By Matt Thornhill Monday, December 28, 2009
For the last two years, the Marketing Executive Networking Group has polled its members to learn about the issues on the minds of top marketers. Both surveys included questions about the "most important marketing segment." Both times Boomers topped the list. Higher than Women or Hispanics/Latinos.
We wonder, though, how many of those marketing executives even have a marketing plan that includes Boomers. Our bet: practically none.
Twenty Ten (get used to it, trust us) is going to change that. Years ago, David Wolfe, author of Ageless Marketing and one of the most visionary marketing minds out there, was asked when marketers would wake up to the older demographic. He said, "When there is pain." That is, when business softens and marketers realize more money is in the hands of the older half of the population -- the one they've been ignoring.
In the last year we think marketers have experienced enough "pain" to their bottom line to examine the opportunities of targeting Boomers, or those over 50. To help in that examination, we offer 10 reasons Boomers need to be part of your marketing plan in 2010.
1.You will build your career and legacy on their backs. (We thought we'd start with a personal reason to motivate you to keep reading.) In 2020, the marketing leaders in organizations will be the ones that figured out how to make their products or services relevant to the over-50 crowd. That's because the over-50 crowd will grow 21% in size in 10 years. The 18-49 crowd will remain the same size. We're not making this up. It's Census data.
2.They buy things. Lots of things. Overall, the over-50 crowd outspends the under-50 crowd by $400 billion. That's more than Walmart sells annually. Want some of that action?
3.They try new things. Boomers were raised in front of the TV; they are not "set in their ways." They'll buy your product if you make it relevant. So make it relevant.
4.They are easy to reach. They read newspapers. They watch TV. They listen to the radio. They are easier to target than younger generations.
5.They think they are in the middle of Middle Age. With a median age of 54, Boomers are far from being done. They don't think they will reach Old Age until age 75 or so. You have plenty of years of strong revenue from their wallets.
6.They use the Internet. They search, they shop, they buy. There may not be as many of them on social networking sites, but they are online -- just as many and just as often as younger generations. You can sell to them online.
7.They have grandkids. Some 40% of all Boomers are already grandparents. Over 55% of all grandparents alive today are Boomers. They spend money on their grandkids, practically without thinking. It's like taking candy from a grandbaby.
8.They are control freaks. They control their parents' consumption of healthcare and their kids' education. They are a sandwich generation that likes being in the center of it all. Think "ham." They like to influence everyone's purchases -- family, friends, Facebook buddies.
9.They like advertising. Sure, they are skeptical, but they are also fans of good advertising. They will respond to your effort if it speaks to them.
10.They are the future. "Old" is where the action is for the next 20 years and Boomers are the new "old." New products, businesses and industries will cater to the new "old." Will you?
Put Boomers into your 2010 plan and demonstrate you've got 2020 foresight......annnnnd....
The Good Dr. Philip Jay...wishes you and yours and healthy, happy and joyous New Year...Have a blast you all!!!
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Cultivate a Team of Strategic Sellers
The role of the salesperson has changed. Today's salesperson must help customers increase market share, introduce new products and manage resources more efficiently. Learn how to transform a tactical sales force into a team of strategic sellers. Free whitepaper.
Hope you all can get this essay from University of Michigan Ross School of Business Executive Education. If you can't, write me and I'll send it to ya. I ordered it. Philip Jay LeNoble,Ph.D.
......drphilipjay@comcast.net.
Hope you all can get this essay from University of Michigan Ross School of Business Executive Education. If you can't, write me and I'll send it to ya. I ordered it. Philip Jay LeNoble,Ph.D.
......drphilipjay@comcast.net.
TV Revs: '09 Down 22%, Rise Predicted in '10
TV stations will resume some advertising growth in 2010 -- but it will take years to get back to pre-recession levels.
BIA/Kelsey, a financial advisor to local media companies, estimates that TV stations' ad revenues will rise 3% in 2010 -- or $500 million -- to $16.1 billion. BIA estimates by 2013, stations will only inch forward to $16.4 billion; however, it notes that TV stations have not been at such levels since the mid-1990s.
The media group now says 2009 will end at $15.6 billion, down 22.4% from last year's $20.1 billion mark. TV stations reached an all-time ad revenue record in 2006, when it was at $22.8 billion.
BIA says 2011 will see negative growth again -- in part because it is a non-Olympic, non-political year. The market will shrink $200 million, landing TV stations at $15.9 billion.
The next year -- 2012, a big Olympics and political year -- will see the market grow a sizable $900 million to $16.8 billion. But in 2013, another non-Olympic, non-political year, the market will again contract to $16.4 billion.
BIA says local Internet advertising revenue for TV stations will be $518 million this year, a 12% increase over 2008. Internet sales for local TV stations will steadily rise to over $1 billion in 2013.
Virtually all TV markets were down in 2009, and many will struggle in 2010. But a couple will manage some meaningful improvements, thanks to local political advertising.
These markets include: Philadelphia, up 6.5%; Pittsburgh, 5% or higher; Las Vegas, 5% gain; and Chicago, St. Louis and Hartford-New Haven, all expected to have 4.5% increases in 2010. LeNoble says,"Much ado about transactional business but local-direct businesses will be looking for growth over 2009...if only sales managers can get their reps to make a call in place of sitting by the fax machine or waiting for an e-order to come in."
BIA/Kelsey, a financial advisor to local media companies, estimates that TV stations' ad revenues will rise 3% in 2010 -- or $500 million -- to $16.1 billion. BIA estimates by 2013, stations will only inch forward to $16.4 billion; however, it notes that TV stations have not been at such levels since the mid-1990s.
The media group now says 2009 will end at $15.6 billion, down 22.4% from last year's $20.1 billion mark. TV stations reached an all-time ad revenue record in 2006, when it was at $22.8 billion.
BIA says 2011 will see negative growth again -- in part because it is a non-Olympic, non-political year. The market will shrink $200 million, landing TV stations at $15.9 billion.
The next year -- 2012, a big Olympics and political year -- will see the market grow a sizable $900 million to $16.8 billion. But in 2013, another non-Olympic, non-political year, the market will again contract to $16.4 billion.
BIA says local Internet advertising revenue for TV stations will be $518 million this year, a 12% increase over 2008. Internet sales for local TV stations will steadily rise to over $1 billion in 2013.
Virtually all TV markets were down in 2009, and many will struggle in 2010. But a couple will manage some meaningful improvements, thanks to local political advertising.
These markets include: Philadelphia, up 6.5%; Pittsburgh, 5% or higher; Las Vegas, 5% gain; and Chicago, St. Louis and Hartford-New Haven, all expected to have 4.5% increases in 2010. LeNoble says,"Much ado about transactional business but local-direct businesses will be looking for growth over 2009...if only sales managers can get their reps to make a call in place of sitting by the fax machine or waiting for an e-order to come in."
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Maximizing Impact with mobile marketing
Since so much new media includes mobile marketing, I thought it would be good to post an essay by Bob Compton, (bcompton@vontoo.com) who is is Founder and CEO and of leading permission-based voice marketing provider, Vontoo, based in Indianapolis, IN.
Hope you enjoy this insight into the heart of mobile marketing...Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D.
With the introduction of new technologies, the face of marketing inevitably changes, as consumers adopt and come to prefer communicating through various new channels. While marketers once relied heavily on radio, television and print advertising, many now find online, SMS text messaging and social media efforts more effective in this digital age.
Mobile marketing can be particularly effective in today’s society as a result of people’s dependence on their cell phones. Cell phones are, certainly, used to make simple phone calls, but they are also now tools for sending text messages, emailing, gaming, checking sports scores, updating social media pages, managing schedules, setting alerts, looking up driving directions and more.
Although mobile marketing can be extremely effective, it is important that marketers realize the responsibility they have to communicate ethically and responsibly with consumers. Regardless of how much is invested in mobile marketing, it’s still important to focus on strategy execution for an effective campaign.
Here are five tips for maximizing the impact of your mobile marketing efforts for optimal results.
1. Communicate via methods customers prefer
Prior to initiating a mobile marketing campaign, thoroughly research your specific target audience. It’s very important to determine what types of people comprise this audience and what their preferences are with regard to receiving information – via text message, email, voice or another medium. Integrating opt-in pages on your web sites can help assist with list-building, ensuring that customers contacted have provided the necessary permission. Finally, be sure to consider the length of a message. For example, the average listening duration for a voice message is 30 seconds. Thus, messages longer than this likely won’t be heard by consumers.
2. Supply desired information
As part of your consumer research, develop an understanding of the information consumers seek. You want to provide desired information – not just details you deem important or that appear likely to benefit you most. For example, say a professional sports team is targeting its past single-game ticket holders to promote ticket sales for next season. While the team might want these consumers to purchase multi-game ticket packets in advance, the fans might actually be looking for information on how to purchase tickets for a single game, at their convenience. By providing the information fans are seeking, the team increases the likelihood of ticket sales and makes customers happy.
3. Avoid intrusive messaging
Be sensitive to the fact that consumers are constantly bombarded by marketing and advertising communications. Messaging should be extremely tailored to the target audience’s interests and needs. If consumers feel taken advantage of or intruded upon, you will risk alienating them from your brand. In addition, make sure that the timing of messaging is appropriate: send messages when consumers are most likely to successfully receive them.
4. Improve relationships with customers
Take advantage of the opportunity to serve customers well and create lasting relationships with them. Use mobile marketing to follow up with customers after purchases, offer any service assistance desired or alert them of upcoming deals. Let customers know they are valued and that you appreciate their business. By building more personal and intimate relationships with customers, you can help secure their business for an on-going basis into the future.
5. Build customer loyalty
Make repeat customers feel special by offering exclusive deals, special service and extra information. By simply creating a “VIP customer” list or offering items at a better value for these loyal customers, you’ll make them feel like they “belong” and truly secure their loyalty and business for the long-haul. For example, a musician might send special “thank you” messages to fans who attended a recent concert. In this messaging, he might also offer special back-stage passes or ticket discounts to these fans at the next concert they attend. Cultivating relationships with these loyal, repeat customers can lead to gaining future business with these individuals as well as those who are referred by them.
Mobile marketing can be a very effective tool if used properly. Research and consumer analysis are very important to planning effective campaigns. However, when it comes to implementing campaigns and building relationships with customers, it is important to properly tailor messaging and include personal elements of your business. Only when you allow yourself to get personal with customers will you see the loyal (and lucrative) business that mobile marketing can make possible.
Hope you enjoy this insight into the heart of mobile marketing...Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D.
With the introduction of new technologies, the face of marketing inevitably changes, as consumers adopt and come to prefer communicating through various new channels. While marketers once relied heavily on radio, television and print advertising, many now find online, SMS text messaging and social media efforts more effective in this digital age.
Mobile marketing can be particularly effective in today’s society as a result of people’s dependence on their cell phones. Cell phones are, certainly, used to make simple phone calls, but they are also now tools for sending text messages, emailing, gaming, checking sports scores, updating social media pages, managing schedules, setting alerts, looking up driving directions and more.
Although mobile marketing can be extremely effective, it is important that marketers realize the responsibility they have to communicate ethically and responsibly with consumers. Regardless of how much is invested in mobile marketing, it’s still important to focus on strategy execution for an effective campaign.
Here are five tips for maximizing the impact of your mobile marketing efforts for optimal results.
1. Communicate via methods customers prefer
Prior to initiating a mobile marketing campaign, thoroughly research your specific target audience. It’s very important to determine what types of people comprise this audience and what their preferences are with regard to receiving information – via text message, email, voice or another medium. Integrating opt-in pages on your web sites can help assist with list-building, ensuring that customers contacted have provided the necessary permission. Finally, be sure to consider the length of a message. For example, the average listening duration for a voice message is 30 seconds. Thus, messages longer than this likely won’t be heard by consumers.
2. Supply desired information
As part of your consumer research, develop an understanding of the information consumers seek. You want to provide desired information – not just details you deem important or that appear likely to benefit you most. For example, say a professional sports team is targeting its past single-game ticket holders to promote ticket sales for next season. While the team might want these consumers to purchase multi-game ticket packets in advance, the fans might actually be looking for information on how to purchase tickets for a single game, at their convenience. By providing the information fans are seeking, the team increases the likelihood of ticket sales and makes customers happy.
3. Avoid intrusive messaging
Be sensitive to the fact that consumers are constantly bombarded by marketing and advertising communications. Messaging should be extremely tailored to the target audience’s interests and needs. If consumers feel taken advantage of or intruded upon, you will risk alienating them from your brand. In addition, make sure that the timing of messaging is appropriate: send messages when consumers are most likely to successfully receive them.
4. Improve relationships with customers
Take advantage of the opportunity to serve customers well and create lasting relationships with them. Use mobile marketing to follow up with customers after purchases, offer any service assistance desired or alert them of upcoming deals. Let customers know they are valued and that you appreciate their business. By building more personal and intimate relationships with customers, you can help secure their business for an on-going basis into the future.
5. Build customer loyalty
Make repeat customers feel special by offering exclusive deals, special service and extra information. By simply creating a “VIP customer” list or offering items at a better value for these loyal customers, you’ll make them feel like they “belong” and truly secure their loyalty and business for the long-haul. For example, a musician might send special “thank you” messages to fans who attended a recent concert. In this messaging, he might also offer special back-stage passes or ticket discounts to these fans at the next concert they attend. Cultivating relationships with these loyal, repeat customers can lead to gaining future business with these individuals as well as those who are referred by them.
Mobile marketing can be a very effective tool if used properly. Research and consumer analysis are very important to planning effective campaigns. However, when it comes to implementing campaigns and building relationships with customers, it is important to properly tailor messaging and include personal elements of your business. Only when you allow yourself to get personal with customers will you see the loyal (and lucrative) business that mobile marketing can make possible.
Friday, December 18, 2009
The Five-Second Brand
By Peter Dunn Friday, December 18, 2009
Gen Y is said to have the attention span of a gnat. Having never studied the attentiveness of gnats, let's all agree that this means that Gen Y is easily distracted. They (we) are distracted away from your brand, and they (we) are distracted towards your brand. But how can you make sure that your brand is flypaper and your followers are flies?
The solution: a five-second brand. For example, the average Gen Yer lives life buried in a mobile device. Therefore, your five-second brand must resonate on this emerging platform. Can your message be conveyed across a Droid or iPhone? If you are trying to reach Gen Y, then it better. Gen Y is the generation that never had to deal with a dial-up connection; they aren't going to tolerate a brand that takes 30 seconds to explain. The five-second brand is all about meeting your audience half-way.
So, how do you make your brand shine in just five seconds? Here are three sure-fire ways to get your brand noticed by Gen Y in that time frame.
1.Authentic There is no more annoying and cliché concept in marketing than authenticity. However, it's still a misunderstood concept that people misplay. Authenticity has nothing to do with test groups or tracking. Authenticity is like having 11 toes. You either have it, or you don't. Authenticity is your ability to let your brand's true personality shine through the messaging.
2.Inviting Your audience needs to feel like they can interact with your brand. Gen Y hates being told what to do. A brand that offers open dialogue is a brand that isn't easily dismissed by a distracted Gen Yer. I'm not talking about the suggestion box mentality either. Gen Y expects to see their name alongside of your brand. You need to go far enough to literally include members of your audience in your brand.
3.Casual The business suit of Gen Y is jeans. Even formal industries see the importance of casualness when targeting Gen Y. The funny thing is that Gen Y doesn't find their jeans to be casual. It's just how they are, which brings us back to authenticity.
Look deep within your brand and try to objectively evaluate its position in your marketing. You can't fake these things, but you can dig deep and discover the true voice of your brand. Can you get the job in five seconds? If not, then you have a lot of work to do.
Gen Y is said to have the attention span of a gnat. Having never studied the attentiveness of gnats, let's all agree that this means that Gen Y is easily distracted. They (we) are distracted away from your brand, and they (we) are distracted towards your brand. But how can you make sure that your brand is flypaper and your followers are flies?
The solution: a five-second brand. For example, the average Gen Yer lives life buried in a mobile device. Therefore, your five-second brand must resonate on this emerging platform. Can your message be conveyed across a Droid or iPhone? If you are trying to reach Gen Y, then it better. Gen Y is the generation that never had to deal with a dial-up connection; they aren't going to tolerate a brand that takes 30 seconds to explain. The five-second brand is all about meeting your audience half-way.
So, how do you make your brand shine in just five seconds? Here are three sure-fire ways to get your brand noticed by Gen Y in that time frame.
1.Authentic There is no more annoying and cliché concept in marketing than authenticity. However, it's still a misunderstood concept that people misplay. Authenticity has nothing to do with test groups or tracking. Authenticity is like having 11 toes. You either have it, or you don't. Authenticity is your ability to let your brand's true personality shine through the messaging.
2.Inviting Your audience needs to feel like they can interact with your brand. Gen Y hates being told what to do. A brand that offers open dialogue is a brand that isn't easily dismissed by a distracted Gen Yer. I'm not talking about the suggestion box mentality either. Gen Y expects to see their name alongside of your brand. You need to go far enough to literally include members of your audience in your brand.
3.Casual The business suit of Gen Y is jeans. Even formal industries see the importance of casualness when targeting Gen Y. The funny thing is that Gen Y doesn't find their jeans to be casual. It's just how they are, which brings us back to authenticity.
