Be Different or be dead

September 26, 2016

Why a business plan that follows others can be a gigantic failure

Source: Unsplash

Why a business plan that follows others can be a gigantic failure.

Fuelled by the Internet and technological innovation, competition in every sector is increasing with blazing speed.

You would think that in the face of relentless competitive pressure, organizations would get more proficient at carving out a differentiated position in their market, creating a value proposition that is crystal clear and unique. But it’s not happening.

In fact, the opposite is occurring.

‘Un-differentiation’ seems to be the norm.

Business is infatuated with copying. Best in class and best of breed are targets for emulation. Benchmarking is the key driver of improvement and innovation.

Follow the leader is played with the belief that somehow a standout competitive claim will evolve and resonate with customers. It just does not happen.

Products and services end up on most organizations’ infatuation list. Me-too features and capabilities are pushed on the market with the hope and prayer that a miracle will happen and their version will end up being the winner.

Product features and benefits are stressed as the panacea to the customer’s wants and desires. What the technology can do is given the limelight over the value it creates for people.

Mass markets are catered to, driven by a one-size-fits-all marketing mentality. Individuals take second seat to plurality.

Product corners are rounded, believing that incremental changes will make the product appeal to more people. The problem is, this strategy results in the product appealing to no one.

Businesses rush to offer lower prices than their competition, believing that this price position will engender customer loyalty and gain competitive advantage. Everyone is in this game to a degree. It seems to be that the herd races to the bottom on price rather than enduring the gruelling work to race to the top on unique value creation for people.

The bottom line: the world is burning with a growing competitive flame yet organizations are not good at establishing a clear, relevant and unique claim that distinguishes them from their competitors and that makes them stand out from everyone else.

What’s the solution?

If the competitive herd is copying products and services, features and benefits, the right long-term strategy is to be different, to stand out from the herd.

How do you stand out?

By creating and delivering value that is relevant (something that people really care about) and unique - something that only you provide.

The end-game is to create an organization that consistently creates distinction, uniqueness, remarkability, gasp-worthiness, indispensability, memorability and unforgettability for the people it chooses to serve.

These are the key strategic concepts that should drive how we innovate and shape our organizations.

These are the characteristics that attract people to buy from an organization because it makes them feel good. Yes, feelings are a hard-core business concept that drive repeat purchases and long-term customer loyalty.

On the other hand, if you can’t be gasp-worthy to people, be prepared to be common, ignored, invisible, dispensable and dead (sooner or later).

You choose.

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

• Posted 9.26.16 at 05:47 am by Roy Osing
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September 19, 2016

5 simple ways to get your marketing message across

5 simple ways to get your marketing message across.

Marketers today face a formidable challenge when it comes to communicating their message to the market

Never has there been so much noise from so many companies in so many forms of media all vying for mind share.

Here are five tips that will help you cut through the clutter and land your message successfully:

Be really clear on who you are talking to — Who do you want to receive your message? Who do you want to convince to buy what you are selling? Too many organizations these days push their message on the masses thinking that it will resonate with someone who cares.

It’s a supply orientation where the emphasis is on pushing what you supply as opposed to fulfilling what people need and desire. And it operates from a belief that there is an ‘average’ potential customer who possesses all the attributes of a worthy target.

It’s a risky proposition to spray the masses with your demands expecting a healthy hit rate that will yield a healthy return on the communications investments made. It might resonate with some but it will be ignored by many.

Effective messaging looks the target straight in the eyes. It is a penetrating one-on-one expression that’s based on what the individual wants, not what you think the crowd wants.

Effective messaging is ‘eyeball to eyeball’. Best to know exactly who you want to talk to before you open your mouth.

Speak to what they receive not what you give — People are tired of getting stuff shoved down their throats and being told what’s good for them in all forms of advertising.

Typically, this ‘message push’ has two characteristics that make it unproductive:

- The communications stresses what the product or service consists of; its feature elements and the gee whiz technology used to provide it;
- The messaging is based on a customer profile which is a composite of what the lowest common denominator person looks like in the market segment being targeted.

By emphasizing what the product does and the technology it employs, companies are hoping the target will be infatuated with its coolness and buy it to be part of the in-crowd.

And by targeting their message at a composite average customer profile, they hope that a sufficient number of potential customers will see the relevance of the product to their own particular needs and make the purchase.

Most organizations hope that their message bombardment will strike the relevance chord with the majority of the audience, but it doesn’t. All it does is add to the noise and clutter.

Both expectations are severely flawed. People buy something because it satisfies a need or want — like amazing pictures on their mobile device — not because it uses a particular technology to deliver it.
And, because everyone of us is different in some way, what I care about is different from most other people so I will likely ignore a message based on an average profile.

