Be Different or be dead

November 18, 2010

Why an aspiration can actually kill your ability to compete

Source: Unsplash

Why an aspiration can kill your ability to compete. Aspirations keep your head in the clouds even though results are achieved on the ground.

An essential component of building a business plan for your organization is declaring how you intend to compete and win against the competition.

This is all about deciding what you will do to convince targeted customers to do business with you and only you.

Unfortunately, most organizations come up with competitive advantage claims that describe what they aspire to do, rather than laying out detailed, specific and concrete reasons for people to buy from them as opposed to others

Meaningless claims like these pervade the marketplace:

▪️‘we provide the utmost in service and selection’

▪️‘we offer the best quality anywhere’

▪️‘we provide top notch service’

▪️‘we have been in business for over 50 years’

▪️‘we provide a wide range of services’

▪️‘we provide the best network in Canada’

▪️‘we are the most technologically advanced company in our business’

▪️‘we have people who care’

These types of statements might pass the helium-filled vision test, but they do little to stake out a claim that will communicate precisely what the organization intends to do to differentiate itself from their competition.

They do little to set customer expectations in terms of the behavior they should expect to see and the experience they should expect to enjoy. What exactly do they mean?

Every customer is likely to view the clams differently. Each employee would likely have a different definition of what each means; a big problem when it comes to delivering on the claim.

Consistency is required, not everyone doing what THEY think the claim means.

They are simply too general and at too high a level to be meaningful.

So, examine your competitive claims. Declare your position in compelling precise terms using the ONLY statement.

Leave aspirations out of the strategy room.

Get specific. Create a competitive claim that clearly articulates how you are different from the herd.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 11.18.10 at 12:00 pm by Roy Osing
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November 15, 2010

Why learning all the time will make your career insanely successful

Source: Unsplash

Why learning all the time will make your career insanely successful.

Are you a continuous career learner?

Or, have you assumed that your formal education and job experience - previous and current - have generated all the intellectual property that you need to help your organization reach greater levels of performance and as a result enhance your career?

Career learning is an imperative. Many don’t take the time to do it so it represents a critical component of personal differentiation. It involves acquiring completely new levels of knowledge outside of what you now know and what your jobs have taught you.

A career learner makes a difference to the organization and develops its immunity to survive.

Career learners determine what is important to the organization and they are constantly learning about topics that can help.

Consider this strategic learning as opposed to more casual learning where you focus on a subject that only interests you. Hopefully you can satisfy both objectives: learn something that interests you and also benefits the organization.

But your priority should be to focus on an area that will provide benefits to your organization. If marketing effectiveness is an issue, for example, go find out what the sales pundits are saying about the subject and what direction they are advocating.
Learn about the options; determine which one is appropriate for your organization and modify it to fit your unique circumstances.

Strategic learning

Here’s how the strategic learning process worked for me:

— List the top three challenges your organization faces. For example, let’s assume they are: declining customer loyalty and market share, reduced product margins and virtually no marketing innovation.

— Determine the learning competencies that you need to adopt. In my case it was marketing

— List your subject matter expertise categories - finance, problem solving, mathematics.

— Determine your learning gap - marketing

— Target the subject matter experts to fill your learning gap - there are numerous sources - authors as well as consulting organizations - that specialize in the topic of service quality. Find one or two that you find potentially productive. My mentor is Seth Godin.

— Gather relevant reading material, attend conferences, contact service quality consultants and start learning.

Hand-in-hand with learning is the application of new knowledge to enhance organizational performance. If knowledge is not applied to drive better results it really has little value.

So, as you are engaged in the learning process, always be thinking about how you could possibly apply it or some version of it to make it useful to your organization.

If knowledge isn’t applied to drive results it has no value - it’s about execution

Early in my career the telecom industry was transforming from a virtual monopoly to an intensely competitive business. With more competition coming, the competitive battle was going to be won or lost over the customer and the winner would be the company that did the best job of understanding and responding to customer needs.

The big picture was marketing.

My formal education was mathematics and computer science and my previous jobs had contributed systems & productivity analysis experience. There was much to learn if I wanted to gain any proficiency in marketing and make myself of value as the company moved forward to do battle in the competitive arena.

I was infatuated with marketing and read everything that I could get my hands on concerning the topic.

Within a year and a half I felt that I had at least a modicum of intellectual competency that would make me a viable consideration for future opportunities when they came available.

Obviously I needed to get into a position where I could practice marketing and show my stuff, but the first task was to be able to discuss and demonstrate that I understood marketing principles and concepts enough to earn the right to practice them.

The result of my career learning’s in marketing were gratifying, leading me to the VP position then on to Senior VP and later in my career to EVP & Chief Marketing Officer.

I was often asked how I managed to get on this career path since I only had a math and computer background and had no formal education in marketing.

The answer: a passion for career learning in marketing and the courage to apply new marketing ideas.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 11.15.10 at 11:59 am by Roy Osing
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November 4, 2010

How my quiz can help leaders know if they are special

How my quiz can help leaders know if they are special

Source: Unsplash

One of the most critical roles of a leader is to create a business plan and strategy for their organization that enables it to standout from their competitors in markets of changing customer needs and intense competition.

