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July 30, 2004
Positioning Statements: A loaded gun
In a recent entry, Market Ramsey at Radio Marketing Nexus asks "Do Positioning Statements Kill?" To which I respond (not trying to sound like the NRA): Positioning is like a weapon, in the wrong hands it can kill, in the right hands it can save your life. That said, Mark Ramsey and Tom Asacker have an important point... that beautifully written slogans are really not the answer. They can be the bane of good marketing, and a huge waste of time. Which made me think of this week's quotes:
"The best ad is a good product."
- Alan H. Meyer
"A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it's bad."
- Bill Bernbach
Nonetheless, I think it's important to make a distinction between "positioning" and "positioning statements." Frankly, if you don't figure out your positioning (unique promise, to a select target, relative to alternatives) before you do a bunch of marketing, you are bound to fail no matter how good your product is.
Posted by johnza at 12:34 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
The Potential Power of Being Number 2
I love this entry from The Origin of Brands Blog: What should you do if you are #2?
I've alway's found #2 positions really interesting opportunities. They can be the best thing for driving attention and eventually winning a dragrace. By contrasting and picking on the big guy you have a lot to gain and they a lot to loose.
As Laura Ries points out,
"A strong #2 brand needs to position themselves as the opposite of the leader.
Listerine: bad-tasting mouthwash
# 2 Scope: good-tasting mouthwash
Home Depot: messy, male-oriented
# 2 Lowes: neat, female-oriented
Coke: older people
# 2 Pepsi: younger people
Microsoft: proprietary-software
# 2 Linux: open-source software
Wal-Mart: always low prices, messy
# 2 Target: cheap chic, wide aisles, neat
Mercedes-Benz: big, comfortable cars
#2 BMW: smaller, “driving” machines
Republicans: conservative
# 2 Democrats: liberal
(Rank determined by which party is defending the White House)"
This strategy can work great - look at Microsoft Word and Excel (in the old days) picking on WordPerfect and Lotus123 (#1 Established, complex key strokes, # 2 GUI and easy to use). And of course look at how long Avis has used it's "We try harder" position to good use.
Posted by johnza at 11:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 28, 2004
The importance of words
Marketing is, at least in part, the art of persuation. And words are - along with pictures, sounds and other sensory, intellectual inputs - a central tool to any marketer or communicator. Easy to take for granted (just look at how some of our political figures use the language), words are powerful, words are cool. For those of us who love words here are some really beautiful cool word tools.
I know I am always looking for other words that better express the meaning I'm trying to put across. The visual thesaurus from ThinkMap has been around for a while, but boy is it neat. Maps the word you chose to all other related words.
Snarkhunting recently highlighted another cool tool. It's called WordCount from the really interesting marketing "lab" at Benneton called Fabrica (at which I really need to spend some more time). Anyway, type any word into WordCount and it will visually show you where it ranks in frequency of use relative to just about every other word. Neato.
Posted by johnza at 11:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 27, 2004
Culture as a part of your playbook
Several really interesting posts and articles around the importance of CULTURE in business. No not yoghurt or throat culture, corporate culture - as a means and source of both strategy and insurance of its effective implementation.
It's one thing to pick a strategy and develop some kind of process, it's that much more lasting and impactful when such strategy is embedded in how people think and act naturally within the company. (Corporate culture is not just something that gets laminated and put on peoples desk along with corporate values, it is a conscious/unconsious, living thing, a set of beliefs and practical ethics that affects hiring, incentives, and all communications.)
There are obviously a wide range of corporate cultures but here are some thoughts and examples of cultures that really drive leadership and true, sustainable positioning.
Customer Service Cultures
Fouroboros, highlights Progressive insurance (a great "progressive" company that is shaking up its industry). They take the claims process after an auto accident personally. Someone hit their customer. They take care of the whole process personally, all the way down to getting the person in the accident a cup of coffee to calm them down. An example of a customer service culture that has got to go a long way in building life-time value.
