artery with a bad case of sclerosis. We need a radical by-pass, it will be painful, dangerous, and require more practical skills, will, and vision than I suspect are currently available, but there is little alternative if we are to have a system that is effective, affordable, and equitable.
Mar 23, 2010 | Branding, Management, Social Media
The phenomena of social media is one that businesses need to understand, and be ready to respond when, rather than if, it gets difficult.
The Nestle Facebook page has been overrun by new “fans” after the publicity surrounding their practices of using palm oil sourced from Indonesia from areas with questionable sustainability practices. On Twitter when I checked a short time ago there were many entries, most about the palm oil, and all of them unhappy.
Justified or otherwise, businesses need to be on the front foot to be able to respond positively, and proactively to the potential of social media to undo brand integrity overnight.
The destruction of a brand, or in Nestles case, many brands is much easier than their construction,
At some point, all organizations will come under the scrutiny of groups utilizing the tools of the social media if they leave any openings at all, and these groups are currently better organised, better focused, and better able to mobilise support. Being proactive is no longer the task that should be given to the graduate trainee, but should be a board issue, as it is a major risk to the Intellectual capital and therefore value of a business.
