August 25, 2008

Cyberpresence Socx

Some of the most nuanced things that we can encounter come from marketers. But the enduring charm of marketing is, basically, shamelessness.

That sounds bad, but the only problem with shamelessness is that it's hard to pull it off successfully, so not everybody can do it. In the strategy of shamelessness it is still, paradoxically, a requirement to maintain some cool.

This amounts to predetermining what kind of "online presence" is needed, and why -- backed of course by the right tools to generate that online presence. Where should people find you online? who should they meet when they find "you"? and why should they (from their perspective) find "you" the way that they do? Assume that they are wherever they are not because of you but because of what that channel offers them; then determine what version of yourself is appropriate to have appear in that channel. "You" might be different from one channel to another, but the different "You's" need to all be appropriate representatives of the brand you are trying to maintain.

It's pretty much like getting dressed to go out with strangers. But how hard could it be? Humphrey Bogart got to say it first: "The only cause I'm interested in is Me."

The scary part is finding out there's not much mileage in your hype. You remember: there's the famous Andy Warhol saying: "In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes."

As for blogs, it's more like "in the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people." (I can't remember who it was that said that, but the quote is certainly memorable, and the citation for it is probably retrievable via Google, etc.)

There are different levels of shamelessness, with blogging and online social networking holding down the opposing goalposts. (Incidentally, Archestra is not a blog, although it runs in blogware. Archestra is, instead, just an open studio.)

Surely, blogging is important to marketing, particularly with the aspect of staging a "market" of ideas about what you sell. But blogs are just the booth in the marketplace. Blogs are inherently editorial, and the only reason we would expect one to succeed is because of the popularity of the personality that is the explicit editorial energy of the blog. (Note: not being a blogger myself, I can't claim to have any expertise on making one work; but having subscribed to several in the past, I found that I only go to the ones where I feel like I am interested in the person whose blog it is. Moreover, with zillions of blogs out there, the fatigue factor of going through yet another new blog is a real impediment that makes it just seem unnecessary. What gets me past the impediment is either a recommendation from someone or a sample of the subject handling that shows me the blogger is unusually interesting.)

Wikis are a bit like blogs in that they have a subject focus, and that subject attracts a crowd (you would hope), but the subject focus is maintained by a crowd, not by a singular editorial personality. With a wiki, one always hopes that peer criticism will culture the crowd towards "wisdom", as they like to say.

Finally (for the moment), the point of a social network is that the crowd moves its focus around and shares what it finds by talking to each other. Focal points emerge rather than being prescribed. But the sharing occurs because of people in the crowd who are already interested in each other and keep introducing who they know to other people. This thing about "buzz" is about when the communication gets flowing strongly about an emergent focalpoint.

A marketer should look at how the online forums* perform compared to each other:
- blogs establish relevance
- wikis establish credibility
- and social networks (which I hereby impertinently deem "SOCX"), being where markets actually live, establish importance

(Let's face it, most people who have used the sound "SOX" outside of baseball could not tell you who Sarbanes is nor Oxley nor whether their company would survive an audit. So why should they get to monopolize the phonemes? In the real world, social exchanges are vastly more interesting, and after I've said "blog" twice and a quick "wiki" a few times in a row I'm not interested in two-part five syllable elaborations for the rest of the choices. SOCX it is. Could be lonely, but I don't care.)

* apologies to anyone with a language degree

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 8:49 AM

August 10, 2008

The Decisive Moment in the Garden of Good and Evil

My Strategy to win the Presidency

So, how do you get it going at such a late stage in the race?

The first part is to pick my Vice Precedent. Eventually, I’ll get caught for something, right? and why not just tell people what it is in advance, especially if it's something that's just more me? Thanks to the internet, people are confused... there’s no longer any sense of priorities amongst most of the self-indulgences that actually get us from Monday to Tuesday and from Tuesday to …

…. oh, you meant vice “president”… hmm, in that case, it would have to be the guy from truTV, Marc Juris, executive vice president and general manager, who showed me that if you can’t be the head, at least keep it on straight. For example, the other day he was saying, "Reality has a connotation of not being real, of being phony… We felt that because (our programming) was real, we couldn't call it reality." There aren’t that many people running around with that kind of clarity now.

