By Bernard S. Sharfman This post originally was published on the R Street Institute website. Proxy access is the ability of certain privileged shareholders to have their own slate of director nominees included in the company’s proxy materials whether or not the board of directors approves. Proxy materials include a proxy statement used to solicit […]
Here on Branding Strategy Insider, Mark Di Somma outlined five essential strategies for brand growth. He noted challenger and national brands can grow extremely fast.With instant access to information via digital networks, growing brands attract the attention of both investors and consumers. Mark used Heineken as his example of a strong global brand. What’s curious about their expansion onto the global stage is that Heineken retained its local character and appeal, using and celebrating that quality to its competitive advantage. Heineken, by the way, is the world’s favorite beer import.
One brand is on the cusp of similar success in the tech space and what they are using to gain a competitive advantage may soon surprise its competitors. Huawei [HWT.UL] is first and foremost a Chinese company, not a company that happens to be Chinese. Contrary to references often made in the west about the quality of goods ‘made in China,’ Huawei’s strategy might make it ‘the Heineken of technology.’
Building Momentum
The smartphone manufacturer was #3 in the global smartphone rankings during Q2 2016. They’re creating strong local partnerships and opening over a thousand customer service centers. In a Forrester Analysis, Richard Fichera states, “The real weight for my prediction that Huawei will rapidly emerge as a significant global player is not sales, but the strong leading indicator of R&D. Overall, Huawei is spending 14% of revenues on R&D. IBM in its first quarter reported approximately 6.5% and HP weighed in approximately 3.1%.”
While the products Huawei makes are good but not game changing at the moment, the rollout of Android Lollipop (replacing the outdated Android Jelly Bean OS), shows the brand is answering the demands of increasingly sophisticated consumers.
Gaining A Competitive Advantage
Clay Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation predicts: Someone will develop a less effective but simpler and/or cheaper solution in the industry. It may initially capture only a small – and relatively less profitable – portion of the market, but will likely improve over time and relentlessly advance up-market. Just review what happened to IBM in the 90’s, Kodak in the 2000’s, and the music industry in the 2010’s – and that’s just three.
Reverse innovation was a successful strategy for GE as, rather than focus on technology geared for affluent western markets, their R&D focused on the needs of emerging markets, specifically in India and China in the form of portable, PC based ultrasounds and other products which are comparatively (and significantly) more affordable.
Huawei seems to be following Clay’s theory to the letter and as their footprint grows, they are pumping 4-9 times more investment into R&D than their competitors. At this level of investment, especially for a technology company, they can only be a threat in markets that have traditionally been considered ‘safe’.
Here’s the reality: No market is safe. Competitive advantage is gained through disruptive innovation exploiting the less known areas where vulnerabilities in competing brands are exposed. In prioritizing R&D over marketing and promotions Huawei seems poised to do just that.
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Where does normalcy in business originate? And how does the disruptive marketer avoid getting caught in its trap? Much of normalcy comes from what is known as the “shared vision meme.”
Most companies assume that there is only one single and defined vision for the organization. This vision comes from its founder, the CEO, or upper management. It is expected that the rest of the organization will accept this vision and march to the same drummer.
We often read about the shared vision meme in the business sections of large news outlets. The New York Times wrote about Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos, defining a cultural revolution at his company that was complete with laminated rules on how employees should behave. This was being done in the belief that rules push employees to lean in toward group-think and conformity, since it leaves no room for interpretation.
The disruptive world has an opposing view: having set principles makes an organization rigid and inflexible. And that’s the total opposite of the DIY ethos. In reality, the highest-performing organizations actively promote dissent and flexibility in all areas, including product development and marketing. Unfortunately, not many companies subscribe to this ideology. I can name only a handful: Red Bull, Virgin Group, T-Mobile, Tesla, American Express, Google, and IBM. (Note: I didn’t mention Microsoft, Facebook, or Apple because although they build and develop extraordinary products, they use conventional marketing strategies.
