Apprentice: Stefani Wins!
The season finale of the Apprentice just now finished airing, and The Donald selected Stefani over James. I’m a bit surprised by that, but I believe it’s a good choice. James has been a strong performer, but he had some close calls in the boardroom, and that seemed to be the deciding factor as both candidates had very few holes in their credentials.
Frank and Nicole had a pretty poor video in my opinion, and that got them booted before Trump focused in on Stefani and James. Both individuals should be highly successful moving forward. This group had a couple of super-stars in the making including Stefani, James, and Heidi although Heidi flamed out pretty bad so maybe she wasn’t as much of a star as I would like to believe–she just has that “it” factor though that it makes it hard not to WANT her to do well. Time will tell I suppose.
Anyway, the finale wasn’t a complete shock as the two predicted to be the favorites ended up that way, but it’s a little surprising James wasn’t chosen. Best of luck to Stefani in her new role with the Trump Organization.
If Heidi, Aimee, or Nicole would like a job working for a consulting firm, I might have a spot for one of them. 
Branding: Differentiate or Die
What has changed in business over recent decades is the amazing proliferation of product choices in just about every category.
It’s been estimated that there are 1,000,000 SKU’s (Standard Stocking Units) out there in America. An average supermarket has 40,000 SKU’s. Now for the stunner: An average family gets 80% to 85% of their needs from 150 SKU’s. That means there’s a good chance they’ll ignore 39,850 items in that store.
The dictionary defines “tyranny” as absolute power that often is harsh or cruel. So it is with choice. With the enormous competition, markets today are driven by choice. The customer has so many good alternatives that you pay dearly for your mistakes. Your competitors get your business, and you don’t get it back very easily. Companies that don’t understand this will not survive. (Now that’s cruel.)
Just look at some of the names on the headstones in the brand graveyard: American Motors, Burger Chef, Carte Blanc, Eastern Airlines, Gainesburgers, Gimbels, Hathaway Shirts, Horn & Hardart, Mr. Salty Pretzels, Philco, Trump Shuttle, VisiCalc, Woolworth’s.
And this is only a short list of names that are no longer with us.
In this global killer economy you have to find a way to differentiate yourself–or have very low prices. To do this, here are the steps you must follow:
Step One: The Context
Arguments are never made in a vacuum. There are always surrounding competitors trying to make arguments of their own. Your message has to make sense in the context of the category. It has to start with what the marketplace has heard and registered from your competition.
The context also includes what’s happening in the market. Is the timing for your idea right?
Nordstrom’s differentiating idea of “better service” played perfectly into the context of a department store world that was reducing its people and service as a way to cut costs.
Lotus launched the first successful network on “groupware software” called Notes just as corporate America was networking its PC’s. IBM ended up buying Lotus and Notes for $3.5 billion.
It’s like riding a wave. If you’re too early or late, you’ll go nowhere. Catch it just right and you’ll get a long and profitable ride for your difference.
Step Two: The Differentiating Idea
To be different is to be not the same. To be unique is to be one of a kind.
So you’re looking for something that separates you from your competitors. The secret is understanding that your different-ness does not have to be product related.
Consider a horse. Yes, horses are quickly differentiated by their type. There are race horses, jumpers, ranch horses, wild horses and on and on. But in racehorses, you can differentiate them by breeding, by performance, by stable, by trainer and on and on.
A product or service can be differentiated by feature, leadership, preference, heritage, specialty, how it’s made and on and on. (I wrote a book on this subject if you want more ways to differentiate your brand.)
Step Three: The Credentials
To build a logical argument for your difference, you must have the credentials to support your differentiating idea. This will make it real and believable.
If you have a product difference, then you should be able to demonstrate that difference. The demonstration, in turn, becomes your credentials. If you have a leak-proof valve, then you should be able to have a direct comparison with valves that can leak.
Claims of difference without proof are really just claims. For example, a “wide-track” General Motors’ Pontiac must be wider than other cars. British Air as the “world’s favorite airline” should fly more people than any other airline. Coca-Cola as the “real thing” has to have invented colas. When it’s “Hertz and not exactly,” there should be some unique services that the others don’t offer.