The second part is I’m going to play the gender card.

How does that make sense? Wouldn’t you be running against two men?

Well, what difference does that make? The point is, I accuse them of being guys, and then they both screw up their responses to that more than I screw up mine. That’s what voters care about.

What’s the third part of your strategy?

It’s very simple, a call to action, but it might be hard because it calls for breaking a tough habit. When you’re president, you should have a limited number of Stupid Points to work with, not term limits. If you spend up all your Stupid Points too fast, you’re out! and someone with fewer Stupid Points should take over. This might not be the other person from your party who is hanging out in the other wing of your big white house. Think about it, if it’s your party at your house, and your party gets seriously boring, people need to be able to go to another party at somebody else’s house, right? Really, it’s not such a new idea, but we can’t be wimps about it.

Is that it? Any other parts?

Well, aside from the challenge of getting enough ME-dia attention, I’m working on getting an additional line added to the list of nominee names on the ballot, right below the third party candidates. If I’m successful, it should just say “Surprise Me: __________________”

(Happy Birthday Diana! xo - M)

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 3:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 5, 2008

Beyond the Spin: Measure What You Give

Does your organization really measure what you give, or does it mainly spin what you measure?

Bruce MacEwen's industry-leading website Adam Smith, Esquire offers an opportunity to gaze into the abyss of metrics and walk away without jumping. In the article
"How High Quality Are Your Lawyers? (How Can You Tell?)"
a close reading shows contrasting business models contesting notions of "performance @ cost" and "value @ quality". In the competitive situation covered, one upstart model strategically goes after a chunk of the opponent's business by bringing customers the performance/cost equation, surprisingly leaving the traditionalist competitor to justify how pricing for that same chunk of business could rationally be based on value/quality. What makes this all interesting, notes MacEwen, is the idea that 99% of what the traditionalist does is what the upstart can steal away.

For those of us who fell out of the old hot habit of saying "disruptive innovation" once a month, this looks like news, but not new news. Still, there are some fresh perspectives worth bringing to this contest.

As seen in the diagram below, the different models above are easily distinguished by what they actually offer, making it inappropriate (for managers) and intellectually dishonest (to customers) for either of them to masquerade as the other. Customers buying into cost/performance are investing in the promise of efficiency, while those buying into value/quality are investing in the promise of reliability.

In MacEwen's article, we are sensitized to the problem that high-prestige value/quality law service firms institutionalize a significant unmanaged cost in the form of "available overachievers", against which these firms then build a hedge by charging premium prices beyond rational evidence of economy for the customer. But what is sold as the justification for this pricing? Their quality?

To be sure of avoiding management posturing, "quality" here must mean only one thing: adherence to the promised appropriateness of the deliverable versus the stated need. Consider that meaning against the question of what it takes to get quality: the value/quality firm proposes that by exceptional capability they eliminate the risk of not getting quality. Therefore, the key variable that this firm actually addresses is unpredictability in the customer's need. As an operational tactic, the value/quality firm hoards talent in order to avoid outsourcing and to presume agility.

But the cost/performance firm basically argues (by demonstration) that legal work requires only competency to sufficiently meet most stated needs -- not a matter of being exceptional but instead simply correct for the task, which eliminates unnecessary effort from the equation right off the bat. Of course this presumes a degree of predictability in scope of need -- and agreement on the scope becomes the main feature.

The discussion above intends no effort to offer a wisened critique of law firm strategy. That said, on the surface there are no truly important differences between marketing professional services in law versus other disciplines where subject matter expertise is the raw material and advice is the product.

Idiosyncracies in the legal services industry will of course provoke distinctive problems and solutions there, yet these are probably driven more by the state of mind of the customer - which is the underlying important difference because it is the competitive arena. Oversimplifying MacEwen's article, the difference between the value/quality firm and the cost/performance firm is that the former sells confidence while the latter sells credibility.

