Archive for the 'management' Category

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Creativity or a slow death?

Published on November 24, 2006 in ROI, advertising, business, design, management and strategy. 0 Comments

Submitted to Hugh as a mini-manifesto…

I read somewhere that the best test for creativity in business was simply to ask “are you creative?” So I tried it. And for the majority of people it seemingly proved true. The people that we all see as creative (designers, PowerPoint gurus, out of the box thinkers) said yes; and the planners, project managers, sales people said no. So I naively believed it to be true.

Watching my two year old daughter run around and play reminds me that we’re all creative. We all have boundless imaginations. We always have. Unfortunately our educational system has progressively worked that aspect our being out of our nature. No educational system on the planet puts as much emphasis on creativity as they do logic. Think about the number of math and science classes you took versus the arts and humanities. Not that logic is bad. In fact, it’s a critical element of life. I just believe that we are over-balanced on logic compared to creativity.

I believe the lack of creativity is slowly killing business. That lack is driving everything to a commodity price-driven market. It’s creating an environment that puts cost cutting before customer satisfaction. Without creative thinking how will the engineering team discover the next breakthrough product? How will the marketing team develop messaging that stands above a crowded market place.

Creativity isn’t solely the realm of designers and ad agencies. It shouldn’t be associated with art. It does not equal wild and crazy. It doesn’t equal foolishness. And being “creative” not a job title.

When you hear “out of the box thinking”; that’s the call to creativity. It’s your management team asking you to come up with a new approach. It’s daring to think differently. It’s not copying the competition. And after all, when you boil it down isn’t creative thinking what we’re paid to do? If everyone has the same view, the same ideas, the same approach, and the same results why are we all still here?

To succeed in business is to be creative in your role. Growth demands creativity. It will separate you from the competition. As humans we’re trained to only notice what’s different in our environment. Therefore, standing out is the best way to raise awareness.The lack of creativity across the board is not only hurting your brand, it’s ultimately hurting your profitability. And it’s hurting your employees.

Creativity isn’t a special gift – we’re all born with it. It never leaves, it’s just hiding behind years of logic. I challenge you to find time to let the two year old inside of you come out and play. Your employees, customers, and shareholders will thank you.

technorati tags > creativity, gaping void, business, marketing, growth, strategies

Typical client presentation

Published on November 23, 2006 in business, management, marketing and strategy. 0 Comments

I’ve been on both sides of the client/agency fence during my career. Now that I’m solely on the agency side, I really appreciate this more than ever…

How NOT to judge “creative”…

Published on November 21, 2006 in business, design, management and marketing. 2 Comments

From Olivier Blanchard…

cartoon

Two things that kill creativity

Published on October 27, 2006 in business, entrepreneur and management. 0 Comments

From Seth Godin…

The first is fear.

The fear that you’ll have to implement whatever you dream up.

The fear that you will fail.

The fear that you will do something stupid and be ridiculed by your peers for decades.

The fear that you’ll get fired.

The fear that there will be an unanticipated backlash associated with your idea.

The fear of change.

The fear of missing out on the thing you won’t be able to do if you do this.

The second is a lack of imagination.

I believe that every single person I’ve met in this profession is capable of astounding creativity. That you, and everyone else for that matter, is able to dream up something radical and viral and yes, remarkable. So why doesn’t it happen more often? Sure, fear is a big part, but it’s also a lack of imagination.

Basically, most people don’t believe something better can occur. They believe that the status quo is also the best they can do. So they don’t look. They don’t push. They don’t ask, “what else?” and “what now?” They settle.

Fear is an emotion and it’s impossible to counter an emotion with logic. So you need to mount emotional arguments for why your fear of the new is the thing you truly need to fear.

As for the second issue, just knowing it exists ought to be enough. Once you realize you’re settling, it may just be enough to get you wondering… wondering whether maybe, just maybe, something better is behind curtain number 2.

technorati tags > marketing, strategy, creativity, fear, imagination

SmallBusinessBranding.com Growth

Published on September 30, 2006 in ROI, branding, business, entrepreneur, management, marketing and strategy. 0 Comments

SBB.com is really beginning to take off. Our readership is increasing almost daily and we just redesigned the site to stay current. Here are some of the latest posts by author:

Nick Rice

Lead Generation Techniques & Hierarchy

Kammie Kobyleski

Online Networking & How to Woo Your Crew

Robert Kingston

Brad Williamson

Jeff Barson

75 Posts on what it means to be an Entrepreneur

Danielle Rodgers

technorati tags > small, business, branding, marketing, strategy, techniques

What are you the best at?

Published on September 20, 2006 in ROI, branding, business, entrepreneur, management, marketing and strategy. 2 Comments

There’s a big push towards niche marketing. Here, Here, Here. As more and more markets commoditize, brand becomes a critical factor. And in most large cash cow commodity markets, there are only two or three major players. Everybody else is left picking at single digit marketshare with little to no growth opportunities.

So you have basically two options for growth. One, you can launch a break-through product or service in your category. Think bagless vacuum cleaners. When there were only bagged vacuums, everybody was pretty much equal. Then the bagless came out in Japan and revolutionized the market – and put most of the aftermarket bag suppliers out of business. It was a game changer. Before that product came out people just assumed you needed a bag to catch the dust.

