BERKONOMICS

We’re talking about brand strategy here.  Not advertising, and certainly not an easy grasp for amateur marketers.  So how developed is your company’s brand?  Is your message clear, concise, and consistent?

Here’s the professional’s process:

There is a process used by professionals to get to clear messaging.  It starts with “discovery,” the process of finding the strengths of the company in the minds of all stakeholders.  That requires careful questioning, accumulation of results, and then the creation of a strategy for making a message reflect these advantages.

Branding a cow seems so much easier.

We start with our intended audience, asking ourselves who we are talking to, what we need to say, and how we are going to say it.  We want our audience to know what we stand for in the fewest, most memorable words.

Think of this as our core message. 

We define (clearly) what we give (our core attributes) and then why it matters, or what our audience gets (the benefits).

[Email readers, continue here…]   A good brand strategy then lists supporting arguments for both the give and the get.  Once we have done this, we should be ready to create our audience–facing message, which we know as advertising.

What we usually do wrong

Very few of us have conducted a brand strategy effort, and much of our advertising reflects this, with wasted ad dollars spent as we nibble around the core message and miss targeting the primary “get” message in our ads.

You can follow the steps outlined above and attempt to define your core message or seek help from a professional.  It seems that most often, this extra effort to define brand message would be cheaper and much more effective than our present attempts at “spray and pray” advertising today.

Or you can hope your present advertising is effective – and concentrate on learning a new skill at the ranch.

Customer empowerment is moving so fast nowadays that many of us are running to just catch up.  Yet if we don’t or can’t, it is a sure thing that someone else will.

Yes, we can blame the Internet for this.  But don’t close your eyes to the fact that your customers have grown to expect your products or services in the form of…

‘WHAT I want, WHEN I want, and WHERE I want.’

Especially for those of us producing forms of media for consumption, from books to movies to music to games to blogs to podcasts and more, our customers expect delivery in the form of bits over the Internet upon demand, usable on a multitude of devices, and sometimes stored and available in the cloud at no additional cost.

Expectations rise with technology.

For those producing physical products (atoms, not bits), Amazon and a few others have set the bar of expectation that already includes one–hour delivery at a cost and for certain items in many urban areas.  At the very least, two–day delivery has become the minimum expectation to virtually anywhere.

Embrace remote outreach to save everyone time.

[Email readers, continue here…]  If you provide services rather than products (neither bits nor atoms), consider offering discounted rates for remote phone or video appointments if applicable, for un–booked appointment times if not possible, and for early booking of time if neither works.

Entering the age of mass customization

As to selection (WHAT I want), do not be surprised to see your customers moving you to find ways to use 3D printing and other mass customization tools to create unique products without inventory cost to you – and certainly moving you to consider “additive manufacturing” (3–D printing) as a new norm for some or many of your products.  Be ready:  remote 3–D printers may soon make “WHERE I want” common for some products produced locally on demand.

If you are not considering these demands and your responses already, surely someone else is.  Be an adaptive business leader.  Create strategies to lead in areas where new technologies can give you a competitive edge.

This one is attributed to Red Adair, the famous oil and gas fire suppressing expert.  And boy, does it apply to most of us and our offerings.

“Quality” products and services…

…should not be positioned as “cheap,” or your potential customers will question your message from the start and will be more critical of the delivered product than if offered as one or the other, but not both.

Let’s define “fast.”

“Fast” applies to either service speed (including delivery) or product manufacturing time.  If you as a supplier have plenty of spare resources available, you might temporarily get away with adding “fast” to both other two attributes of good and cheap.

But beware. 

Being fast usually requires having inefficient links or spare resources in the supply chain that can be stretched at comparatively low cost in terms of your overhead cash and offering quality.  If it becomes a part of your long-term sales message, there is risk that you will set expectations you cannot achieve.  And a disappointment based on missed delivery or completion is as great as one based upon trounced quality or price expectations.  This is particularly true if you have been caught up in supply chain issues lately that are well beyond your control, or if you failed to anticipate the extent of these and under-ordered materials.

What if you’re competing as an Internet seller using “fast?”

And if you are an Internet seller, “fast” becomes difficult to offer if you know that Amazon (and perhaps others) offer one or two–day delivery at no charge – and at least Amazon now provides same day delivery of many items in some metro areas.

One answer to this puzzle

[Email readers, continue here…]   So, consider this:  Make “fast” a tool for use as an inducement for particularly important customers or orders, or at times when resources are underutilized.  Offer “fast” when it works for you to close a sale that would not have been likely otherwise.

Back to Red Adair…

Red Adair said, “…pick any two.”  I think it more appropriate for most of us to concentrate upon “good” (quality) or “cheap” (price) and add “fast” as needed to close the sale or fill the resource cup.

There are other ways to describe this.

Our good friend Adam Miller, founder of Cornerstone on Demand, uses words appropriate for software development when describing his version of this “pick any two” quandary.   He describes his choice as “cost, quality or scope. Pick two.”

It is an excellent variation on the theme – selecting from a limited menu of the use of resources.  Note that the only difference in Adam’s shortlist is that he substitutes “scope” for “fast” – but we could just add “scope” to the three we dealt with above to demonstrate yet again that we all have limited resources from which to select our best path.

About “scope” with development-related issues

For software–related tech businesses, scope always creeps, increasing the complexity, disturbing the planned progress, and increasing costs – sometimes dramatically, as projects fall further behind.

The lesson then is that resources are always going to be limited, and that management always must select the most important of the competing outcomes.  It would be worth spending time with your team with someone volunteering to take the unpopular position just to explore the edges of this with speakers for each of the alternatives actively bringing the alternative views to the discussion.