Are there spats? One accusing the other of con games, and the other accusing the first of being incredible? MacEwen's article says yes; but what is further interesting (per evidence of the illustration above) is the opportunity that both types of firms can objectively profile themselves on common ground (efficiency, capability, reliability and acceptability) -- and use those profiles to determine how to optimally segment and grow a shared market. When they don't do that, you can bet it isn't because the customers don't care.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 9:59 AM

June 18, 2008

When is "value" not valuable?

A wonderful discussion on Bruce MacEwen's website Adam Smith, Esquire included this challenging note from Paul Lippe about what logic is available to explain the connection between quality and value. While he questions "reputation" as an indication of warm fuzzies like "quality", he also kicks off his note citing the less fuzzy implication that better performance presumes to justify higher price:

"I'd be curious if anyone can come forth with any data to show that in fact (as opposed to in repute) more expensive law firms produce better results, e.g. can it be shown that the investment banks who had the largest losses on their mortgage portfolios were served by lower reputation law firms?

Once this conversation settles down, I will start a separate string (and perhaps a wiki to really pull something together) on what I consider to be the core issue: how can we develop a definition of VALUE in legal services that is meaningful and useful, and not simply measuring inputs like hours spent, diligence of lawyers, law school attended or reputation of the firm. With such a definition of value, I think we could expect that some lawyers' reputations and income would go up, but some would not."

Let's dig into that overall observation by making the undercurrents obvious.

1. "Value" is a label for the significant distinctions attributed to something. "Value" in professional services is 3-dimensional, at minimum. A certain method of co-operation with the customer interacts with a certain type of target outcome at a certain level of effective cost to the customer. The method, outcome, and customer cost are variables, each having a range of acceptability, which in turn allows some universe of acceptable overall impact to sprout from their combination. Now, from that dynamic, some professional service providers are great at being predictably consistent within a smaller universe (range of impacts) that the customer prefers. Some are great at being agile enough to cover a larger universe, keeping up with a customer who has more volatile preferences. And there are several other "flavors" of competency that a service provider may have. Ultimately the provider wants to be paid for the competency, and then be paid even more for a competitively greater level of competency. But the customer wants to pay for customer satisfaction, which is something different. And what mediates the balance of the two things is often just culture. I wouldn't choose to drive a perfectly good Tercel to the White House Christmas Ball, but I could; and I wouldn't choose to drive a Bentley to the 7-Eleven, but I could. In fact, I could use either car to get to either destination.



2. That's all well and good in theory, but in practice the realization of the potential value is hugely affected by the ability of the customer to appropriately and effectively align to it. (There is even plenty of historical evidence that customers sometimes buy based on how they wanna be seen, not based on how they really are.) That reality is the "forest". Relentless pursuit of profit is the bulldozer that strips the forest. Atomic metrical inputs like law schools and hours spent risk merely being "trees", where excessive attention obscures the view of the forest and therefore obscures the proper understanding of the value.
Profit and arbitrary metrics actually must not dominate an analysis of value. Instead, value, properly identified, can be correlated with profits and other interesting measures, and the correlations may be revealing or even exciting.


3. The final point from the above is that it is probably important to use rigor in discussing value, because "value" is not a reliable synonym for other things that deserve their own names, such as "competency" and "satisfaction", and "culture". It's important to know what is actually being taken into consideration and not gloss over things for convenience, because otherwise we find out too late that we're actually sitting on some key coordinate that does not allow us to "get there from here" (i.e., to the necessary value) on time. Meanwhile -- if we would like to elevate the discussion of value from the 3-D space of CustomerCost /Outcome/Method to the 3-D space of Competency/CustomerSat/Culture, while remembering to map the current coordinates in both spaces, well that's fine.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 12:17 PM

January 9, 2008

Run That By Me Again?

It's only January, but here, from Datamation, by Mike Elgan, is the most important IT article of the year, so designated because it whacks the pollution of communication that eventually separates responsibility and authority at the worst possible times.

Where Annoying Tech Buzzwords Come From
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/cnews/article.php/3720391

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 5:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 1, 2008

Driving Value from Change with Knowledge

Frank thoughts about why people are important to an organization mainly go down two tracks.
One track examines what is necessary for the organization to be "in the game" it plans to play... The other examines what is necessary for the organization to play the way it wants to play, when already in the game.