Companies such as Red Bull, Virgin Group, and T-Mobile don’t treat their employees as “resources,” “assets,” or “roles”; these characterizations dehumanize people and make robots of them. Robots don’t create thinking, feeling, emotionally driven stories, and they don’t build identifiable cultures that customers crave. In an uncertain, rapidly changing business world, making safe bets won’t provide much movement. Calculated risks don’t open up the eyes of customers looking for different products, innovative packaging, constant product updates, or left-of-center experiences.
While the theme of much of my thinking on Branding Strategy Insider is that thinking and acting differently is the differentiating factor in marketing, I acknowledge that you probably don’t want to take risks. After all, companies that don’t take risks benefit most by staying the course. Right? Maybe not . . .
Let’s take a quick look at the top five U.S. companies, as rated by their employees:
1. Google
2. Bain & Company
3. Nestle Purina PetCare Company
4. F5 Networks
5. Boston Consulting Group
Now let’s list the top five companies based on market valuation:
1. Apple
2. Exxon Mobil
3. Berkshire Hathaway
4. Google
5. Microsoft
And the top five most innovative companies based on customer event experiences:
1. Bud Light
2. Nike
3. American Express
4. Microsoft
5. iHeart Radio
Finally, here are the five most popular products based on consumption:
1. Coca-Cola
2. Lay’s Potato Chips
3. PlayStation
4. Toyota Corolla
5. Apple iPad
Next, let’s cross-match these lists and note which companies appear on two or more. There are only three: Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Those companies are among the highest valued, so it makes sense that their employees rank them high, their customers rank them high, and their products are bought in large quantities. Now, let’s look a little deeper and ask a “what if ” question. What if we looked at the top five valuated companies by market capitalization in 2015 again? Here’s the list:
1. Apple
2. Exxon Mobil
3. Berkshire Hathaway
4. Google
5. Microsoft
Now, how about that same list in 2006?
1. Exxon Mobil
2. General Electric
3. Microsoft
4. Citigroup
5. Gazprom
Only 2 of the top 5 valued companies by market capitalization in 2006 are still top 5 today. The historical data shows that energy companies have a whole set of new circumstances they will need to solve in order to remain relevant. Meanwhile, technology companies that enable us with communications are beginning to dominate the list, with even more companies forming in the tech sector as I write this. What great leaps of risk will these new companies bring to the new normal? Will these leaps be from a shared vision of group-think or involve bets against the status quo?
Look back at the 2015 top five list. What if these companies don’t take risks moving forward the next ten years? Will they be on the list in 2026?
Risk To Learn
There is no real cause for failure in this new world of marketing. There are only things we can learn. There is more data available than ever before to pivot or pursue in real time with messaging, content, and experiences. Failure occurs for those who persevere on pride even when the customer user experience data informs them they should have concluded their experiment months ago. Some schools of thought welcome risk because trends are emerging and transforming at such a fast pace that there are more unknowns than knowns in the business world. We can learn from failure in marketing, but only if marketing involves everyone, not just the marketing department.
Learn how to keep your brand relevant in the 21st Century in my new book Disruptive Marketing.
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A billion-dollar industry, coaching is booming, but the ease of entry has created plenty of unsuccessful coaches. The reality is that, like any other business, building a successful coaching practice requires a great deal of work and dedication. It also requires building a solid platform made of people who trust…
IBM’s editorial director, Michela Stribling, kicks off Session 1 at TED@IBM: Spark, November 16, 2016 in San Francisco. (Photo: Russell Edwards/TED)
From artists to scientists, mothers, mathematicians and business visionaries, people in every corner of the world are dreaming up solutions to our most pressing problems. Whether tackling war and peace or the principles of machine learning, ingenuity starts with one thing: a spark.
And regardless of where the spark takes hold, inspiration demands action to reach its greatest potential. At the third installment of TED@IBM — part of the TED Institute, held on November 15, 2016, at the SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco — a diverse and brilliant collection of speakers and performers dared to ask: What if we used our collective expertise and insights to provide a spark that could change the world for good?
