I am NOT Maverick Marketing Sydney

What can you learn from spies? It seems a great deal. Here’s how what they do can be applied in your business.

In this interview, Kenneth Knight (who describes his job as helping the president of the United States and his administration “avoid surprise”) shares insights into how he evaluates threats, overcomes cognitive biases, and constructs scenarios—challenges familiar to most private-sector strategists.

In his job as the national intelligence officer for warning, Knight oversees a small team of analysts who serve as an institutionalized safeguard against risk—monitoring and challenging the analyses and assumptions of the broader intelligence community.

So what does he say are the Challenges facing Strategists?

• In today’s world, there are a tremendous number of issues that don’t lie within a nation state, that don’t involve a military or defense-related kind of background. So trying to transform that system to be more adept, more dynamic, more able to deal with and anticipate emerging challenges in this global environment we’re in today is the hardest thing, because it’s not an organizational change as much as it is a mind-set and focus change.
• Most experts become experts and rise to the top of our community because they have a very good analytic framework for looking at their issue. That allows them to process lots of information, put it in some kind of strategic context, and say something relevant and useful to the policy people.
• A lot of times surprises occur when those analytic frameworks that the experts have—and have built their career on, and have built their experience on—no longer apply. And so we are constantly kind of pushing that and causing tension, where a nonexpert from my office is engaging with an expert and challenging their expert bias. I think the ways to get around that: there’s really two. And we’ve tried in both areas, and I think have made progress in both areas.
• to me, it’s this constant articulation of what are you trying to accomplish? What are you trying to avoid? And then a conscious examination of the world and the information you have in front of you to try to, from a possibilities-based perspective, imagine how this information and the situation you see developing could make an impact on those things you’re trying to accomplish.
• I think this constant need to look at your own business model or your own, in our case, intelligence model, and to look at what are the baseline assumptions that you have that that model rests on and to challenge those—and not just in a check-the-box way, not just do an alternative assessment at the end of your baseline analysis and reconfirm your analysis, but to truly challenge them—to me it’s the only way, I think, to stay current and perhaps stay ahead of the curve.
• I would say that not all analytic problems are the same. I think the kinds of issues we’re trying to deal with fall on a spectrum from the known knowable to the more complex chaotic. I think it was Joe Nye, when he was chairman of the National Intelligence Councils, who described this as mysteries and secrets, which is not a bad shorthand.

See the full transcript at McKinsey Quarterly.

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The crisis—one year on: McKinsey Global Economic Conditions Survey results, September 2009 has just been released.

And it says that a year after the global economic system nearly collapsed, many companies are finally finding ways to increase profits under the new economic conditions.

But almost as many expect profits to continue falling, and executives have also indicated  that their broader economic hopes remain fragile.

Many expect more government involvement in economies and industries over the long term.

So what else does the survey reveal? Here are some of the highlights:

• Some companies have moved beyond merely coping with the crisis and are once again actively planning for the long term. Now, for the first time in a year, more respondents expect their companies’ profits to rise than fall in the near term. Product development and long-term planning are back to being high priorities for many companies, and most are optimistic about their prospects in the longer term.

• In the longer run, many executives expect the globalization of financial and other markets to resume after slowing notably in 2009. They foresee additional significant changes in their industries and economies over the next five years, including a stronger government role in both.

• While the crisis started in the United States, executives in North America have consistently indicated that it will end sooner than executives elsewhere expect. Those in the eurozone have consistently been gloomiest about their economic situation and outlook. But the pattern for expectations is essentially the same in all regions, indicating that the present crisis hasn’t fundamentally disconnected the world’s economies.

• A majority of the executives don’t expect GDP to rise soon, and the responses also suggest other indicators of economic anxiety: 54 percent, for example, say that governments should scale back—but not stop—their support for economies.

• The anxiety of the executives is also highlighted by the plurality—42 percent—of them still think “battered but resilient” is the best description of the economy over the next several months. This finding suggests that the respondents expect a long, slow recovery.