Few experienced people still hold on to the simplistic idea that the former track is about line workers with the latter being about the managers. Since the recognition of CRM's dominant influence on the top line of the business, ample evidence establishes that alignment of front and back offices is critical to sustaining wins. Repeatedly getting the right things to the right place at the right time for the right reason means that staff in management and in line production must both attend to operational fundamentals, and both attend to situational performance differentiators.

During the early adoption period for that principle of alignment, "knowledge worker" became a profile arguing for distinction. We identify it as a profile, and not as a role, because it is an optional mode for every role. In organizations where it actually makes sense to discuss "knowledge workers", I.T. has made the greater part of production dependent on information processing and on interpreting the status of the processing outputs. Net: in the procedural life of the organization's activity, analysts now constantly threaten to outnumber mechanics.

The appropriate new idea of worker "productivity" follows quickly on the management of information, where the issue is about what value the worker's information management should provide. In the usual formula, value is expected to result where experience influences the information management.

But there are two tracks involved in applying that experience to the information:

- keeping things the way they were designed to be; and,
- successfully adapting as necessary to changes.

Most practical experience in organizations is role-based. In fact, we must assume that managing experience through roles is the complement to managing information, with their sum being what we recognize as practical knowledge. The question that the information age has added to the foreground of this discussion is how the manager role and the line worker role respectively exercize the knowledge worker profile to provide the value expected from their roles.

Workers with a higher degree of performance recognition in the organization are most frequently those who run the second track -- adapting to change -- in the knowledge worker mode.

To point this out more specifically, it helps to identify what qualifies as "change". The table below identifies, in ordinary language, the key types of change (points where value is generated), and the relevant "valuable behaviors" sought from managers and line workers executing their roles in the knowledge-worker mode.

Aside from confidential facts, the most privileged type of information is ideas. Speaking broadly, we can say that an "idea" is a proposed condition with an expected meaning. Left to its own devices, the "k-worker" (knowledgeworker) profile is about managing ideas for specific circumstances. As shown in the table, that relatively "pure" focus is pulled to different pragmatic effects by the role that uses it (manager or production line worker). That said, for most companies relevant to this discussion, a prescribed business process is the production line of importance that "manufactures" the necessary deliverables from the organization.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 12:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 5, 2006

Fear and Loathing, well, Mainly Fear, in the Garden of Good and Evil

(filed under "Customer Relationship Management")

Rose Hill Cemetery, Macon, GA - Duane Allman -- who in the 1970's made the south rise again by, more or less in this order, sliding an empty glass Coricidin bottle around on skinny metal cables, becoming a god, and dying under his motorcycle at age 24 -- spit out his peach last month at the news that the hit southern country classic "Blue Sky", by his not-dead-yet bandmate Dicky Betts, has become the national television theme song for Menopause.com.

Duane has turned over and spit once before, when to start the new millenium the Allman brothers fired Betts, who, oh that's right, wrote stuff that ranks Number Two on the Country Music Television's poll of the top twenty Greatest Southern Rock Songs of all time.

But this new coffin flipping level of distress can be matched only by that which accompanied Ingmar Bergmann's Swedish goddess of Agony Liv Ullman dancing on tabletops in the worst movie of all time, Ross Hunter's 1973 musical atrocity "Lost Horizon", readily available through eBay "on DVD with Deleted Scenes. "

Let's hope the DVD is blank. And, the Allman Bros were way stupid after Duane died. But who do we hold responsible for the TV theme song assignment? Is no one safe?

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 10:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 1, 2006

Run That By Me Again

Over at InformationWeek Daily, Alice LaPlante drops in on Microsoft's PR to add 15 minutes of infamy to MS's aging celebrity. Lamenting the news that the new Microsoft website enhances the fun for Explorer users and disses Firefox users, her excerpt of the Microsoft "12 Tenets" for ethical business conduct calls up this item :

Computer manufacturers and customers are free to add any software to PCs that run Windows. More broadly, every computer manufacturer and customer is free to install and promote any operating system, any application, and any Web service on PCs that run Windows. Ultimately, end users are free to choose which software they prefer to use.