After opening remarks from Michela Stribling, IBM’s editorial director, the talks in Session 1 challenged us to think about how we can work together to solve problems and, maybe, leave the planet better than we found it.
Where light meets sound. In a performance that blurs the boundaries of light and sound, Ryan and Hays Holladay create a visual experience of beats and tones shaped around reverberations of color. With multicolored projections and an assortment of carefully placed lamps, the brothers transcribe their music across the illuminated bursts of surfaces suddenly made visible. Here, music becomes the performer, rather than the performance, directing us not toward itself but toward the tempo and rhythm that orchestrates its narration. It’s a melody as much seen as it is heard: a series of intonations whose colorful pattern of sound eventually collapses into the nearly faded spotlight of a solitary lamp.
The answer to fighting cybercrime. Cybercrime netted $450 billion in profits last year, with 2 billion records lost or stolen. As the vice president at IBM Security, Caleb Barlow recognizes the insufficiency of our current strategies to protect our data from the ultra-sophisticated criminal gangs that are responsible for 80 percent of all cyber attacks. His solution? When a cyber attack occurs, we should respond to it with the same collective effort and openness as a health care crisis — we need to know who is infected and how the disease is spreading. Last year, Barlow and his team started publishing all of IBM’s threat data in an effort to encourage the same sharing from other major corporations, governments and private security firms. If we’re not sharing, he says, then we’re part of the problem.
According to Adam Grant, there are three basic kinds of employees: givers, takers, and matchers (who’ll match the prevailing behavior of the group). The key to a happy workplace is to balance that mix. Grant speaks at TED@IBM: Spark. (Photo: Russell Edwards/TED)
One bad apple spoils the bunch. The success of any company is defined by the quality of people who work there. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant has spent a lot of time analyzing business structures, and he’s concluded that there are three different types of employees: givers, takers and matchers. To achieve a balanced workplace with equal opportunity for and distribution of work, power and play, companies must endeavor to hire givers and matchers, whose personalities allow employees to feel supported, heard and acknowledged. The challenge is to stop takers from getting a seat at the table, because they so often undercut the spirit of collaboration workplaces need to thrive.
The business of rewriting stereotypes. After what felt like a lifetime spent simultaneously living out stereotypes and being imprisoned by them, Villy Wang wondered how she could break the cycle of racism and still make a living. She hit upon the idea of empowering young, diverse kids — those most misrepresented in the media — to become storytellers, training them in filmmaking so they can create new, authentic stories. After training, she helps place them into creative industries that influence media and entertainment, helping rewrite stereotypes at one of its sources. Wang has nested this entire program within a professional media production studio, a business that helps fund and ensure the future of the program. “Obviously, racism is deeply rooted in our history, politics, media and language,” she says, “but I believe if we can empower more diverse kids to take that narrative and change it, we will break hold of these ugly roots.”
Performer Ise Lyfe, at right, breaks down the Bay Area’s gentrification battles in a spoken-word collaboration with cellist Michael Feckses, performed at TED@IBM: Spark. (Photo: Russell Edwards/TED)
We are not mud, we are fertile ground. Spoken-word artist and activist Ise Lyfe sparks crucial dialogue on social justice through performance. With music accompaniment by master cellist Michael Feckses, Lyfe unravels the impact of the displacement of minority communities in American cities, threaded from his personal experience in East Oakland. By using the image of a flag in the mud to convey the claiming of a muddy territory, Lyfe creates a symbol for gentrification but urges: “I reject the notion of your flag in our mud. Let us be the spark to convey. We are not mud, we’re fertile ground waiting on the rain.”
AI and justice for all. You need a good lawyer if you’re involved in a legal case. But a typical case can cost thousands of dollars in legal fees — and a lot of that money goes toward the time it takes to learn the case and study the law around it, sifting through hundreds of documents and databases to find a winning angle. Lawyer and entrepreneur Andrew Arruda set out to democratize this process by partnering with a computer scientist to create the world’s first artificially intelligent lawyer, ROSS. Using ROSS, a lawyer can search through millions of documents in a matter of minutes, saving hours of research time. ROSS is already being rolled out, for free, to pro-bono lawyers who are helping those most in need. “Justice should cost the same for everyone,” Arruda says. “More money should not buy better justice.”