Johnnie Moore highlights a great story about a hotel chain where culture beat "technology to the "CRM" punch of true touch customer relationships. We all like it when staff recognize us as return customers. Well, this chain made sure the front desk knew a repeat customer with no technology, just culture. Simple, the bellman asked if it was the guest's first visit and then deposited the luggage at the angle that told reception to say "Welcome back to the ..." It's amazing how many hotels with sophisticated databases fail to do that.
Continuous Improvement Cultures
Business 2.O recently profiled how culture radically improved results ... in manufacturing. The company is Toyota. The core tenets of the TPS (Toyota Production System) seem less about process than about culture, here are two of my favorites:
"Andon (Line Stopping). Any worker can halt the line to fix a problem. Workers shouldn't be afraid to do so." What a great way to incent a do it right of thinking, a culture of empowerment and personal responsibility.
Start Up Cultures
Business Pundit poinders the challenges of building and maintaing the right culture in a start-up, especially when bringing together a bunch of people from different backgrounds. As VCs we see this all the time with our companies. But frankly leadership is the key thing. How the leader acts and how much energy he/she puts into developing and staying true to a culture is critical. A great start-up culture can make all the difference in the world, in hiring the best talent, in driving product delivery, in hitting milestones, you name it.
One example we've seen is in a portfolio company. A new CEO came in and defined an agressive sales culture (appropriate to the company's situation) and drove and cemented this culture throughout the company. How? By incenting people, communicating and walking his own talk. Everyone (including receptionists) took salary cuts with the difference plus more to made up by bonuses based on company sales results. And the CEO started by cutting his own, freshly negotiated salary in half. Everyone, everyone became focused on meeting prospect and customer needs.
In our playbook system, we ask you to look at your playing field - the customers, competition and your own company's competencies. It's easy to focus on economics, technology etc. in such analysis. How about looking at the culture of each of these as a core part of the analysis? Seems like a good idea.
Posted by johnza at 09:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 26, 2004
TripHub: Investing and Testing
While large companies spend millions on market research, smart entrepreneurs like Josh Herst are using the Internet to test new ideas and offerings for very little money.
Josh has some ideas about group travel and is implementing it over at Trip Hub. Buying ad words at google and having fulfillment via a travel agency, he's learning quite a lot from a small experiemnt.
Posted by rich at 09:36 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
July 24, 2004
Go ahead and ask!
Great entry from Beyond Bullets. Although written for PowerPoint presentations, these 6 Clarifying Questions are exactly what you need "When you're so far along you seem to have lost your way, sometimes it's easiest to map your way back to the beginning."
Whenever you get stuck, ask them. Just because they are obvious, doesn't mean they are critical and often overlooked. Apply them to your understanding your playing field, your play, your positioning, your communications (not just PPT):
- WHO: Who do you need to be thinking about? Who are your target customers, your competition, your partners, your constituents?
- WHAT: is your product, offering, category?
- WHY: should you exist in the first place? What is your vision and mission?
- WHERE: are you trying to go? What are your goals and objectives?
- HOW: are you going to achieve them? What is your core strategy or play, what bets are you making? What are the tactics your will deploy?
- WHEN: are you going to do what? What is the actual plan for rolling out these strategies over time? With what realistic milestones and expectations?
Good to keep in mind!
Posted by johnza at 07:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 19, 2004
Ries and Trout
I remember the first time I read Positioning, really made clear so many of the core challenges of marketers. Well, Ries (and Ries) and Trout still at it.
Al and Laurie Ries' have a new book, The Origin of Brands. Looks really intriguing. And Laura Ries has entered the blogsphere with her new blog. And she's already generating a lot of attention. Her most recent entry on Positioning Alive and Well covers some key levers/strategies for positioning from "the prospect's point of view"
1. pricing (the open hole) - going premium or discount
2. creating a new category you can be great in
3. go for the number two spot
4. the specialist
5. the channel brand
6. the gender brand
Brand Mantra likes the number 2 strategy. In his very good interview with Laura, BJ Olin highlighted on interesting tidbit about the importance of focus, not just for startups but for all marketers pursuing any of these strategies. Here here.
Meanwhile, the book and blog sparked a different kind of discussion at Radio Marketing Nexus, where the opinions ranged from re-hash to dangerously out of date. Hmmm..
