Business Strategies Archives
Here you’ll find a collection of blog entries published under the Business Strategies category.
Evil Business Models: AT&T
By Bruce LaFetra on March 17, 2010
If you follow Nilofer or Mike, you know Nilofer got hit with a $10,000 mobile data bill from AT&T for a recent trip to Canada. Not only do the rates go up once you cross the border, the billing increment changes from MB to Kb! The net-net is mobile data service in while roaming Canada is 3000% the domestic rate. Yikes!
What’s a person to do? The charges are legitimate; albeit unconscionable no matter how one measures these things.
Canon Gets It
By Bruce LaFetra on November 16, 2009
I was looking at digital cameras on the web the other day, and Canon stopped me in my tracks. They have user reviews just like many resellers, but very few manufacturers. Reviews are prominently featured just below the fold on the initial page for each camera model. More than that, they collect the most common comments at the top and list them under “Pro” and “Con” sections. You read that correctly—Canon prominently lists top consumer complaints on their web site. Things like “poor low light performance,” “complicated to use controls/menu,” and “difficult to use.” Were the marketing people completely cut out of the loop?
Quantifying Collaboration
By Bruce LaFetra on September 9, 2009
One of the challenges with a qualitative process framework like the LOVE model is that it is hard quantify all the benefits, especially during the initial stages of adoption. The latest McKinsey Global Survey looks at the business benefits from Web 2.0. Operationalizing the LOVE model in practice leverages many aspects of Web 2.0, so the McKinsey data is perhaps the most relevant data we currently have for this type of approach.
Hope or Hype: Data in the Cloud
By Bruce LaFetra on September 2, 2009
Nilofer, just back from FOO Camp this past weekend, reports the underlying current in discussions involved data in the cloud and how valuable it will be. I’m on the record as a believer in cloud data, but maybe see it happening in a different way.
Filling Your Company with LOVE: A new framework for understanding consumer relationships
By Bruce LaFetra on July 28, 2009
As companies see increasing value in social media campaigns, it is becoming apparent that the transactional-centric models currently used for tracking and measuring marketing campaigns are not up to the social media challenge. With social media campaigns often focused on brand building and driving engagement, the tools used to measure the impact on sales and brand are ill-suited to accurately measuring the full impact and value of social media campaigns.
The buying or sales funnel that has served marketers well for many years no longer works in an environment now centered on two-way and unstructured communications. A new framework developed at Rubicon Consulting, Inc., building on ideas originally conceived by Harry Max, offers the relationship-centric LOVE model as a replacement—and enhancement—for the transaction-based buying funnel.
Recessions Are Good for Your Business
By Bruce LaFetra on May 16, 2009
Can your business grow in a down economy? According to a VARBusiness survey of 117 solution providers (“7 Ways to Grow in a Down Economy, VARBusiness, February 2009), fully half are expecting to grow in 2009. Does this seems crazy? It didn’t seem so to me until after I read the list of top strategies that the VARs had for achieving this growth. Any business that helps customers do more with less should do very well; something to which the booming SaaS / on-demand software market can attest. But, unless you are in a hot growth market, the same-old, same-old will not produce results in 2009. And, if you are in a hot-growth market like enterprise SaaS solutions, doing the right things during a down market will act like a competitive force multiplier.
Marketing Marketing
By Bruce LaFetra on December 2, 2008
The business equivalent of making sausage is the marketing of marketing. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (November 29-30, 2008), Tom Hayes and Michael Malone explain the new world of marketing in a Web-based world. They have a provocative name (“Marketing 3.0”) and a new concept (the business meme or “beme”). In the end, they sound like apologists trying to make a pitch for why advertising agencies are still relevant and reminds me of this humorous video imaging what would happen if a modern advertising agency designed the stop sign. In short, they are marketing marketing.
Know Yourself
By Nilofer Merchant on September 25, 2008
What matters to you? This isn’t just a touchy-feely question, it’s the bedrock that describes who you are. What is deeply felt and has meaning for you will ultimately inspire you to do your best work. It took me years…
Is Your Business Model Built for the Long Haul?