Intelligence, knowledge and wisdom … in the age of smart machines. Artificial intelligence is a next step in the evolution of our species; some say, in fact, we have come to the limits of our own intelligence. But intelligence is only part of the story — it’s what we do with that intelligence that matters. In a special video created for TED@IBM, Guruduth Banavar, chief science officer of cognitive computing at IBM, asks us to cultivate the wisdom necessary to improve our future.
An organic approach to an organic problem. Beset by plunging biodiversity, pathogens and skyrocketing populations, our global food supply is at risk — but solutions that rely on chemicals and genetically modified organisms come with their own problems. Computational geneticist Laxmi Parida proposes instead that we use the genetic biodiversity that already exists within plants, wrought over millennia by evolution, in order to safeguard our food. To sort through and make sense of the vast amount of sequenced DNA, artificial intelligence and machine learning don’t quite make the cut. Parida has another technique in mind: discrete mathematics. Using math, Parida is cracking open our understanding of the links between DNA and external traits, like stress resistance, so we can breed more robust crops while reducing strain on the environment.
Building with dust. The world-changing promise of nanotechnology remains just that — a promise. We don’t yet have the disease-fighting nanobots, elevators to space or quantum computers that nanotech could someday provide. Why? Because building things from nanomaterials is incredibly difficult, says George Tulevski, a nano architect and researcher at IBM. We don’t have tools small enough to manipulate nanomaterials into something useful. But Tulevski and his team think they’ve located the missing link: chemistry. They’re developing chemical processes to compel billions of nanoparticles to simultaneously assemble themselves into the patterns needed to build circuits, much the same way that natural organisms like Radiolaria build intricate, diverse and elegant structures. It’s like building a sculpture from dust, Tulevski says, and it may be the key to delivering on — or far exceeding — those original promises of nanotechnology.
Behavior hacks for the well-intentioned. “Why is it that we have such a difficult time doing what’s right?” asks behavioral scientist Bob Nease. “It’s because intention and action don’t often go hand-in-hand.” That is, good intentions don’t always lead to good behavior, while bad behavior is not always the result of bad intentions. So how do we bridge the gap between good intention and positive action? Nease offers two simple mind-hack solutions: first, make the right thing so easy to do that it requires minimal mind power to arrive at a good decision. Then make the wrong thing so drawn out and convoluted that it’s nearly impossible to justify doing. Nease applies these principles to current issues surrounding health, business and even government reform.
World music group Wobbly World led off Session 2 of TED@IBM: Spark with a musical celebration of collaboration that included singing, rapping, guitar, congas and much more. (Photo: Russell Edwards/TED)
Session 2 kicked off with Wobbly World, a global collective of musicians whose dynamic blend of sounds from around the world reminds us of the incredible power of music at bridging the cultural divide.
One of the most important tools in the fight against cancer? Time. An early cancer diagnosis can be the difference between a chance to fight for life, or death. But diagnostic tools tend to be costly, invasive and slow to reveal results, and they’re not always totally accurate. Cancer fighter Joshua Smith presents an affordable, formidable weapon in the fight against cancer that combats these statistics — a noninvasive early-warning system that works like a pregnancy test by intercepting and analyzing the biomarkers that may hint at the presence of cancer. With this streamlined process, says Smith, early-stage cancer detection can happen more frequently and start when a person is still healthy. It’s a strong beacon of hope in the fight against cancer.