• Expectations for profits are significantly brighter than they were six weeks ago, and expectations for customer demand are notably brighter. The share expecting that their companies will increase the size of the workforce over the next six months has risen to 26 percent, equaling—for the first time in a year—the share that expect it to decline.

• The top current priorities of companies are a mix of short- and long-term moves, including cutting costs, developing new products, and working to ensure that organizations are flexible enough to respond to changing economic conditions.

• Respondents from almost three-quarters of the companies expect them to be in a stronger competitive position five years from now than they were before September 2008.

Read the full report here: McKinsey Global Economic Conditions Survey results, September 2009

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CHANGING THE NAME OF THE GAME.

Ok, lots of famous people talk about the need to innovate. Gary Hamel did it, so did Tom Peters, and Seth Godin, and many others far more famous than me.

It’s true too.

You must innovate – but none of these people tell you how to do it.

I can see why. It’s difficult to define where a breakthrough idea comes from.

But I am going to attempt it. Right now. Right here. Today. Get yourself comfortable, it’s gonna be a long read.

From a marketing strategy point of view, the truly exciting, but potentially high risk strategy is one that changes the way the game is played.

The outcome of this is usually a product, service or way of doing something that is disruptive to an industry.

In other words, they are disruptive technologies since they shift the balance of power, often from a large cumbersome dinosaur-like incumbent to an agile upstart that has the audacity to challenge Goliath.
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We’ve all heard the term rightsizing, and the mere mention of the word serves as the catalyst for a room full of eyes to roll towards the heavens. Groan. Here we go again.

In this era of layoffs, restructures, downsizing (or should I say rightsizing), corporates have tended to grab the opportunity to reduce the cost of employing people with a flourish. And it’s easy to see why.

Inside the hallowed walls of your average corporation, more than half the people employed never ever deal with a customer. Compare that to a small business where 75% of employees are dealing with customers – and it doesn’t take Einstein to see it’s easy pickings for a corporate to target its human cost base.

And, in an era where quarterly results matter, and stock markets will whack your business hard if the numbers aren’t right, so there is plenty of incentive for senior management to look at ways to actively reduce costs. And often employees represent a large proportion of the cost.

So why then are there more downsides than upsides when it comes to restructuring.

Because a headcount reduction – in the absence of a program of work that looks to streamline business process (and this program of work needs to be initiated before the restructure and almost never is) – is one of the dumbest things for a business to do and yet smart well-paid executives keep on doing it. But you cannot reasonably expect fewer employees to do the same amount of work – instead you can reasonably expect a substantial impact on productivity and morale, and the increasing engagement of contractors to help bridge the gap in delivery left by the departure of employees. SO you might shift costs across budgets – but you ain’t shifting them out.

So before you slash and burn your headcount:

• Put in place a program of reengineering processes and streamlining them.
• Remove duplication of effort
• Dismantle bureaucracies
• Reduce cycle times

“Any company that is more successful at restructuring than reengineering will find itself getting smaller faster than it is getting better,” Hamel and Prahalad, authors of Competing for the Future, told us back in 1994. Words that still ring true today.

If you don’t pursue growth and new market opportunities with the same zest you apply to rightsizing your organisation and creating operational efficiency, you will die by the numbers you live for. And you may fatally risk the health of your entire business in the process.

What do you think? Check out other posts about Business.

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Over the course of my career, like everyone else I’ve faced a wide variety of marketing problems.

Most of them were not difficult to solve – provided I took off a textbook mentality and applied some plain old common sense.

It isn’t education that makes you great at marketing – although it helps. It isn’t attitude either – although that helps a lot too.

Experience counts for a lot too, so let’s not dismiss its important.

However, even more than these attributes, what really helps the most is plain old common sense, something that is in desperately short supply amongst marketers and business people in general – and best of all, you don’t need a university or a degree to learn it.

To just need to learn to think.