Effective messaging speaks to personal relevance, what we as individuals personally care about with absolutely no consideration of the person standing next to us.
So take off your product and service hat, downplay its technology platform and focus on what individuals desire, covet and ‘lust for’ if you seek a messaging strategy that will perform beyond expectations.

Convince them why they should choose you — You have merely seconds to establish your currency in the crowd of companies all vying for audience attention. Everyone has a shield up in front of them to protect themselves from the inundation of messages they see on television, hear on radio or that pop up on the web page they are browsing.
The volume of messaging stimuli is overwhelming so the ignore factor is always high.

So how do you capture my interest in a nano-second before my eyes glaze over and I move on?
Even if your message addresses what I care about — i.e. it’s relevant — in a compelling way I may still ignore it because relative to other companies supplying something similar it doesn’t stand out — it’s not unique.

Elsewhere, I’ve talked about creating the ONLY Statement to express what makes an organization special, unique and unmatchable in a relevant and compelling way:

‘We are the ONLY ones that…’

Your messaging plan must use your ONLY as the way to carve out your place in the crowd and enhance your indispensability to the audience.

Make your call to action respectful and easy — You can’t demand their money but make them feel stupid if they don’t capitulate to your offer at incredible savings. I’ve actually had sales people suggest I was crazy not to take them up on their offer that would save me money.

‘In your face’ asks like this are insulting. Be honoured if they decide to do business with you. And if they don’t, be respectful and grateful that they even considered you.

And, if they do agree to buy, make it easy for them to complete the transaction. Making them go through hoops could force them to lose their good intentions.

The reason most organizations can’t get their message across is they are trapped in mass thinking, and pushing their agenda on everyone. This approach doesn’t work in today’s ‘me’ society where relevance and personalization are key.

Don’t talk about low prices — The price messaging game is insanity. If all you have is lower or lowest price to talk about, you have nothing substantive to say at all. So ZIP IT!

Organizations that advertise lower prices trust that this strategy will make their business better off, that somehow they will gain a market advantage in the long run.

The benefits of focusing on price are illusory or short term at best. Revenue may spike up in the short term but it comes at the expense of lower margins unless costs can be reduced at the same time (which rarely happens).

Communicating lower prices has little strategic value; it never enhances your long term market position.

It contributes nothing to differentiate you. It doesn’t make you special or unique in the eyes of the customer.
In fact it has the opposite effect. It shouts out your status as a commodity player who is interested in providing little more than low prices.

The reason it seems that price is all your customers care about is that you haven’t given them anything else to care about — Seth Godin

Price floggers are a dime a dozen; you will not likely win this game. You might keep your head above water for a short time but sooner or later you will either hit the margin wall, or some gunslinger will come along and lower their prices again.

And the race to the bottom is on.

Effective marketing communications speaks to value and benefits being delivered to the customers you want to attract or keep. Forget about the easy price message because you have no credibility or future with it.

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

• Posted 9.19.16 at 06:28 am by Roy Osing
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September 12, 2016

Why online dating is a great way to create your personal brand

Source: Pexels

Why online dating is a great way to create your personal brand.

Building a personal brand is more than seizing some words that you think tell the story of who you are and what you stand for. Rather, it’s a process of defining and then doing many ‘small things’ that collectively define you.

Personal brand building is a strategic process that asks more than ‘Who am I?’, it also then asks ‘Who do I need to be?’. The latter question is the strategic piece; ‘How do I need to be perceived?’ is answered as if you were creating a business plan with a competitive advantage claim.

Your brand needs to be forever relevant, for if it fades from resonating with the people around you, it’s useless.
To be effective, a brand must continue to resonate with those that experience it; they must see it as a ‘forever’ solution to problems they continue to have or challenges they continue to face.

A brand that doesn’t relate to the issues people care about in the moment is irrelevant and the person propagating the brand goes unnoticed.

Furthermore, a compelling brand is amoebic. It adapts to and changes with the circumstances surrounding the person owning it. It’s like a coronavirus variant that is searching for new ways to stay alive.
A meaningful brand position is forever in a state of flux, anxious to morph itself to survive in a new environment.

So, in no particular order, these are the actions I took to adapt and evolve my brand during my career, starting from an entry level systems analyst position to president and CMO three decades later.

Each action helped me stay relevant during highly changing and turbulent times, but no single one was a ‘silver bullet’ for success.

‘Stay relevant’ brand actions

▪️ Identify the people who you want to ‘talk to’ about who you are and what you do These are the foxes in any organization who tend to make career decisions in your space. It’s important that these people get exposed to the values you represent.

▪️ Have a good understanding of the other players the other players competing for the same brand attributes to understand the brand field you are competing with and their brand claims.

▪️ When presented with a task, ask yourself the question “How can I do this differently?” than others. This is a critical question to get you noticed (if you answer it right). Just having the subject top of mind will lead you in the right direction; use it as the lens to determine what to do and how to do it. Ask yourself this question everyday.