We can’t afford to give up on government, says Charity Wayua. She speaks at TED@IBM:Spark. (Photo: Russell Edwards/TED)
How to cure ailing governments. In the current political climate, it’s easy to want to give up on transforming government, says public sector researcher Charity Wayua — but we can’t afford to be afraid to tackle challenges like government efficiency head-on. Starting in 2014, Wayua, a trained biochemist, and a team of scientists, engineers and technologists began to “treat” the government of Nairobi, Kenya, as an ailing patient in order to restore the health of the country and its economy. In keeping with a biomedical approach, the team examined the government, its divisions, its employees and every single one of its malfunctions before making a diagnosis and devising a strategic treatment plan. Within two years, the efforts of Wayua and her team paid off, and Kenya moved from 136 to 92 on the World Bank’s index ranking the ease of doing business there. As Wayua says, just because something is sick doesn’t mean it’s dying.
The drumming habits of neurons. In March 1993, an article published in the journal Cell identified the single gene responsible for Huntingon’s disease. The product of a nearly ten-year effort by scientists from around the world, the article held great promise that a cure for the neurodegenerative disorder would soon follow; yet today, there is still not a single medicine able to slow, stop, or reverse this disease. James Kozloski has watched a generation of neuroscientists struggle with this, and his conclusion is that neuroscientists have focused far too long on just the neuron. He argues that the answer lies not only in showing how neurons suffer from genetic disorders but also in how genes suffer from nervous disorders. Comparing the communication of neurons to the beat of a drummer, Kozloski highlights that in brains, things like a bad gene, an injury or aging can lead to changes in circuits that first create and then reinforce subtle bad drumming habits, which are often difficult to detect until it’s too late. His team has been working to detect these habits early in order to break them, mapping the brain’s core components and connecting them together in what he calls the Grand Loop. “Before we can fully understand how genes cause imbalance in neurons leading to their death,” he says, “neuroscience must understand how the brain’s core circuitry balances itself, how genes change synapses, and how brain feedback onto neurons, synapses and genes can push imbalance to the tipping point.”
How the internet of things is transforming the routine. How do we protect our aging population while letting them keep the comfort of their lives and their daily routine? Everyday objects with sensors and WiFi can track each step of that routine and form a picture of a life being lived, in real time, to the children and support systems caring for the safety and independence of their loved ones. Learn more about how the internet of things is changing the routine in another special video produced for TED@IBM.
A library of human cognition. What if you could consult Winston Churchill on a looming international crisis? Or ask Einstein what he thinks about the latest scientific breakthrough? National security expert Juliane Gallina is working on a way to harness the best minds of all time to make the world safer. When Gallina was in the military, she learned a special concept: the OODA loop, a mental model (which stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) designed to help intelligence officers get into the minds of their adversaries. You’re in the OODA loop right now, Gallina says, and every person or team that makes decisions is constantly using it. Today, Gallina is a technologist, and she’s using the OODA loop in her work on cognitive computing. Her goal: to create a way to systematically record the way we think when solving problems so that future generations can better tap into the wisdom of the past. “Let’s find and record the exquisite thinking strategies of innovators and pioneers,” Gallina says, “and then let’s use it.”
The untold story behind a landmark NASA mission. Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn, Mary Jackson — you’ve probably never heard their names, but these three African-American women were instrumental in putting astronaut John Glenn into orbit around Earth. Their story has been largely untold until now with the upcoming release of biographical film Hidden Figures. Elizabeth Gabler, president of Fox 2000 Pictures, talks with TED@IBM curator Bryn Freedman about what drew her to make film and shares with the audience more about the women from the upcoming film and the barriers they overcame.
No expertise required. The problem with music, says Tim Exile, is that it’s so perfect. For those of us who didn’t grow up playing an instrument, instruments can never be objects of play because we’re often too afraid to mess around and try things out due to a strict idea of what an instrument should sound like. In a talk-performance hybrid, Exile demos a software instrument that he designed to allow anyone, whether they have musical training or not, to record loops, mix sounds and make music. “Apart from anything else,” he says, “this is is a hell of a lot of fun, and we’re all missing out!”