You can’t differentiate with smoke and mirrors. Consumers are skeptical. They’re thinking, “Oh yeah, Mr. Advertiser? Prove it!” You must be able to support your argument.
Step Four: Communicate Your Difference
Just as you can’t keep your light under a basket, you can’t keep your difference under wraps.
If you build a differentiated product, the world will not automatically beat a path to your door. Better products don’t win. Better perceptions tend to be the winners. Truth will not win out unless it has some help along the way.
Every aspect of your communications should reflect your difference. Your advertising. Your brochures. Your Web site. Your sales presentations.
In marketing, the rich often get richer because they have the resources to drive their ideas into the mind. Their problem is separating the good ideas from the bad ones, and avoiding spending money on too many products and too many programs.
Unfortunately, without the proper resources, even the best differentiating idea won’t get off the ground. Look what happened to AT&T in recent years. They failed to differentiate themselves from Sprint Nextel and MCI. The result: A price war that ended in the ignomy of being bought by a Baby Bell.
As I said, differentiate or die.
The Essence of Duct Tape Marketing
Duct tape (the tape) is simple, effective, and affordable—it’s not always the prettiest solution, but it does always work. The central theme of Duct Tape Marketing: The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide by John Jantsch is that effective small business marketing is a system—not an event—composed of simple, effective, and affordable techniques.
by When you combine that with the cult-like obsession many people have for all things duct tape you also get a pretty good example of how something simple like the right name can do a great deal for a company, product, service, or book. I asked John to distill his marketing ideas to a top-ten list, and here is what he provided:
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Narrow the market focus. Create a picture of the ideal client: what they look like, how they think, what they value, and where you can find them. Start saying no to non-ideal clients.
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Differentiate. Strip everything you know about your product or service down to the simplest core idea. Make sure that the core idea allows you stand out.
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Think about strategy first. Take everything you’ve done in steps one and two and create a strategy to own a word or two in the mind of your ideal client and prospect.
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Create information that educates. You are in the information business, so think of your marketing materials, web sites, white papers, marketing kits as information products, not “sales” propoganda.
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Package the experience. Put visual elements around every aspect of the marketing strategy that you adopt. Use design to evoke the appropriate emotional response from your ideal prospect.
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Generate leads from many points. People learn in different ways. Your lead generation efforts must allow your prospects to experience your firm from many different angles and views.
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Nurture leads along the logical buying path. There’s a natural way for your prospects to come to the conclusion that you have what they need. Build the lead conversion system for before, during, and after the sale.
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Measure everything that matters. Certain things always matter. The secret sauce is in finding and measuring the intangibles – those things down on the shop floor that eventually add up to profit.
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Automate for leverage. Embrace the Internet or else. Create access, stimulate community, capture innovation, and build knowledge to automate the basic delivery elements of your information business.
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Commit. Resist the temptation of the marketing idea of the week. Create daily, weekly, monthly, and annual marketing calendars, make marketing your new habit, and find the money to stick with the plan.
March good for biz magazines, bad for personal finance titles
By Chris Roush on Wired Magazine
March saw an increase almost across the board for mainstream business magazines in terms of ad revenue and ad pages, but decreases for the personal finance glossy titles, according to data from the Magazine Publishers of America.
Leading the way was Inc. magazine, which saw a 39.3 percent increase in ad revenue to $7.5 million and a 34.5 percent jump in ad pages. Right behind it were Barron’s and The Economist, which saw increases in ad revenue of 29.7 percent and 25.4 percent, respectively. Barron’s ad revenue 
jumped to nearly $6 million, while the Economist was at $10.9 million. Barron’s ad pages rose 19 percent, while the Economist’s ad pages rose 12 percent.
Among other business magazines:
– BusinessWeek saw a 2.3 percent increase in ad revenue to $24.9 million for March, but a 4.5 percent decrease in ad pages;
– Fast Company saw a 6.7 percent increase in ad revenue and a 2.7 percent increase in ad pages;
– Forbes saw an 18.3 percent increase in ad revenue to $31.7 million, but only a 1.7 percent rise in ad pages;
– Fortune saw a 2.5 percent increase in ad revenue to $24.3 million, but a 5.3 percent decline in ad pages.