Is there a lawyer in the house, or can we just pick someone from the fast readers' group? Does the paragraph above actually say anything that promises other manufacturers or customers the ability to use other stuff on the PC while the PC is actually running Windows?

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 7:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 16, 2006

Hey, What About Me?

Deloitte Research gives us a handy path to the illustration of Clayton Christensen's disruptive innovation. On numbered page 6 of their downloadable paper, the diagram of a value gap attacked by innovation stresses the problem of improvements that are "missing the mark." In this case, customers have already decided on what their quality requirements are worth and have stopped asking for more quality.

But let's cut through the innovation buzz right away: what is vitally important is that the customer's preferences do not consist only of quality issues. The value gap arises from the "customary" product not meeting preferences well enough.

Cued by that, let's look at the issue of "profiling" the potential customer. In a highly general view, this profile should be able to account for at least a few simple things like:
- what's good for the person,
- what the person wants; and
- what the person needs.
In fact, as we cover those items from top to bottom, we earn more and more permission to take a critical place amongst the prospective customer's set of reasonable alternatives.

Prospects can make this tough to figure out, though. The sources of their apparent resistance can range from indifference to confusion, and can be passive or active.

One view on this problem comes from the question, how do we get to know the customer? Do they want us to know them? We start out not knowing them, and we're trying to get to persuade them. But in really tough instances we may have to solve problems ranging from their anonymity (versus our knowing how to find them), on through these:
- their secrecy (versus our knowing what's good for them);
- their privacy (versus our knowing what they want); and
- their security (versus our knowing what they need).

It is an unusual list, but the items are related by the idea that the prospective customer is actually taking some risk by getting discovered or exposed, in which case they will psychologically work to minimize that risk. Offbeat?

Maybe, but not so much. This corresponds to our real-life experience in which being pigeonholed by others reduces our ability to get what we really want. In effect, other parties are actually competing with us for the right to define our identity.

My real point: the notion of risk is significant to the notion of preferences. Furthermore, preferences are critical to the notion of identity.For us suppliers/marketers, then, the underlying principle in engaging the prospect is to get the prospect's permission to "cast" them in a role that we want them to play. We'll get that permission due to preferences.

Marketing to an identity is an effort very well paved in the customer relationship management practice. Any number of references and cases are easily obtained, such as work still found online from MIT's Sloan Management Review about demographics, psychographics, and branding. This particular work brings up the idea that identity is a result of layers of multiple personalities, and furthermore that a cetain hierarchy of these layers may be persistent for one prospect -- although not consistent across more than a small percentage of many prospects.

What is going on in these layers or hierarchies? Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs has long given us a representation that proved very helpful in taking the prospect's temprature and generating some segmentation of general populations. But the most interesting twist on that view is that people are not fundamentally "rational" in their behavior, and they might for example routinely prioritize entertainment over safety. Psychographics has to account for those kinds of things if it is really to be of any reliable use.

Without saying that psychographics hasn't been or isn't effective, the identity definition model that follows below takes on the hierarchical issue without needing caveats. It's not so much a hierarchy of personal progress that matters; instead it's an architecture of identity.

Agreed: the prospect's challenge is to choose who to be. The result of solving the challenge is a predisposition, and the predisposition is what the marketing initially engages.

This challenge would have little importance if the prospect had no need to be social. So a major point of what follows is that solving the challenge is done in terms of factors that affect perceived and actual relationships -- notably, comparisons of one's own identity against either (a.) the apparent identity of others or (b.) the identity that they appear to ask of you.

With that selectivity behind its pertinent factors, the following model illustrates the construction of the identity that the prospect puts into in play:

This self-construction by the prospect can range widely in nature, from being tacitly intuitive to explicitly calculated, as well as ranging from being passively conducted to aggressively.

Regardless, it starts with a prospect's self assessment of two things:
- how they want to fit in (association), and
- how they think they do fit in (accommodation).
The model here identifies association and accomodation as the two key dimensions of the "demographic". The point to remember is that the prospect is determining his/her own demographic.