Grady Booch asks us to worry a bit less about artificial intelligence, while speaking at TED@IBM: Spark. (Photo: Russell Edwards/TED)
The illusion of intelligence. When we think about artificial intelligence and its possibilities, it becomes difficult to disassociate the concept with the dangers outlined by films like The Terminator and 2001: A Space Odyssey. For supporters like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, such fears are far from misplaced; they and others argue that artificial intelligence represents an existential threat to humanity. But according to Grady Booch, super-knowing is not the same as super-doing. Cognitive systems, he argues, are far different from the software-intensive systems of earlier generations, in that, “by and large, we don’t program them: we teach them,” imparting onto those machines reflections of our already-present human values. Rather than worry about any existential threat of superintelligence, Booch cautions us to focus instead on the realities that we currently face, “for the rise of computing already brings to us a myriad of other human and societal issues to which we must attend.” Indeed, from raising the level of education around the world to helping humans eventually reach the surface of Mars, “the right question we should now be asking is how shall we best use this technology to augment our humanity, not diminish it.”
Some time back, I looked at what it took to get a brand promise right. Today, I want to examine the converse: when (consumers feel that) brands have not lived up to what they said they would deliver. What happens to generate customer disappointment?
While brand strategists hold up the brand promise as a critical element in a brand’s credibility, consumers, it seems, are less sure that brands will consistently do what they have undertaken to do. In fact, Gallup findings show that only half of customers believe that companies will always deliver what they promise and just 27% of employees strongly agree that they always deliver what they promised. There is, to say the least, something of a credibility gap.
That’s not helped by the fact that companies that do break their promises seem to make a habit of doing so. Research by Accenture shows that 82% of consumers who encountered a broken promise say the company or brand concerned broke multiple promises to them. “Telecommunications companies are the most commonly mentioned, followed by consumer goods retailers, and retail banking or insurance providers. However, when it comes to breaking multiple promises, healthcare and automotive companies were the dubious leaders. Clearly, customers’ ability to recall specific instances of service failures is acute, and it affects their overall view of the company.”
But is breaking a promise as simple as not doing what you said you would do? Yes and no.
Promises by their very nature have explicit and implicit elements. There are the words that are actually used, and that form the literal undertaking. And there are underlying meanings that consumers take from what has been said, that may or may not have been what the brand meant, but that fit with the ‘internal logic’ of buyers. For example, a brand that promises to clean up its supply chain may literally intend to audit and reconfigure how it gets its goods to market. However, that ‘promise’ may be read by consumers as a shift to a more ethical approach, the instigation of audited traceability, an intention to shift the supply chain either on-shore or off-shore or something else … If the brand delivers what it considers to be its side of the bargain but that is not what buyers believed they were entitled to, then the word “broken” will quickly enter the fray.
The other aspect of course is that every brand promise is only as strong as the people who are asked to deliver on it. If you fail to give your people the tools, permissions, resources or training to do what they must, there will be a shortfall. Too many brands forget this. They simply go to market with an idea that they then expect their frontline and support teams to work out for themselves.
Here are 7 scenarios around how a brand can fall short:
1. The promise was never kept – the brand just didn’t do what it said it would, because it didn’t wish to, it didn’t know how to or couldn’t. Unless this is a matter of outright deception, the key problem here is often one of over-optimism: the brand managers have talked themselves into believing that the brand can do more than it is capable of.
2. The promise wasn’t delivered in the way that buyers expected – the brand’s view of what was expected differed markedly from what consumers understood it to mean. This is the classic case of customers expecting “X” and the brand delivering “J”.
3. The promise came with too many conditions – the promise is kept, but consumers face what they consider to be unacceptable or unexpected hurdles to qualify. Another scenario here is that the brand changes its terms and conditions, such that consumers feel they now have to do so much more to achieve what they once got so much more easily.
4. There was a significant delay in fulfilling the promise – things just took too long. This is particularly the case for brands that take longer than consumers expected to put things right.
5. The promise was only ever a hope – the brand mistook a dream for a promise. They went public with a big idea in the hope that their people would rise up and deliver on the new expectation. It never happened.