Personally, I'm ok with rehashing. Basics are good to take a fresh look at. But, what the heck, I can't help but try to relate all this to the 5 Plays.
- Going for number 2 feels like a classic way to win by direct comparison - which you do in a Dragrace.
- Filling the pricing hole is something you can do in both a dragrace (as a tool for winning or in a Hi-Low Play where you are trying to get both margin ends of a market.
- creating a category is something you kind of do when you run best of both by collapsing two opposite ends, but I guess we have conservative bent to avoid telling people it's a revolutionary, new category but rather an improvement of an old one (the old horseless carriage vs. automobile play)
- the channel brand is at least in part what becoming a platform entails, although it seems to cover other scenarios too
- and both the specialist and gender brand concepts feel to me like they at least start out as stealth or add-on plays where rather than confronting the biggest competitors head on you slice of niches (by the way, I think ethnic is as important as gender as a brand play).
Seperately, Jack Trout recently gave a pitch on positioning to the AMA (check out the slides here). One of the main points was that strategy = survival. Well, as you might have gathered from previous posts, we just couldn't agree more.
Posted by johnza at 09:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 10, 2004
Blog Vacation
Rich and I are both on vacations in places where cell phones and blackberries don't work and internet connections can barely be found. Hate to say it, but sounds kind of nice. See you all in a week.
Posted by johnza at 06:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
It's keeps on going - Yahoo buys Oddpost
Thanks Rajesh Jain and Paul Kedrosky for the heads up. In the what seem like ever escalating stakes in the yahoo/gmail/hotmail dragraces, here's a new development.
Yahoo just bought Oddpost, the service/tool that has a very nice, integrated RSS reader and a bunch of fans and their own blog (of course).
Of course, they also had their detractors and switchers, cause gmail was turning up the heat.
Interestingly, they were already on some kind of Yahoo stealth play - they aleady let you use Oddpost to read your Yahoo mail. Wonder what the next move will be.
Posted by johnza at 06:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 09, 2004
Gmail part of Google moving to plaform play?
We've talked a lot about search and email dragraces. Now, Rajesh Jain and Rick Klau both look at how email can really move more and more toward developing a platform. In their view gmail is very well positioned to do the right things - to be open to more and more functionality (like adding an RSS/ATOM reader) and utility.
In our view, though to be a true platform you have to embrace others and be embraced by them. Gmail is clearly embracing others by doing things like making it easy to import contacts. But will they go further and encourage/make it easy for outsiders to develop applications and utilities for them (as Anil Dash and Omar Shahine note that Outlook - you got it, from none other than Microsoft - has been doing for a good long time)? Until they really embrace their own ecosystem of third parties who really love helping them win the email race (like they have done well in search), they will still be just a dragracer vs. yahoo and msn and not yet a real platform.
Posted by johnza at 05:05 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
July 08, 2004
Strategy vs. Tactics
BusinessPundit: Strategy - It's Hard To Stick With It Business Pundit highlights an age old issue that made me think of this week's quote (one of our all time favorites):
Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
- Sun Tzu (Chinese General, circa 500 BC)
So what is strategy and what are tactics. For fun below is a short outline of an explanation we've used to clarify this supposedly easy but often devilshly tricky distinction:
-------------
Objectives 101
. What is an objective?
. What is a goal?
. What is a strategy?
. What is a tactic?
. What is a plan?
Objectives and Goals
. Objective a : something toward which effort is directed : an aim, goal, or end of action b : a strategic position to be attained or a purpose to be achieved by a military operation
. Goal a : the end toward which effort is directed : AIM (Also a specific, measurable achievement behind an objective)
Context
. Business: How to make money from spending money - Engineering, Finance, Operations, Marketing Sales
. Marketing: How to build demand with the market place - Product, Price, Place, Promotion
. Communications: How to promote effectively - Messaging, Media
. Personal: How to contribute to all of the above
Strategy
. Strategy a : The science of military command, or the science of projecting campaigns and directing great military movements; generalship.