In addition, Wired was up 3.1 percent in ad revenue but down 6.4 percent in ad pages. Business 2.0 was down 1.5 percent in ad revenue and off 7.5 percent in ad pages compared to March 2006.
The personal finance magazines fared the worst. Kiplinger’s saw an 18.2 percent drop in ad revenue and a 19.8 percent drop in ad pages compared to March 2006, while Money magazine was down 14.1 percent in ad revenue and 22.8 percent in ad pages. Smart Money was off 17.2 percent in ad revenue and 20.8 percent in ad pages.
All of these numbers take on greater significance starting Monday with the first issue of new business magazine Conde Nast Portfolio hitting New York newsstands. How it fares in the market — and who it takes ad revenue away from — will be closely watched in the business of business magazines.
See the numbers here.
Book Review: Success Built to Last
Success Built to Last: Creating a Life that Matters by Jerry Porras, Stewart Emery, and Mark Thompson mentions plenty of famous names but its main emphasis is on how ordinary people can do extraordinary things.
Although some of the book’s findings are predictable (Successful people maintain a high level of passion for their calling), one of the book’s strengths is its willingness to challenge conventional wisdom – they’re not big on balance and love obsession – or give it some new twists, such as noting that if you don’t love what you do you’ll be at a competitive disadvantage to someone who does.
A listing of traps that can keep you from responding to your true career desire includes:
- Getting too practical.
- Letting things (“Bright Shiny Objects”) own you.
- Being seduced by competence; i.e., beng simply good instead of great.
- Pleasing others instead of yourself and creating false choices (“ors”) when you can have “ands.”
Those are only sidelines. The main theme is the necessity to find a cause that will engage your passion and your efforts and, regardless of your personal charisma, provide you with the charisma of its mission and the self-esteem that comes from achievement. The cause is all. It gives you drive, sustains you when setbacks occur, and is far more realistic than mere positive thinking.
Persistence and a rock-solid determination not to act like a victim bolster the commitment to the cause. But so too is the pragmatic willingness to drop projects that are failures if they prove to be inadequate avenues to furthering the cause.
There were many times when I found myself arguing with Success Built to Last. “But what about this event?” and “There are exceptions to that!” came to mind more than once. I have to admit though, that the book’s most powerful appeal is not the Big Hairy Audacious Goals (from Jim Collins’s and Porras’s Built to Last) or its interesting personal success stories.
It’s the power of The Cause and how finding one can unleash creativity, strength, and energy that a quest for mere personal advancement will never unchain.
What’s Happened to Effective Writing?
There are several poorly written articles circling the bowl on a daily basis, and this may end up being yet another one, but it’s alarming to me that professional journalists consistently botch spelling and grammar. It used to be newspapers, magazines, and books served as an example of the proper use of punctuation, word groupings, grammar, and synonyms. Not anymore.
On any given day, I challenge you to count the number of typos or grammatical miscues in your local fish wrap. In the past, you’d be lucky to find one per month. Nowadays, you’d be lucky NOT to find one per section. Online versions are even worse, but that is likely due to the push to get more and more content live and the desire to make the online versions more “free flowing.”
That said, is it too much to ask of someone paid to write for a living to pay attention to the squiggly lines in the word processor? Those lines are trying to tell you something! At least pay them some lip service, and double check your work before you submit it to an editor. Speaking of an editor, what are these people responsible for now? In the old days, they served as quality control, but today they seem to be more interested in cranking out material to meet or beat a deadline. Quality doesn’t seem to matter anymore and we, the public, don’t seem to care because we still read the stuff even if it is sub par without complaining loud enough for anyone to hear us.
Another reason sub par material may have become acceptable is the big business management approach of the major literary outlets. When larger companies attempt to manage numerous resources by stretching everyone thin in the interest of “productivity,” things naturally slip through the cracks. I run a small business so if a larger firm came to me and offered to buy me out for a nice chunk of change, I’d have to listen. It would be nice if there weren’t so many mergers and spin-offs of media companies, but that is the world we live in today.
You regularly hear phrases such as instant gratification, microwave society, what have you done for me lately, etc. when describing the order of the day. They all apply, but are we in such a hurry that we can’t take a little more pride in the work we produce? I would hope the majority of people would be embarrassed by producing a widely viewed article or literary piece peppered with poor grammar and/or spelling errors. The good old days of looking to print media as an example to follow are long gone, but I wish they’d return at least in this aspect. Am I asking for too much?