Look deep within your brand and try to objectively evaluate its position in your marketing. You can't fake these things, but you can dig deep and discover the true voice of your brand. Can you get the job in five seconds? If not, then you have a lot of work to do.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Two Words: Event Marketing
This is a great idea for media clients who want to engage teens...Philip..
By Lauren Zaner Thursday, December 17, 2009
In an age where teens have the ability to access information in a multitude of media, including the Internet, cell phones, TV, print and more, it has become increasingly difficult for brands to differentiate themselves among one of the most savvy and picky demographics. How can brands stand out from the competition and create a lasting connection with teenagers? Two words: Event Marketing.
Put a sample of a product in a teenager's hand and, sure, if they like it, they are more likely to purchase versus sight unseen. Give that same teen a sample and an experience with the brand and the purchase intent increases even more. Event marketing has taken product sampling and given it 3-D and surround-sound. It gives brands a chance to create an experience based memory.
Event marketing allows a brand to hand-pick the most appropriate venue to reach a very specific consumer and tailor its activation to fit that lifestyle. Teens are like wolves; they travel in large packs. Where you see one indie rock-loving, skinny jean-wearing teen, or young fashionista, you are bound to see dozens or hundreds more. This makes it easy to pick and choose where a brand can tap into, and successfully execute event marketing. However, as event marketing creates a more lasting impression, it is just as easy for that impression to be negative versus positive. There are a few key points to keep in mind when utilizing events to market to teens successfully.
Authenticity.Event marketing gives a brand a lot of freedom to get a little crazy. Teens have become very discerning. The key is to thoroughly research the likes and dislikes of the group of teens you are specifically targeting. For instance, if you are going after 15-year-old baseball playing males, trucker hats with the brand on them as a premium would be a huge miss. Teens can see right through poorly researched and executed brand marketing attempts, especially when it's experiential. There's little room for error.
Don't Hold Back. If you are going to use the awesome power of event marketing, do it right. Work with a creative team or agency that specializes in youth marketing or, even more specifically, the target market within the teen demographic. If you are sponsoring an event, don't cut corners on execution. If you are executing a buzz or guerilla strategy, make sure you aren't doing something that's been done before ... they will know.
By Lauren Zaner Thursday, December 17, 2009
In an age where teens have the ability to access information in a multitude of media, including the Internet, cell phones, TV, print and more, it has become increasingly difficult for brands to differentiate themselves among one of the most savvy and picky demographics. How can brands stand out from the competition and create a lasting connection with teenagers? Two words: Event Marketing.
Put a sample of a product in a teenager's hand and, sure, if they like it, they are more likely to purchase versus sight unseen. Give that same teen a sample and an experience with the brand and the purchase intent increases even more. Event marketing has taken product sampling and given it 3-D and surround-sound. It gives brands a chance to create an experience based memory.
Event marketing allows a brand to hand-pick the most appropriate venue to reach a very specific consumer and tailor its activation to fit that lifestyle. Teens are like wolves; they travel in large packs. Where you see one indie rock-loving, skinny jean-wearing teen, or young fashionista, you are bound to see dozens or hundreds more. This makes it easy to pick and choose where a brand can tap into, and successfully execute event marketing. However, as event marketing creates a more lasting impression, it is just as easy for that impression to be negative versus positive. There are a few key points to keep in mind when utilizing events to market to teens successfully.
Authenticity.Event marketing gives a brand a lot of freedom to get a little crazy. Teens have become very discerning. The key is to thoroughly research the likes and dislikes of the group of teens you are specifically targeting. For instance, if you are going after 15-year-old baseball playing males, trucker hats with the brand on them as a premium would be a huge miss. Teens can see right through poorly researched and executed brand marketing attempts, especially when it's experiential. There's little room for error.
Don't Hold Back. If you are going to use the awesome power of event marketing, do it right. Work with a creative team or agency that specializes in youth marketing or, even more specifically, the target market within the teen demographic. If you are sponsoring an event, don't cut corners on execution. If you are executing a buzz or guerilla strategy, make sure you aren't doing something that's been done before ... they will know.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
10 Tips for Saving Your Life From Your Business
OK..it's Hanukkah...Christmas, Kwanza and a whole New Year and new beginnings coming up...and you may feel like you can't get anything accomplished to meet sales budgets, target tasks, the amount of the company's growth objectives you and the management team set up this past year as well as making those key personnel hires you need as well as shredding those who are just taking up space and you promise yourself and the sales managers to get it done in 2010 no matter what! Well..sit back and take a breath and look at what I found that may make life and your business plan a lot more focused and enjoyable...Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D.
by Tim Berry on December 15, 2009
in Advice, Back to Fundamentals, Entrepreneurship, Reflections, Work Life Balance. Your business or your life? The nagging question comes up a lot. Recently I saw this startling statement:
Maximizing your chance for success means sacrificing health and family.
That was in this post by Jason Cohen on VentureBeat. He’s serious. He quotes Mark Cuban and one other successful entrepreneur. He says you can’t get it all done otherwise. Build your business first, then build your life. Yeah, right. Like business gets easier at some point? When it grows? Good luck with that.
Logical flaw: for every successful entrepreneur who cites sacrificing health and family as the key to success, there are 10 others who say sacrificing health and family is a tragic mistake. Another logical flaw: millions of people sacrificed health and family and weren’t successful. All their sacrifice did was ruin their lives. Nobody quotes them. They call that survivor bias.
Personally, I don’t buy the passion, obsession, sacrifice all for your business philosophy. Success in life can be something different than purely sales, growth, profits, and celebrity as an entrepreneurial success. Not many of us end up as top-ten world-class entrepreneurs, and, for the rest of us, having a life can be way more important. The sacrifice doesn’t cause success. It’s a rationalization. So I’d like to suggest two sets of rules to help you save your life from your business. The first five are fundamental rules. The second set, five more, are suggestions more than rules; different ways to think about things; reminders.
First, the five fundamentals. I consider these practical, realistic, actionable rules that are good for everybody. For the record, four of the five are rules that I’ve lived with for a long time. Two of them thanks go to my wife and not me; and the fifth, the exercise one, I learned the hard way, by not doing it. I promise you that you can live by all five and not have to sacrifice business success for any of them. These will help you keep your balance:
Develop and honor meal times with people you love. For me and my wife, as we built our business, it was about family meals, dinner time, once a day. We made the family dinner a priority. During crunch times, we’d stop, have dinner with our kids, and then go on later (see point 3, below). And you don’t need a marriage and children to make this rule important. Do it your way, not mine. It applies just as well to any relationship that’s important to you.
Schedule vacations long in advance. If you like what you do in your business, you’re always going to have trouble getting away. There will always be a good business reason to not go on vacations. If you’re scheduled long in advance, then the vacation is on the calendar. As you talk to clients, schedule business events, and generally work on the business, your vacation shows up, and you naturally work around it.
Get used to working at home. So you have a lot of work but you tear yourself away, take your dinner time, spend some time in real life, and then later on, when everybody else is watching dumbing and numbing television, you can get back on the computer and catch up with your obsession. That requires good Internet connection and related tools, like online productivity tools, GoToMyPC, and the like.
Don’t obsess; plan. Don’t wander through the rest of life with business thoughts running through your head like a helicopter background noise in your dreams. Take a few deep breaths. To get the business-helicopter-mind out of your head keep the planning realistic. Planning gets a lot of things out of your head and into the plan. When you wake up at night obsessing, go to your planning. Write it down. Relax, and go back to sleep.
Get regular exercise. I’ve been there: It’s so easy to put off exercise because you’re worried about the business. “I have too much to do, I don’t have time for exercise,” you tell yourself, and it becomes a rationalization to dive back into that project or those emails. But there’s a trick to exercise: you get more time back, in productivity, than what you put into the exercise. Seriously: put in 45 minutes 3-4 days a week and you’ll get back an hour of productive time for every half hour you spend. It has to do with sleep, stress, and mental health.
And then, after the fundamentals, five fine touches, embellishments, not-so-universal, but maybe still useful:
Do something you can believe in. It’s not just finding the best business opportunity; it’s finding one you believe in. There’s quality of work as well as quantity, and high quality makes high quantity easier to live with. Make sure that when you take a step back from it, every so often, you can see how what you do made other lives better.
Acknowledge risk. Don’t bet what you can’t afford to lose. Understand the risk you take. Talk about it with the other people in your life, so you don’t feel all alone with the risk. Think about the worst case. Learn to live with it.
Don’t clam up. Share carefully. Be able to talk about business problems, safely, with at least one other person in your life. Get out of the let’s solve them mode, and into the let’s just talk about them so creative juices can percolate. People who care about you take silence as being something like walls and barriers. Secrets are stressful. Sharing relieves stress. But be careful, mind the framework and parameters of sharing, people have to know when you don’t want to be told the obvious feedback.
Understand that you make mistakes. Acknowledge your mistakes, analyze them, and them package them up in your mind and store them somewhere out of site, somewhere where you can access them occasionally to help avoid making the same mistakes again, but, on the other hand, where they won’t just drive you crazy.
Tell the truth. Then you don’t have to keep track of which lies you told to which people. It’s hard enough to manage stress without having to manage complex alternate realities.
None of the above guarantees business success, but none of it is really going to get in the way of your success either, and it may help you stay sane in the meantime. Think about this: my wife taught me, early in our 40-year-marriage, that time is the scarcest resource, way scarcer than money. And some day you’re going to turn 60. Unless you die first.
by Tim Berry on December 15, 2009
in Advice, Back to Fundamentals, Entrepreneurship, Reflections, Work Life Balance. Your business or your life? The nagging question comes up a lot. Recently I saw this startling statement:
Maximizing your chance for success means sacrificing health and family.
That was in this post by Jason Cohen on VentureBeat. He’s serious. He quotes Mark Cuban and one other successful entrepreneur. He says you can’t get it all done otherwise. Build your business first, then build your life. Yeah, right. Like business gets easier at some point? When it grows? Good luck with that.
Logical flaw: for every successful entrepreneur who cites sacrificing health and family as the key to success, there are 10 others who say sacrificing health and family is a tragic mistake. Another logical flaw: millions of people sacrificed health and family and weren’t successful. All their sacrifice did was ruin their lives. Nobody quotes them. They call that survivor bias.
Personally, I don’t buy the passion, obsession, sacrifice all for your business philosophy. Success in life can be something different than purely sales, growth, profits, and celebrity as an entrepreneurial success. Not many of us end up as top-ten world-class entrepreneurs, and, for the rest of us, having a life can be way more important. The sacrifice doesn’t cause success. It’s a rationalization. So I’d like to suggest two sets of rules to help you save your life from your business. The first five are fundamental rules. The second set, five more, are suggestions more than rules; different ways to think about things; reminders.
First, the five fundamentals. I consider these practical, realistic, actionable rules that are good for everybody. For the record, four of the five are rules that I’ve lived with for a long time. Two of them thanks go to my wife and not me; and the fifth, the exercise one, I learned the hard way, by not doing it. I promise you that you can live by all five and not have to sacrifice business success for any of them. These will help you keep your balance:
Develop and honor meal times with people you love. For me and my wife, as we built our business, it was about family meals, dinner time, once a day. We made the family dinner a priority. During crunch times, we’d stop, have dinner with our kids, and then go on later (see point 3, below). And you don’t need a marriage and children to make this rule important. Do it your way, not mine. It applies just as well to any relationship that’s important to you.
Schedule vacations long in advance. If you like what you do in your business, you’re always going to have trouble getting away. There will always be a good business reason to not go on vacations. If you’re scheduled long in advance, then the vacation is on the calendar. As you talk to clients, schedule business events, and generally work on the business, your vacation shows up, and you naturally work around it.
Get used to working at home. So you have a lot of work but you tear yourself away, take your dinner time, spend some time in real life, and then later on, when everybody else is watching dumbing and numbing television, you can get back on the computer and catch up with your obsession. That requires good Internet connection and related tools, like online productivity tools, GoToMyPC, and the like.
Don’t obsess; plan. Don’t wander through the rest of life with business thoughts running through your head like a helicopter background noise in your dreams. Take a few deep breaths. To get the business-helicopter-mind out of your head keep the planning realistic. Planning gets a lot of things out of your head and into the plan. When you wake up at night obsessing, go to your planning. Write it down. Relax, and go back to sleep.
Get regular exercise. I’ve been there: It’s so easy to put off exercise because you’re worried about the business. “I have too much to do, I don’t have time for exercise,” you tell yourself, and it becomes a rationalization to dive back into that project or those emails. But there’s a trick to exercise: you get more time back, in productivity, than what you put into the exercise. Seriously: put in 45 minutes 3-4 days a week and you’ll get back an hour of productive time for every half hour you spend. It has to do with sleep, stress, and mental health.
And then, after the fundamentals, five fine touches, embellishments, not-so-universal, but maybe still useful:
Do something you can believe in. It’s not just finding the best business opportunity; it’s finding one you believe in. There’s quality of work as well as quantity, and high quality makes high quantity easier to live with. Make sure that when you take a step back from it, every so often, you can see how what you do made other lives better.
Acknowledge risk. Don’t bet what you can’t afford to lose. Understand the risk you take. Talk about it with the other people in your life, so you don’t feel all alone with the risk. Think about the worst case. Learn to live with it.
Don’t clam up. Share carefully. Be able to talk about business problems, safely, with at least one other person in your life. Get out of the let’s solve them mode, and into the let’s just talk about them so creative juices can percolate. People who care about you take silence as being something like walls and barriers. Secrets are stressful. Sharing relieves stress. But be careful, mind the framework and parameters of sharing, people have to know when you don’t want to be told the obvious feedback.
Understand that you make mistakes. Acknowledge your mistakes, analyze them, and them package them up in your mind and store them somewhere out of site, somewhere where you can access them occasionally to help avoid making the same mistakes again, but, on the other hand, where they won’t just drive you crazy.
Tell the truth. Then you don’t have to keep track of which lies you told to which people. It’s hard enough to manage stress without having to manage complex alternate realities.
None of the above guarantees business success, but none of it is really going to get in the way of your success either, and it may help you stay sane in the meantime. Think about this: my wife taught me, early in our 40-year-marriage, that time is the scarcest resource, way scarcer than money. And some day you’re going to turn 60. Unless you die first.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Retail Sales Up in November for Third Month in Last Four
Good times seems to be starting again for media marketing executives as ad revenues are beginning to stabilize with manager's sales volume reports based on the stronger spot sales booked in 1st quarter. The report is inclusive of advance sales booked from multi-media platforms inclusive of mobile and Internet, being part of TV and radio management reporting as of the end of November. Phiip J. LeNoble, Ph.D............
FOX Business December 11, 2009
U.S. consumers stepped up their spending in November and grew more optimistic this month, data showed on Friday, raising hopes a self-sustaining economic recovery was starting to unfold.
The Commerce Department said total retail sales increased 1.3% last month, the largest advance since August, after rising 1.1% in October. It was the second straight monthly gain and beat market expectations for a 0.7% gain.
A separate report showed consumer sentiment improved in early December on signs of stabilization in the labor market.
The data were the latest in a series showing the economy may expand at a brisker pace in the fourth quarter than the 2.8% annual rate in the July-September period.
"The improvement in confidence is a complement to the good retail sales. It suggests that the consumer is slowly turning upward," said Alan Gayle, senior investment strategist, Ridgeworth Investments in Richmond, Virginia
The data lifted U.S stock indexes and the U.S. dollar rose sharply against the yen and euro.
The Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers said its preliminary index of sentiment for December rose to 73.4, just a touch below the year's high set in September. This was above the 67.4 for November and exceeded economists' expectations of a reading of 68.5.
The data eased concerns that the economy's recovery could falter because of lackluster consumer spending. The economy resumed growing in the third quarter, fueled mostly by government stimulus.
With the labor market starting to stabilize and household wealth rising, there is growing optimism that consumer spending will soon pick up.
CONSUMERS RAMPING UP SPENDING
Overall sales in November were boosted by strong receipts from gasoline stations, increased purchases of motor vehicles and parts, building materials and electronic goods among others.
"The numbers were a pleasant surprise. Consumers are starting to spend a little more freely than they have been and that is going to be an important source of sustainable growth," said David Resler, chief economist at Nomura Securities International in New York.
Despite slightly lower gasoline prices at the end of November from the end of October, sales at service stations surged 6%, the largest increase since June.
Compared to November last year, overall retail sales were up 1.9%, the first year-on-year gain since August 2008, a Commerce official said.
Some analysts said the unexpectedly strong data could cause problems for the U.S. Federal Reserve. The U.S. central bank, which meets next week, has committed to keep interest rates near zero for an "extended period", while watching to see if the recovery will pick up steam.
"The big picture ... is that the recovery looks to be more on track. That combination of improvements in the labor market and improvements in consumer spending is a strong signal that we're not at this point entering into a double-dip scenario," said Torsten Slok, senior economist at Deutsche Bank in New York.
"There is definitely a significant upside risk here that we will have a stronger recovery than what the Fed and what the consensus was expecting. That's probably causing headaches ... the thing that's at the center of their radar screen is when should we remove the 'extended period' language."
Excluding motor vehicles and parts, retail sales increased 1.2% in November, the largest increase since January, after being flat in October. Economists had expected a 0.4% increase.
Core retail sales excluding autos, gasoline and building materials rose 0.6%, advancing for a fifth straight month.
"Spending is increasing, which is good, but we'll see how sustainable it is," said Kurt Brunner, portfolio manager at Swarthmore Group in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Sales of building materials climbed 1.5% last month, the biggest gain since April 2008, after falling 1.8% in October. Purchases of electronics and appliances jumped 2.8%, the largest increase since January.
Another government showed report U.S. business inventories unexpectedly rose in October for the first time in more than a year.
FOX Business December 11, 2009
U.S. consumers stepped up their spending in November and grew more optimistic this month, data showed on Friday, raising hopes a self-sustaining economic recovery was starting to unfold.
The Commerce Department said total retail sales increased 1.3% last month, the largest advance since August, after rising 1.1% in October. It was the second straight monthly gain and beat market expectations for a 0.7% gain.
A separate report showed consumer sentiment improved in early December on signs of stabilization in the labor market.
The data were the latest in a series showing the economy may expand at a brisker pace in the fourth quarter than the 2.8% annual rate in the July-September period.
"The improvement in confidence is a complement to the good retail sales. It suggests that the consumer is slowly turning upward," said Alan Gayle, senior investment strategist, Ridgeworth Investments in Richmond, Virginia
The data lifted U.S stock indexes and the U.S. dollar rose sharply against the yen and euro.
The Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers said its preliminary index of sentiment for December rose to 73.4, just a touch below the year's high set in September. This was above the 67.4 for November and exceeded economists' expectations of a reading of 68.5.
The data eased concerns that the economy's recovery could falter because of lackluster consumer spending. The economy resumed growing in the third quarter, fueled mostly by government stimulus.
With the labor market starting to stabilize and household wealth rising, there is growing optimism that consumer spending will soon pick up.
CONSUMERS RAMPING UP SPENDING
Overall sales in November were boosted by strong receipts from gasoline stations, increased purchases of motor vehicles and parts, building materials and electronic goods among others.
"The numbers were a pleasant surprise. Consumers are starting to spend a little more freely than they have been and that is going to be an important source of sustainable growth," said David Resler, chief economist at Nomura Securities International in New York.
Despite slightly lower gasoline prices at the end of November from the end of October, sales at service stations surged 6%, the largest increase since June.
Compared to November last year, overall retail sales were up 1.9%, the first year-on-year gain since August 2008, a Commerce official said.
Some analysts said the unexpectedly strong data could cause problems for the U.S. Federal Reserve. The U.S. central bank, which meets next week, has committed to keep interest rates near zero for an "extended period", while watching to see if the recovery will pick up steam.
"The big picture ... is that the recovery looks to be more on track. That combination of improvements in the labor market and improvements in consumer spending is a strong signal that we're not at this point entering into a double-dip scenario," said Torsten Slok, senior economist at Deutsche Bank in New York.
"There is definitely a significant upside risk here that we will have a stronger recovery than what the Fed and what the consensus was expecting. That's probably causing headaches ... the thing that's at the center of their radar screen is when should we remove the 'extended period' language."
Excluding motor vehicles and parts, retail sales increased 1.2% in November, the largest increase since January, after being flat in October. Economists had expected a 0.4% increase.
Core retail sales excluding autos, gasoline and building materials rose 0.6%, advancing for a fifth straight month.
"Spending is increasing, which is good, but we'll see how sustainable it is," said Kurt Brunner, portfolio manager at Swarthmore Group in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Sales of building materials climbed 1.5% last month, the biggest gain since April 2008, after falling 1.8% in October. Purchases of electronics and appliances jumped 2.8%, the largest increase since January.
Another government showed report U.S. business inventories unexpectedly rose in October for the first time in more than a year.
Monday, November 30, 2009
The Core Characteristics of Knowing What Great Managers Know: Part 1
by Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D.
In searching for some of the answers to what helps make great managers, we consulted
the research of Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman of the Gallup Organization, who presented their remarkable findings in their massive indepth study of great managers across a wide a variety of situations in First Break All The Rules. As a review, Buckingham and Coffman were the lead researchers in Gallup’s twenty year effort to identify the core characteristics of great managers and great workplaces based on interviews of over 80,000 managers in 400 companies, the largest study of its kind ever undertaken. Because we are all traveling at breakneck speed, accomplishing personal, professional and company objectives, we will save you time and help identify some of the prime observations of their study to give managers a first-hand glimpse of their findings in capsule form.
The Core Characteristics of Knowing What Great Managers Know: Part 1
In the measurement of the four different kinds of business outcome, productivity, profitability, employee retention, and customer satisfaction, while some companies had difficulty gathering the data, 2,500 companies provided a significant prospectus enabling a more de-tailed explanation or statistical technique that cuts through the different performance measures.
This allowed for a real link between employee opinion and business unit performance across many different companies. When the data was gathered, the strength of a workplace can be simplified to twelve questions that measure the core elements needed for managers to attract, focus, and keep the most talented employees and thus become great managers. Today more than ever before, if a company is bleeding people, it is bleeding value, states Buckingham and Coffman. While Gallup’s twelve questions are the simplest, they are the most accurate way to measure the strength of a workplace and as a result produce great managers.
1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?
2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
5. Does my supervisor (sales manager, general manager, ad manager) seem to care about me as a person?
6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
7. At work, do my opinions seem to count?
8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?
9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
10. Do I have a best friend at work?
11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
12. This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?
Whether in a bank, restaurant, radio station, multi-system cable operator, TV station, ad agency, P.R. firm or newspaper, ten of the questions allowed for Gallup to measure productivity since people always believe there is a direct link between the employee’s opinion and his/her work group’s productivity.
Eight of the twelve questions showed a link to the profitability measure, while questions 1-3, 5and 7 (above) revealed a link to retention. The most powerful combination of the strongest links to the most business outcomes was 1-6. If a manager were to rate employee responses to questions 1 through 6 on a scale of “1” to “5,” “1” being strongly disagree, “5” being strongly agree, managers must focus on securing 5s from their employees as an excellent place to start. If you notice, there are no questions dealing with pay, benefits, management, or organizational structure. They are indeed important factors and are issues that help managers play the game; they can’t help you win the game. In the Gallup analysis it was discovered that the manager, not the commission, pay, benefits, perks or a charismatic corporate leader was the critical player in building a strong workplace. It’s not that the employee focused initiatives such as vacation, benefits, profit sharing, 401K plans or company training is unimportant, it’s the immediate manager that’s more important. He/she defines the work environment, sets clear expectations, knows you, trusts you and invests in you. If you don’t have a good relationship with your manager, nothing else much matters. Questions 1-6 help managers know where they stand and help them decide what to do next. The key to getting 5s to these twelve questions and engage employees is first to know where to start.
Of the twelve, the two most fundamental employee questions that will get a manager started are:
1. Do I know what is expected of me?
2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
As an employee’s perspective begins to change they may ask themselves, “Am I in a role I can excel?” If not what might they think of you the manager? At this point of attainment in an employee’s perception they are interested in knowing their individual contribution and what other people think of their work. The next four questions 3-6, help an employee know if they feel they are doing well in their role (question 3), and if other people value their individual performance (question 4), and them individually as a person (quesiton 5), and if the manager is investing in their growth (question 6). All of these questions deal with an individual’s self-worth
and as Abraham Maslow would say, self-esteem. Buckingham and Coffman know
that if a manager cannot feel the employee(s) can give a 5 rating, “strongly agree” answer to the questions, or the questions remain unanswered, their perceptions of their feelings of belonging, of being a part of the team, learning and innovating will be undermined.
Having the employee move up to their perceived success rung on the ladder with positive answers to those questions, a manager can feel the employee is gaining their strength and so are you on the road to becoming a great manager.
The next questions, 7-10 zero in on letting the employee sense they fit well within the company and have that sense of urgency that you do in accomplishing objectives.
The most advanced stage of management is to provide the employee the sense or feeling they are not just valued and are making a contribution and their opinions are important but, with that sense of urgency we stated, the impatience you the manager may feel
for everyone to improve by asking, “How can we all grow?” You as a manager want to make things better, to grow, to innovate to speed the company to their objectives so they can see you as a valuable asset so you can take the next step up the rung along with the employees. You as a manager cannot innovate if questions 7-10 are not answered positively. While innovation is a novelty that can be applied, if all the earlier questions are not answered positively, it will become most difficult to apply any of your new ideas or concepts as an effective and great manager
The last two questions indicate you as a manager are at the peak of your performance to gain credibility that you are becoming a great manager and the employees have that same sense of professional achievement. Here they are:
11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my
progress?
12. This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?
Based on the answers you get along the way, sometimes you have to go back a few steps to go forward again.
Management is about doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things. Don’t get the two confused. If the employees have you at their side, and the best of you is being shown each day, and you are pulling out the best of what’s in each employee, and
they are feeling a thrill in the challenge of coming to work each day, the winds are with you. Don’t focus on the future, just concentrate on what is expected of each employee each day, including yourself. As Buckingham and Coffman found from the insights echoed by tens of thousands of great managers interviewed:
People don’t change that much.
Don’t waste time trying to put in what was left out.
Try to draw out what as left in.
That is hard enough.
The insight of “What Great Managers Know” from the Gallup research
(Buckingham and Coffman, 1999) is the source of their wisdom, as it explains everything they do with and for their people. As stated in their text, First, Break All the Rules, it is the foundation for their success as managers.
The essay was written to help remind and coach management teams throughout the world during these chaotic times. Your employees are the most valuable asset you have. They are the link to yours and the company's success. Treat them with respect and honor them...make them feel important and they will assure yours and the company's success.
In searching for some of the answers to what helps make great managers, we consulted
the research of Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman of the Gallup Organization, who presented their remarkable findings in their massive indepth study of great managers across a wide a variety of situations in First Break All The Rules. As a review, Buckingham and Coffman were the lead researchers in Gallup’s twenty year effort to identify the core characteristics of great managers and great workplaces based on interviews of over 80,000 managers in 400 companies, the largest study of its kind ever undertaken. Because we are all traveling at breakneck speed, accomplishing personal, professional and company objectives, we will save you time and help identify some of the prime observations of their study to give managers a first-hand glimpse of their findings in capsule form.
The Core Characteristics of Knowing What Great Managers Know: Part 1
In the measurement of the four different kinds of business outcome, productivity, profitability, employee retention, and customer satisfaction, while some companies had difficulty gathering the data, 2,500 companies provided a significant prospectus enabling a more de-tailed explanation or statistical technique that cuts through the different performance measures.
This allowed for a real link between employee opinion and business unit performance across many different companies. When the data was gathered, the strength of a workplace can be simplified to twelve questions that measure the core elements needed for managers to attract, focus, and keep the most talented employees and thus become great managers. Today more than ever before, if a company is bleeding people, it is bleeding value, states Buckingham and Coffman. While Gallup’s twelve questions are the simplest, they are the most accurate way to measure the strength of a workplace and as a result produce great managers.
1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?
2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
5. Does my supervisor (sales manager, general manager, ad manager) seem to care about me as a person?
6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
7. At work, do my opinions seem to count?
8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?
9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
10. Do I have a best friend at work?
11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
12. This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?
Whether in a bank, restaurant, radio station, multi-system cable operator, TV station, ad agency, P.R. firm or newspaper, ten of the questions allowed for Gallup to measure productivity since people always believe there is a direct link between the employee’s opinion and his/her work group’s productivity.
Eight of the twelve questions showed a link to the profitability measure, while questions 1-3, 5and 7 (above) revealed a link to retention. The most powerful combination of the strongest links to the most business outcomes was 1-6. If a manager were to rate employee responses to questions 1 through 6 on a scale of “1” to “5,” “1” being strongly disagree, “5” being strongly agree, managers must focus on securing 5s from their employees as an excellent place to start. If you notice, there are no questions dealing with pay, benefits, management, or organizational structure. They are indeed important factors and are issues that help managers play the game; they can’t help you win the game. In the Gallup analysis it was discovered that the manager, not the commission, pay, benefits, perks or a charismatic corporate leader was the critical player in building a strong workplace. It’s not that the employee focused initiatives such as vacation, benefits, profit sharing, 401K plans or company training is unimportant, it’s the immediate manager that’s more important. He/she defines the work environment, sets clear expectations, knows you, trusts you and invests in you. If you don’t have a good relationship with your manager, nothing else much matters. Questions 1-6 help managers know where they stand and help them decide what to do next. The key to getting 5s to these twelve questions and engage employees is first to know where to start.
Of the twelve, the two most fundamental employee questions that will get a manager started are:
1. Do I know what is expected of me?
2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
As an employee’s perspective begins to change they may ask themselves, “Am I in a role I can excel?” If not what might they think of you the manager? At this point of attainment in an employee’s perception they are interested in knowing their individual contribution and what other people think of their work. The next four questions 3-6, help an employee know if they feel they are doing well in their role (question 3), and if other people value their individual performance (question 4), and them individually as a person (quesiton 5), and if the manager is investing in their growth (question 6). All of these questions deal with an individual’s self-worth
and as Abraham Maslow would say, self-esteem. Buckingham and Coffman know
that if a manager cannot feel the employee(s) can give a 5 rating, “strongly agree” answer to the questions, or the questions remain unanswered, their perceptions of their feelings of belonging, of being a part of the team, learning and innovating will be undermined.
Having the employee move up to their perceived success rung on the ladder with positive answers to those questions, a manager can feel the employee is gaining their strength and so are you on the road to becoming a great manager.
The next questions, 7-10 zero in on letting the employee sense they fit well within the company and have that sense of urgency that you do in accomplishing objectives.
The most advanced stage of management is to provide the employee the sense or feeling they are not just valued and are making a contribution and their opinions are important but, with that sense of urgency we stated, the impatience you the manager may feel
for everyone to improve by asking, “How can we all grow?” You as a manager want to make things better, to grow, to innovate to speed the company to their objectives so they can see you as a valuable asset so you can take the next step up the rung along with the employees. You as a manager cannot innovate if questions 7-10 are not answered positively. While innovation is a novelty that can be applied, if all the earlier questions are not answered positively, it will become most difficult to apply any of your new ideas or concepts as an effective and great manager
The last two questions indicate you as a manager are at the peak of your performance to gain credibility that you are becoming a great manager and the employees have that same sense of professional achievement. Here they are:
11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my
progress?
12. This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?
Based on the answers you get along the way, sometimes you have to go back a few steps to go forward again.
Management is about doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things. Don’t get the two confused. If the employees have you at their side, and the best of you is being shown each day, and you are pulling out the best of what’s in each employee, and
they are feeling a thrill in the challenge of coming to work each day, the winds are with you. Don’t focus on the future, just concentrate on what is expected of each employee each day, including yourself. As Buckingham and Coffman found from the insights echoed by tens of thousands of great managers interviewed:
People don’t change that much.
Don’t waste time trying to put in what was left out.
Try to draw out what as left in.
That is hard enough.
The insight of “What Great Managers Know” from the Gallup research
(Buckingham and Coffman, 1999) is the source of their wisdom, as it explains everything they do with and for their people. As stated in their text, First, Break All the Rules, it is the foundation for their success as managers.
The essay was written to help remind and coach management teams throughout the world during these chaotic times. Your employees are the most valuable asset you have. They are the link to yours and the company's success. Treat them with respect and honor them...make them feel important and they will assure yours and the company's success.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Winning Customers Through Story: A New Take
November 23, 2009
By Lori L. Silverman and Karen Dietz
If your organization is like most, it has invested significant dollars in training sales staff to bring in new business and maintain long-term client relationships. Chances are high that these skills have served them well. But what about in today's downturn economy? Is your enterprise receiving the level of sales it needs to survive and thrive? Or has it taken a turn for the worse?
Several actions typically are invoked in this sort of situation. Sales executives may tweak the compensation plan, hoping it will motivate their staff, or ask them to increase their work hours, require them to make more cold calls, or push them to do what they have always done—only at a heightened pace. On the other hand, what outcomes might you get if you explored the question, "Is there anything new or different we could add to our sales arsenal as a competitive advantage?"
What's New?
Most sales training programs and initiatives promote the telling of "success stories" by account executives and sales associates. But, they do not recognize that examples and case studies are not the same as compelling stories. Not surprisingly, they neglect to teach the critical elements that make a story a story and the specific structure it needs to motivate prospects to take action and close a deal.
Moreover, these endeavors overlook the fact that the most powerful story techniques for business development come in the form of story prompts, story triggers, and story listening—the ability to pull stories out of prospects and to authenticate them. If your organization desires to decrease the time it takes to turn prospects into clients and to build stronger relationships with them, then incorporating these unrecognized approaches into the sales process is critical.
Because the field of story use in organizations is less than a decade old, most early applications focused on its use in training, knowledge management, and presentation skills. Consequently, these broader story techniques only now are finding their way into core business activities.
Some of the most comprehensive research that exists on the ROI associated with story-telling across 12 different business functions is presented in my book, "Wake Me Up When the Data Is Over: How Organizations Use Stories to Drive Results" (2006, Jossey-Bass) —and probably is not one being read by your sales executives. Did you know 36 percent of the 72 examples in this book show documented increases to the bottom line through growth, profitability, and/or increased funding? Would this outcome make a difference in your organization?
Why Story?
Stories are not the same as examples, anecdotes, case studies, news reports, or profiles. They have unique characteristics: characters, character dialog (both internal and external), a plot (identifiable conflict), a universally applicable key point, drama, contrast, and sensory information.
What is it about stories that give them the ability to impact business results? The brain needs sensory information, patterns, and the like for experiences to be logged into immediate and short-term memory. Since a story is a packet of sensory material that allows people to quickly and easily internalize, comprehend, and create meaning, when crafted well, it can move others to open their wallets. The latest brain research not only demonstrates that stories are remembered far longer than other communication forms (bulleted information, data and facts, for example), it shows they immediately connect to the emotional center of the brain, where most buying decisions are made.
While the use of stories in organizational settings is in its infancy, the research around what makes a story powerful has been available for the last 20 years. The results include:
•Captivating people's interest and making them more attentive listeners.
•Communicating information faster, with more accurate recall of key points over time.
•Quickly and successfully conveying the meaning of complex concepts.
•Fostering creativity and enhancing problem-solving.
•Making information more believable.
•Strengthening relationships.
•Inspiring people to change.
Knowing this, why would you not be using a variety of story techniques to generate sales?
Winning New Customers
If you believe the value a story brings is key to securing new business, here are a variety of ways story techniques can be used to win new customers. As you go through this list, ask yourself, "How many of them are my organization’s business development, sales, and marketing staff using today?"
Prior to Prospecting
•Understanding the business story behind new market segments.
•Gathering consumer feedback using story prompts in focus groups.
•Translating and relaying market research data and findings through composite stories.
Prospecting
•Evoking stories from new contacts at networking events.
•Listening to stories in ways that more quickly build rapport.
•Relaying a story to clearly communicate the distinction between your organization/industry and a competitive organization/industry (e.g., distinguishing between community banking, traditional banking, and credit unions).
•Having the organization's founding core values and folklore already crafted as hip-pocket stories, ready for sharing.
Calling on a Prospect
•Relaying personal stories about experiences with the prospect's business.
•Knowing how to prompt stories to help build a foundation of trust.
•Employing story triggers to get the prospect to open up about their business during discovery.
•Using story-telling as a tool to identify immediate needs and pain.
Asking for the sale
•Incorporating a story into the proposal.
•Overcoming objections by telling or prompting a story.
•Co-creating a future story.
•Substituting traditional PowerPoint slides for a story-based presentation.
Post-Sale
•Soliciting testimonials as stories.
•Conveying results through stories.
Can You Afford to Wait?
Stories are the most powerful communication vehicles we have for connecting, communicating, and influencing others. Unconsciously we think in stories, talk in stories, and inspire through stories. What about using them to increase sales? Start training your business development and sales force to consciously and competently use a variety of story techniques and watch what happens to the bottom line.
If your organization is like most, it has invested significant dollars in training sales staff to bring in new business and maintain long-term client relationships. Chances are high that these skills have served them well. But what about in today's downturn economy? Is your enterprise receiving the level of sales it needs to survive and thrive? Or has it taken a turn for the worse?
Several actions typically are invoked in this sort of situation. Sales executives may tweak the compensation plan, hoping it will motivate their staff, or ask them to increase their work hours, require them to make more cold calls, or push them to do what they have always done—only at a heightened pace. On the other hand, what outcomes might you get if you explored the question, "Is there anything new or different we could add to our sales arsenal as a competitive advantage?"
What's New?
Most sales training programs and initiatives promote the telling of "success stories" by account executives and sales associates. But, they do not recognize that examples and case studies are not the same as compelling stories. Not surprisingly, they neglect to teach the critical elements that make a story a story and the specific structure it needs to motivate prospects to take action and close a deal.
Moreover, these endeavors overlook the fact that the most powerful story techniques for business development come in the form of story prompts, story triggers, and story listening—the ability to pull stories out of prospects and to authenticate them. If your organization desires to decrease the time it takes to turn prospects into clients and to build stronger relationships with them, then incorporating these unrecognized approaches into the sales process is critical.
Because the field of story use in organizations is less than a decade old, most early applications focused on its use in training, knowledge management, and presentation skills. Consequently, these broader story techniques only now are finding their way into core business activities.
Some of the most comprehensive research that exists on the ROI associated with story-telling across 12 different business functions is presented in my book, "Wake Me Up When the Data Is Over: How Organizations Use Stories to Drive Results" (2006, Jossey-Bass) —and probably is not one being read by your sales executives. Did you know 36 percent of the 72 examples in this book show documented increases to the bottom line through growth, profitability, and/or increased funding? Would this outcome make a difference in your organization?
Why Story?
Stories are not the same as examples, anecdotes, case studies, news reports, or profiles. They have unique characteristics: characters, character dialog (both internal and external), a plot (identifiable conflict), a universally applicable key point, drama, contrast, and sensory information.
What is it about stories that give them the ability to impact business results? The brain needs sensory information, patterns, and the like for experiences to be logged into immediate and short-term memory. Since a story is a packet of sensory material that allows people to quickly and easily internalize, comprehend, and create meaning, when crafted well, it can move others to open their wallets. The latest brain research not only demonstrates that stories are remembered far longer than other communication forms (bulleted information, data and facts, for example), it shows they immediately connect to the emotional center of the brain, where most buying decisions are made.
While the use of stories in organizational settings is in its infancy, the research around what makes a story powerful has been available for the last 20 years. The results include:
•Captivating people's interest and making them more attentive listeners.
•Communicating information faster, with more accurate recall of key points over time.
•Quickly and successfully conveying the meaning of complex concepts.
•Fostering creativity and enhancing problem-solving.
•Making information more believable.
•Strengthening relationships.
•Inspiring people to change.
Knowing this, why would you not be using a variety of story techniques to generate sales?
Winning New Customers
If you believe the value a story brings is key to securing new business, here are a variety of ways story techniques can be used to win new customers. As you go through this list, ask yourself, "How many of them are my organization’s business development, sales, and marketing staff using today?"
Prior to Prospecting
•Understanding the business story behind new market segments.
•Gathering consumer feedback using story prompts in focus groups.
•Translating and relaying market research data and findings through composite stories.
Prospecting
•Evoking stories from new contacts at networking events.
•Listening to stories in ways that more quickly build rapport.
•Relaying a story to clearly communicate the distinction between your organization/industry and a competitive organization/industry (e.g., distinguishing between community banking, traditional banking, and credit unions).
•Having the organization's founding core values and folklore already crafted as hip-pocket stories, ready for sharing.
Calling on a Prospect
•Relaying personal stories about experiences with the prospect's business.
•Knowing how to prompt stories to help build a foundation of trust.
•Employing story triggers to get the prospect to open up about their business during discovery.
•Using story-telling as a tool to identify immediate needs and pain.
Asking for the sale
•Incorporating a story into the proposal.
•Overcoming objections by telling or prompting a story.
•Co-creating a future story.
•Substituting traditional PowerPoint slides for a story-based presentation.
Post-Sale
•Soliciting testimonials as stories.
•Conveying results through stories.
Can You Afford to Wait?
Stories are the most powerful communication vehicles we have for connecting, communicating, and influencing others. Unconsciously we think in stories, talk in stories, and inspire through stories. What about using them to increase sales? Start training your business development and sales force to consciously and competently use a variety of story techniques and watch what happens to the bottom line.
The Keynsian Approach to the Economy
by Michael Hiltzik Nov 24 2009
It's fitting, therefore, that the recent economic meltdown has begun to restore that great apostle of uncertainty, John Maynard Keynes, to his rightful position of influence in economic thought.
"Keynes asked why financial markets are inherently unstable," Robert Skidelsky told me the other day. "His answer was that we don't know what the future will bring. He talked about the inherent precariousness of knowledge, that when we estimate the future we're only disguising our ignorance."
If that sounds obvious, keep in mind that the financial disaster of recent times was born in the hubris that the financial markets are nearly flawless machines for assessing risk and that government regulation would make them inefficient.
Skidelsky is a British economic historian whose three-volume biography of Keynes came out on these shores from 1986 to 2001. We had a chance to talk last week while he was visiting the U.S. to promote his latest work, "Keynes: The Return of the Master," published in September, which aims to spotlight the relevance of Keynesian economics for modern times.
He argues that it's impossible to miss the connections: For one thing, the banking and credit collapse of recent years stems from precisely the same economic mistakes Keynes saw in the 1920s.
For another, the government stimulus programs that have stemmed the worldwide decline and begun the process of recovery are based on his precept that when confidence is shattered in the private investment market, the only remedy is "state intervention to promote and subsidize new investment" -- presumably by deficit spending.
"The most positive difference between now and the Depression," Skidelsky says, "is that we have Keynes' writing, so that governments didn't repeat the mistake of the early '30s of cutting their own spending when private spending was falling."
Keynes (1883-1946) is sometimes described as not an economist so much as a moral philosopher. His intellectual affinity was less toward bankers than artists -- he was part of the literary Bloomsbury Group, among whose most famous members were Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster.
Yet he was the antithesis of the ivory tower intellectual. His ideas emerged directly from his experience running a sort of proto-hedge fund speculating in currencies and commodities between the world wars. In the process he experienced his share of personal ups and downs. He made healthy profits in 1920 by shorting the mark, franc and lira, but lost heavily in a highly leveraged bet against the pound when the Bank of England raised interest rates.
Keynes' Bloomsbury friends were among those he wiped out. But he recovered and made good some of their losses. He lost a second fortune in the Depression, but made it all back, and more, buying at the lows during the '30s. At his death in 1946, Skidelsky writes, he was worth about $20 million in today's terms.
"The instability of the financial markets was a crucial experience for him as a thinker and as a player," Skidelsky says.
The hallmark of Keynes' thought was the recognition that the efficient-market theory -- the notion that the market synthesizes all that is known and that needs to be known about current conditions and that it therefore can be left to regulate itself -- is flawed.
"If you have a self-regulating market," Skidelsky explains, "you don't have crashes like this. You don't have great contractions."
Keynesian economics and its implicit warning that the free market has inherent limitations and therefore demands regulation remained in vogue from World War II until the mid-1970s, followed by its nearly complete abandonment by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
Many of the problems that developed since then derived from the assumption that risk can be predicted, measured and accurately priced.
Banks were allowed to enter the securities businesses because surely they know how to manage risk. Subprime mortgages were packaged into securities, so investors could buy just as much risk as they thought they could handle. The outsized bonuses pocketed by derivatives traders were based on the idea that the profits for which they were rewarded were riskless -- that is, they wouldn't backfire down the line.
The uncertainty of real life eventually, and inevitably, came back to bite them where it hurts. (It's the rest of us who bear the tooth marks.)
Another Keynesian notion suppressed by the free-market lobby was the danger, not to say immorality, of increased income inequality. Skidelsky acknowledges that later Keynesians have made more of this than the master himself, but Keynes did feel that excessive inequality promoted speculation by those at the top of the income scale and reduced consumption by everyone else -- a formula for economic stagnation, or worse.
Indeed, it shouldn't escape anyone's notice that during the free-market heyday of the 1980s and beyond, living standards for most Americans plateaued while vastly more wealth became concentrated in fewer hands. The only way for the majority to maintain their economic place was to borrow, with consequences we've seen documented ad nauseam.
That brings us to what Keynes has to say about recovery and reform policy. Those who consider him the ultimate liberal might be surprised to learn that he might well counsel President Obama against moving too fast on financial reform.
As stated in a famous open letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt published on New Year's Eve 1933, Keynes' view was that recovery hinged on building trust and confidence in the business community. Too much reform too soon "will upset the confidence of the business world and weaken their existing motives to action." Only after recovery should reform, necessary as it was, be launched.
Keynes fretted that FDR had placed his public works program in the hands of his exceedingly frugal Interior secretary, Harold Ickes, who spent the money as though it came from his personal bank account.
Overall government spending in the '30s never came to more than a fraction of the $4.8 billion a year Keynes thought was needed to fill the investment gap -- one reason Keynesians believe the New Deal recovery was less robust than it could have been.
Keynes' theories don't all stand up to classical critiques, but his guiding principle, that it's wise to know how much you don't know, is unassailable. Given how right he was about the roots of economic collapse, we could do worse than follow his pointers about where to go from here.
Michael Hiltzik writes Mondays and Thursdays. Reach him at michael.hiltzik@latimes.com,
It's fitting, therefore, that the recent economic meltdown has begun to restore that great apostle of uncertainty, John Maynard Keynes, to his rightful position of influence in economic thought.
"Keynes asked why financial markets are inherently unstable," Robert Skidelsky told me the other day. "His answer was that we don't know what the future will bring. He talked about the inherent precariousness of knowledge, that when we estimate the future we're only disguising our ignorance."
If that sounds obvious, keep in mind that the financial disaster of recent times was born in the hubris that the financial markets are nearly flawless machines for assessing risk and that government regulation would make them inefficient.
Skidelsky is a British economic historian whose three-volume biography of Keynes came out on these shores from 1986 to 2001. We had a chance to talk last week while he was visiting the U.S. to promote his latest work, "Keynes: The Return of the Master," published in September, which aims to spotlight the relevance of Keynesian economics for modern times.
He argues that it's impossible to miss the connections: For one thing, the banking and credit collapse of recent years stems from precisely the same economic mistakes Keynes saw in the 1920s.
For another, the government stimulus programs that have stemmed the worldwide decline and begun the process of recovery are based on his precept that when confidence is shattered in the private investment market, the only remedy is "state intervention to promote and subsidize new investment" -- presumably by deficit spending.
"The most positive difference between now and the Depression," Skidelsky says, "is that we have Keynes' writing, so that governments didn't repeat the mistake of the early '30s of cutting their own spending when private spending was falling."
Keynes (1883-1946) is sometimes described as not an economist so much as a moral philosopher. His intellectual affinity was less toward bankers than artists -- he was part of the literary Bloomsbury Group, among whose most famous members were Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster.
Yet he was the antithesis of the ivory tower intellectual. His ideas emerged directly from his experience running a sort of proto-hedge fund speculating in currencies and commodities between the world wars. In the process he experienced his share of personal ups and downs. He made healthy profits in 1920 by shorting the mark, franc and lira, but lost heavily in a highly leveraged bet against the pound when the Bank of England raised interest rates.
Keynes' Bloomsbury friends were among those he wiped out. But he recovered and made good some of their losses. He lost a second fortune in the Depression, but made it all back, and more, buying at the lows during the '30s. At his death in 1946, Skidelsky writes, he was worth about $20 million in today's terms.
"The instability of the financial markets was a crucial experience for him as a thinker and as a player," Skidelsky says.
The hallmark of Keynes' thought was the recognition that the efficient-market theory -- the notion that the market synthesizes all that is known and that needs to be known about current conditions and that it therefore can be left to regulate itself -- is flawed.
"If you have a self-regulating market," Skidelsky explains, "you don't have crashes like this. You don't have great contractions."
Keynesian economics and its implicit warning that the free market has inherent limitations and therefore demands regulation remained in vogue from World War II until the mid-1970s, followed by its nearly complete abandonment by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
Many of the problems that developed since then derived from the assumption that risk can be predicted, measured and accurately priced.
Banks were allowed to enter the securities businesses because surely they know how to manage risk. Subprime mortgages were packaged into securities, so investors could buy just as much risk as they thought they could handle. The outsized bonuses pocketed by derivatives traders were based on the idea that the profits for which they were rewarded were riskless -- that is, they wouldn't backfire down the line.
The uncertainty of real life eventually, and inevitably, came back to bite them where it hurts. (It's the rest of us who bear the tooth marks.)
Another Keynesian notion suppressed by the free-market lobby was the danger, not to say immorality, of increased income inequality. Skidelsky acknowledges that later Keynesians have made more of this than the master himself, but Keynes did feel that excessive inequality promoted speculation by those at the top of the income scale and reduced consumption by everyone else -- a formula for economic stagnation, or worse.
Indeed, it shouldn't escape anyone's notice that during the free-market heyday of the 1980s and beyond, living standards for most Americans plateaued while vastly more wealth became concentrated in fewer hands. The only way for the majority to maintain their economic place was to borrow, with consequences we've seen documented ad nauseam.
That brings us to what Keynes has to say about recovery and reform policy. Those who consider him the ultimate liberal might be surprised to learn that he might well counsel President Obama against moving too fast on financial reform.
As stated in a famous open letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt published on New Year's Eve 1933, Keynes' view was that recovery hinged on building trust and confidence in the business community. Too much reform too soon "will upset the confidence of the business world and weaken their existing motives to action." Only after recovery should reform, necessary as it was, be launched.
Keynes fretted that FDR had placed his public works program in the hands of his exceedingly frugal Interior secretary, Harold Ickes, who spent the money as though it came from his personal bank account.
Overall government spending in the '30s never came to more than a fraction of the $4.8 billion a year Keynes thought was needed to fill the investment gap -- one reason Keynesians believe the New Deal recovery was less robust than it could have been.
Keynes' theories don't all stand up to classical critiques, but his guiding principle, that it's wise to know how much you don't know, is unassailable. Given how right he was about the roots of economic collapse, we could do worse than follow his pointers about where to go from here.
Michael Hiltzik writes Mondays and Thursdays. Reach him at michael.hiltzik@latimes.com,
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
10 Brand Trends for 2010
Provided by Rob Weisbord, Regonal Group Manager and Director Digital Interactive, Sinclair Broadcast Group and John Kelly of Ballistix. 11-18-2009
Though US economists are predicting an uptick in consumer spending next year, the post-recession landscape will present brand marketers with new challenges, new engagement realities and new rules, and will increase pressure to prove how and why branded products deliver value, according to a leading brand researcher. Based on their studies of consumer values, needs and expectations for the next 12-18 months, here are 10 brand trends you may experience in the new year:
Value is the new black: Consumer spending, even "on-sale" items, will continue to be replaced by a reason-to-buy at all. This may spell trouble for brands with no authentic meaning, whether high-end or low.
Brands are increasingly a surrogate for value: What makes goods and services valuable will increasingly be what’s wrapped up in the brand and what it stands for.
Brand differentiation is brand value: The unique meaning of a brand will increase in importance as generic features continue to propagate in the brand landscape. Awareness as a meaningful market force has long been obsolete, and differentiation will be critical for sales and profitability.
“Because I said so” is over: Brand values can be established as a brand identity, but believably must exist in the mind of the consumer. A brand can’t just say it stands for something and make it so. The consumer will decide, making it more important than ever for a brand to have measures of authenticity that will aid in brand differentiation and consumer engagement.
Consumer expectations are growing: Brands are barely keeping up with consumer expectations now. Every day consumers adopt and devour the latest technologies and innovations, and hunger for more. Smarter marketers will identify and capitalize on unmet expectations. Those brands that understand where the strongest expectations exist will be the brands that survive and prosper.
Old tricks don’t - and won’t - work anymore: Consumers are onto brands trying to play their emotions for profit. In the wake of the financial debacle of this past year, people are more aware then ever of the hollowness of bank ads that claim “we’re all in this together” when those same banks have rescinded their credit and turned their retirement plan into case studies. The same is true for insincere celebrity pairings - such as Seinfeld & Microsoft or Tiger Woods & Buick. Celebrity values and brand values instead need to be in concert.
Consumers won’t need to know a brand to love it: As the buying space becomes even more online-driven and international (and uncontrolled by brands and corporations), front-end awareness will become less important. A brand with the right street credibility can go viral in days, with awareness following - not leading - the conversation.
It’s not just buzz: Conversation and community is increasingly important, and if consumers trust the community, they will extend trust to the brand. This means not just word of mouth, but the right word of mouth within the community. This has significant implications for the future of customer service.
Consumers talk with each other before talking with brands: Social networking and exchange of information outside of the brand space will increase. This - at least in theory - will mean more opportunities for brands to get involved in these spaces and meet customers where they are.
Engagement is not a fad; it’s the way today’s consumers do business: Marketers will come to accept that there are four engagement methods: The platform (TV; online), the context (program; webpage), the message (ad or communication), and the experience (store/event). At the same time, they also will realize that brand engagement will become impossible using out-dated attitudinal models.
Accommodating all of these trends will require some companies to undergo significant paradigm shifts, which will likely be painful but necessary. Either way, change in the brand marketing space will be inevitable.
Though US economists are predicting an uptick in consumer spending next year, the post-recession landscape will present brand marketers with new challenges, new engagement realities and new rules, and will increase pressure to prove how and why branded products deliver value, according to a leading brand researcher. Based on their studies of consumer values, needs and expectations for the next 12-18 months, here are 10 brand trends you may experience in the new year:
Value is the new black: Consumer spending, even "on-sale" items, will continue to be replaced by a reason-to-buy at all. This may spell trouble for brands with no authentic meaning, whether high-end or low.
Brands are increasingly a surrogate for value: What makes goods and services valuable will increasingly be what’s wrapped up in the brand and what it stands for.
Brand differentiation is brand value: The unique meaning of a brand will increase in importance as generic features continue to propagate in the brand landscape. Awareness as a meaningful market force has long been obsolete, and differentiation will be critical for sales and profitability.
“Because I said so” is over: Brand values can be established as a brand identity, but believably must exist in the mind of the consumer. A brand can’t just say it stands for something and make it so. The consumer will decide, making it more important than ever for a brand to have measures of authenticity that will aid in brand differentiation and consumer engagement.
Consumer expectations are growing: Brands are barely keeping up with consumer expectations now. Every day consumers adopt and devour the latest technologies and innovations, and hunger for more. Smarter marketers will identify and capitalize on unmet expectations. Those brands that understand where the strongest expectations exist will be the brands that survive and prosper.
Old tricks don’t - and won’t - work anymore: Consumers are onto brands trying to play their emotions for profit. In the wake of the financial debacle of this past year, people are more aware then ever of the hollowness of bank ads that claim “we’re all in this together” when those same banks have rescinded their credit and turned their retirement plan into case studies. The same is true for insincere celebrity pairings - such as Seinfeld & Microsoft or Tiger Woods & Buick. Celebrity values and brand values instead need to be in concert.
Consumers won’t need to know a brand to love it: As the buying space becomes even more online-driven and international (and uncontrolled by brands and corporations), front-end awareness will become less important. A brand with the right street credibility can go viral in days, with awareness following - not leading - the conversation.
It’s not just buzz: Conversation and community is increasingly important, and if consumers trust the community, they will extend trust to the brand. This means not just word of mouth, but the right word of mouth within the community. This has significant implications for the future of customer service.
Consumers talk with each other before talking with brands: Social networking and exchange of information outside of the brand space will increase. This - at least in theory - will mean more opportunities for brands to get involved in these spaces and meet customers where they are.
Engagement is not a fad; it’s the way today’s consumers do business: Marketers will come to accept that there are four engagement methods: The platform (TV; online), the context (program; webpage), the message (ad or communication), and the experience (store/event). At the same time, they also will realize that brand engagement will become impossible using out-dated attitudinal models.
Accommodating all of these trends will require some companies to undergo significant paradigm shifts, which will likely be painful but necessary. Either way, change in the brand marketing space will be inevitable.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Want to Move Up? Learn to Manage Like a CEO
by Steve Tobak
If you really want to learn how to move up in the business world, you’ve got relatively few sources of expert information. And when you’re done with all the MBA BS, the business self-help books, and God help us - the life coaches - ask somebody who’s done it, and he’ll tell you.
Come to think of it, if you think you can learn what works in the real world from anyone but someone who actually succeeded in the real world, well, let’s just say you might want to rethink your management potential.
In the past we’ve talked about all kinds of management tools and leadership qualities, but this time, we’re going to cut right to the chase. You won’t find these five tips anywhere else, since you’re the first ones to read them. Moreover, these are indeed CEO best practices that I’ve observed in few middle managers - those with CEO potential.
5 Ways to Manage Like a CEO
Focus on critical, trouble areas and leave everything else alone. Successful CEOs have learned to rapidly determine when a direct report or functional area is in trouble. Then, with laser-like precision, they go to work on determining what’s wrong and resolving the issue with all due haste. Because of the focus required, too many problem areas can spell trouble, which leads us to the next point.
Hire functional experts who are also solid, upcoming managers. The order and choice of words is critical here. You can mentor capable, upcoming managers, but you probably can’t teach them a functional expertise, nor should you or will you have the time. If they’re not eminently capable, you can end up with multiple critical simultaneous problems, which could be job or even career-ending.
Business comes first. Business and customers always, always, always comes first. Now, that doesn’t mean you let morale get out of control or internal processes fall apart, but you must recognize that the primary function of the business is business, and that means customers and sales. Any manager who doesn’t get that is doomed to mediocrity and stagnation.
Manage up. A critical function of any manager is to provide his boss with what she needs to succeed, and in a manner that fosters a compatible and mutually beneficial relationship. And frankly, that goes for peers, too. If you sense your boss and peers are not getting what they need from you, meet one-on-one and ask. Successful CEOs work with their boards and other key stakeholders the same way.
Help to “manage the company.” This is a critical mindset that can make all the difference in your career. If you have a strong silo mentality - my group is all that matters - you will never move up. But if you always remember that one of your priorities is to help “manage the company,” then your chances are great increased. Why? That mindset gives you a broader perspective that will indeed help the company and be positively perceived by peers and executive management.
If you really want to learn how to move up in the business world, you’ve got relatively few sources of expert information. And when you’re done with all the MBA BS, the business self-help books, and God help us - the life coaches - ask somebody who’s done it, and he’ll tell you.
Come to think of it, if you think you can learn what works in the real world from anyone but someone who actually succeeded in the real world, well, let’s just say you might want to rethink your management potential.
In the past we’ve talked about all kinds of management tools and leadership qualities, but this time, we’re going to cut right to the chase. You won’t find these five tips anywhere else, since you’re the first ones to read them. Moreover, these are indeed CEO best practices that I’ve observed in few middle managers - those with CEO potential.
5 Ways to Manage Like a CEO
Focus on critical, trouble areas and leave everything else alone. Successful CEOs have learned to rapidly determine when a direct report or functional area is in trouble. Then, with laser-like precision, they go to work on determining what’s wrong and resolving the issue with all due haste. Because of the focus required, too many problem areas can spell trouble, which leads us to the next point.
Hire functional experts who are also solid, upcoming managers. The order and choice of words is critical here. You can mentor capable, upcoming managers, but you probably can’t teach them a functional expertise, nor should you or will you have the time. If they’re not eminently capable, you can end up with multiple critical simultaneous problems, which could be job or even career-ending.
Business comes first. Business and customers always, always, always comes first. Now, that doesn’t mean you let morale get out of control or internal processes fall apart, but you must recognize that the primary function of the business is business, and that means customers and sales. Any manager who doesn’t get that is doomed to mediocrity and stagnation.
Manage up. A critical function of any manager is to provide his boss with what she needs to succeed, and in a manner that fosters a compatible and mutually beneficial relationship. And frankly, that goes for peers, too. If you sense your boss and peers are not getting what they need from you, meet one-on-one and ask. Successful CEOs work with their boards and other key stakeholders the same way.
Help to “manage the company.” This is a critical mindset that can make all the difference in your career. If you have a strong silo mentality - my group is all that matters - you will never move up. But if you always remember that one of your priorities is to help “manage the company,” then your chances are great increased. Why? That mindset gives you a broader perspective that will indeed help the company and be positively perceived by peers and executive management.
The Innovator's Vulnerability
by Saul Kaplan 11-17-2009
If you hang around innovators long enough, it's pretty clear they all have a deep-seated confidence in both their ideas and their ability to turn ideas into reality. The best innovators are able to do this on a regular basis, delivering value along the way. To some, they may seem invincible, impervious to the naysayers, roadblocks, and intransigent systems in their way. But I believe that this confidence, however valuable, is not what distinguishes a great innovator. Instead, innovation requires a level of vulnerability with which most are uncomfortable.
Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, says the hallmark of an innovator is having a confident point of view combined with the self-awareness that something is always missing. I agree. Neurosis-laced vulnerability is what enables innovators to seek critical input and make the random connections needed to fuel innovation. There is always a better way and innovators open themselves up in order to search for missing puzzle pieces.
Innovators possess the unique capacity to put themselves and their ideas out in traffic, expecting and welcoming an onslaught of direct and hard-hitting feedback. The cliché that innovators have thick skin is true—but it isn't impenetrable armor. It is a semi-permeable membrane that enables a free flow of ideas and experiences in both directions. The innovator's vulnerability enables an active osmosis of ideas, allowing for freely flowing input from diverse external networks.
Feedback is Welcome
Don't mistake vulnerability for weakness. Innovators are not weak. They are driven to find a better way and will stop at nothing to find solutions and deliver value. They are not afraid to assert and defend their point of view or present their case for change with confidence and conviction. They don't hold back—and if you listen closely, it's always personal.
Innovators don't give presentations. Instead, they share stories, designed to create an emotional connection with the listener. The stories are often self-deprecating, laying bare the innovator's vulnerabilities. And innovators are central characters in their own narrative, not removed from the process. They're sensitive, too. They're the first ones to read the reviews. They can't wait for feedback and devour every press mention, blog post, or social media blurb. Critiques can't come fast enough, and good, bad, and ugly comments are all welcome. Anything with the potential to improve an idea or concept is welcome insight. Critical feedback from respected sources is the best fuel source.
Innovators celebrate their vulnerability by diving into the gray area between disciplines, sectors, and departments. They know you can't learn anything by being the smartest person in the room or from hanging around with people who all think and act alike. Instead, their goal is to recognize patterns and connect dots horizontally across silos. Connecting unusual suspects by bridging perspectives, language, and approaches is imperative.
A Rare Breed
Don't mistake vulnerability for naiveté, either. True innovators are firmly grounded in reality and will not claim victory until value is delivered or a problem is solved. Optimism and belief in a better way provides immunity from the anti-everything crowd. A cacophony of detractors is nothing but white noise to an innovator. Despite being surrounded by skepticism and those supporting the status quo, innovators manage to remain positive and committed to their visionary paths forward.
Being genuinely vulnerable is in short supply these days. Perhaps it's not a coincidence that innovators are such a rare breed.
If you hang around innovators long enough, it's pretty clear they all have a deep-seated confidence in both their ideas and their ability to turn ideas into reality. The best innovators are able to do this on a regular basis, delivering value along the way. To some, they may seem invincible, impervious to the naysayers, roadblocks, and intransigent systems in their way. But I believe that this confidence, however valuable, is not what distinguishes a great innovator. Instead, innovation requires a level of vulnerability with which most are uncomfortable.
Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, says the hallmark of an innovator is having a confident point of view combined with the self-awareness that something is always missing. I agree. Neurosis-laced vulnerability is what enables innovators to seek critical input and make the random connections needed to fuel innovation. There is always a better way and innovators open themselves up in order to search for missing puzzle pieces.
Innovators possess the unique capacity to put themselves and their ideas out in traffic, expecting and welcoming an onslaught of direct and hard-hitting feedback. The cliché that innovators have thick skin is true—but it isn't impenetrable armor. It is a semi-permeable membrane that enables a free flow of ideas and experiences in both directions. The innovator's vulnerability enables an active osmosis of ideas, allowing for freely flowing input from diverse external networks.
Feedback is Welcome
Don't mistake vulnerability for weakness. Innovators are not weak. They are driven to find a better way and will stop at nothing to find solutions and deliver value. They are not afraid to assert and defend their point of view or present their case for change with confidence and conviction. They don't hold back—and if you listen closely, it's always personal.
Innovators don't give presentations. Instead, they share stories, designed to create an emotional connection with the listener. The stories are often self-deprecating, laying bare the innovator's vulnerabilities. And innovators are central characters in their own narrative, not removed from the process. They're sensitive, too. They're the first ones to read the reviews. They can't wait for feedback and devour every press mention, blog post, or social media blurb. Critiques can't come fast enough, and good, bad, and ugly comments are all welcome. Anything with the potential to improve an idea or concept is welcome insight. Critical feedback from respected sources is the best fuel source.
Innovators celebrate their vulnerability by diving into the gray area between disciplines, sectors, and departments. They know you can't learn anything by being the smartest person in the room or from hanging around with people who all think and act alike. Instead, their goal is to recognize patterns and connect dots horizontally across silos. Connecting unusual suspects by bridging perspectives, language, and approaches is imperative.
A Rare Breed
Don't mistake vulnerability for naiveté, either. True innovators are firmly grounded in reality and will not claim victory until value is delivered or a problem is solved. Optimism and belief in a better way provides immunity from the anti-everything crowd. A cacophony of detractors is nothing but white noise to an innovator. Despite being surrounded by skepticism and those supporting the status quo, innovators manage to remain positive and committed to their visionary paths forward.
Being genuinely vulnerable is in short supply these days. Perhaps it's not a coincidence that innovators are such a rare breed.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Save Time and Money Advertising
OK guys and dolls....while you're sitting at your computer contemplating cost-per-point...and not hitting the streets to take care of your direct advertisers...this company is taking your money. LOOK!!
Your BusinessAvenue Right makes it easy to plan and buy local advertising media that reaches the right audience. Find out how with a free Avenue Right account! Simply login to plan and buy local radio, broadcast TV, print, and online media. Sign up now and get a complimentary white paper, "7 Steps to a Multi-Channel Advertising Campaign."
The money you are losing to them along with Google, Yahoo, Bing, Comcast, Time Warner, ViaTV (Verizon), interactive digital marketers and the Internet has already had an impact on your wallets. Whadyya gonna do about it?
Get out there!!!!
Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D.
Your BusinessAvenue Right makes it easy to plan and buy local advertising media that reaches the right audience. Find out how with a free Avenue Right account! Simply login to plan and buy local radio, broadcast TV, print, and online media. Sign up now and get a complimentary white paper, "7 Steps to a Multi-Channel Advertising Campaign."
The money you are losing to them along with Google, Yahoo, Bing, Comcast, Time Warner, ViaTV (Verizon), interactive digital marketers and the Internet has already had an impact on your wallets. Whadyya gonna do about it?
Get out there!!!!
Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D.
Leading During A Downturn
Leadership problems come up again and again in a downturn. Solving them doesn't take fancy technology - just character and courage.
By Geoff Colvin, senior editor at large
November 10, 2009: 8:50 AM ET
(Fortune Magazine) -- Businesspeople love to tell me their problems, and in the waning days of this recession they keep describing three of them more than any others. They have to do with vanishing leadership, changing corporate culture, and talent.
They're problems that grow particularly acute in a downturn -- which means every company needs to worry about them. Here's what they are and how to fix them.
My leader won't lead.
This is a classic recession problem: employees frustrated that just when they're most afraid, their leader seems to be disappearing rather than stepping forward.
Have pity on such leaders before condemning them. In times of crisis leaders have to spend more hours on the phone and closeted in meetings, reducing their visibility, and they're particularly starved for the information they need to make high-stakes decisions. Every force is pushing them to "hunker in the bunker," as American Express CEO Ken Chenault expressed it to me.
If your leader won't lead, try telling him or her not what you want but what you hear from the employees that they want; that's the tactic one executive at a Midwestern manufacturer uses.
Our culture won't let me adapt.
The economic recovery may be faint at the moment, but the best companies adapt to a changing world before the change is obvious.
It isn't always easy. An HR manager at a metals company recently told me she was going nuts trying to change the criteria for promotion at her company to emphasize growth over cutting costs. The culture valued skinflint managers, and seemingly nothing could budge it.
That manager was right to realize that a culture of adaptability is crucial. Look at Thomson, formerly one of the world's greatest newspaper publishers, which decided in 2000 -- the all-time best year for newspaper ad revenues -- to get out of papers entirely.
The move looked insane, but Thomson (now Thomson Reuters (TRI)) was adapting to the world it saw coming. Its culture encouraged such radical thinking; in previous decades the company moved into and out of oil, airlines, and other businesses.
Unfortunately, battling a calcified culture may be futile unless you're the boss. I told that HR manager that as soon as the economy turned up it might be time to move.
We can't get rid of C-players.
You'd think a recession would be an easy time to get rid of underperformers -- you can see clearly who they are, and you may have to cut headcount anyway.
The problem is that some managers seem to think problems are caused by everything but people. When James Kilts took over at Gillette, sales and profits had been flat for years. Yet when he analyzed performance reviews, he found 74% of managers had been given the highest rating and only 3% had received the lowest.
It's tough to eject poor performers when almost everyone's a genius. The solution? Honesty in evaluations: Encourage a culture where anyone at any level can tell the truth. It may not be popular, but explain you're facing reality.
These problems are deep-seated. The good news: Solving them doesn't require new technology or complex analysis, just character and courage, which are available to us all -- and which a historic recession might help bring out.
Recession checklist
1. Stand up and be seen. It's a simple yet powerful way for leaders to be effective. Warren Buffett raised his profile in this recession, reassuring investors and even helping to calm markets.
2. Steer the culture with stories. Southwest Airlines (LUV, Fortune 500) has always understood this, celebrating stories of employees who perform heroically for customers. Make sure the stories you repeat embody the culture you're aiming for as the economy recovers.
3. Upgrade your people standards. With high unemployment, you have an opportunity to raise the bar on whom you hire and promote, as McKinsey and other top leader factories are doing.
By Geoff Colvin, senior editor at large
November 10, 2009: 8:50 AM ET
(Fortune Magazine) -- Businesspeople love to tell me their problems, and in the waning days of this recession they keep describing three of them more than any others. They have to do with vanishing leadership, changing corporate culture, and talent.
They're problems that grow particularly acute in a downturn -- which means every company needs to worry about them. Here's what they are and how to fix them.
My leader won't lead.
This is a classic recession problem: employees frustrated that just when they're most afraid, their leader seems to be disappearing rather than stepping forward.
Have pity on such leaders before condemning them. In times of crisis leaders have to spend more hours on the phone and closeted in meetings, reducing their visibility, and they're particularly starved for the information they need to make high-stakes decisions. Every force is pushing them to "hunker in the bunker," as American Express CEO Ken Chenault expressed it to me.
If your leader won't lead, try telling him or her not what you want but what you hear from the employees that they want; that's the tactic one executive at a Midwestern manufacturer uses.
Our culture won't let me adapt.
The economic recovery may be faint at the moment, but the best companies adapt to a changing world before the change is obvious.
It isn't always easy. An HR manager at a metals company recently told me she was going nuts trying to change the criteria for promotion at her company to emphasize growth over cutting costs. The culture valued skinflint managers, and seemingly nothing could budge it.
That manager was right to realize that a culture of adaptability is crucial. Look at Thomson, formerly one of the world's greatest newspaper publishers, which decided in 2000 -- the all-time best year for newspaper ad revenues -- to get out of papers entirely.
The move looked insane, but Thomson (now Thomson Reuters (TRI)) was adapting to the world it saw coming. Its culture encouraged such radical thinking; in previous decades the company moved into and out of oil, airlines, and other businesses.
Unfortunately, battling a calcified culture may be futile unless you're the boss. I told that HR manager that as soon as the economy turned up it might be time to move.
We can't get rid of C-players.
You'd think a recession would be an easy time to get rid of underperformers -- you can see clearly who they are, and you may have to cut headcount anyway.
The problem is that some managers seem to think problems are caused by everything but people. When James Kilts took over at Gillette, sales and profits had been flat for years. Yet when he analyzed performance reviews, he found 74% of managers had been given the highest rating and only 3% had received the lowest.
It's tough to eject poor performers when almost everyone's a genius. The solution? Honesty in evaluations: Encourage a culture where anyone at any level can tell the truth. It may not be popular, but explain you're facing reality.
These problems are deep-seated. The good news: Solving them doesn't require new technology or complex analysis, just character and courage, which are available to us all -- and which a historic recession might help bring out.
Recession checklist
1. Stand up and be seen. It's a simple yet powerful way for leaders to be effective. Warren Buffett raised his profile in this recession, reassuring investors and even helping to calm markets.
2. Steer the culture with stories. Southwest Airlines (LUV, Fortune 500) has always understood this, celebrating stories of employees who perform heroically for customers. Make sure the stories you repeat embody the culture you're aiming for as the economy recovers.
3. Upgrade your people standards. With high unemployment, you have an opportunity to raise the bar on whom you hire and promote, as McKinsey and other top leader factories are doing.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Brands May Represent an Overlooked Financial Asset
Hi All: Snowing big time here...in Colorado...Oct 28th, 2009...Here's a piece I wrote that I adapted from an idea I found in Marketing Management that is useful to share with your clients name of business...which is their brand.
Marketers agree that brands are assets, but do financial managers, analysts, and C-level executives concur? Brands must be treated as financial assets, and brand equity should be directly linked to financial value, argue William Neal and Ron Strauss in their article "Widening the Moat."
In the past, the key to growth was access to capital; however, brand value "has assumed greater importance in companies' growth strategies. Brand value allows for sustainable competitive advantage and signals that a company has developed attributes that are difficult to copy and often are unique to the company.
Since most brand value methodologies use current financial statistics to create estimates of future operating profits, they can be flawed. "Brands don't fit the 12-month timescale of annual financial statements," the authors state.
Brand equity is a subset of total brand value. Intangible assets such as reputation and perceived brand quality help companies compete effectively over the long run while increasing revenue, freeing cash flow, and strengthening shareholder value. "Brand equity is a measure of the water in the lake (a reservoir of cash flow earned but not yet released to the income statement), which is akin to long-term value," the authors state. "Brand equity serves as an early warning device, even when it's not reflected (when treated as an expense) in current earnings. If it's rising, it indicates that the company has been investing in future value. Conversely, it serves as an early warning device that the company is sacrificing future cash flows and value for short-term goals."
Marketers should manage brand equity as a financial asset as well as employ it to increase enterprise value, the authors argue. "Marketing is about generating demand and the consequent income that flows from that demand," they state. "In many product and service categories, brand equity is a significant driver of demand." ¹
As each media executive, and I’m referring to those who sell media, attempt to surpass last year’s sales revenue, do they really think about what happens to the client’s reputation for its enterprise value amidst their competitors? Not at the 433 media companies we’ve taught. Most are mainly concerned with making the monthly/quarterly budget…slamming the latest quarterly/monthly promotion/project down the local business owner’s throat because it was soooo specially priced and hanging out on line or waiting at the fax machine for the agency order to come in to save their derrières.
The relationship between the prospective clients is interdependent upon several key brand development factors: 1.The knowledge the media rep knows about their business, 2. The patience to spend the necessary time to develop trust and confidence, 3. Place…how the prospective client’s brand/name of business fits within the specific business classification and 4. Position vs competition and what the client believes how their consumers see them, 5. What are the current Promotions, 6. The overall sales within the county in which the prospective client’s business resides [Found in the current Sales Management Survey of Buying Power or the current Census of Retail Trade found in most any public library] compared to what the media rep finds is the gross sales of the prospective client’s business, [7. This is optional..but provides the client with their share of market], 8. This too is optional…the current share of voice, which is the client’s current total ad budget divided by the industry’s current ad budget, 9. What marketing objectives the prospective client wishes to attain in the next twelve months, 10. What the current creative is supposed to do. These ten brand development factors are crucial in determining the client’s actual needs.…which is the paramount solution to revenue and profit growth as opposed to advertising which is mostly related to only moving merchandise at the moment. The media rep who wants to earn the top money in the field for them and the client always takes the time to find out these 10 market development factors which are only a part and parcel of what true brand equity is all about….the value of a given business within the consumer’s mind at present.
Yes it takes time, effort and a great deal of patience in assisting the client in reaching their optimum brand equity….but that’s what makes world class media professionals who view media sales as a career rather than something to do while waiting for something else to come along and who make the six figure incomes each year. That’s what we call the Personal Financial Asset.
Passion, commitment, structure, discipline and continued practice are required to become the best of the best. If not….why even bother?
Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D.
1. Adapted from an article in Marketing Management
Marketers agree that brands are assets, but do financial managers, analysts, and C-level executives concur? Brands must be treated as financial assets, and brand equity should be directly linked to financial value, argue William Neal and Ron Strauss in their article "Widening the Moat."
In the past, the key to growth was access to capital; however, brand value "has assumed greater importance in companies' growth strategies. Brand value allows for sustainable competitive advantage and signals that a company has developed attributes that are difficult to copy and often are unique to the company.
Since most brand value methodologies use current financial statistics to create estimates of future operating profits, they can be flawed. "Brands don't fit the 12-month timescale of annual financial statements," the authors state.
Brand equity is a subset of total brand value. Intangible assets such as reputation and perceived brand quality help companies compete effectively over the long run while increasing revenue, freeing cash flow, and strengthening shareholder value. "Brand equity is a measure of the water in the lake (a reservoir of cash flow earned but not yet released to the income statement), which is akin to long-term value," the authors state. "Brand equity serves as an early warning device, even when it's not reflected (when treated as an expense) in current earnings. If it's rising, it indicates that the company has been investing in future value. Conversely, it serves as an early warning device that the company is sacrificing future cash flows and value for short-term goals."
Marketers should manage brand equity as a financial asset as well as employ it to increase enterprise value, the authors argue. "Marketing is about generating demand and the consequent income that flows from that demand," they state. "In many product and service categories, brand equity is a significant driver of demand." ¹
As each media executive, and I’m referring to those who sell media, attempt to surpass last year’s sales revenue, do they really think about what happens to the client’s reputation for its enterprise value amidst their competitors? Not at the 433 media companies we’ve taught. Most are mainly concerned with making the monthly/quarterly budget…slamming the latest quarterly/monthly promotion/project down the local business owner’s throat because it was soooo specially priced and hanging out on line or waiting at the fax machine for the agency order to come in to save their derrières.
The relationship between the prospective clients is interdependent upon several key brand development factors: 1.The knowledge the media rep knows about their business, 2. The patience to spend the necessary time to develop trust and confidence, 3. Place…how the prospective client’s brand/name of business fits within the specific business classification and 4. Position vs competition and what the client believes how their consumers see them, 5. What are the current Promotions, 6. The overall sales within the county in which the prospective client’s business resides [Found in the current Sales Management Survey of Buying Power or the current Census of Retail Trade found in most any public library] compared to what the media rep finds is the gross sales of the prospective client’s business, [7. This is optional..but provides the client with their share of market], 8. This too is optional…the current share of voice, which is the client’s current total ad budget divided by the industry’s current ad budget, 9. What marketing objectives the prospective client wishes to attain in the next twelve months, 10. What the current creative is supposed to do. These ten brand development factors are crucial in determining the client’s actual needs.…which is the paramount solution to revenue and profit growth as opposed to advertising which is mostly related to only moving merchandise at the moment. The media rep who wants to earn the top money in the field for them and the client always takes the time to find out these 10 market development factors which are only a part and parcel of what true brand equity is all about….the value of a given business within the consumer’s mind at present.
Yes it takes time, effort and a great deal of patience in assisting the client in reaching their optimum brand equity….but that’s what makes world class media professionals who view media sales as a career rather than something to do while waiting for something else to come along and who make the six figure incomes each year. That’s what we call the Personal Financial Asset.
Passion, commitment, structure, discipline and continued practice are required to become the best of the best. If not….why even bother?
Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D.
1. Adapted from an article in Marketing Management
Monday, October 19, 2009
Sales Architects: The Two Most Powerful Words for Selling More
By Lee B. Salz
Let me guess…the headline pulled you in, right? You may well be thinking someone has found a new formula for water—that there are two magical words you can say that will skyrocket your revenue and commissions. The headline referred to these words as "powerful," so they must be new. Perhaps these words are a deceptive trick, hypnotizing prospects into pulling out their credit card to buy from you.The reality is, these two words aren't ones you can ever say to a prospect, but they are guaranteed to drive your revenue and income. Yes, you read correctly: guaranteed. Who would be crazy enough to make such a claim about two little words? Well, it's not crazy. In my travels working with thousands of sales professionals, I've found a common thread in those who are tremendously successful. That thread comes down to the aforementioned two words, on which they base their entire sales career.It's popularly thought rock star salespeople are born with a gift of gab, and that this is the differentiator that makes them a success. Not true. Our two magic words can be taught to any salesperson, who can then effectively include them in his selling repertoire. Enough mystery: The two most powerful sales words are synergy and priority.Synergy is the process by which matches between the needs of a prospect and the capabilities of the supplier are identified. Synergy means you are crafting a solution, not pitching wares. Synergy means you understand the buying players as individuals, not just their company. Keep in mind that, to date, a company has never bought anything…people do.
To master synergy, several actions need to be taken. The first is to study your buying players, making sure you fully understand them and what makes them tick. As they lie in bed at night thinking about their work, where is their mind focused? If your buying player is a CFO, he is probably focused on profits. How does your solution help the profitability of the company?The second is to fully study your company and understand its capabilities. What is it that your company does that solves the awake-at-night problems for your buying players? If you cannot identify these synergies, you now know why you can't get meetings with the people you want to engage. Your solution has to be congruent with their focus.The third action is to develop a template needs analysis program, one including questions that expose the prospect's perceived challenges, as well as positioning questions that expose opportunities where your firm can improve upon the present situation. This part takes work, but it becomes the foundation for your sales success. Needs analysis (also two words) drives sales.In my keynote speech, I use a Velcro metaphor to make the point about synergy. As you know, there are two sides of Velcro—the cotton side and the hook side. If you evenly overlay the two sides, a tight bond is created, and it's difficult to separate the two pieces. But if you only match a corner, it is easily separated. Synergy in sales means you are forming a tight bond between a supplier and a prospect based on a match of needs, wants, and desires. As you can imagine, the needs analysis discussions are critical to a salesperson's ability to identify the synergy. And needs analysis plays a role with the other most powerful sales word: priority.Priority is what leads a prospect to buy today. Not tomorrow. Not in the future. Today. Synergy gets the prospect into the pipeline. Priority leads a prospect to become a client. The same tools referenced earlier for synergy are also necessary for priority. A salesperson's ability to facilitate effective needs analysis discussions is the key to mastering priority. "Why should they buy this today when they can just as easily buy tomorrow?" Sure, there are motivators that can be employed: discounts, incentives, etc. But if you truly understand your prospect, their challenges, and the solution, you have all the information necessary for getting the deal done without those motivators being offered. Priority's arch-enemy is status quo&; and don't underestimate the power it has. It is the No. 1 killer of sales pipelines. Status quo will win every time if you don't have the information you need to understand why the buyer should buy today."But the decision-maker is a busy person," you proclaim. "How am I supposed to get her attention?" Well, I'll bet I can get your attention: Imagine receiving an e-mail from your CEO saying he to meet with you tomorrow to discuss tripling your salary. You won't even check your calendar before responding, "I'll be there!" Making money is a priority for you. All else gets cast aside when someone wants to put more money in your pocket. The same concept applies to sales. If the solution that you have designed is aligned with the priorities of the decision-making buying player, the deal happens. If not, status quo will win it.
Let me guess…the headline pulled you in, right? You may well be thinking someone has found a new formula for water—that there are two magical words you can say that will skyrocket your revenue and commissions. The headline referred to these words as "powerful," so they must be new. Perhaps these words are a deceptive trick, hypnotizing prospects into pulling out their credit card to buy from you.The reality is, these two words aren't ones you can ever say to a prospect, but they are guaranteed to drive your revenue and income. Yes, you read correctly: guaranteed. Who would be crazy enough to make such a claim about two little words? Well, it's not crazy. In my travels working with thousands of sales professionals, I've found a common thread in those who are tremendously successful. That thread comes down to the aforementioned two words, on which they base their entire sales career.It's popularly thought rock star salespeople are born with a gift of gab, and that this is the differentiator that makes them a success. Not true. Our two magic words can be taught to any salesperson, who can then effectively include them in his selling repertoire. Enough mystery: The two most powerful sales words are synergy and priority.Synergy is the process by which matches between the needs of a prospect and the capabilities of the supplier are identified. Synergy means you are crafting a solution, not pitching wares. Synergy means you understand the buying players as individuals, not just their company. Keep in mind that, to date, a company has never bought anything…people do.
To master synergy, several actions need to be taken. The first is to study your buying players, making sure you fully understand them and what makes them tick. As they lie in bed at night thinking about their work, where is their mind focused? If your buying player is a CFO, he is probably focused on profits. How does your solution help the profitability of the company?The second is to fully study your company and understand its capabilities. What is it that your company does that solves the awake-at-night problems for your buying players? If you cannot identify these synergies, you now know why you can't get meetings with the people you want to engage. Your solution has to be congruent with their focus.The third action is to develop a template needs analysis program, one including questions that expose the prospect's perceived challenges, as well as positioning questions that expose opportunities where your firm can improve upon the present situation. This part takes work, but it becomes the foundation for your sales success. Needs analysis (also two words) drives sales.In my keynote speech, I use a Velcro metaphor to make the point about synergy. As you know, there are two sides of Velcro—the cotton side and the hook side. If you evenly overlay the two sides, a tight bond is created, and it's difficult to separate the two pieces. But if you only match a corner, it is easily separated. Synergy in sales means you are forming a tight bond between a supplier and a prospect based on a match of needs, wants, and desires. As you can imagine, the needs analysis discussions are critical to a salesperson's ability to identify the synergy. And needs analysis plays a role with the other most powerful sales word: priority.Priority is what leads a prospect to buy today. Not tomorrow. Not in the future. Today. Synergy gets the prospect into the pipeline. Priority leads a prospect to become a client. The same tools referenced earlier for synergy are also necessary for priority. A salesperson's ability to facilitate effective needs analysis discussions is the key to mastering priority. "Why should they buy this today when they can just as easily buy tomorrow?" Sure, there are motivators that can be employed: discounts, incentives, etc. But if you truly understand your prospect, their challenges, and the solution, you have all the information necessary for getting the deal done without those motivators being offered. Priority's arch-enemy is status quo&; and don't underestimate the power it has. It is the No. 1 killer of sales pipelines. Status quo will win every time if you don't have the information you need to understand why the buyer should buy today."But the decision-maker is a busy person," you proclaim. "How am I supposed to get her attention?" Well, I'll bet I can get your attention: Imagine receiving an e-mail from your CEO saying he to meet with you tomorrow to discuss tripling your salary. You won't even check your calendar before responding, "I'll be there!" Making money is a priority for you. All else gets cast aside when someone wants to put more money in your pocket. The same concept applies to sales. If the solution that you have designed is aligned with the priorities of the decision-making buying player, the deal happens. If not, status quo will win it.
The 13 Most Annoying People to Work With
By Margery Weinstein
Most of us have had colleagues over the years who turned annoying into an art form. Well, now it's a classifiable art form. Career experts Christine Lambden and Casey Connor, authors of the new book, "Everyday Practices of Extraordinary Consultants," have compiled a list of "The 13 Most Annoying People to Work With." How many of these does your company still have on its payroll? • Pontification Person. This person goes on and on, telling you what he or she is going to say, saying it, and then telling you what he or she said. • Um Person.To avoid losing control of the conversation, this co-worker fills every pause with "Um," not realizing he or she might be able to think better when not talking.• Too Much Detail Person. The authors could elaborate on this one, but then, of course, that would be contributing to the problem.• 50,000-Foot-Only Person. He or she is eloquent when you talk about the big picture, but refuses to allow anyone to get into the details, which we all know is where the real work gets done. "Unless you’re the CEO of a multinational corporation," say Lambden and Connor, "you have to be willing to work at any altitude."
• Hypnotized-by-E-mail Person. Wireless technology can be a lifesaver, but there’s something defeating about presenting to the tops of people's heads because everyone at the conference table is hunched over his or her laptop. • Buzzword Person. "This employee is annoying in meetings, team rooms, and in cubicles," say Lambden and Connor. "In fact, this person is just plain annoying all the time."• Foul Language Person. Much like Buzzword Person, this co-worker is too lazy to think of the right words to express what he or she is thinking, if, indeed, he or she is thinking at all. This person isn’t trying to impress you with his or her knowledge. "They aren't trying to impress you at all," Lambden and Connor note. "They don't care what you think of them." Refreshing on some level, but probably not a person you’d want on your team. • Reiteration Person. The only contribution this person makes is to restate what already was said. So, basically, he or she actually has no contribution to make.• Too Busy to Be Prompt Person. He or she always is late to work and every meeting, clearly lacking time management skills. Nobody can be working on something important all the time, after all.• Can't Control the Meeting Person and arch-nemesis Wants to Take Over the Meeting Person. There has to be some balance between the out-of-control ditherer and the maniacal meetings dictator, doesn't there?• Secondary Conversation People. Your best material often isn't riveting, but staffers at least could pretend to care. But Lambert and Connor point out these workers "only are annoying if their conversation is less interesting than the meeting."• Disagrees With Everything Person. "This co-worker honestly believes he is just being practical, or serving as the voice of reason, or playing devil's advocate," the authors point out. "This may be true sometimes, and even helpful occasionally, but when it becomes a habit, everyone else just tunes them out."• Obscure Metaphor Person. This employee is as annoying as "the fool in a troupe of Morris dancers," say Lambden and Connor. "See? Wasn’t that annoying?"
Most of us have had colleagues over the years who turned annoying into an art form. Well, now it's a classifiable art form. Career experts Christine Lambden and Casey Connor, authors of the new book, "Everyday Practices of Extraordinary Consultants," have compiled a list of "The 13 Most Annoying People to Work With." How many of these does your company still have on its payroll? • Pontification Person. This person goes on and on, telling you what he or she is going to say, saying it, and then telling you what he or she said. • Um Person.To avoid losing control of the conversation, this co-worker fills every pause with "Um," not realizing he or she might be able to think better when not talking.• Too Much Detail Person. The authors could elaborate on this one, but then, of course, that would be contributing to the problem.• 50,000-Foot-Only Person. He or she is eloquent when you talk about the big picture, but refuses to allow anyone to get into the details, which we all know is where the real work gets done. "Unless you’re the CEO of a multinational corporation," say Lambden and Connor, "you have to be willing to work at any altitude."
• Hypnotized-by-E-mail Person. Wireless technology can be a lifesaver, but there’s something defeating about presenting to the tops of people's heads because everyone at the conference table is hunched over his or her laptop. • Buzzword Person. "This employee is annoying in meetings, team rooms, and in cubicles," say Lambden and Connor. "In fact, this person is just plain annoying all the time."• Foul Language Person. Much like Buzzword Person, this co-worker is too lazy to think of the right words to express what he or she is thinking, if, indeed, he or she is thinking at all. This person isn’t trying to impress you with his or her knowledge. "They aren't trying to impress you at all," Lambden and Connor note. "They don't care what you think of them." Refreshing on some level, but probably not a person you’d want on your team. • Reiteration Person. The only contribution this person makes is to restate what already was said. So, basically, he or she actually has no contribution to make.• Too Busy to Be Prompt Person. He or she always is late to work and every meeting, clearly lacking time management skills. Nobody can be working on something important all the time, after all.• Can't Control the Meeting Person and arch-nemesis Wants to Take Over the Meeting Person. There has to be some balance between the out-of-control ditherer and the maniacal meetings dictator, doesn't there?• Secondary Conversation People. Your best material often isn't riveting, but staffers at least could pretend to care. But Lambert and Connor point out these workers "only are annoying if their conversation is less interesting than the meeting."• Disagrees With Everything Person. "This co-worker honestly believes he is just being practical, or serving as the voice of reason, or playing devil's advocate," the authors point out. "This may be true sometimes, and even helpful occasionally, but when it becomes a habit, everyone else just tunes them out."• Obscure Metaphor Person. This employee is as annoying as "the fool in a troupe of Morris dancers," say Lambden and Connor. "See? Wasn’t that annoying?"
Salespeople Must Bring the Total Package of Benefits
Excerpt from "5 Skills of Master Salespeople" by Michael D. Maginn (Singularity Group, 2009) Every customer has problems to be solved. The point is that the salesperson has to go beyond the product need and into the wider array of needs customers have in buying, in making the buying decision, in using the product effectively, as well as in the future of the business.To do that successfully, the salesperson has to see what he or she is selling in a different way. The salesperson's offering is not a product or service or even a family of products or services. Rather, the offering is the total package of benefits associated with doing business with the salesperson's company. This extended concept of the offering—including the deal itself, the efforts of the vendor to make the product work, and the customer's business success now and in the future—gives the salesperson more solutions to apply to customer problems. The more solutions the salesperson brings, the more value the customer feels. When the salesperson brings a lot of value, the total offering—the full package of solutions to the broader array of customer needs—starts to outweigh price objections or price-only advantages the competition may have.What is the total package of benefits?Consider what a salesperson brings to the table. Typically, in the eyes of the customer, it's a product or service. The cost of entry into the sales relationship is that a salesperson must know and be able to explain the features and benefits of the product or service and how they are different from the competitions'. Presumably, a good salesperson should be able to relate these features and benefits directly to customer needs. But, clearly, products and services are not the only things a salesperson brings in.
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̢̢۬۬Because of their company knowledge, industry expertise, and exposure to a range of customers, the salesperson also has ideas and information about payment terms, availability, delivery, installation, support and application concepts, and even credit and billing options.A salesperson also brings ideas about customization, about how the basic product can be modified or configured for a specific customer use. Customization may be related to the actual product itself, the financial relationship, or any other aspect of doing business with the vendor company. When the salesperson searches for and finds a need for adapting the product to make it fit more effectively, then he or she can explain how the vendor does that or how he or she can do it for the customer. Once again, the broader capabilities of the vendor company are on the table.Even intangibles can fill a customer's needs. Consider a new buyer of complicated products or services. The salesperson's ability to relate past success stories about smoothly run installations and operations may be just what an uncertain customer needs. The salesperson is selling reassurance by citing specific related experiences.Finally, part of the package is the salesperson. The old adage about people buying the salesperson is true. Customers see an effective salesperson and sales process that yield the best possible solution as a benefit. Salespeople can provide access to expertise, industry gossip, and networking contacts. The salesperson is the initial interface to the vendor organization; he or she can get things done, especially when other channels don't work.
CM8ShowAd("Middle");
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̢̢۬۬Because of their company knowledge, industry expertise, and exposure to a range of customers, the salesperson also has ideas and information about payment terms, availability, delivery, installation, support and application concepts, and even credit and billing options.A salesperson also brings ideas about customization, about how the basic product can be modified or configured for a specific customer use. Customization may be related to the actual product itself, the financial relationship, or any other aspect of doing business with the vendor company. When the salesperson searches for and finds a need for adapting the product to make it fit more effectively, then he or she can explain how the vendor does that or how he or she can do it for the customer. Once again, the broader capabilities of the vendor company are on the table.Even intangibles can fill a customer's needs. Consider a new buyer of complicated products or services. The salesperson's ability to relate past success stories about smoothly run installations and operations may be just what an uncertain customer needs. The salesperson is selling reassurance by citing specific related experiences.Finally, part of the package is the salesperson. The old adage about people buying the salesperson is true. Customers see an effective salesperson and sales process that yield the best possible solution as a benefit. Salespeople can provide access to expertise, industry gossip, and networking contacts. The salesperson is the initial interface to the vendor organization; he or she can get things done, especially when other channels don't work.
Double Your Income by Warming Up Those Cold Calls
By Silvia Quintanilla
Salespeople are under a lot of pressure to win new business. This fact hit home a few weeks ago when I spoke to a salesperson who uses our research.She told me she is expected to perform five demos every week. In fact, someone from headquarters calls her every Monday to find out what five demo appointments she has lined up that week. And just two weeks before, her company laid off a slew of under-performing salespeople.I have to admit, just speaking to her made me a bit nervous, and I don't even work there!That conversation inspired this article. Hopefully, the tips below can help your sales team meet their metrics—whether it's demo appointments, in-person meetings, or opportunities in the pipeline.
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Finding a Good Prospect When we do research for our clients, we're always looking for a "way in." In other words, we're looking for a project or challenge the prospect is facing that matches what our client sells.Here are some of our favorite ways of finding that information:Tip 1: Use the Job Postings

This has helped us find hundreds of sales opportunities for our clients. The key is to use a site that aggregates job openings from many places (such as Career Builder, Monster, Dice, etc.). A good one we like is Indeed.com. Once there, go to the Advanced Search function. Next, type in a few key words that apply to your service/product. For example, let's say you offer business intelligence (BI) solutions. Type in that key word (or similar key words that would indicate a company is working on a BI project). You'll likely have to sift through a few postings, but it could prove worthwhile. Once you find a company that is starting a project in this area, your chances of engaging your prospect will improve significantly.
Tip 2: Regularly Review Vertical and Functional Periodicals No matter what you sell, there's probably a monthly magazine that matches it. There are online magazines dedicated to IT professionals, HR, marketing, finance, legal, etc., as well as magazines devoted to verticals (banking, health care, retail, etc.). There are even online magazines devoted to specific geographic regions.Each magazine is packed with stories and news events for that specific area. We recommend reviewing them regularly to find timely prospects. For example, many of our clients focus on selling to IT executives. Besides CIO.com, here are three other online magazines that may prove helpful:• Baseline Magazine: www.baselinemag.com • CIO Insight: www.cioinsight.com • Computerworld: www.computerworld.com There's an online magazine(s) for nearly every area. If you need help finding one that fits your solution, send me an e-mail at silvia@industrygems.com 

Tip 3: Read the Earnings Transcripts If your salespeople are looking for the six-figure (and potentially seven-figure) sale, have them read the company's quarterly earnings transcripts (if the company is public). Every quarter, public U.S. companies must present to shareholders and investors. Those meetings are recorded and later transcribed to written word.At these meetings, the executive management talks about future strategies, upcoming projects and any issues or challenges they're trying to resolve. It's a great way to find out the more "hidden" type of information—information that's not being reported in the news. You can find a company's earnings transcripts at Seeking Alpha.Silvia Quintanilla is president of Industry Gems, a boutique custom sales intelligence company dedicated to helping salespeople win large deals with America's biggest companies.
Salespeople are under a lot of pressure to win new business. This fact hit home a few weeks ago when I spoke to a salesperson who uses our research.She told me she is expected to perform five demos every week. In fact, someone from headquarters calls her every Monday to find out what five demo appointments she has lined up that week. And just two weeks before, her company laid off a slew of under-performing salespeople.I have to admit, just speaking to her made me a bit nervous, and I don't even work there!That conversation inspired this article. Hopefully, the tips below can help your sales team meet their metrics—whether it's demo appointments, in-person meetings, or opportunities in the pipeline.
CM8ShowAd("Middle");
Finding a Good Prospect When we do research for our clients, we're always looking for a "way in." In other words, we're looking for a project or challenge the prospect is facing that matches what our client sells.Here are some of our favorite ways of finding that information:Tip 1: Use the Job Postings

This has helped us find hundreds of sales opportunities for our clients. The key is to use a site that aggregates job openings from many places (such as Career Builder, Monster, Dice, etc.). A good one we like is Indeed.com. Once there, go to the Advanced Search function. Next, type in a few key words that apply to your service/product. For example, let's say you offer business intelligence (BI) solutions. Type in that key word (or similar key words that would indicate a company is working on a BI project). You'll likely have to sift through a few postings, but it could prove worthwhile. Once you find a company that is starting a project in this area, your chances of engaging your prospect will improve significantly.
Tip 2: Regularly Review Vertical and Functional Periodicals No matter what you sell, there's probably a monthly magazine that matches it. There are online magazines dedicated to IT professionals, HR, marketing, finance, legal, etc., as well as magazines devoted to verticals (banking, health care, retail, etc.). There are even online magazines devoted to specific geographic regions.Each magazine is packed with stories and news events for that specific area. We recommend reviewing them regularly to find timely prospects. For example, many of our clients focus on selling to IT executives. Besides CIO.com, here are three other online magazines that may prove helpful:• Baseline Magazine: www.baselinemag.com • CIO Insight: www.cioinsight.com • Computerworld: www.computerworld.com There's an online magazine(s) for nearly every area. If you need help finding one that fits your solution, send me an e-mail at silvia@industrygems.com 

Tip 3: Read the Earnings Transcripts If your salespeople are looking for the six-figure (and potentially seven-figure) sale, have them read the company's quarterly earnings transcripts (if the company is public). Every quarter, public U.S. companies must present to shareholders and investors. Those meetings are recorded and later transcribed to written word.At these meetings, the executive management talks about future strategies, upcoming projects and any issues or challenges they're trying to resolve. It's a great way to find out the more "hidden" type of information—information that's not being reported in the news. You can find a company's earnings transcripts at Seeking Alpha.Silvia Quintanilla is president of Industry Gems, a boutique custom sales intelligence company dedicated to helping salespeople win large deals with America's biggest companies.
Fashion sellers turn shopping into an event
susan.carpenter@latimes.com Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
Here's a great piece about how to bring customers to ta retailer's store that your media company can promote as "entertainment" within the ad schedule....With the economy still in a jam...all things are possible...
Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D....
Here ya go.........
Navin Megji calls it "the thoroughfare" -- a stretch of San Vicente Boulevard that isn't a shopping district so much as a racetrack for commuters. Yet it's this strip of posh Brentwood where the 25-year-old boutique owner set up Feature -- a chic, fashion-forward enclave selling splatter-paint mini dresses and fitted boyfriend jackets from designers such as Alexander Wang, Vena Cava and Wayne."There's not a lot of walking traffic," said Megji, who, on a recent Monday in her 1,000-square-foot shop, was spending most of her time refolding lingerie and doing paperwork. "I've found the best way to get exposure is to do pop-up events or more of an extended trunk show."The $200 she springs for Champagne and cocktails for each event "is a minimal cost for the amount of business it brings in," said Megji, who's done meet-and-greets and extended trunk shows with the creative directors of the Geren Ford and Wren lines and various cupcake and cocktail events to lure a customer base she describes as "Brentwood moms and their daughters" who "prefer more 'editorial' looks" and "don't shop at Nordstrom."What's the payback? A doubling in sales, with the added bonus of building relationships with her customers, Megji said.Megji isn't the only fashion retailer to use events to lure buyers. With retail sales down 9.1% so far this year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, emporiums as varied as outlets that specialize in eyeglasses and department stores that sell, well, everything, are hiring DJs, screening movies, serving drinks, offering tattoos, showing art, throwing parties and rolling out the red carpet for shoppers."Retailers are really jumping in [to experiential marketing] because in this kind of economy, you've got to build that brand affinity if you're going to survive," said Stacey Ruth, CEO and chief creative officer of the Wow Factory event marketing firm in Atlanta. "With events, there's an interaction between the brand and the consumer that is not purchase-dependent. Retailers are able to capture information about their customers that's not invasive, and customers get a chance to try without having to buy and to get some perks and benefits for participating."At Macy's Shoe Diva events, customers can shop 'til they drop while listening to a DJ, getting fake tattoos or having their fortunes read. At Bloomingdale's, which has been running its film-inspired "Lights, Camera, Fashion" campaign since August, fashionistas who've exhausted themselves pawing through piles of designer jeans can take a break in the stores' screening rooms, which have been running an endless loop of Bloomie's-financed indie flicks. If they spend at least $150, they also get a free pass to a screening of a soon-to-be-released movie, such as the Earhart bio-pic "Amelia."At the Beverly Center Bloomingdale's, a third-floor alcove that is usually a customer service area for one-on-one-fashion consultations is currently a small movie theater, set up with a large flat-screen TV and rows of directors' chairs. Located between a display of French Connection embroidered dresses and Trina Turk geometric-print tops, the "theater" has seen the most use by bag-carrying husbands, according to one sales associate who works in the area.Though Anne Keating, Bloomingdale's senior vice president of public relations and special events, said that the campaign has "definitely improved business," especially in ready to wear, accessories and cosmetics, she declined to say by how much, only that "we've had great sales results."The Event Marketer Institute puts a finer point on the subject. It estimates that nearly half of participants at in-store events purchase sponsoring products.At Matrushka -- a hip Silver Lake boutique that, in the last year, has hosted dance troupe performances, art openings and T-shirt nights that allow customers to choose the pieces of a shirt and have them sewn together on the spot -- business is up for the year, said owner-founder Laura Howe."It's not by much, just by enough that we're able to say that," said Howe, who's been holding events since she founded her boutique six years ago. The concept: "Customers should feel like they're a part of something as opposed to just straight commercialism. That energy really translates because people identify with feeling like there's something more going on."And that, in turn, creates excitement."My whole initiative right now is keeping the customers curious and interested," said Jeff Rudes, co-founder and president of J Brand, an Anna Wintour favorite. In early September, the luxury jeans maker partnered with the Ron Herman store on Melrose Avenue to do a jeans "gallery" where the denim was mounted to the wall like art pieces, complete with explanatory placards. It was the best turnout for an event in the store's 37 years, according to Rudes."Today, it's very hard to have exclusivity because there are so many brands. Events are something that makes us different," Rudes said. "We're looking for out-of-the-box, cool openings and events to create something special, and that's what the retailers want too."Not only do events pay off with sales, they also bring publicity. Once the initial frenzy of a store's opening has subsided into the daily grind of an ongoing business, it's hard for shops to get attention when the only "news" is a sale or change of season. Events lure the media, which is constantly hungering for fresh material."Events are a very low-cost way to get imagery out," said Ethan Lipsitz, owner of Apliiq. The downtown boutique regularly hosts DJs and live art happenings that demonstrate the store's concept of upcycling old clothes and freshening them with rare-textile appliques. This year, Lipsitz invited an artist named Phade to airbrush his appliqued T-shirts at a party, which was documented by a photographer, who posted the pictures to Apliiq's website, where potential shoppers could not only search out pictures of themselves but also purchase Apliiq products."It shows people enjoying your space and wearing your product and showing the process as something that can be celebrated in a small community and blasted out online," said Lipsitz, 25.For the shopkeepers, it's also a way to have fun."If you're going to be there anyway, you might as well open some Champagne and invite everyone you know," said Crystal Meers, L.A. editor of the fashion and lifestyle blog Daily Candy, which has seen an uptick in fashion retail events, especially at the boutique level. "Why not?"
Here's a great piece about how to bring customers to ta retailer's store that your media company can promote as "entertainment" within the ad schedule....With the economy still in a jam...all things are possible...
Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D....
Here ya go.........
Navin Megji calls it "the thoroughfare" -- a stretch of San Vicente Boulevard that isn't a shopping district so much as a racetrack for commuters. Yet it's this strip of posh Brentwood where the 25-year-old boutique owner set up Feature -- a chic, fashion-forward enclave selling splatter-paint mini dresses and fitted boyfriend jackets from designers such as Alexander Wang, Vena Cava and Wayne."There's not a lot of walking traffic," said Megji, who, on a recent Monday in her 1,000-square-foot shop, was spending most of her time refolding lingerie and doing paperwork. "I've found the best way to get exposure is to do pop-up events or more of an extended trunk show."The $200 she springs for Champagne and cocktails for each event "is a minimal cost for the amount of business it brings in," said Megji, who's done meet-and-greets and extended trunk shows with the creative directors of the Geren Ford and Wren lines and various cupcake and cocktail events to lure a customer base she describes as "Brentwood moms and their daughters" who "prefer more 'editorial' looks" and "don't shop at Nordstrom."What's the payback? A doubling in sales, with the added bonus of building relationships with her customers, Megji said.Megji isn't the only fashion retailer to use events to lure buyers. With retail sales down 9.1% so far this year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, emporiums as varied as outlets that specialize in eyeglasses and department stores that sell, well, everything, are hiring DJs, screening movies, serving drinks, offering tattoos, showing art, throwing parties and rolling out the red carpet for shoppers."Retailers are really jumping in [to experiential marketing] because in this kind of economy, you've got to build that brand affinity if you're going to survive," said Stacey Ruth, CEO and chief creative officer of the Wow Factory event marketing firm in Atlanta. "With events, there's an interaction between the brand and the consumer that is not purchase-dependent. Retailers are able to capture information about their customers that's not invasive, and customers get a chance to try without having to buy and to get some perks and benefits for participating."At Macy's Shoe Diva events, customers can shop 'til they drop while listening to a DJ, getting fake tattoos or having their fortunes read. At Bloomingdale's, which has been running its film-inspired "Lights, Camera, Fashion" campaign since August, fashionistas who've exhausted themselves pawing through piles of designer jeans can take a break in the stores' screening rooms, which have been running an endless loop of Bloomie's-financed indie flicks. If they spend at least $150, they also get a free pass to a screening of a soon-to-be-released movie, such as the Earhart bio-pic "Amelia."At the Beverly Center Bloomingdale's, a third-floor alcove that is usually a customer service area for one-on-one-fashion consultations is currently a small movie theater, set up with a large flat-screen TV and rows of directors' chairs. Located between a display of French Connection embroidered dresses and Trina Turk geometric-print tops, the "theater" has seen the most use by bag-carrying husbands, according to one sales associate who works in the area.Though Anne Keating, Bloomingdale's senior vice president of public relations and special events, said that the campaign has "definitely improved business," especially in ready to wear, accessories and cosmetics, she declined to say by how much, only that "we've had great sales results."The Event Marketer Institute puts a finer point on the subject. It estimates that nearly half of participants at in-store events purchase sponsoring products.At Matrushka -- a hip Silver Lake boutique that, in the last year, has hosted dance troupe performances, art openings and T-shirt nights that allow customers to choose the pieces of a shirt and have them sewn together on the spot -- business is up for the year, said owner-founder Laura Howe."It's not by much, just by enough that we're able to say that," said Howe, who's been holding events since she founded her boutique six years ago. The concept: "Customers should feel like they're a part of something as opposed to just straight commercialism. That energy really translates because people identify with feeling like there's something more going on."And that, in turn, creates excitement."My whole initiative right now is keeping the customers curious and interested," said Jeff Rudes, co-founder and president of J Brand, an Anna Wintour favorite. In early September, the luxury jeans maker partnered with the Ron Herman store on Melrose Avenue to do a jeans "gallery" where the denim was mounted to the wall like art pieces, complete with explanatory placards. It was the best turnout for an event in the store's 37 years, according to Rudes."Today, it's very hard to have exclusivity because there are so many brands. Events are something that makes us different," Rudes said. "We're looking for out-of-the-box, cool openings and events to create something special, and that's what the retailers want too."Not only do events pay off with sales, they also bring publicity. Once the initial frenzy of a store's opening has subsided into the daily grind of an ongoing business, it's hard for shops to get attention when the only "news" is a sale or change of season. Events lure the media, which is constantly hungering for fresh material."Events are a very low-cost way to get imagery out," said Ethan Lipsitz, owner of Apliiq. The downtown boutique regularly hosts DJs and live art happenings that demonstrate the store's concept of upcycling old clothes and freshening them with rare-textile appliques. This year, Lipsitz invited an artist named Phade to airbrush his appliqued T-shirts at a party, which was documented by a photographer, who posted the pictures to Apliiq's website, where potential shoppers could not only search out pictures of themselves but also purchase Apliiq products."It shows people enjoying your space and wearing your product and showing the process as something that can be celebrated in a small community and blasted out online," said Lipsitz, 25.For the shopkeepers, it's also a way to have fun."If you're going to be there anyway, you might as well open some Champagne and invite everyone you know," said Crystal Meers, L.A. editor of the fashion and lifestyle blog Daily Candy, which has seen an uptick in fashion retail events, especially at the boutique level. "Why not?"
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
New U.S. Census to Reveal Major Shift: No More Joe Consumer
LOS ANGELES (AdAge.com) -- The 2010 Census is expected to find that 309 million people live in the United States. But one person will be missing: the average American.
"The concept of an 'average American' is gone, probably forever," demographics expert Peter Francese writes in 2010 America, a new Ad Age white paper. "The average American has been replaced by a complex, multidimensional society that defies simplistic labeling."
The message to marketers is clear: No single demographic, or even handful of demographics, neatly defines the nation. There is no such thing as "the American consumer."
The census is the biggest market-research project of the decade. The Census Bureau will spend upward of $15 billion to count the population as of April 1, 2010, and amass a treasure-trove of data on U.S. consumers.
"The decennial census will tell us quite precisely how American consumers have changed in the past decade," Mr. Francese writes. "It also will give us clues about where the consumer marketplace is moving. The census is the gold standard against which the results of all major consumer-research studies are benchmarked."
The Census Bureau will begin releasing data in spring 2011. Mr. Francese, demographic trends analyst at WPP's Ogilvy & Mather, New York, and founder of American Demographics magazine, now offers projections and insight on what the census will show.
His 32-page report, available at AdAge.com/2010America, will give marketers a window on what the census will show and how to adapt those findings in a marketing world reliant on broadscale demographics that no longer exist.
Selected findings of 2010 America:
· U.S. households are growing ever more complex and varied.
"This census will show that no household type neatly describes even one-third of households," Mr. Francese writes. "The iconic American family -- married couple with children -- will account for a mere 22% of households."
The most prevalent type of U.S. household? Married couple with no kids, followed closely by single-person households, according to Mr. Francese's projections.
The Census will give Americans 14 choices to define household relationships. Mr. Francese says this will "enable the Census Bureau to count not only traditional families but also the number and growth since 2000 of blended families, single-parent families and multigenerational families, as well as multiple families doubling up in one household."
That presents boundless opportunities for marketers and media in how they target and segment households.
· Minorities are the new majority. "One fact says it all," Mr. Francese writes. "In the two largest states (California and Texas), as well as New Mexico and Hawaii, the nation's traditional majority group -- white non-Hispanics -- is in the minority." And in the nation's 10 largest cities, he says, "no racial or ethnic category describes a majority of the population."
Mr. Francese notes how diversity varies greatly by age, "with the younger population substantially more diverse than the old."
Consider these 2010 projections: 80% of people age 65-plus will be white non-Hispanics. But just 54% of children under age 18 will be white non-Hispanics. Mr. Francese observes: "White non-Hispanics will surely account for fewer than half of births by 2015."
In 2010, Hispanics will be both the nation's fastest-growing and largest minority (50 million people).
· The nation is moving. Over the past decade, Mr. Francese says, 85% of the nation's population growth occurred in the South and West. "During the still-nameless decade from 2000 to 2010," he writes, "a total of about 3 million people have moved out of the Northeast, and another 2 million have left the Midwest" for the South and West.
Mr. Francese's report offers his "2020 vision," analyzing how things will change over the next decade. "Our nation will be older and more diverse, and consumer markets more complex," he writes. The white paper pinpoints age and income groups where marketers could find the biggest opportunities.
~ ~ ~ Peter Francese wrote and Bradley Johnson edited 2010 America.
"The concept of an 'average American' is gone, probably forever," demographics expert Peter Francese writes in 2010 America, a new Ad Age white paper. "The average American has been replaced by a complex, multidimensional society that defies simplistic labeling."
The message to marketers is clear: No single demographic, or even handful of demographics, neatly defines the nation. There is no such thing as "the American consumer."
The census is the biggest market-research project of the decade. The Census Bureau will spend upward of $15 billion to count the population as of April 1, 2010, and amass a treasure-trove of data on U.S. consumers.
"The decennial census will tell us quite precisely how American consumers have changed in the past decade," Mr. Francese writes. "It also will give us clues about where the consumer marketplace is moving. The census is the gold standard against which the results of all major consumer-research studies are benchmarked."
The Census Bureau will begin releasing data in spring 2011. Mr. Francese, demographic trends analyst at WPP's Ogilvy & Mather, New York, and founder of American Demographics magazine, now offers projections and insight on what the census will show.
His 32-page report, available at AdAge.com/2010America, will give marketers a window on what the census will show and how to adapt those findings in a marketing world reliant on broadscale demographics that no longer exist.
Selected findings of 2010 America:
· U.S. households are growing ever more complex and varied.
"This census will show that no household type neatly describes even one-third of households," Mr. Francese writes. "The iconic American family -- married couple with children -- will account for a mere 22% of households."
The most prevalent type of U.S. household? Married couple with no kids, followed closely by single-person households, according to Mr. Francese's projections.
The Census will give Americans 14 choices to define household relationships. Mr. Francese says this will "enable the Census Bureau to count not only traditional families but also the number and growth since 2000 of blended families, single-parent families and multigenerational families, as well as multiple families doubling up in one household."
That presents boundless opportunities for marketers and media in how they target and segment households.
· Minorities are the new majority. "One fact says it all," Mr. Francese writes. "In the two largest states (California and Texas), as well as New Mexico and Hawaii, the nation's traditional majority group -- white non-Hispanics -- is in the minority." And in the nation's 10 largest cities, he says, "no racial or ethnic category describes a majority of the population."
Mr. Francese notes how diversity varies greatly by age, "with the younger population substantially more diverse than the old."
Consider these 2010 projections: 80% of people age 65-plus will be white non-Hispanics. But just 54% of children under age 18 will be white non-Hispanics. Mr. Francese observes: "White non-Hispanics will surely account for fewer than half of births by 2015."
In 2010, Hispanics will be both the nation's fastest-growing and largest minority (50 million people).
· The nation is moving. Over the past decade, Mr. Francese says, 85% of the nation's population growth occurred in the South and West. "During the still-nameless decade from 2000 to 2010," he writes, "a total of about 3 million people have moved out of the Northeast, and another 2 million have left the Midwest" for the South and West.
Mr. Francese's report offers his "2020 vision," analyzing how things will change over the next decade. "Our nation will be older and more diverse, and consumer markets more complex," he writes. The white paper pinpoints age and income groups where marketers could find the biggest opportunities.
~ ~ ~ Peter Francese wrote and Bradley Johnson edited 2010 America.
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