The prospect then takes that demographic into the realm of immediate experiences. This happens either actually, or by the prospect's forecasting or hypothesis. The model here refers to that "realm" as the "location" . Location, which is predominantly a mental coordinate, has three interacting components:
- negotiation
- position
- status
These components have individual definitions, but right away lets point at what they mean to the prospect:
- association (how I want to fit in) is a result of balancing negotiation and position.
- accommodation (how I think I do fit in) is a result of balancing position and status.
- I need to have my sense of association and of accommodation be compatible with each other.

Now, to get to the particular definition of the components, first note the central role of "position". Position is the product of current goals versus current constraints. Goals may be determined by some decision calculus related to a value system such as ambition, competition, or morals. But goals can be highly sensitive to the situation at hand. Meanwhile, constraints are defacto limitations or dependencies that exist in the way current circumstances are arranged, especially when imposed by other parties or by natural laws. Since both goals and constraints change all the time, the position in the current moment may or may not be reasonably similar to the last time we checked.

Next let's look at "negotiation". What gets negotiated is deviation versus tolerance. Deviation refers to rules, while tolerance refers to expectations (or as some put it, mental models). It doesn't matter yet whether the rules at hand are synthetic (contrived, arbitrary) or natural (circumstantial, self-evident), but moreso whether they seem inevitable. Meanwhile, expectations build up from the impact of actual experiences, so their strength is subject to the influence of new impacts even if the current strength is high. Deviation from rules is a possibility, but the amount of deviation is often bound up in the attractiveness of some imagination or ethic. And tolerance framed by expectations can set boundaries around sensitivity and acceptance -- but those boundaries may be flexible because of changing expectations. Balancing deviation and tolerance often produces what we commonly see as the main signs of differentiation or character-type.

The third component of location is "status", which in this model is a component still under study. But to date it refers to the prospect's environment and particularly to the fit in the environment. Generally, this pertains to the actual external circumstances in which the prospect is having current experiences, as opposed to the more internal mental coordinates of position and negotiation. The common form of this status crosses the mind as, for example, a sense of whether "I belong here" or whether "I'm in good shape here". We anticipate that statuswill also break out into at least two factors, not just to environment -- or that "environment" is the placeholder for a pair of more precise items -- but for now we have enough of a working distinction, and we note that environment can change a lot or a little, depending on at least the prospect's mobility, obligations and luck...

All of the items to which the "location" components refer are what this model calls "conditions".

As seen in the diagram, the prospect's overall predisposition is formed from the way that conditions determine location, which in turn determines the demographic and finally the identity.

The prospect faces the world in terms of those conditions. The conditions posed to the world are dynamically establishing themselves all the time, both separately and against each other. As described above, these dynamics are what the model calls "governors", and it is the governors that comprise the likely interaction with the world. This is, in other words, the "interface" that the prospect has with the world. Typical influences are on one side of the interface; while on the other side, underneath that interface, the derivation of identity is constantly being repeated to generate the prospect's likely response.

In the big picture, the model describes what goes on between (at bottom) the sense of identity that the prospect is forming or maintaining, and (at top) the typical influences that everyone might suspect surrounds them. From bottom to top, the prospect does not decompose an identity to figure out how to face the world; instead, this hierarchy of states is all there all the time, and the typical influences are running the pathways that derive the prospect's sense of identity in the moment.

For influencers working on prospects, there are many types of influence -- from (at top) authority to features -- thus there are many ways to try to "form" a prospect's momentary identity for more correspondence to the influencer's agenda.

It can be important for the influencer to understand things lower in the hierarchy to be more quickly effective. Remember the basic tension:
- how they want to fit in (association), and
- how they think they do fit in (accommodation).

For example, if the prospect thinks "I look good in yellow, but the group that I want to belong in thinks that red is cool", then the prospect is trying to balance association (red) and accommodation (yellow). The prospect has to gauge, "what's my risk of not embracing red, versus my opportunity to get away with yellow?"