Internal Brand Building: Living the Brand
Increasingly, organizations are finding it critical to gain their employee’s understanding and enthusiastic support of their brand’s essence, promise and personality. They know that they must achieve integrity between what the brand says about itself and how it actually behaves. The bottom line: they understand that consistently delivering the brand promise at each and every point of customer contact is critical to their success.
Organizational Support Critical to Brand Strategy Success
In 1998, The Conference Board conducted a study on “Managing the Corporate Brand.” In that study, they discovered four organizational support factors were critical to brand strategy success.
They are:
•CEO leadership and support
•A distinctive corporate culture that serves as a platform for the brand promise
•The ability to obtain support from a broad spectrum of employees
•The alignment of brand messages across functions
These factors are clearly more dependent upon the human resource function than the marketing function.
The Importance of Front Line Employees
At the Institute for International Research’s December 1999 Brand Masters Conference in Palm Beach, Florida, Sixtus Oechsle, Manager, Corporate Communications & Advertising, Shell Oil Company, indicated that in a study of sources of brand favorability, Shell Oil found that interaction with company employees had the greatest impact (much greater than brand ads or news) on brand favorability. Indeed, most organizations have discovered that the ‘moment of truth’ in the delivery of the brand promise almost always occurs in customers’ interactions with front-line employees.
At the Institute for International Research’s The Branding Trilogy conference in Santa Barbara, California, Kristine Shattuck, Los Angeles Area Marketing Manager, Southwest Airlines put it well when she said, “Enthusiastic employees spread enthusiasm to customers. Market to your employees as much as your customers. If your employees don’t ‘get it,’ neither will your customers.” This can only happen if top management aligns all of its organization’s processes and systems in support of its brand’s promise.
Why Most Small Businesses Fail
Michael Gerber, author of the mega-best sellers “The E-Myth” and “The E-Myth Revisited,” is one of the people I admire and respect and who has had a significant impact on me and my businesses. Although I have listened many times to Gerber’s audio tape about the E-Myth, and have read and reread his book, I always come away learning more. In addition, I have read a booklet by Michael Gerber entitled: “Why Most Small Businesses Fail and What You Can Do About It.”
In this booklet – Gerber lists the 10 reasons why most businesses fail – and how you can avoid them. So – here they are:
1. Lack of management systems
2. Lack of vision, purpose, or principles
3. Lack of financial planning and review
4. Over dependence on specific individuals in the business
5. Poor market segmentation and/or strategy
6. Failure to establish and/or communicate company goals
7. Competition or lack of market knowledge
8. Inadequate capitalization
9. Absence of a standard-quality program
10. Owners concentrating on the technical, rather than the strategic, work at hand.
After reading this list a couple times, it became apparent that “strategic planning and strategic thinking” are absolutely vital to avoiding these reasons for failure. And that is the primary focus of my consulting practices, J. G. Ebersole Associates and The Renaissance Group(TM). If you would like to learn more about how to be better prepared to develop and grow a successful business and know how you can avoid these ten reasons for failure, please contact Glenn Ebersole through his website at www.businesscoach4u.com or by email at jgecoach@aol.com
Glenn Ebersole, Jr. is a multi-faceted professional, who is recognized as a visionary, guide and facilitator in the fields of business coaching, marketing, public relations, management, strategic planning and engineering. Glenn is the Founder and Chief Executive of two Lancaster, PA based consulting practices: The Renaissance Group, a creative marketing, public relations, strategic planning and business development consulting firm and J. G. Ebersole Associates, an independent professional engineering, marketing, and management consulting firm. He is a Certified Facilitator and serves as a business coach and a strategic planning facilitator and consultant to a diverse list of clients. Glenn is also the author of a monthly newsletter, “Glenn’s Guiding Lines – Thoughts From Your Strategic Thinking Business Coach” and has published more than 250 articles on business.
To find out more about the benefits & rewards of effectively working with a strategic thinking business coach, please contact Glenn Ebersole through his web site at http://www.businesscoach4u.com or jgecoach@aol.com