For Example, Common Sense Says That:

• If you have a commodity product that you are trying to charge a 30% premium for and nobody’s buying it because they do not believe you can justify your pricing premium, you need to revisit your pricing or brand strategy.

• If you use generic keywords to attract visitors to your website, your sales conversion ratio is going to look really ugly because you’re going to attract a lot of traffic, most of which is not remotely interested in buying your product.

• If you do not move your brand with the times, it’s going to become tired and boring, and you are going to be eaten alive by someone else that is more progressive than you.

• If you treat your employees disrespectfully, their morale will drop. They will stop being champions of your brand and your business. And if they are any good at what they do, they will leave you and take their experience and skills to someone who treats them better.

• If your product does not deliver what it is expected to – or what you claim it will – word will spread and your brand will be damaged.

• The best way to create brand goodwill is to build engagement between your customers and employees. You only need to look at social media traffic to get the gist of this piece of common sense.

So as you can see, common sense tells you a lot.

Often the solution to problems or challenges (for those with a preference for more politically-correct statements than me) is very simple and can be fixed with a dose of common sense.

And simple is good. Simple ideas are usually more powerful. They are quicker to implement.

They get locked into people’s minds. You’ll get results faster.

Keep everything as simple as possible. And that’s another thing common sense tells you.

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A product roadmap is exactly that – it is a map outlining the route your product development will take over a specified period of time.

The time span covered will depend on your product and its industry.

(For example, you would expect upgrades and changes to software products to move extremely quickly; conversely the development of a new piece of large machinery may take many years.)

The purpose of creating a product roadmap is to develop out the innovation strategy for your product (or service) – to think through and articulate the direction, the technology required, the marketing, the investment and the milestones.

As a document, a product roadmap brings together the thinking of the technologist with the marketing manager, and provides the basis for your discussions with major suppliers and customers.

It also serves the entrepreneur with a vehicle to take to investors since it describes how the products will be brought to market; the potential applications for the product; the short-term focus (and why you choose to focus where you do) and the longer term market opportunities both for increasing your market (and in case your original markets do not mature – a contingency plan) and of course how your product is different from (and superior to) competitors.
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It’s showtime.

Plop yourself into a comfy chair, kick back, and watch as the contest unfolds.

Woolies has announced plans to buy into hardware in a classic case of he did – so I will too.

Wesfarmers owns Bunnings and Coles, and in the not-too-distant future Woolies will own Safeway and yet-to-be-named-new-hardware-chain.

It’s big news, it even made the Wall Street Journal.

The scene is set for a ferocious battle of two retailing giants (well, they are giants by Australian standards).

Both ambitious, both well-resourced. It sure will make for an interesting battle.

So what’s behind the move? Well, according to Woolies chief executive Michael Luscombe, the expected demand for construction off the back of first home owner grants is an excellent time to enter the fray. Of course, in the other corner, the champion at hardware is telling the media that the chain relishes the opportunity to compete with any new entrant.
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#1 Facebook:

Anyone can join, anyone can build an online profile, anyone can link to one another and share information. To use it for business, create a “Fan Page” for your business. Through creating fans of your customers, you can use this platform to inform them of news, updates or information.

#2 Twitter:

An online short messaging service where you can inform, update and share stuff with your followers as long as you can say it within 140 characters. Businesses use it in a variety of ways, some with spectacular success. If you want to find out more, head to Twitter 101 (if you find yourself at a crappy affiliate/cybersquatter site you’re at the wrong place).

#3 YouTube:

Gotta love YouTube. You can spend days watching videos – and they have videos covering every conceivable subject. If you’re looking for footage from the Bay City Rollers or Rick Astley – it’s on YouTube. If you want to see the first man on the moon – that’s there too. Anyone can upload to YouTube provided you have registered on the site.

Businesses are using to display their advertising. You can even upload your video content to YouTube and embed it in your own website, thus side-stepping the need to dig into your wallet to pay for bandwidth. (There is a loss in video quality but, heck, it’s free.)