Or what if it is important to the prospect to NOT be associated with a group that likes red (accommodation)? Then a preference for "not red" can become highly activated, leaving plenty of identity room for deviation from the norm (association). This is a scenario that, in revolving around a change of goal, relates to the popular notion of the "tipping point", in which rapid adoption of a new standard takes place when an early instance of the new standard proves to satisfy a preference of either unusual or previously unsuspected importance, AND the environment proves to be a reliable supplier of more instances. Put that way, it is easy to recognize that tipping points and disruptive innovations both address the value gap between what is customarily offered and what is actually preferred.

[This article developed from related studies of dynamics in behavioral economics and complexity theory, which other articles at Archestra will eventually discuss with links to this one.]

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 9:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 28, 2006

Broad Friggin Daylight in the Garden of Good and Evil

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 7:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 21, 2006

Culture as Brand

Here's a thought: large companies have the problem of peering into the crystal ball, while small companies have the problem of functioning in a fishbowl.

What does that mean? Large companies act like they are picking the market; small companies act like the market is picking them. Both cases, tough situations for them to handle.

Ironically, the lip-service in each case is usually reversed. At least when these companies are facing their funders, large companies talk about being picked, and small companies talk about doing the picking. Interesting how things switch when the issue is asking for money instead of taking it.

Thinking of the small start-ups and non-profits that I've worked with (not exclusively!) over the years, I'm reminded that both of them frequently struggle with another interesting choice. They might have multiple value propositions riding on the same competency, or they might have only one value prop that anyone cares about, and must shift amongst multiple competencies in order to continue delivering the goods. My experience with them is that the more the outfit needs money, the more it sends multiple competencies at one value prop -- whilst the more it already has money, the more it imagines that one competency is wonderfully fertile. This is related to the market targeting issue, but it's more directly concerned with competing after the targeting has been done.

Related to that, I notice that we usually try to imagine branding as being a cause versus being an effect. That is, if brand is what we want buyers to think we think we're about, how do we make the many things that we do cause them to see us one way? Or are we simply at the mercy of whatever random things they do to see us?

Mulling over branding a few years back, and thinking about companies that can't see themselves the way customers see them, I hit a point regarding the vast difference between "positioning" and "position" -- hardly a new topic. I suddenly had the thought that to close the gap, the real purpose of a business is to create customers, while the purpose of a customer is to create products.

The realization came from an imaginary dialogue:

Company: "I'm doing this *for You*
Prospect: "Yes, but are you doing it *this way* ?"
Company: "Well, what do I get if I do?"
Prospect: "You get *me*..."

Think about how persuasive it is to be able to tell an audience what kind of customer you make -- which is what we can think of as the "cause" aspect of branding. Prospects would say "I want to be like your other customers" and so the reputation helps you to make more customers. (Good positioning!)

The "effect" aspect is more about the product (or likewise service) that actually gets made. Although the catalyst for the product is the customer, the bottom line is that the company winds up making the product for itself and finding out later if it's good enough to sell. Prospects say "I require something of a certain type" and their scrutiny of your product/service ranks you (leaves you) somewhere in their consciousness. (Position, for better or worse.)

At any rate, those thoughts boil down to the idea that the prospect defines the opportunity by expressing their *preference*, so you market to the preference. Moreso, as savvy salespeople know, the preference reflects an "assumed identity", and the same prospect could turn into several different customers.

Putting it in the context of revenue growth through superior competition, such differences seem to point at segmentation. It's quite interesting to imagine that one given potential buyer might be a customer simultaneously in different segments, but this is something to think about especially in terms of what customer relationship management must address. Frankly, it must address culture -- which is the empirical evidence that the prospect's multiple personalities make sense to them...

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 1:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 11, 2005

Needs Are Not Requirements - A Failed Romance

This week, as in many others, our customary readings intersected in a question of whether business is the best way for customers to get what they need. Answer: maybe not!

In a handy coincidence, Joshua Greenbaum wrote that customers hate their software vendors, while Richard Snow wrote that vendors don't understand their customers.

It might be said that customers pay for a satisfying relationship without having the wherewithal to manage the relationship successfully. Here we have to separate the idea that the customer gets what they demand from that of their getting what they want. A lack of customer satisfaction is about needs, while getting what they are entitled to is about requirements. Unfortunately, needs and requirements are two different things.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 8:15 AM | Comments (0)