By Bruce LaFetra on September 22, 2008
Public statements notwithstanding, more business plans in Silicon Valley are built around technology than around customer relationships. It’s just the way it is; we’re talking about technology companies, right? The problem is that, given time, all technology either becomes obsolete or a commodity. With the increasing pace of technological change, this is happening sooner rather than later. The risk in building on technology rather than customer relationships is that you are never more than a wrong turn or two away from putting your business survival at risk. Customer relationships provide your business with more options, and strong relationships can be very forgiving of the occasional misstep, meaning your business is more resilient and your plans can be bolder. Further—and perhaps even more important—technology-centric business models limit your offerings and growth potential, so they are associated with lower valuations over the long term.
Lessons Learned
By Nilofer Merchant on September 22, 2008
I constantly remind myself to learn. No matter what the experience, how tough or how painful, if I’ve learned something from it, I can live with it. Pay attention to what you’re learning. Work to incorporate those lessons into the…
Difficulty is a Great Teacher
By Nilofer Merchant on September 18, 2008
What I thought was torture when I worked at Apple - working with 23 different managers in seven years - I now see as an experience that refined by ability to work with many different kinds of leaders. It was…
Sit Forward
By Nilofer Merchant on September 15, 2008
How often do you go to a meeting and check-out? Do you ever tune-out people you don’t agree with? Make the decision today to engage and be truly present. Instead of judging, participate. Embrace whatever you find. I call it…
Performance vs. Behavior
By Nilofer Merchant on September 8, 2008
We’re schooled, whether through B-school or working in organizations, in the outer trappings of success - status, money, title and so forth. How do we tie that to individual satisfaction and a feeling of success? What we likely haven’t been…
Harvard Business Publishing: Umair Haque - What Apple Knows That Facebook Doesn’t
By Marsha Keeffer on August 20, 2008
Too often, we don’t recognize the power of platforms - even in Silicon Valley. Nilofer Merchant, Rubicon’s CEO, writes frequently on the topic and ties it together with strategy. The piece below by Umair Haque, draws an interesting difference between…
Strategy vs. Truth
By Nilofer Merchant on August 17, 2008
What happens inside an employee when strategy doesn’t jive with what they know to be truth? In a millisecond, a string of questions unwinds. Questions like: Do they expect me to say something? Will I get in trouble if I…
Strategy has 5 Structural Elements: People
By Nilofer Merchant on August 15, 2008
Strategy has 5 Structural Elements - power distribution, decision-making, idea generation, ideas, process and people. If you miss tuning one, you’ll fail. Add items that don’t blend and you’ll fail. People In an organization of any size, people bring their…
The Five Structural Elements of Strategy: Idea Generation
By Nilofer Merchant on August 4, 2008
Strategy has 5 Structural Elements - power distribution, decision-making, idea generation, ideas, process and people. Miss tuning one and you’ll fail. Add items that don’t blend and you’ll fail. Idea Generation How ideas are generated affects the quantity and quality…
Don’t Miss the Middle When Formulating Strategy
By Nilofer Merchant on July 14, 2008
What purpose does middle management serve in strategy development? Misunderstandings between the C-suite and middle management lead to bad decisions, loss of time and loss of money. Many organizations have flattened management structures. Those that haven’t are working on it….
Who Owns Strategy? We All Do.
By Nilofer Merchant on June 27, 2008
A couple weeks back, I was teaching a course at Santa Clara University for their high tech marketing program, when a bright young product manager asked me a question. In a room filled with engineers and a handful of…
Who’s making money on the Web?
By Bruce LaFetra on June 23, 2008
While failure for the high-tech entrepreneur is less likely to result in death, the parallels between the Gold Rush and the current Web-based economy are many. In both cases, participants must to adapt to a new way of life, with new rules. Or rather, no pre-existing, fixed rules.
Silicon Valley’s famous tolerance of entrepreneurial failure has its roots more than 150 years ago in the Gold Rush when more than 90,000 people made their way to California in the two years following John Marshall’s discovery of gold near Sacramento in January, 1848. By 1854, more than 300,000—representing more than one percent of the total population of the United States at the time—had come west in search of fortune.
VARs adapt to new realities
By Bruce LaFetra on May 26, 2008
Technology businesses come and go, but as a category VARs are the survivors of the technology world. A couple of years ago an editor asked me if SaaS was going to kill the channel. At the time, it was too early to tell exactly what was going to happen, but I expressed confidence that VARs would survive as an important channel, even if they had to evolve in significant ways.
