Tag Archives: Strategic management

July 21, 2014 · 8:40 am

Following The Audience

One of the biggest things one can learn in the business world is how to adapt to changing environments.

English: American family watching TV (cropped)

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I suspect that a lot of executives believed they were good at it until they faced the challenges of the last decade.  It’s relatively easy when you’re in start-up mode to pivot the business from one model to the next.  Once you’re a mid-size enterprise or a public company (much harder since every move is public and scrutinized by analysts and shareholders).

The better media companies can and have done this.  For example, most of the traditional television networks have accepted that their role has changed.  They once were programmers who decided what the audience would watch based on time of day.  Audience flow created by content choreography was a big deal.  Today they are curators.  They have learned to buy or create programs and to present them in a channel-agnostic fashion.  Why?  To survive.  37 percent of U.S. consumers now own a tablet, a smartphone and a laptop, which is a whopping 42 percent increase year-over-year. Women comprised 35 percent of this group two years ago; now they account for 45 percent of the group.  Failing to address this change in consumer habits could have been fatal.

We live in an A.D.D. world.  Everyone’s brain is focusing on something for a few seconds and then it’s on to the next bit of information or device.  86 percent of U.S. consumers multitask while watching TV, yet only 22 percent of these activities relate to the program being watched.  If you’re a marketer, how can you become part of the conversation that’s occurring around the program, even if it’s only a quarter of the audience? If you’re the content provider, how do you grow the 22 percent? Binge viewing is another concept pretty much unheard of until recently.  What has this done to overnight or even weekly ratings and do they tell even half of the true audience story?

The media companies have learned to survive on smaller segments aggregated into massive audiences.  Those audiences are spread out over time and across multiple platforms.  I’d say it’s been a pretty nice demonstration of how to change to follow your audience’s tastes, which is something at which they’ve always been good.  What are your thoughts?

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July 10, 2014 · 11:14 am

What’s Your Story?

I’m preparing to work with a client team on their marketing plan for the next year.

Bedtime Stories

(Photo credit: Robynlou8)

The group is excited to start talking about which media, various tactics we’d use across the social platforms they employ, and how we’d communicate to consumers. I’m pretty sure that I’ll bring the discussion to a pause by asking them to tell me the story before we focus on any of that. I’ll get several curious looks but I think that’s the most important question one can ask as the plan begins to take shape. Why?

The story is what defines everything else. If we’re going to be successful in touching the consumer we need to do so in a way that resonates with them and stories are the things that drive that connection.  Obviously the consumer needs to be the hero of the story.  Well, maybe the focus of the story is a better way to say that.  They will be confronted with an obstacle and that problem is solved by whatever it is you’re selling.  Seems pretty basic, right?

Take a look around you.  How many pieces of marketing content can you spot that have it backwards?  The product is the hero, the consumer just a spectator.  How many tell a coherent story (they have beginnings, middle, and ends)?  How many have a call to action, even if it’s subtle?

Once we all agree on the story we’re telling, the focus becomes translating that tome into each channel and each medium.  We may need to alter the story slightly to be more specific to the audience we’re reaching through a particular medium but the basic story itself needs to remain intact.  If we’re really doing our jobs well the message will resonate, the characters (which might be the product and the consumer) will be well-formed, and the call to action will result in whatever it is we want them to do – a click, read something else, give us an email or maybe even buy something.

Tactics are, frankly, the less-fun part.  Writing the story is fun and an important first step.  So ask yourself – what’s your story?

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July 9, 2014 · 11:52 am

Squirrels

In the movie “Up”, every so often the dogs interrupt themselves mid-sentence because a squirrel – or even the thought of a squirrel – appears. They stop the conversation or whatever else it is they’re doing to chase that distraction.

Squirrel

(Photo credit: likeaduck)

We don’t call them squirrels in business. They’re more like bright shiny objects or the next new thing. Sure, we call them something else altogether – market opportunities for one. In some cases, they really are. Most of the time, however, they’re just a squirrel that’s dashed across the business plan and provided a major distraction.

Consumers can be fickle.  For example, the typical mobile app is used fewer than 10 times before deletion and over a quarter of people use an app once after downloading.  If you’re working to monetize one of those apps, you have a very limited window in general.  Most businesses aren’t living in that fickle a world unless they choose to be there.  They do that by chasing squirrels.

So how does one distinguish between a legitimate opportunity and a shiny object/squirrel?  As always, it’s a combination of things; some consumer-focused, some business-focused.  With respect to the latter, any new business extension will require resources of some sort, even if it’s the shifting of existing support to the new thing.  Resources are finite in most businesses.  Do you have them?

Ask yourself if customers care.  We can point to any number of examples of being too early for the market.  GO had a mobile operating system and mobile, pen-based computers long before the iPad or iPhone.  NextNewNetworks was doing video long before there was broadband to support streaming.  WebTV was another.  In those and other cases consumers couldn’t understand what was in it for them.  After all, selling is about providing value.  How does the squirrel you’re considering do that?  Does it really provide sustainable growth or just a brief pop in revenues (and maybe not in profits)?

Looking over the horizon is the hardest part of any good business person’s job.  The great ones learn to stay focused on what’s in front of them while taking that peek while ignoring the squirrels.  Can you do that?

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