Spock Fails at Branding

Every purchase decision involves emotion. We buy from people we like, we buy from brands we like. Unless you’re selling commodities to robots, reason takes a back seat to feelings. Spock fails at branding. Every time.

Don’t manage people.

Manage things. Lead people. Organizational strategies often use “manage” as a catch-all verb for how to deal with finance, operations, people, processes, time – as if all kinds of assets were alike. As if  you could use a similar set of tools to manipulate financial capital, human capital, intellectual capital, and so on. It’s myopic, and it leads to dysfunction. …

Startup Success Step #9

Who will you steal from? You can’t invent a new audience, or discover money not being spent elsewhere, as our wise friend/business guru Dave Baney often says. You must steal a customer away from somebody else. Understanding this reality puts into perspective the activities that you need to convince someone to buy from you. Your revenues will not be created …

Startup Success Step #11

Some entrepreneurs, knowing their startup is going to go against formidable entrenched competitors, try to succeed by “flying under the radar,” hoping that the big guy (Unilever, Ralston Purina, IBM, Whoever) will somehow not pay attention to them and not squash them like a bug. Fingers crossed. Not a practical strategy. A new venture needs visibility first and foremost, so …

Startup Success Step #14

Grab that category. We often talk about owning a category, a very desirable if ambitious goal for a startup, particularly if you can create a Blue Ocean category where you are the only participant. More often, your startup will resemble other alternatives in an existing category. So the relevant question becomes, if you can’t own the category, do you at …

It’s Darwinian. (Duh!)

Is your brand endangered? Here are nine tests to see if you’re adapting for survival: 1. Have you shifted >51% of your media spending to online? 2. Could your tagline be used only by you, and not by your closest competitor? 3. Has your website been redesigned since 2007? 4. Have you introduced a new product line (not just a …

The zen of push and pull

In olden days (think 1994) marketing was 90% push marketing. We pushed messages in print, on broadcast, at trade shows, in directories, by direct mail, by any hunter-gatherer technique we could find. We believed if we smiled louder than competing brands, more often, we would build awareness of our USP, and … our work was done. That strategy is a …