▪️ Purge every aspect of copying from your being.
This is tough because it’s almost second nature for people to ask ‘How did someone else do it?’; to benchmark best in class and apply best practices.

We’ve been conditioned to believe that we are better off when we follow the best in the herd, which is nonsense. All we have done is temporarily change our position in it.

Using a boilerplate that someone else developed robs you of the originality needed to stand out and be remarkable.
Copying what others do keeps you in ‘the common herd’ and prevents you from being noticed. Do whatever it takes to act with attitude and in a way that separates you from the crowd.

▪️ Look at what everyone else is doing then do the opposite. Amazing results are achieved by contrarian acts.

▪️ Learn to focus on the critical few things you need to be successful. It’s so tempting to chase the possibilities that are out there but the problem is that you are busy but ineffective in delivering quality results. Different people are “mindlessly” focused on a few critical things that are not on anyone else’s radar.

▪️ Shed the CRAP that gets in the way of your ability to focus on your key priorities. Holding on to comfy food may satisfy your appetite temporarily, but it won’t enable your quest to stand-out from the herd in the long run.

▪️ Connect with weird and different people. If you’re going to seek stimulation from others, lean in to people who don’t follow the rules and have off-the-wall views.

▪️ Be the first to take on new projects. Covet opportunities to offer standard solutions to radical problems that have not been addressed before. Your solution to a new problem will carry the ‘different’ tag.

▪️ Loosen up on planning; tighten up on execution. Most people think the value is in the cleverness of a plan; of course they’re wrong.
Jump into the messy inelegant world of implementation where results get delivered. Different people get stuff done; they don’t sit around pondering theoretical possibilities.

The do-it brand

▪️ In my experience a winning brand position is to adopt a ‘do-it’ persona. However, never act without a framework that will create a better than average probability of success. Unharnessed action may feel good at the time, but it will likely not produce the outcome you desire.

Build context for action. Action with no context is at best uncontrolled behaviour with no predictable outcome. Context could be your career goals, your personal set of values or the organization’s strategic game plan. Context sets the boundaries inside which acceptable action is defined and outside which inappropriate action resides.

Look for an opportunity to add value to the actions you take. Go beyond what might be expected; surprise the judges observing you by adding extras rather than simply meeting expectations. ‘Action - Plus’ is a way to think about it: act and do more.

Achieve with a twist; leave your fingerprints and personal mark on what you do. Doing something without leaving a trace of YOU is a missed opportunity to leave a lasting impression. If your action blends in with what everyone else does, no one notices and your brand pays the price.

Pause, then act. Be disciplined about taking action. Before moving, take a deep breath to ensure your action is grounded and will have the highest probability of making a positive impact.
Use ‘the pause’ as a necessary element of the acting process. Once you commit to act it’s a chore to shift direction so use the pause wisely.

Prepare for follow up. The results of your action must be determined in order to learn from them. Think through exactly how you intend to track the outcome and the impact it had on people. Develop an improvement plan for any action that didn’t work out the way you had intended.

Memorable action isn’t a knee jerk response; it’s taken with a sense of purpose.

Finally, Try, try and try. While others are seeking the impossible dream of perfection the do-it brand people are achieving results inch-by-inch.

▪️ Ensure that your brand addresses the critical issue of the day for your organization by continually measuring and refreshing your only claim.

And, again, remember that if your brand doesn’t respond to a compelling and relevant need that your business has, it will simply fall on deaf ears and be perceived as merely self serving.
If your brand, however, resonates with people and is consistent with the strategic imperatives of the business, it makes you the currency leader among your peers with the job satisfaction and career growth that goes along with that leadership position.

▪️ Develop the competency to recover brilliantly when you make a mistake (and you will, that’s what do-it professionals do). Fix your mistake (because that’s what people expect) fast, and then add something to the mix that surprises them. You will be remembered for your risk taking and brilliance of recovery; your mistake will quickly be forgotten.

▪️ Develop a communication plan to expose your brand both within your organization and to external audiences.
- Offer to do presentations on your chosen brand topic;
- Get quoted as a subject matter expert in any internal communications media your organization uses;
- Write articles for your organization and for external publications on your brand content; be the thought leader;
- Offer to talk to customers on your brand topic. Help them in any issues they have, and get known on the outside. In my case many of our customers were interested in what we were doing in the area of customer service as well as a ME marketing. I had many speaking engagements to air my brand;
- Talk to the media on your topic. Make it interesting for them. Get them calling you. Your organization’s reputation will overtime be influenced by you.

▪️ Listen to the conversation about you and use your social media presence as the ‘listening post’.
Dedicate time to monitor social media feeds to get real time hands-on feedback from various audiences on your brand.

And engage in any conversation to show that you’re interested in the commentary and to further reinforce your personal tag.