Ballmer to Yang: I Just Can’t Quit You
By Marsha Keeffer on May 19, 2008
Two NYT journalists see Microsoft ‘needing a franchise’ as the software giant puts the moves on Yahoo all over again. Two weeks after walking away from takeover talks with Yahoo, Microsoft made clear on Sunday that it still needed to…
Google’s JotSpot Wiki Reborn As Google Sites
By Marsha Keeffer on February 28, 2008
Google Sites offers simple tools for collaborative Web site creation. Thomas Claburn of InformationWeek writes about Google’s plans for Google Sites - an outgrowth of the Google Apps suite. Users get simple, intuitive tools for collaborative Web site creation. It’s…
iPhone software roadmap: You’ve got (Exchange) mail?
By Marsha Keeffer on February 28, 2008
Fortune’s Philip Elmer de Witt on the genesis of iPhone. Enterprise use coming our way? “Some exciting enterprise features.” Those were the magic words in the e-mail that Apple (AAPL) analysts and journalists received Wednesday from the company”s media events…
Better than Free
By Bruce LaFetra on February 13, 2008
Kevin Kelly has a thought-provoking post on what adds real value in an Internet-centric world. He likens the Internet to a giant copy machine. If books, music, even ideas, can be freely copied so that they are free, where will value reside. To answer the question, he lays out eight “generatives”—or things that cannot be copied, and thus remain valuable. Read the whole thing.
Listen to the Oppressed
By Nilofer Merchant on February 11, 2008
The people who are the troublemakers in the organization.
The people on the front lines of the service phone calls.
The sales people who haven’t made their number.
Those people are not considered worthy of ‘the list’. And yet they often have a perspective worth listening to.
Amen, Brother
By Nilofer Merchant on February 8, 2008
“Don’t envy your competitors; this has done more for hurting AMD than anything Intel could do to us.”
Pricing as a Head Trip
By Bruce LaFetra on February 6, 2008
Can prices be set too low for consumers? A recent study by Dr. Antonio Rangel of CalTech says yes. Dr. Rangel observed the brain activity of subjects and found they exhibited more pleasure drinking wines when they thought they cost more. For those of us that study the finer points of pricing, this is a very interesting result. We all know that there is a sense to “you get what you pay for” that acts as a negative factor when evaluating the lowest priced alternatives. What Dr. Rangel has established is that there is more than the fear of getting stuck with an inferior product at work; people actually get more enjoyment from certain products if they think they cost more. The data communicated by the price is working not just at a rational level, but at an emotional level as well. That is, from the brain’s standpoint, these products are objectively better in a post-purchase environment.
What was Ford’s Alan Mulally thinking?
By Bruce LaFetra on January 30, 2008
Unless you are selling talking beer openers or donuts, comparing your product to Homer Simpson defies conventional wisdom. When your product is a slow-selling car, your actions are certain to leave people saying, “D’oh!”
Yet, this is exactly what Ford Motor CEO Alan Mulally did recently. He wasn’t subtle, in a public speech he projected an image of Homer over a picture of Ford’s Taurus sedan while being critical of the design and talking up future models as much better. We can be pretty sure that this will not rally sales of the Taurus over the coming months, so has Mulally gone mad or is he actually smart?
Week in Review: Spotlight on Key Ideas
By Nilofer Merchant on November 11, 2007
Staying on top of some latest news, moves, thinking. Things worth paying attention to including FaceBook, Google, Landor Brand Study, & Amazon’s Strategy.
Something New for Carly Fiorina
By Marsha Keeffer on November 5, 2007
Fox Business Network, the soon-to-debut cable and satellite news channel, has signed Carly Fiorina as a contributor. A highly recognizable business leader, Fiorina is the former CEO….
Marvel Story
By Nilofer Merchant on November 2, 2007
Marvel Comics used to sell comic books. That was their business. They created comics, they sold them in the form of books. Then, one day, they realize that the real asset isn’t the publishing business. Which is what they had directly built. What they had indirectly built is characters that had stories. And those were assets.
CMOs: Lead a Revolution!
By Nilofer Merchant on July 9, 2007
A CEO I was working with at a Fortune 500 asked if I could leave my company and join his exec team as their (latest) CMO. I loved the company, its customers, and the team so I was seriously tempted….
Some good reads …
By Nilofer Merchant on July 8, 2007
I’d like to simply point you to some good articles with little commentary that I think are worth noting. Here, a great visual of every product Apple ever made since 1976. I became a customer in 1984, worked there from…
Affinity!
