Jun 7, 2023 | Marketing, Small business, Strategy
Standard marketing advice in this day of homogeneity, and certainly my advice for SME’s, is to ‘find a niche and own it’.
Be the only one that competes in a market niche that you define.
The deeper, darker and more remote the niche the better, because when you get engagement there, you will be alone, you alone will be able to address the needs of those few who inhabit the niche with you.
Kevin Kelly’s now famous quip from his 2008 essay: ‘to be successful you do not need millions of followers, you need only a thousand true fans’ remains as accurate today as it was then.
A true fan is one who will buy anything you produce, they will drive 200kms to see you in a bookstore signing, then buy a bunch of signed books to give away to friends.
The challenge of course is to find those true fans, or more accurately, create the circumstances where they find you, and move through the now standard journey of Awareness, Knowledge, Liking, Preference, Conviction, and Purchase, to Advocacy.
Marketing plays a role in each step of the journey, but the starting point must be ‘macro’. If you start at the niche end of the cycle, too few will be able to find you. There needs to be a filtering process from the macro to the micro for there to be sufficient opportunity for those in the niche who may become true fans to find you in the first place.
It also pays to consider the paradox: There may be a niche in the market, but is there a market in the niche? For you as an SME, the niche may be ideal, but too small for a larger competitor to bother with, or even see.
,Niches can be global, local, and everything in between. To some they represent a ‘Blue Ocean’, a market without competitors. The question now is whether there is a market in the niche, wherever it hides, that will generate an ROI on the resources you allocate towards owning it.
May 30, 2023 | Change, Innovation, Marketing
In this new world of marketing, being reshaped by Artificial Intelligence, how should those concerned with the longevity and salience of their brands respond?
Innovate.
AI is really good at looking at what has happened in the past, but has yet to develop a crystal ball to tell the future. Marketers key responsibility is to tell the future, then shape the resource allocation decisions their enterprises make to best leverage what they think will happen. No future comes in a linear fashion, but AI can only reflect in a linear way, in response to the algorithms on which it was trained.
Strategise.
Strategy is a game of choice, where what you will not do is at least as important and often more so than what you will do. Again, these choices are based on what you think might happen, and as noted, these are never linear choices. Strategy in a world being homogenised by access to data will be more fundamentally important than ever.
Manage Communication structures.
Yesterday’s world was dominated by silos. The simple fact is that customers do not care about your silos, only how you deliver value to them. Enterprises have evolved hierarchical silo structures as the most efficient way to allocate and manage resources. That remained true until the mid-nineties, and most enterprises still have not got the memo. Today, even any hint of silos and barriers to communication internally, and more importantly with customers, will lead to a rapid and fiery death at the hands of data and its scribe, AI.
Remove marketing complexity.
The last 20 years have seen a multiplication and fragmentation of communication channels to customers and consumers, along with the inevitable silent middlemen and rent seekers who just siphon off dollars with little or no value add. The complexity of the choices and channels has created a situation where the analysis of the value of marketing expenditure is little short of a children’s guessing game. This is despite and partly because of because of the plethora of options and tools. The only way to address this complexity is to cut the gordian know and simplify, simplify, and then simplify some more. In other words, marketing focus driven by strategy. Easy to say, hard to do.
Generate attention.
The main game of being relevant in a huge homogeneous crowd is to first generate attention. You do that by being different, and being different with a big dose of energy being injected into the differences that are relevant to customers and consumers because they solve real problems, delivering them real value.
If you do all that, while leveraging the capabilities of AI, and digital systems generally, it will be your competitors that struggle, while you are ahead of the game.
Header cartoon credit: Tom Gauld
May 26, 2023 | Governance, Leadership
People will achieve all sorts of great outcomes when they know and buy into the reasons why the immediate actions should be taken.
‘Why?.
Imagine this scenario: Your boss comes to you to and tells you to drop what you are doing, and do this, just get it done, and moves on.
By contrast he/she comes to you are asks you to do that same thing, and explains why it needs to be done, why it is more important than the things you are currently engaged in, and how your contribution will make a difference to the outcome.