How does a leader approach the challenge? How do they know if their business plan is on the right path to being different from the herd of competitors they face in the market?

It is often the simple tools that provide the greatest insight into such a question, and over my 40+ year leadership career I’ve developed specific practical and proven practices that work together to build an organization that is unmatched by others.

If you want to see how your organization rates on the BE DiFFERENT or be dead scale, check out my 25 question quiz .

Rate your leadership in each of the critical categories of strategy, marketing, customer service, serving customers and sales to see how effectively you are applying my practices to separate your organization from the competitive blur in the marketplace.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 11.4.10 at 12:00 pm by Roy Osing
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October 21, 2010

How to market happiness and beat your competition

Source: Pexels

How to market happiness and beat your competition.

Happiness has significant implications for marketing to stand-out and be more successful.

The simple truth is that marketing happiness makes good business sense. But I don’t see it happening anytime soon.

I find marketing for the most part today predictable and for the most part lacking imagination.

As I’ve said elsewhere, probably greater than 80% of all marketing activity is spent flogging products and services to mass markets (although the internet technology available today allows a higher degree of personalization) based on persona composites of the ‘average’ person in the crowd.

Product myopia is the result of a supply-minded view. Marketers are infatuated with the capabilities of what they produce. The coolness of their technology. The functionality of their gadget.

The problem is, with virtually everyone following this marketing pedagogy none achieves the exalted position of DiSTINCTION, UnFORGETTABILITY, UnIQUENESS, GaSPWORTHINESS and ReMARKABILITY.

Consumers see a blur of offerings and capabilities with no one standing out from the herd. Value is a spoken word with no substance. It’s all about the ‘iron’ of production. The secret desires of the fan are lost in the flurry of product management activity to ship the product.

The course of marketing must change if it is to be relevant in today’s markets.

A person buys when they are happy and it’s the experience that triggers it.

Tangible goods at best deliver short term euphoria; they don’t produce long term happiness.

A new SUV initially delivers awesomeness to its owner for a period, but the euphoria soon fades as it becomes a used car. A new condo is amazing as the paint dries, but thereafter is an asset that has to be cleaned and maintained.

And if the new MacBook Air delivers all the functionality it promises, it’s rated ‘ok’; it’s acceptable but no long term adulation is created (in fact if the functionality of a tangible good is not delivered as promised, the purchase creates short term ‘pain’ for the producer as the consumer’s anger is spread to their friends and family).

Experiences on the other hand are a different matter. People remember experiences. They feel experiences. They talk to others about experiences. They buy repeatedly on experiences. They are happier when they are in a memorable experience. It’s not rocket science.

The trip to Maui leaves long lasting impressions and the family dinner leaves gratitude indelibly etched within us. And we want to experience those feelings again and again.

So why don’t marketers listen?

- They don’t understand the power of the happiness marketing strategy and why it should take priority over a product-push one;
- The product push approach has worked in the past and they trust that it will continue to work in the future;
- They like what they’re doing and don’t want to change;
- There is a great deal of effort required to engage niche customer groups and find out what experiences, specifically, would make them happy;
- They see happiness as a ‘fluffy’ value with little evidence that marketing it will produce economic benefits.

Yet credible opinion exists on the power of happiness and the benefits produced:

- University and other studies — at Cornell for example — show that experiences bring greater happiness and satisfaction than buying and owning possessions;
I attended a Deepak Chopra event in Vancouver where he argued that experiences deliver happiness in three ways: planning an experience creates anticipation and excitement, participating in the experience creates in-the-moment euphoria and remembering the experience creates lasting memories;
- Tony Hseih, CEO of Zappos in his book Delivering Happiness, discusses ‘how using happiness as a framework can produce profits, passion and purpose in both business and life’;
- And happiness has even taken on a political dimension. Tiny Bhutan has made ‘Gross National Happiness’ the central aim of its domestic policy to increase well-being and improve the quality of life for all their citizens.

The current attitude to marketing happiness must change if the craft is to become an even more relevant and vibrant profession.

What we need is a ‘happiness pandemic’ in the marketing community where the virus is encouraged to spread.

The new marketing order — happiness marketing — must focus on creating memorable experiences for people. Where feelings reign supreme. Where emotion rules. Where marketing success is measured by how many mind-blowing experiences are created for people rather than how many products are sold.

There is a simple, practical way to get started. Establish the position of ‘Experience Manager’ to marketing organization charts to complement the product or customer manager position.

Hold the experience manager accountable to:

- Learn about what types of experiences in various customer groups make people happy.
- Define the high emotion experiences with the strongest appeal.
- Use the ‘happiness secrets’ that are discovered as the vaccine to inject into company operations as well,as products and services.
- Measure and track the number of memorable experiences created in the organization every day.
- Set experience targets in the marketing plan.
- Work with product management to determine the products and services that produce the best experiences for customers and find ways to replicate the happiness impact with the broader product portfolio.
- Build an annual marketing ‘experience plan’ that influences what the product and customer managers do.

Happiness can be an amazing business builder for any organization and epic experiences are the way to trigger it in any person.

Establish the Experience Manager and use the position to give your organization a competitive advantage over the product-floggers.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 10.21.10 at 12:00 pm by Roy Osing
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