By Nilofer Merchant on June 11, 2007
Affinity! That illusive icon in the distance that every company wants to attain. When you have it, you’re golden. When you don’t, everything’s a struggle. It’s that tight grouping and bond a customer has with a company, a brand. And…
Reaching Good Decisions
By Nilofer Merchant on March 8, 2007
I spent a walk last week with a friend who is struggling to make a good decision. It’s more a personal decision rather than a professional one. And yet I think the decision process he’s facing is the one all…
Dinosaur Defense Strategy / Consumer Software Companies
By Nilofer Merchant on February 11, 2007
A colleague who works within one of my company’s clients writes this email to me about a month ago: “I still find myself scratching my head at how to apply this line of advice (referring to a white paper…
2 Parts Enlightenment, 1 Part Truth, and a Smidge of Creation
By Nilofer Merchant on January 31, 2007
A colleague (on the client side) is preparing a Microsoft defense strategy, and talked to my team recently about what to do to prepare. We helped him in terms of process steps: the need to build a common data set,…
When in Doubt, Pilot
By Nilofer Merchant on January 29, 2007
Ever heard this? Let’s go 180 degrees in a different direction, at full speed, with everyone on board, and expect our current business to do great while we turn everything in a new direction. Yippee. Sound like a good idea…
Top 10 Trends for 2007
By Nilofer Merchant on January 27, 2007
For work this month, I wrote some “top 10 trends” for what my team and I think should matter to those high-tech firms that want to win… details of all of these are available here. Top 10 Trends for 2007…
Technorati: Measuring Volume not Value
By Nilofer Merchant on November 22, 2006
Technorati recently published a state of the blogosphere about 2 weeks ago. And I’ve wanted to write on it ever since as an example of being clear on what you are intending to measure and what you are actually measuring….
Employees Co-Create Brand
By Nilofer Merchant on November 15, 2006
A bunch of writing has been done by myself and others about how “consumers now co-create the brand”. But what about employees? Are they co-creators, too? Many, many fortune 1000 companies are afraid to let their own employees blog. “What…
Top 10 Ideas from Web 2.0 Summit
By Nilofer Merchant on November 11, 2006
My top 10 ideas or reflections from Web 2.0 conference this week in San Francisco. #1 There’s a real Heirarchy in Value Creation Apps beat features. Online applications beat packaged applications. “Open” applications beat online applications (meaning those you can…
Two types of Advisors: those that Critique and those that Create
By Nilofer Merchant on October 28, 2006
Have you ever had the feeling that the people around you are there to tell you how something won’t work? Those are called critiques. Having a critique around as an advisor would be like being in the middle of the country and lost trying to get to NYC let’s say, and having someone come by to say, “this freeway won’t take you to there”. Okay, fair enough. But don’t just leave me there, dude. Tell me which one does!
Dash used Stealth just Right
By Nilofer Merchant on August 28, 2006
Is there ever a good reason to not tell everything to everybody? Yes, there is. Surprise you that I would say that? In relationships, power is not the key to connection. So, don’t deceive or cajole in personal relationships, where…
How are Synergy and Ajax Technology related?
By Nilofer Merchant on August 26, 2006
When buzz starts to happen in Silicon Valley, the same terms are used over and over again, with a completely different definition for the same words. Yesterday, a client of ours came in for a quick-stop ‘consultation’ to review a…
Churn and Burn or Ways to Go?
By Nilofer Merchant on August 25, 2006
It is true that, over time, strong technology consumer companies will win market share from weak companies. However, there’s one nearly surefire way to make sure you don’t fail. Focus. You got know enough to know if you’re going to…
Give me that thing called [customer] Love
By Nilofer Merchant on July 26, 2006
Just got published on MarketingProfs for what will be a six-part series or “Summer Bootcamp for Business”. For those of you that aren’t familiar yet with MarketingProfs.com, it’s a great source for content and real-know from people in the field….
10 Ways to Convince Other Execs to Follow YOU!
By Nilofer Merchant on May 7, 2006
At a speech last month at a women’s exec group, one audience member asked “how do I build a business case so I get heard”. Great question. In my day job, I help execs form business cases all the time,…
Playdough, anyone?
By Nilofer Merchant on February 27, 2006
In our offices, we have playdough. Yes, you read it right. Playdough. When I asked my assistant to get some playdough, she thought she had heard wrong. (It could have been I was mumbling, too). But I wanted to leave…