6. The promise was what was expected already – nothing will make cynical consumers even more sceptical than a promise that buyers took for granted from the whole sector anyway. Consumers quickly identify this as lowballing.
7. The promise was superseded by competitors – not so much a case of failure, but rather one where the promise loses its punch. A promise, which may have been attractive at one point, falls flat because others already offer (or appear to offer) more. Consumers quickly come to see the promise as uncompelling.
Regardless of why it happened, what is the fallout of not delivering? The Accenture research reveals that companies that fail to keep their actual or implied promises cause unnecessary erosion to their customer base. 38% of consumers who experience a broken promise will switch soon after, 10% will keep working with the company but move some of their spending, and the rest – more than half – will look to switch, opening the door to an eventual defection. Many consumers, in areas such as retail banking and telecommunications, will use moments like renewal of contract to make these changes.
Three thoughts to close. If you’re shaping or reshaping a brand promise right now: be careful what you say; be aware of what others may think you mean; and be certain that you have what’s required to deliver.
Compete. Win. Learn. Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.
The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop
Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education
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The rate of succession of older CEOs of large U.S. public companies slowed significantly in 2015, bringing to a halt a generational shift in business leadership that had been observed since the 2008-2009 financial crisis, according to a new report by The Conference Board. CEO Succession Practices: 2016 Edition and its companion report, Key Dimensions […]
– the book: Amazon bestseller The Relationship Engine: Connecting with the People Who Power Your Business, an instructive book about developing valuable, sustaining business relationships
– the brain: Ed Wallace, President and Chief Relationship Officer of The Relational Capital Group, a consulting firm that bring expertise in leadership, sales, account management and customer service to clients around the world — and perhaps the ultimate Relational Leader (read on to find out what that means)
– the best bits: The Relationship Engine is comprised of three parts: strategy, application, and tools.
There a lots of thought-provoking ideas throughout the book, from the more factual or tangible:
“Seventy-eight percent of professionals overestimate the strength of their business relationships.”
“The best relationships are working at only 45 percent of their potential.”
“When planning client meetings, I think about the acronym “POP,” which stands for purpose, outcomes and process.”
To the more strategic or philosophical:
“Relational Leaders leave nothing to chance when they focus on the relationships that will most impact their performance.”
“Authenticity is the most difficult quality to demonstrate due to the degree of bravery it requires for us at times to be our unvarnished selves.”
“Purpose pulls profits along the way a horse pulls a cart.”
– the bottom line: The Relationship Engine is a must-read for anyone whose success relies on working with other people — and that’s pretty much everyone — so I highly recommend it.
Listen to my conversation with Ed to learn:
Check out:
Other Brand Book Bites:
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By Vanessa DiMauro Most community professionals need a better way to show how their online community is giving their business a competitive edge. Because we know the struggle is real, Leader Networks, a source for digital industry research, is doing the first research study on “The Business Impact of Online Communities.” The Society for New […]
Marketers are no longer in the advertising business; we are in the relationship business.
How do we know what people are feeling before we even speak to them about a solution? In this new norm, listening—not dialoguing—is the barometer. Listening gives us an indicator of what people are feeling. These days, if you want to go out of business, keep having one-way discussions about using advertising. If you want to sustain long-term success, however, cultivate relationships by listening first and then having a dialogue in which the other party’s emotional investment takes precedence.
Marketers need to spend less time advertising to their customers and more time connecting with them, growing with them, and listening to them. The path to this relationship is creativity, not knowledge. No amount of knowledge can help you in this situation.
While many companies and agencies rush to hire social media strategists, digital experts, and chief content officers, forward-thinking organizations are building influencer programs or hiring chief influencers. Some employees are simply becoming influencers without a mandate because of the abundance of publishing platforms and networks at their service, like LinkedIn, Pulse, and Medium. These programs are a combination of diagnosing customer feedback mixed with amplifying company insights in a robust, ongoing dialogue. Several of these influencers have a mixture of skills including:
+Product and competitive product awareness
+Awareness of technology evolution
+Product research and development
+People relations
+Thought leadership
+Controversial points of view
The ability to connect and listen to customers and other influencers directly within a line of business may seem antithetical to our long-held perspective on brand marketing. Yet this creative destruction uses two key elements to help customers learn and make decisions: debate and ongoing conversation. Unfortunately, not everyone has the qualities needed to create these new programs. In the rush to be on trend with what they consider new, many organizations try to establish a foothold in a discipline in which they don’t have much investment, or they will shape it to have the look and feel of an advertising campaign. We know how successful that will be.
