Tag Archives: business thinking

January 24, 2014 · 11:53 am

Can You Feel It?

It’s Foodie Friday and today I was inspired by something I saw last night on The Taste.

Healthy Berries are Good Food for Health

(Photo credit: epSos.de)

Yes, I do watch a lot of competitive cooking shows but I find it to be a great way to learn about technique and also how to think about blending flavors, textures, and foods into great dishes.   The guest judge was Roy Choi and he was giving one team a master class on making street food (of which he is a master!).  While serving them the food, he asked the contestants a lot of questions about how what they were eating made them feel.  Not how did it taste – how did it make them feel.

That resonated with me on a number of levels.  Maybe you’ve had the experience of eating something and having had a flood of memories hit you.  I certainly get that when I cook one of my grandmother’s recipes.  I’ve also had it happen sometimes when I eat a dish in one place that I’ve had in another and I am taken back to the place in which I first had it.  Food that makes you feel something is a great goal, one we can apply to our businesses too.

Part of many great brands’ success is that they make you feel something.  It can be nostalgia about our childhoods (Coke, Kraft, Campbell’s Soup) or being a part of a bigger cause (Apple, Prius), or maybe just safe and loved.  That emotional involvement, how we make people feel, is what helps differentiate great brands and great service businesses.  It’s not how the business “tastes” as much as it is how it feels.

Think about “cold” brands.  I’ve been to hotels where the place was clean and the service good but I’d have given up some efficiency for a little warmth.  I don’t think “warm and fuzzy” is for every business but I think every business does need to think about how their customers feel after interacting with them.  Those aren’t the kind of check box answers one gets on most surveys if the questions are even asked.  You need to dig deeper, maybe even become your own customer.  If you can’t feel anything, they probably can’t either, or at least not anything you’d want them to repeat. You with me?

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January 22, 2014 · 11:36 am

Benchmarks

There is a scene in the movie “Caddyshack” in which two of the characters are having a chat after golf:

Judge Smails: Ty, what did you shoot today?
Ty Webb: Oh, Judge, I don’t keep score.
Judge Smails: Then how do you measure yourself with other golfers?
Ty Webb: By height.

I know – I do manage to find ways to get golf references into the screed a lot.

Charts

(Photo credit: GrapeCity)

However, what you just read is an example of benchmarking – measuring your performance or a business unit’s performance against a standard.  It’s something we all do.  Clients ask if their email open rates are good or if their site’s bounce rate is higher than others I’ve seen.  Most of the time a company tries to identify standards that come out of best practices and benchmark themselves against them.  Sometimes even entire industries (usually through a trade association or some other third-party) will anonymously aggregate the results  across the industry to help the members figure out if their results are on par with the industry as a whole.

We see the benchmarks all the time in financial results.  ARPU in the wireless industry, for example, is a very public benchmark; percent subscriber growth is one in the cable industry.  I find them helpful but am probably not as fixated on them as a lot of other people.  Here is why.

In my consulting experience I’ve found very few businesses that align exactly.  Sure, many of the folks with whom I work face the same general challenges, but asking, for example, if a bounce rate is high if it ignores the purpose of your page or site vs. what others are trying to do. Where I have a bigger issue with benchmarks is when companies use them to judge other companies (or other people!).  Those sorts of comparisons get our eyes off our own goals.  By comparing and judging, we’re implying that every business is on the same journey (or that every person is as well).  We can’t know for sure what those journeys involve.

Benchmarks are like many other business tools.  In the right hands and using the right perspective they can be very useful.  The again, some companies do what Ty did in the example – he’s a tall guy, let’s measure results by height!  Used without context or skewed to a purpose or to pass absolute judgement, they’re dangerous.  That’s my take – what’s yours?

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January 20, 2014 · 11:09 am

The Content That Matters

Martin Luther King leaning on a lectern. Deuts...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There has been a lot written about content marketing.

Some seers have even proclaimed 2014 as the year of content marketing, and as Google adjusts their search algorithms to make content more important in determining search rank, one can understand why “content” is on everyone’s lips here in digital business land.  Since I’m never one to miss a large bandwagon, let me jump right on to talk about the only content that matters.  I have a particular reason for doing so today.

We celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday today.  As I’ve written in past years on this occasion, I remember him and his struggles well from my childhood.  The quote that stuck is from the “I Have A Dream” speech about the importance of judging people by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin.  That is the content that matters – the ONLY content that really matters – as we do business.

What, for example, does it say about the character of those retailers who run sales tied to “the MLK event.”  What it says to me is that they are tone-deaf, as was the cognac brand that sent out an email with drink recipes “MLK Jr. would be proud of.”  Really?  This is not about Dr. King or his principles or his legacy.  It’s about a brand trying to sell something and is, in the word Dr. King’s daughter used to describe similar activities, “appalling.”  That describes the character of their content just as it does the content of their character.

I don’t know about you, but I try to do business with people, not brands.  There are restaurants and other businesses I frequent almost solely because I like and trust the people with whom I deal.  I hope that many of my clients have hired me not just for what and who I know but also because they have a sense of the business person I try to be.  You can be sure that many of the people with whom you do business are looking at you and your company in the same way.

A business’ success or customer service isn’t about the store; it’s about the person on the other side of the counter or the desk or who answers the phone.  The content of their character will determine the brand’s success or failure.  You can choose those people wisely and support them as they let the content of that character show.  You can choose to market as did the brands above which also reveals a lot about the content of brand’s character.  It’s the only content that matters.  What’s your choice?

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