Which are you more likely to buy into?
Coincidently, it is the same question all our kids ask us as they are learning about the world. However, we seem willing to remove it from common conversation, or alternatively, answer the simple question that often has a complex answer with platitudes, evasion, or some other form of ‘non-answer’.
May 24, 2023 | Change, Innovation, Strategy
Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, often labelled ‘the Godfather of AI’ left his ‘home’ at Google so he could ‘freely share his concern that AI could cause the world serious harm’.
The idea of AI is not new. Philosophers and mathematicians through the ages have been speculating and writing about things we would now count as part of the foundations of AI.
Jonathan Swift gave the Lilliputians ‘the Engine’, Thomas Bayes built his probability framework that is still used every day, and Nicola Tesla built a radio-controlled boat for the 1898 New York exhibition controlled by what he called, ‘a borrowed mind’, and the first paper that recognised the potential neural symmetry with our own brains was publsiesh in 1943.
Alan Turing proposed what became known as ‘The Turing Test’ in 1950. This generated a surge of activity, culminating in three academics hosting a workshop at Dartmouth College in 1956. This workshop is now seen as the ‘kick-off’ of AI research, much as the Solvay conference in 1927 was the catalyst to the nuclear research that led to ‘the bomb’ in 1945.
From that workshop, great minds have been busily stuffing the AI equivalent of Pandora’s Box until Pandora, in the form of Open Ai’s ChatGPT opened it in November 2022, and let the whirlwind rip.
As in the fable of Pandora, one of the most enduring of the ancient Greek allegories, once the box was opened, despite all efforts, there was no stuffing the evils back in the box. Luckily, Pandora had also been created with beauty, intelligence, and tellingly, curiosity, which led to her opening the box.
This is as it is with AI.
There is the evil we all see, centred on the rapid destruction of the status quo in all corners of our commercial, private, and public lives. The beauty may be harder to see in the short term, but will become obvious in the longer term, after all, the last thing to escape Pandora’s box was ‘hope’.
If nothing else, it will be exciting, and for some, the source of significant new leverage that can lead anywhere.
Header credit: Dall-E with the instruction: ‘Create a painting of Pandora opening the box allowing the evils to escape, in the style of the ancient Greeks’
May 22, 2023 | Change, Governance, Leadership
The most valuable resource in every business is the time, talent, and energy of employees. However, as these are hard to manage, and do not appear on any balance sheet, they are often grossly under-managed or completely ignored.
By contrast, Capital is readily available, cheap, and readily returnable, and as it is recorded and easily managed, it consumes our whole management focus.
Dollars are really the only easy measure of compliance and outcomes. However, they are a poor measure of much else that actually makes a business successful.
Time, strategic and tactical focus, and employee engagement are our most valuable resources, but are universally managed poorly.
There is lots of advice from the digital ‘cheap seats,’ all of it obvious with thought, but equally challenging to implement.
Wasted time in meetings, unnecessary email, excessive double handling, unnecessary process delays, broken processes, cultural norms, and many others. All add complexity, ambiguity, and time, while obscuring accountability.
Employees start covering their arses by copying everyone, shifting responsibility, hedging on project delivery times, duplicating unnecessarily, and focussing on the trivial while ignoring the risky.
You have all seen it, and from a distance shook your heads and asked yourself:
“Why not a bit of common sense?”
These transaction costs consume huge unrecorded amounts of time and energy, which translates into commercial obesity.
Think about all this as the ‘organizational load’ that is being put on people.
This load is similar to being overweight. As complexity increases, we allow practices to creep in that adds obesity to processes. It is a bit like letting your belt out an extra notch.
As of November 2022, we have the most potent anti-obesity drug ever conceived in our midst.
Artificial Intelligence, trained on large Language Models arrived with ChatGPT3 leading the charge. The performance improvement between Chat 3 and Chat 4 launched in March 2023 is astonishing. Forecasting what Chat 5, 6, and 7, just around the corner will be able to deliver makes my head hurt.
Are you thinking about your obesity problem now??
Your competitor surely is!
