Tag Archives: business

May 23, 2012 · 8:58 am

Bad Decks And Missing Logic

I saw something yesterday that made me laugh out loud. Unfortunately, it was something that was shown to me as part of a media proposal. It involved a social media campaign and the agency that had created the plan (which I was reviewing for another consultant) was going to use Facebook. Based on the client and their objectives, this was probably not the best place for the media placement but let’s put that aside.

Illustration of Facebook mobile interface

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What made me laugh was the projection of the number of impressions both paid and earned that the campaign would generate. It came out to such a ridiculously high number (as in reaching every person on Facebook hundreds of times each) that it called into question everything in the rest of the presentation as well as the agency’s overall competence.

As I thought about it, I became a little scared and then a lot offended.  It bothered me that an agency who has a pretty good list of clients had moved into social media and was treating it the same as broadcast media.  They should know a lot better.  It made me scared because this is the sort of irresponsible behavior we find all too often in digital.  People become digital or social media experts or SEOs overnight and sell an inferior grade of services to clients who will get lousy results.  How can they invest in this form of marketing going forward when the results weren’t there?

The point is this – whether it’s media plans or budgets or a report on manufacturing, we need to ask simple, logical questions.  Why are we using Facebook when our objective is more geared to the broader web and restrictions in Facebook’s policies will prevent us from activating properly?  Do the numbers they’re projecting make sense (and if we’re really going to reach the audience 300+ times each, maybe we’ve gone too far)?

There were a bunch of other issues in the deck and aside from the numbers my general response was “these guys just don’t get it.”  None of us should be offering off the shelf, cookie-cutter solutions to problems that get more complex every day.  The nature of media is changing – the nature of media planning need to change as well, along with the messages.  You’ve experienced it in your own media behavior – why are you thinking everyone else has remained the same?

You with me?

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May 22, 2012 · 10:30 am

The Rule Book

I was watching the hockey playoffs last night and had a thought about business. You might not find that strange given that for several years of my life hockey WAS my business. However, what occurred to me has both broader application and a less-obvious path. It has to do with obstruction.

NEWARK, NJ - DECEMBER 20: Kurtis Foster #2 of ...

Getty Images via @daylife

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, obstruction (and its cousins hooking and holding) is what players do to decrease the flow of the game. An easy way to think of it is as a player preventing another player who doesn’t have the puck from skating, obstructing their ability to play. Almost a decade ago, the NHL cracked down on the practice by enforcing the existing rules against it in an effort to improve the flow of the game and allow the more skilled players to show those skills. As one might expect, teams adjusted their rosters over the years to emphasize great skating and stick-handling over the clutching and grabbing that was so prevalent .

Watching the game last night, I was struck by how little free-flowing skating was going on.  Many of the other games I’ve watched during the season have seemed the same.  The rules, or at least their enforcement, seem to have changed.  Which is the business thought.

If you’ve built your team to play the game a certain way and the rules change, how do you compete?  If you’re a media company that’s built on ad revenue for eyeballs, what do you do when the audiences you’re selling evaporate to other channels?  If you’re selling SEO, what happens when the algorithms change and everything you do is now wrong?  Even if you’re in online commerce, what do you do with inventory when tastes change?

Ultimately, I think our success and failure revolves around change management – what happens when the rule book gets modified.  We need to be thinking about that as we bring on new hires – how well have they dealt with change in the past?  We need to maintain flexibility in our planning – why spend money to a budget that’s based on old rules?

I’m sure it’s frustrating to the coaches and managers when they find a different set of rules on the ice than in the rule book.  I know it’s frustrating to find a different set of business conditions and consumer preferences.  What do you do when the rules change?

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May 17, 2012 · 8:03 am

Outrunning The Bear

I expect most of you have heard the old joke about the campers and their encounter with a bear.

Haley the polar bear at the Memphis Zoo.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

However, on the off-chance you haven’t, the gist of it is that two campers cross paths with a bear.  As the angry bear begins charging out of the woods towards them, the first camper starts putting his sneakers on. The other camper screams, “It’s no use, we’ll never be able to outrun the bear!”  The first camper yells back, “I don’t need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you!”

A number of folks use that as a business analogy to say that in most business categories, we need only to beat our competition to survive.  I disagree.  By  thinking about surviving or “outlasting” the competition, the focus is on the short-term (we need to run only as fast as the other guys) rather than building for the long-term.  Focusing on the other guys as the standard might just mean you’re being dragged down rather than creating enough of a gap so as to make them non-entities.  After all, what is that bear protecting and what kind of opportunity does it present?

The auto industry is a great example.  For years, the US car companies built cars that were responses to what the other guy had to offer.  The standards of production in terms of fit and finish were OK.  It was pretty much a race to stay slightly ahead of one another.  Then the Japanese auto invasion hit and suddenly there was a different standard in terms of quality and innovation.  It was much higher as measured by independent firms such as J.D. Power.  The domestic manufacturers’ share of business dropped quite a bit – imports offered better quality and more car for the money.  Because they were focused on outrunning one another rather than the foreign bear, they almost got killed.  Had they been focused on an altogether different standard – the one that asks “how can we build something that’s great” who knows what might have been.

Let’s assume (hopefully correctly) that you or your company is really passionate about what you do.  You are delivering a great product or service and you have a path to profitability (or maybe you’re even well down that road).  What piece of that equation involves a standard set by others?
Stop trying to outrun the other guys and figure out why you’re running in the first place.  Maybe outrunning the bear isn’t the best strategy or the highest standard.  What do you think?
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