Be Different or be dead

January 17, 2011

3 simple moves that will make your organization absolutely brilliant

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3 simple moves that will make your organization absolutely brilliant.

Competitors are entering markets at a breathless rate. Consumers are empowered more than ever before, flexing their muscles to get what they want and punishing those who fail to deliver.

So, how does an organization win in this world? How do you capture the hearts, minds and soul of the people you want to attract?

There IS a formula for this and it is really quite simple and straightforward:

Deliver VALUE that is RELEVANT —  something that your fans really care about, and UNIQUE — something that ONLY you provide.

VALUE is not what you produce or supply; it’s the experience what you supply creates for your your customer.
It’s not about technology and the cool things you can do with it. It’s about Feelings, Happiness and Joy people experience when you make use of whatever you produce.

RELEVANCY describes the extent to which the value created fits with the person’s worldview (the complex set of bias, interests and beliefs we all have when making a buy decision).

UNIQUENESS. If you are the ONLY ones who do what you do you will be noticed and paid attention to. AND you will build a fan base that will fuel growth and prosperity.

The fact of the matter is:

If you’re not ReMARKABLE, you’re CoMMON, IgNORED and InVISIBLE;

If you’re not DiFFERENT, you’re DiSPENSABLE;     

If you’re not DiFFERENT, you’re DEAD (or soon will be).

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

• Posted 1.17.11 at 11:27 am by Roy Osing
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January 10, 2011

3 proven ways to make marketing incredibly successful

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These strategic drivers should guide how you market in today’s world.

— Remarkability

— Indispensability

— Gaspworthiness

— Unforgettability

— Uniqueness

— Distinction

You won’t be successful if you continue to practice marketing in the traditional way.

Product push is offensive. A focus on what you produce makes you invisible. Catering to the mass market makes you irrelevant. Mass market media purchases defines you as being the same as every other organization.

Here are the three essentials to create the change you need in your marketing strategy if you really want to make a difference in people’s lives and stand-out.

#1. Create value — as opposed to continuing to push products and services down people’s throats. Its about defining the value that’s delivered to people rather than the fancy gadget with lots of cool capabilities.

It’s about the problems solved for people The experiences created. The happiness generated. The memories produced.

#2. Focus on your fans — the people who really care about what you do. Who are they? What are they all about? What do they need, want and desire?
Who are the Sneezers who have enough social power to spread your word around and expand your customer baset? How do they communicate among themselves? How can you be unique and distinctive in the value created for them?

Growth occurs when you provide more value to your fans and expand your fan base, not by trying to attract new customers through mass market advertising .

#3. Offer packages rather than products — memories, mind-blowing experiences and happiness usually happens when people experience a number of elements rather than a single one.

For example, a “Mountain Adventure” is more likely to delight someone with a combination of a hotel room, a daily breakfast, a spa and a guided horseback ride rather than if a horseback ride alone were provided.

Define the experience. Assemble the package components. Integrate them seamlessly into a value proposition that will resonate with your fans.

That’s the process. And it will make you different.

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

• Posted 1.10.11 at 11:10 am by Roy Osing
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December 4, 2010

Why business success depends on being different not by being better

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Why business success depends on being different not by being better.

The majority of business failure is due in large part to the lack of organizational survival skills. So what’s the solution? How do you develop these skills?

What are the things that an organization should do to immunize itself against the shocks of external events?

The answer can be boiled down to this: if you are not different you are dead or you soon will be

In other words, to be able to survive, an organization needs to position itself uniquely in the marketplace.

It must be able to carve out a special place in the customer’s mind so that loyalty is not only created but also has a long life. An organization must Be Different.

I’m sure you’ve heard it said that if the external environment is changing faster than the inside of an organization, the end is near.

You need to recognize and keep pace with the dynamics impacting your business, and if you fail to do so, it will not be a question of whether or not your organization will die; it will be a matter of when.

DiFFERENT beats better

The interesting thing is that you don’t necessarily have to be better than your competitors; you just have to be different.
I am not suggesting that you can get away with providing shoddy products and services or marginal customer service; rather that you find a way to redefine yourself as different from others in the marketplace and give customers what they want in the quality they expect.

The challenge is to create meaningful and compelling differences that will separate you from your competition, and to articulate these differences to your target customers in a way that will convince them to do business with your organization and no one else.

A meaningful difference is value, provided that it combines a high must matter factor to the customer with a low currently satisfied factor. It is something that is really important to the customer and is currently not satisfied by any supplier in the market.

Your business plan must be built around this notion.

You need to get the customer’s attention, clear the message clutter, and then tell them in very clear and specific terms why they only have one choice, and that choice is you.