. The set of decisions made to best ensure achievement of the desired objectives, based on an assessment of:
... one's own current situation/position; capabilities & shortcoming; competitive position
... options/alternatives -- risks
... timing
Tactics
. Tactic a : a device for accomplishing an end; b : a method of employing forces in combat
. The set of requirements for a plan to take effect
Tactical vs. Strategic:
. Always relative to one another
. Tactics: the set of actions taken to fulfill a strategy
Plan
. Plan a : a scheme devised; a method of action or procedure expressed or described in language; a project; as, the plan of a constitution; the plan of an expedition.
. The combination of objectives, strategies and tactics
. The specific articulation of how the tactics will support the strategies that will achieve the objectives in time
. The rationale that supports this course of action
Anyway, we've found this little glossary useful in the past. Let us know if you think it makes sense.
Posted by johnza at 04:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Go Spamnet!
"Thank goodness for spamnet." Frogblog notes a beneficiary of all the email wars, Cloudmark's Spamnet. I agree. Love 'em and I'm rated a gold star spamfighter! Smart way to build a highly involved spamfighting Platform Play.
Posted by johnza at 07:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 06, 2004
PPC to PFP
MediaDailyNews 07-06-04. The web is becoming more direct marketing oriented than ever. First there were banners where you paid from banner shown (the so called CPM) model.
Then, we hit the Pay-per-click model where a site only gets paid if someone clicks through.
Now, we are on the next trend which is Pay-for-performance. This means you only get paid if someone actually buys a product for your site.
Some also called it affiliate marketing. The big players are networks of sites like ValueClick, 24/7 Real Media and AOL's advertising.com. LinkShare is another example.
Posted by rich at 07:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 05, 2004
More fun with packaging
Here are two fun recent entries on fun packaging
Brand autopsy highlights hilarious Heinz labels submitted by customers like "For best results, eat."
Wonderbranding found these really cool plastic shopping bag holders. Not only are they functional but they act as paid billboards. Talk about beyond broad reach.
Posted by johnza at 02:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Ikea - another Best of Both Play
A while ago, I wrote about Target as a guilty pleasure, and a terrific Best of Both Play.
Well, here's another store/brand that fits both categories - IKEA. They re-positioned the home furnishings category the same way Volkswagen did German cars - young, hip, functional and affordable.
What's the story? How do/did they do it? Even this brand is not without controversy. For other Ikea lovers like myself, here are a number of interesting and amusing posts:
Brand Mantra has two entries examining the passion of Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad, its powerful influence on the Ikea corporate culture and it's potential downsides. He wrote "The Testament of a Furniture Dealer", setting out Ikea's "sacred concept" and expounding that "Those who cannot or will not join us are to be pitied ... What we want to do, we can do and will do, together. A glorious future!" Wow. Heavy-duty.
Oliver Thylmann and others poke fun at the in store experience with a funny Ikea walkthrough guide.
Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine waxes nostalgic for his Ikea youth.
ZDNet has quite a funny spoof on what Ikea would be like if Microsoft ran it - you guessed it - security problems, not enough competition, and no to very little model choices.
Jen at VeryBigBlog is so in love with Ikea, she has a whole category devoted to it (one recent post Project Big Blue has some very, very funny banner designs for an upcoming store in Ohio). Go Jen!
Finally, Margaret Marks (eine Deutsche die Englisch auch spricht) has a great guide to how Ikea goes about coming up with all its funky product names. This is interesting and the comments are hilarious too.
Whatever you think of Ikea. It sure has been successful at establishing a global brand! And heck, the kids love the ballroom and the meatballs with lingonberry soda. What could be better?
Posted by johnza at 08:30 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
July 04, 2004
Beyond bands, parades and fireworks
NARA | The National Archives Experience
What a great document! Clear, focused, hard hitting, memorable. Nothing to do with marketing but so what.
Happy Birthday USA.
(PS: this is a very nice National Archives site)
Posted by johnza at 05:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 03, 2004
Trade Pubs Ho!
Figuring out the playing field ain't easy. One way is to monitor all the many trade publications. Obviously, online is one way to do it, but another is to look at controlled circulation publications like Infoworld for instance.