#4 LinkedIn:

I’ve been on Linked In for some years now. I like Linked In because it’s more professional and you don’t get spammed as frequently as you might do in other forums. Businesses use it to search for partners, venture capitalists and, most commonly of all, recruiting new staff.

#5 Digg:

Digg is a place where people share news content. If your business article, tips, advice or story ranks well on Digg, you can see a significant increase of traffic to your website – so it’s a good vehicle for improving your site ranking in search engines.

#6 Stumbleupon:

Similar to Digg, Stumbleupon is a networking site where Stumblers can explore and rate different content. The popular websites and blogs tend to rank higher in stumbleupon which sends traffic to your website – so it’s another good vehicle for improving your site ranking in search engines.

#7 Yelp:

The website’s slogan is real people, real reviews. So it’s members write reviews about businesses. If you are in the US, you can check out your own rating and feedback, and spy on your competitors too.

#8 Delicious:

Delicious is a bookmarking website. You can bookmark your favorite content to share with others, and generate traffic to your website by writing comments which link back to your website (via your profile page).

1 Rule about Social Media.

It is no place for sales pitches. That’s it. Full stop.

Social media is concerned with establishing relationships with people, and to do this successfully you need to give before you can get. Spend the time getting to know people, building trust and rapport, and experimenting with which social media websites work best for you.

There is no doubt that you should consider using social media for your brand and business, but to do it successfully, you must follow the cardinal rule of no pitches. Instead, focus on having a bit of fun and creating great content that everyone enjoys.

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When it comes to building online brand communities using social media, do unto yourself as others already do unto you, so say the Wall Street Journal in its latest article, Fans Know Best, on the increasingly popular topic of social media.

The haves are the social media sites where visitors like to hang out, exchanging ideas and information, chatting freely about the product or company—or about the weather, if they prefer. These web sites have rich potential for marketing insights and for strengthening bonds between the product makers and their customers.

The have-nots, not so much. These web sites tightly control what visitors can discuss—often, the product only—and offer few ways for them to interact. These communities are so drab, so uninviting, that many visitors never return after a brief first visit.

But here’s the really sad part: Most of these have-not communities are run by the companies themselves. The more-successful communities are usually run by enthusiasts and customers of the brands and products.

The Four Rules to Getting Fans on Social Media.

So you want to get fans on social media? Here are the 4 rules you have to follow:

Rule #1. Stop Controlling Everything.
Allowing discussion and activities like networking and socializing leads visitors to participate in the site for emotional and social reasons. It keeps them coming back, and thus strengthens the bond between them and the company.

Rule #2. Welcome diversity.
Limiting a community to customers only can prevent a company from discovering attractive new market segments it hasn’t considered before.

Rule #3. Give visitors ways of interacting.
Encourage a variety of social interactions. Visitors frequently network, flirt and joke with each other. Off-topic conversations are common, though so are rules against personal attacks, pornography and other types of offensive postings.

Letting visitors talk and interact makes them feel that they are part of a special group, which reinforces their support of the brand and fuels resistance to rival brands. Shared rituals and traditions also arise, such as narratives of the brand’s origins and history, celebrations, and unique jargon. These types of cultural underpinnings help tighten bonds between customers and company, too.

Rule #4: If you can’t be like the fan sites, at least monitor and support them.
Systematically tracking and engaging these communities opens up a host of potential benefits for companies. Not only will marketers gain access to some of their most devoted and influential fans here, but they will also find more ideas for innovations; sharper criticisms of existing product problems, along with ideas for fixing them; and more sincere providers of customer service.

See the full article online at the Wall Street Journal.

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How important is a brand name? The answer is critical.

So you’ve got a new brand or product and you’re feeling blank about what to call it.

You can engage an expensive consultant to help you to work this out – or you can follow the dos and don’ts of naming new brands below (plus a stay out of jail card, absolutely free) and have a crack at it yourself.

The most important thing that you need to do when you create a new product or service is to provide that product or service with a name.
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