Seek Out Creative Hybrids
To navigate this new, creative economic growth territory, the best way to be a marketer is to not be a marketer at all. Instead, it is to be a media company. For years, media companies struggled with digital formats, but lately they seem to be crossing the chasm. The New York Times, Washington Post, and even Condé Nast have embraced new ways of thinking. Armed with content, data, and creative talent, BuzzFeed, Vox, Mashable, and many new media outlets have successfully pushed the envelope, reimagining what media should look and feel like. And the titans have perked up. NBC/Universal is heavily invested in both BuzzFeed and Vox. Even big media legacies realize the power of data-driven, creative-hybrid outlets. While brands continue to navigate this new world, it’s important to note who is on your team and how the team handles working in this environment. So, ditch the “MBAs preferred” approach to marketing and embrace the 50/50 creative-hybrid approach. You can start by building on and improving these seven personality traits for your team:
1. Listening Skills. Listening is essential to future success. To truly find out what’s interesting in the world and how it links with other things, you need to possess amazing listening skills. This flies in the face of conventional marketing, which has always believed in amplification. Yet as we know, those who do all the talking cannot stay silent long enough to listen and learn. Know when to shut up.
2. Curiosity. Rather than trying to find something interesting in everything, pay attention to the things you genuinely find interesting—no matter how obscure, silly, embarrassing, or irrelevant they may seem. Because when you are curious, you bring your whole self to whatever you’re doing. You give it your full attention, and you have the energy and persistence you need to do something innovative.
3. Emotional Intelligence. I believe that a greater awareness of emotional intelligence (EI) will lead to more women taking positions of power in marketing and in embracing disruptive marketing. Some industries are becoming so competitive that effective marketing is no longer a numbers game. Instead, it is about connecting with customers and clients in meaningful ways. This connecting entails building friendships with your target audience so they adopt your culture. Those entrepreneurs who can successfully walk in the shoes of their customers almost always create a foolproof model for success and longevity.
4. Creativity. Steve Jobs famously said, Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it. They just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while; that’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. In the creative economy, every profession requires some degree of creativity. Creativity is taking preexisting elements and integrating them in a way that has never been done before, with the aim of improving conditions. Indeed, some may argue that creativity is the source of all innovations and improvements. And how you build that creative vision is through experience. How you gain experience is by doing as many different things as possible. You never know how those experiences will influence the future.
5. Customer Centricity. In the book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, Chris Anderson counts the ways that giving away content can help boost your business and build your tribe. He argues that many individuals under the age of thirty aren’t used to paying for digital information when they know they can find it somewhere online for free. By tapping into this demand for getting something for nothing, you can attract and maintain a loyal audience while building premiums as you go. Some feel this flies in the face of monetization. Again, a growth hacker builds via customer experience, whereas an MBA-trained brand marketer uses monetization. The former is thinking about the customer; the latter is thinking simply about the company.
6. Story Making. Marketing is no longer about corporate storytelling, mind tactics, manipulation, or persuasion. It’s about inspiring your audience to tell a story by using media in new and different forms. Ask yourself, “What story does my business allow others to build or make? How do they help translate a narrative with their POV to others?”
7. Generalist Experts. If you’re a marketer and still don’t understand how paid social targeting works, you should make an effort to improve your knowledge and skill set in this area. If you’re good with pay-per-click advertising and data, but you don’t understand the creative process that goes into producing video, creating imagery, or design, make an effort to learn more about how creative content is actually made. Don’t be an expert in one area. Be an expert in both.
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