This process requires that your organization develop and communicate a value proposition to the market that is truly unique.

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

• Posted 12.4.10 at 11:00 am by Roy Osing
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November 25, 2010

Why your business plan should focus on 3 limited things

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Why your business plan should focus on 3 limited things.

If you try to boil the ocean you’ll lose; if your business plan focuses on 3 limited things, success awaits.

So, here you are. You have completed your business plan for your new business and now you must determine the tactics you need to see your brave idea turn into reality.
You start with a clean sheet of paper and decide to brainstorm on all the things you need to do to implement your new plan.

Good idea? Well, it can be, or it can create a lot of activity but little movement forward.

It’s ok to create a list of possible actions that you feel should be taken, but then you must purge the list down to the critical few actions to focus on that you believe have an 80 percent chance of achieving the results you want.
You simply don’t have enough resources and bandwidth to do an effective job on 25 things you have on your brainstorming list.

Multitasking is deadly when you are trying to implement the game plan of your ‘new baby’

If you can’t define the critical few actions necessary to achieve progress towards your business plan goals, it indicates that you really don’t understand your strategy and the specific execution levers are necessary to get you going.
Spend time debating this issue because if you merely throw possibilities at the wall and then try to implement every one of them, your energies will be spread too thin and you will be unable to move forward.

Determine 3 things (or maybe 4 or 5, but not a dozen) that will produce 80% of your business plan results and get on with them — Roy’s Rule of 3

Spend time on Roy’s Rule; it will pay off handsomely for you.

Beware of Yummy

Once you’ve defined the few critical things that you believe will get your startup off the ground, be prepared for distractions that will pull you away from your game plan. This always happens as you learn more about what your strategy means, and when others find out what you’re up to and present you with added opportunities.

If you have more than three priorities then you don’t have any — Jim Collins, Author

For example, you’ve decided on the customer group you want to target and out-of-the-blue comes someone who is not a target customer reaching out to you to ask for your attention.

They want to explore adopting your product solution and of course they have questions that they need answers to which will take time and effort on your part to accommodate — they will drain your scarce resources.

This happens all the time. A client of mine decided to focus on the Vancouver market where access was easy and market growth was attractive. Then they received a call from an organization in South America who found out about their innovative solution and wanted to explore partnership opportunities with them. Clearly not on strategy. But oh so tempting to chase!

‘Yummy incoming’  is the over-the-transom stuff that comes up that we are tempted to chase

Another client developed an innovative wireless technology for a particular application in the security market segment. When other companies learned of their plans, they reached out and presented them with other potential applications for their technology.

The CEO was delighted with the additional interest and decided to evaluate these new opportunities but in doing so diffused the efforts of his team and reduced the focus on building the security solution. The end result after about a year of toiling over at least a half dozen applications was nothing advanced. The security opportunity faltered and investors pulled their funding. Yummy was the instrument of their demise.

What do you do when Yummy appears and has the potential of pushing your business plan off the rail?

How to beat Yummy

Here’s how to keep Yummy from diluting the effectiveness of your business plan:an action plan to consider.

— Give yourself one day — no more — to do a quick and dirty evaluation on whether or not Yummy has any potential. It’s important that you maintain the discipline to not burn endless resource cycles on the possibility that there could be a significant opportunity vis-a-vis your current focus but you have to make the call fast so the impact on your current momentum is minimized.

— If you decide to chase Yummy, go back and review your business plan. If Yummy looks like it has potential, change the focus of your business plan.
If you decide to try and have it both ways — trying to stay on your original path and also chase Yummy — you won’t succeed in execution your business plan and you probably won’t do a decent job chasing Yummy. 

You can’t have a handful of number one priorities as a fledgling company. Multitasking is bad news for most organizations but it’s deadly for startups. And don’t for even a moment think you have the luxury of taking on additional resources to implement Yummy. You don’t.

— Explore whether or not the organization representing Yummy is prepared to contribute resources to evaluate the potential of their idea and to help implement it if it turns out if it offers as much value as your current strategy. They may be willing to partner with you in the development of their idea and in the go-to-market action plan in return for a piece of the action.

Remember, every minute Yummy consumes your time is a minute less you have to spend on the focus you’ve decided on to execute your overall strategy so resist the temptation to deviate from it without compelling evidence that you will be better off doing so.

Chasing stuff is not healthy. Busyness may be comfort food, but remember that you created a game plan to avoid eating it

Successful businesses focus on limited priorities in their business plan and don’t chase things that are interesting and cool but are clearly off strategy.

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

• Posted 11.25.10 at 11:00 am by Roy Osing
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