Until now, getting on these lists has been a little bit hard. You have to go to someone's office. But with tracepub.com, its now easy and the publications get qualified people as well.
A great example of meeting a market gap cleverly. The market gap is that controlled circulation relies on a qualified audience to justify its ad rates and the more circulation, the higher the ad revenues.
The customer gap is that it is expensive to reach the right audience and folks who want the publications have a hard time reaching you.
The competitive gap is that there hasn't been a site dedicated just to this vertical. There are plenty of paid subscription sites (netmagazines.com is my current favorite), but not for controlled publications.
Posted by rich at 08:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 02, 2004
Orkut, Friendster and social networking
Google sued over Orkut bug replication feature | The Register. It's amazing how a trend can start and there can a be a whole host of players. A good example if Friendster and Google's versions called Orkut.
These are great examples of sites that are driving for popularity. Friendster has 2M users and they are not just chatting (uhmmm) online. Amazing what basic instincts lead you.
In any case, like online dating, these sites represent the epitomy of drag races, get out there, drive for momentum and get to a tipping point where if everyone is on a network, then you win.
These things combine two ideas, first there is Metcalf's Law, the value of network increases as the square of the number of users, and also the Tipping Point where, if you can get to that kind of geometric expansion pretty much you own the world.
Where is the Tipping Point, or the point where folks can't catch up. Well, for products we've worked on that point has been around the 5% mark if you can get at the influentials. Before the Tipping Point, there was the theory fo the influential end-users used at Microsoft in the late 1980s. This was all about getting the most influential core of users to talk about your product (whether hush puppies or Excel) and get them to recommend it.
Its why so many drag races like social networking, ebay auctions have this incredible property that lots of people an start and there is one sustainable winner.
Posted by rich at 09:25 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Search Turf Wars - Next Chapter
This week's announcement by Microsoft of it's new moves into search are the next salvo in the ongoing turf battle/drag race between Microsoft and Google. You can get a brief peak at the "Sandbox." Have to say my initial tests underscore that this is still very much a work in progress or just the first "baby steps". What will happen? Can the new and more scrutinized Microsoft still turn up the heat and come to dominate this space? Big question, especially in light of Google's move last month into the home turf of MSFT, the desktop - with the announcement of "Puffin" it's desktop search tool. Paul Kedrosky sees this as a very smart move to grow and grab stickiness. A kind of thrust and parry long overdue to keep MSFT on the run. Others see that MSFT Longhorn search may have some advantages but either that they may be too late or that desktop search is kind of irrelevant anyway. I don't know. Finding stuff on my computer seems just as hard or harder than on the net. I hope this battle results in a better answer for consumers and not just a lot of scorched earth.Posted by johnza at 02:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 01, 2004
PestPatrol's information service
MediaDailyNews 07-02-04 - PestPatrol Unveils Center For Pest Research . This is a great idea for promotions that we're seeing so much more of. The market for anti-spyware is vast and growing. Dells says 20% of their tech support is devoted to getting rid of the stuff. So, in the classic promotional sense, how do you get on top? Well, the miracle of google means that if you provide useful information people will come to you. Probably the greatest service Google has provided is that useful information remains the best way to get a good pagerank. You can obviously game it, but its still mostly true. The smart companies like PestPatrol or Applied Discovery work hard to provide information that is useful. So check out your category page rank and instead of just buying keywords, ask how could I be the #1 site in google:"home networking" or google:"anti virus".Posted by rich at 08:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Billg Blog
The BlogFather: Bill Gates may be launching a personal blog! Can't wait to see it. Talk about blogs as marketing. When/if Bill does this he will have a terrific ongoing pulpit to drive Microsoft thought leadership. If he does it well and does not sanitize it too much. Who cares if lots of people disagree with what he says. Controversy will be great. The thing could end up being more closely watched than American Idol.Posted by johnza at 04:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Jingle all the way
Radio Marketing Nexus: Jingle all the way Love the notion from Mark Ramsey that jingles are not ear candy but "Memory Food"Posted by johnza at 03:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack