Verbs

“BBM me on Whatsapp.”

“Paint is good enough to photoshop this picture.”

“The automatic xeroxing capability of my new HP printer has saved me hours of manual labor.”

What’s wrong with these everyday conversational statements? These statements, it turns out, are blunders for Blackberry (BBM), Adobe (Photoshop) and Xerox respectively. People have relatively low brand affinity towards these brands while they are completely engraved in everyday vocabulary. In some cases, such brands even lose the brand awareness and start getting treated as verbs.

It it awesome when your brand becomes synonymous to the product you are selling. It signals clear market dominance and leadership in the category. But it takes no time to become dangerous when the brand becomes verbs with better and more economical alternatives substitute you in the product category.

The way to dodge it is by preventing your brand from becoming a generic verb. Keep the focus on the problem you are solving, whether its easy messaging, picture editing or photo copying. If you are too good and far ahead to avoid that from happening, just stay ahead of competition. Keep innovating. Keep getting better. Just don’t let anyone else become the brand to “verb” you in the category.

Masterpiece

Jerry Seinfeld never made a sitcom after the immensely successful Seinfeld. It is only imaginable the kind of offers he must be getting from network executives to make something. The reason being he had already made his masterpiece. He very well knows that whatever he makes next is not going to be as good as Seinfeld and it will be in comparison, no matter how successful it is, sub par.

Another television personality I adore is Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin, in my opinion, had a masterpiece in The West Wing. He followed that by shows like Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and The Newsroom, but none came close to getting the acclaim he earned for The West Wing. Both these shows were great in their own ways, but their problem was that they were following Sorkin’s masterpiece.

Masterpiece is a dream and a curse. Everyone, be it an artist or an entrepreneur, wants that masterpiece in a lifetime. It brings with itself all you want for which you burn that midnight oil, put your more than 100%. You got to earn it and it’s not easy. But once you have it, it instantly becomes a curse. The act that follows the masterpiece is the hardest. You set the bar way above anything that is normal by any standards and to meet it is as rare as it gets.

The best thing to do is to accept it and move on to do something completely different. John D. Rockefeller and Bill Gates have done the same and they went on to have (or are going to have) a new masterpiece stroke in their second innings which will be incomparable to their masterpiece in their first act.

Follow your customers

I happened to walk into a Cold Stone Creamery outlet on the 72nd Street last week. It was around 8 pm, there was one person managing the store, not a single customer in a relatively big store. We hanged around there for about 15 minute and no one entered the store. Interestingly, on our way back we passed through about 5 yogurt places all pretty packed.

This brings up an interesting point. Why did a major ice cream parlor chain with more than 1000 stores nationwide missed the boat to serve customers what they wanted to eat? How did the yogurt parlors manage to steal their customers? For that matter, the same question is valid on lot of other industries. Apple killed the Walkman maker Sony with iPod. Amazon did it to Barnes & Noble. The list can go pretty long where an incumbent leader is brought down by new upstarts.

There are a few reasons for this. One of the key reasons is complacency. Companies are on the path of downward spiral when they start thinking they are invincible. Another reason is legacy. It is so hard for companies with all the extra fat and years of legacy to be nimble. Then there is always that fear of cannibalization. Companies don’t want to shift their attention or take any kind of risk that might cannibalize their money generating business. And to top it all up, there is denial. Something that is far too evident is not visible because companies are stuck in the state of denial.

The core way to tackle this is by understanding what is important for your customers. Understand what they want in your industry, why they need it and how can you provide it. Be nimble and quick in transforming yourself to meet the needs of customers. Don’t be scared to nudge your existing business. You got to understand that you cannibalizing your own business is so much better than someone else doing it. Way too often you won’t be at the forefront of innovation and transformation, some other company with a fresh mindset will be ahead of you. In that case, just shed the extra weight and follow your customers as fast as you can.

Round 2

The last two books I happened to read focused a great deal on business leaders who got a second chance to do it all over again. The first one is Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul by Howard Schultz. The book takes you through the journey of Howard Schultz about how he rebuilt the company which lost its mojo in the eight years he was away from being the Starbucks CEO.

The second book is Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. The book dedicates a large section on how Steve Jobs came back to Apple and built a company from the verge of bankruptcy to being one of the highest valuation companies ever.

There are a few key things that come to mind when you read books and stories of this nature. First is the emphasis on how easy it is to end up losing the brand equity that is built with continuous labor over a long period of time and how hard it is to earn it back. It shows the impact of your mavens, your most loyal customers and partners, who believe  in you till the very end. They are the ones who love you no matter what and they are the ones who critic you because they just can’t stand letting the brand be destroyed. They are in fact the backbone of a brand’s marketing. They are the early adopters, the loud backers and the selfless promoters.

The second is the difference an individual can make for a company. It is said that teams run a company and you cannot do it all alone. That is so true, but the most overlooked factor is that individuals build teams. An individual recruits other individuals to become part of a team. One of the hardest things in building a business is to find people who trust you, who share your vision, who can deliver and can put their all in for the sake of building the company.  Even harder is to be cold enough to let people go when they are not at the right place. One individual can make a whole lot of difference in steering the company in the right direction.

This also speaks a great deal about the founder’s touch. The founder knows the core of the company. When you start the company, you have a vision and a mission you set for it. To build it sustainable and successful, you make hard decisions more often than not keeping the long-term view in mind.  Whether you take a hiatus (Howard Schultz) or are fired (Steve Jobs), things are shaken. A continuity is lost. This might be good in cases where the company needs a fresh look, but I believe Round 2 cases strongly prove that there is nothing like the founder’s touch in building a company, whether its first time or all over again.

Actionability

Rational decision-making is an important and priced skill. Many great business leaders from Jack Welch to Steve Jobs have talked a great deal about making decisions from the gut. It is important to make decisions that feel right and are actionable to bear some results. More often than not, people make good decision when they have evidence generated from in-depth research to support the rational behind it. 

I believe the most important thing in making right decisions, whether it is made from the gut or based on good research, is the confidence and conviction to execute on it. Data is a great confidence builder. It is tangible. When analyzed in an unbiased fashion, it doesn’t lie. And when used in the right way, it helps us make the right decisions and put things in motion. 

There is no shortage of data out there. Digital connectivity and accessibility has provided us with rich quality big data. Big data can act like an unparalleled resource to provide insights leading to good decisions and actionable plans.

One of the core principles of MavenMagnet is to provide insights that are actionable. It is important for us to make our research findings crisp, easy to interpret and actionable for our clients. There are services out there that will dump tons of data in a really cool looking user interface. But that won’t provide you the gist of information without spending days, if not months, figuring it out. Our core idea is to do the heavy lifting with the help of our technology so that what you receive is something that you can directly put to use in your business, make rational decisions and take swift actions.

Who’s invincible?

The biggest sign of over confidence is to think and believe that you are invincible, and it is well-known that the road to downfall starts at the home of over confidence.

Sport stars play a good case study when it comes to the topic of invincibility. History books are full of sportsmen who were once upon a time big stars in their fields but were displaced from their place of authority by new faces way before they have used their full potential because they were lost in the belief of being invincible.

Same is true in the field of business and product development. Products become obsolete as soon as the developers start believing that their creation is invincible. You got to be on top of where your industry is going. You got to have a vision of what your customers will embrace next, because if you don’t there is someone out there doing exactly that while you are swimming in the pool of invincibility.

So who is invincible? The one who keeps re-innovating, changing, adapting and getting better. The one who continuously focuses on what’s next.

Enriching Insights through Integration

Big data is an unparalleled source of rich insights. Integrating multiple sources of information enriches the insights and makes them stronger and more actionable. Twitter and Facebook, the face of social networks, provide great deal of information that can provide good insights. But insights get richer when you span your horizons and look at diverse sources of information like blogs, videos, communities, forums and so on. Different sources provide different perspectives. Each have their strengths when it comes to information. They compliment each other. When everything is brought together, playing field is leveled, and analysis is done across platforms, the insights you get are in-depth, self validating and actionable.

Online sources by themselves provide great insights. These insights can be made even stronger when mapped across other sources of information. For example if you span the horizons further and bring in Point of Sales data, you can get actionable insights on how sales process can be enhanced. If you go wider and look at customer support data, you can add another dimension to the market insights which can be used in product innovation and  development.

The basic idea is to provide companies with sharp and actionable insights that can help them improve their business processes and better serve their customers. With information overcrowding it becomes frustrating and overwhelming to deal with the data and get the jist out of it. Every data source provides a lens that adds value. It provides you the capability to unearth something that can make your customers love you more. It gives you early warning signals to avoid a crisis. It points out gaps in your consumer outreach efforts to better allocate your resources. What you need is to bring all the data together, analyze it and get actionable insights. That’s exactly what we strive to do at MavenMagnet!

Say no to free trials

When you are in the business of enterprise sales and you are selling something new, the most common proposition you get from your client is to do a free trial. From the client’s perspective, it may sound logical because they are trying you out. The bigger the client, more lucrative the free trial sounds. But there are a few key reasons why free trials just don’t work.

First, in enterprise business, free has no value. If you are giving something away for free, the chances are it is not going to be used. The client is going to pay much more attention at something they have paid for because they are much better off justifying to themselves the product for which they shelled out some money from their budgets.

Second, if you give away a water-down product to the client because you are doing it for free, you are anchoring your capabilities there from the perspective of the client. If you claim to move mountains but turn a stone in the free trial, it will be really hard for you to convince your client that you do have the capabilities to move mountains. This is a lose-lose scenario for both your client and you. Your client is not getting the real meat and is not satisfied by your product. You are taking a hit in doing whatever you are doing and not able to convince your client to trust you to go for the real product.

A much better approach is to do a “pilot” for a discounted price with your client. You might not make money in this round, or even end up losing some, but this will make them comfortable to try it out for a price where you are not giving it away and at the same time making your client comfortable as they are taking a smaller risk on a new thing. You might lose some business by not giving it away for free the first time around, but it will make sure whoever is getting it is going to put your product to use and increase the probability of engaging with you in the next phase.

How real time should Real Time be?

Classic answer to this classic question is Depends!

With technology at hand and data accessible and flowing continuously, it is important to understand what Real Time means for your business and what it should be for a particular situation.

In case of customer service, where companies are answering questions of customers and looking into their issues one customer at a time, or in other words when you are in the business of Real Time Support, Real Time should be instantaneous. A lag of even minutes is a bit too long and if that gets to days, you better pray that that customer issue doesn’t take form of the next phenomenon like United Breaks Guitar.

If you are a marketing manager running a campaign, Real Time analysis should have a bit different meaning for you. What you want to do here is to gauge consumer reaction to your campaign. You want to understand where consumers are noticing your advertisement, out of the three versions of the advertisement you dropped which one is getting the best reception, should you worry about anything not going as planned and what should you do to adjust the campaign. In this case, Real Time is getting answers to these questions based on expert analysis. If you are in top gear with your campaign, this should be within (or every) 72 to 96 hours and this should vary based on the stage of your campaign. The real deal here is to get actionable insights after proper analysis of consumer data.

Then there is a scenario where you want to analyze your brand in the industry. What people are liking about it, what they are not. Where you are being considered better or worse than your competition. The idea is to get the reputation of your brand so that it your team can take steps to better plan the brand’s positioning and take actions as required. The Real Time in this case is a couple of weeks. The idea is to get statistically relevant information, make sure the analysis is fool proof and the landscape is properly analyzed with taking input from various stakeholders having an impact on your brand.

With the advent of social media and rise of participation in online conversations, Real Time has become more of a buzz word. Real Time for the sake of it doesn’t add any value. If you get to see a dump of data flowing in as people converse on the web, it might look cool, but in most situations where you are looking to analyze the information and take decisions based on these consumer insights, you better take a breather and let the data be analyzed and presented to you in a format that is easy to consume and has actionable takeaways for your business.

Importance of analysis

There is no shortage of data. It is omnipresent and more often than not, overwhelming. Internet is full of conversations, videos, tweets, blogs and news. While this makes searching for information about any topic easy, at the same time it makes dealing with it a big challenge.

The important thing is converting this data into knowledge or in other words, extracting insights from that data. Viewing continuously flowing data about your brand or product is in itself more of a cool thing. There are tools out there that will show data flow of what buzz is happening on the Internet. If you own a well known brand or operate in a talked about industry, you better don’t blink, otherwise you might miss some important posts. In other words, just getting this data is no good.

What is good is the insights that can be extracted from this data. Analyzing this data, understanding the sentiments behind it and coming up with actionable takeaways is what makes this data worthwhile and in some cases magical.

Core strength of MavenMagnet is our capability to analyze complex data sets and extract insights out of it. We have developed cutting edge technological infrastructure that can comprehend massive amounts of data and distill it down to organized information sets which are in turn processed to deliver rich insights in a user friendly way.