Online dating

▪️ Look to online dating for help. I’m not suggesting that you necessarily get involved in online dating, but I do believe the process can provide valuable insights on how to effectively position one’s brand in a highly contested world.

The crucial element in online dating is the personal profile where the challenge is to describe and ‘paint a picture’ of yourself that leaves no doubt as to who you are and what your specific interests are with the objective of attracting interest from people who are aligned with you — a daunting task given the size of the internet universe.

Bland, general and vague profiles attract few worthwhile hits whereas clear, expressive, and detailed profiles, on the other hand, stand-out to people who are looking for specific characteristics — specifics in the profile do a better job of explaining a brand and hence attract people who are interested in it.

Think of an online personal profile as a granular version of your brand and use it to express what makes you special. Over emphasize your attributes and specifically those that you think make you distinct from everyone else.

And also apply the ‘so what and who cares?’ test intended to catch the vague generalities and a helium-filled claims used by the crowd. If it’s a statement that everyone else uses, delete it and focus on what makes you special.

And don’t expect miracles overnight. You most likely will not come up with a profile that is sufficiently detailed to get the response you want, nor will it likely be crystal clear on how you are different than everyone else.
Doesn’t matter. It’s a start. Work with it and revise it as you experience its impact on your intended audience.

Wrap up

Building an effective personal brand is a journey; it’s not a one-shot exercise. And it’s not built by seizing on a single attribute or trait, but rather by consistently expressing a collection of ‘little things’ that people care about.

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

• Posted 9.12.16 at 05:11 am by Roy Osing
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September 5, 2016

9 subjects that will make you a better business student

9 subjects that will make you a better business student when you venture out into the brave new world of business.

The gap between school teachings and what is really needed for organizations to thrive and survive in the new markets that are unfolding is wide and is getting wider.

As an executive leader, I made it a priority to engage with business students and graduates on a regular basis. I needed to know where the talent was; who I should keep my eyes on for employment.

Based on my experience, my conclusion is that students coming out of business school are not ready.

Straight out of school they are ill-prepared to add the value required to enable our organizations to be remarkable, compelling, indispensable and unforgettable.

They are not being taught the right stuff.

They are getting traditional pedagogy jammed down their throats by professors who often have a minimal amount of experience running businesses in the real world of aggressive competition, unpredictability and biased employees.

These principles should be espoused by business schools if graduates are to be relevant to business in today’s markets.

1. Execution is the key to winning - a business plan without flawless execution is worthless. It’s one thing to define what has to be done, but without a detailed implementation plan and accountability, nothing happens and strategic intent remains a dream.

2. Customer learning is a competitive advantage - we need more than periodic market research to keep pace with how customers are changing; we require a continuous process of learning to monitor minute by minute what people desire.

Organization’s today succeed by providing what makes people happy; what they want, covet and “lust for” in their lives. Satisfying what they “need” is no longer a recipe for sustainable competitive advantage.

3. Serve people don’t service them - you service computers; you serve people. Amazing and remarkable organizations put the customer ahead of themselves; they exist to serve others.
They build operations system to make engagement easy; they create policies and procedures that enable transactions not control customer behaviour.

4. Perfect solutions don’t exist - the business world is too complex to be formularized. Flawed solutions that excite people beat those that may be theoretically pristine but don’t meet the practical realities of the specific organization and the market it serves. Imperfection rules and be imperfect fast is the guiding mantra.

The more failures with a heathy dose of learning from them = more successes. Punish failure only if you want compliance, policy-pushers and order takers.

5. The frontline is the boss - people who control the customer experience are the really important people, not the executives. Build your hierarchy to serve them.

6. Screw-ups create customer loyalty - a successful WOW! service recovery from an OOPS! results in a more loyal customer than if the screw-up never happened.
And when someone is screwed over, “I’m sorry” is the most strategic phrase ever and is the heart of a mind-blowing service recovery.

7. Erect barriers to customer exit - Ignore the competition and creating barriers to competitive entry. You can’t control the competition; if they want to attack you they will.
The right strategy is to prevent customers from leaving and you won’t have to worry about the hordes entering.

8. Lose a sale (but keep the customer) - the immediate transaction should not be the number one priority; building a long term relationship with a client should be the ultimate mission and focus of all sales activity.

So if you find yourself unable to satisfy a short term need your client has, suck it up and help them find a solution elsewhere. Be the problem solver, preserve the relationship and earn the right to sell another day.

9. Storytelling ignites the passion - every organization needs a cadre of amazing storytellers who are able to make a vision or strategy come alive for people. It makes the organization’s purpose real to employees in a way that excites them to play an active role in the chosen future.

Build a business curricula around these subjects; old school teaching gets a failing grade.

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

• Posted 9.5.16 at 05:26 am by Roy Osing
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