The second method is to be seen as “head and shoulders” better than anything else in the market. Think Dyson. Until that brand was launched there was little growth or movement in vacuum cleaners. Now Dyson is stealing share from everyone. They really didn’t invent anything new or revolutionary. They’ve done a great job of promoting the things people really care about – weak vacuums that lose suction and pass a lot of dust through back to the carpet. And they’ve done it with stylish advertising and marketing. They look high tech, expensive, and worth it. The funny thing with Dyson is that he was not trained as an engineer, but as an industrial designer. He’s turned a stale market on its end and is raking in the profits.

More and more firms are moving to a niche marketing strategy. They want to be seen as the best provider of a very specific offering. The Long Tail theory tells us that a lot of small providers with very passionate customers can be as powerful as one or two large providers – that they control more of the marketplace than previously realized. The hard part is getting them organized and focused towards a common goal.

Very few firms in the world can be a Wal*Mart (in fact no one can). The average retailer cannot compete with Wal*Mart. So my advice is to not compete at all. You can make a lot of money offering the high-end products that they cannot. You can make a lot of money providing products that are above Target. So why should it surprise or anger people when Wal*Mart puts small Mom & Pop’s out of business. They simply need to adapt with unique offerings. They’ll be more profitable and sustain future growth. In theory, Mom & Pop shops have the advantage of convenience. They should be closer to their customers and they definitely have potential for much better customer service.

So, you will be relegated to commodity status if you cannot easily answer and defend what you are the best at. Start planning now how your products and services can change the game or stand out from the competition. Once you can easily answer the question, your audience will begin to find you. People are always looking for specialists to solve their problems. Being recognized as an expert makes your marketing efforts a lot easier. Jeffrey Gitomer said it best, “No one wants to be sold, but everyone likes to buy.” Being seen as a specialist creates a buying environment, not a sales situation. Even after you are seen as a specialist, you still need to market. Marketing gives you the ability to even further refine your customer set and profitability criteria. It’s about creating more demand than capacity. It’s about creating choices.

What do you do better than anyone?

technorati tags > marketing, strategy, niche, small, big, long tail

Email makes it too easy

Published on September 17, 2006 in business, entrepreneur, management, marketing and strategy. 0 Comments

There are so many things I love about communicating via email:

low effort
trackable
easy to revise in order to get “perfect”
immediate
available 24/7
not restricted by time zones
impersonal
searchable
you know when the recipient receives/opens it
the list goes on…

Unfortunately, email is a poor way to build relationships. We all know that business is built upon relationships – especially in my role as a business developer. No one wants an account executive that stays in the office all day. They want their acct exec to be in front of them. Unfortunately, half of my job is project management. That requires the exact opposite. Good PM’s are always in the office. They are always in touch with what their teams are supposed to be working on and where they are supposed to be in relation to the status of the project.

Email makes it too easy. It’s too easy to confuse the quantity of communication with the quality. When it comes to quality, nothing is better than face to face. When you’re in person, there’s no guessing about the other person’s reaction to your words, presentation, or comments. Yes, it takes more time to be face to face; but how much time is wasted trying to interpret an email reply? How much time is wasted before you pick up the phone?

I know it’s just basic blocking and tackling. But that’s the point.

Seth Godin’s post about looking me in the eye prompted me to write about email. He gave a challenge, for one week try to do as much in person as possible. I’m going to try. Are you?

technorati tags > email, in person, communication, sales, project, management

What it takes to win

Published on September 3, 2006 in advertising, business, management and strategy. 0 Comments

My firm recently lost a big deal. We were one of three agencies to bid on a year long integrated media & advertising contract worth well into the six figures. Now this isn’t a sob story or anything close, we win and lose bids all the time. But it did get me to thinking about was what it takes to win an advertising contract as a small agency (which is pretty much a constant thought as a business developer).

All three firms are small agencies (significantly less than 50 people – but more than 10). And we had a little bit of an inside track in that we have a personal relationship with the decision maker that no one else does to our knowledge. That relationship offered some advice on what the first agency presented to her. It was all about what the decision maker liked and what she expected to see but didn’t. And like normal, we learned about the first firm too late to change our presentation.

But here’s the rub. During the initial meetings, our executive made it very clear that she was looking for ideas and visionary direction. She even twice mentioned that she didn’t want to have our best designers put a lot of time into concepts. During our initial internal brainstorming sessions, I fought to present two concepts to our client. These weren’t two different look and feels as much as they were a proposed identity mark and a website mockup. We decided it would be best to show that we could generate quality ideas that met all of the goals of the project and that we would save the other mediums (radio & TV) until after we won the bid. That way we wouldn’t waste a lot of time on scripts and storyboards because those are always subject to heavy revisions.

Apparently the firm that was awarded the project came up with full storyboards for at least two TV spots and a couple of radio script ideas. They presented the exact opposite mediums as we did. In fact, to my knowledge they didn’t do any work on the brand identity itself. Now I’m not saying we’re right and they’re wrong – especially since they won the business. But it is funny how an executive (with a lot of advertising experience) was swayed by storyboards and scripts. I think part of it’s due to the fact that business execs don’t view script writing and story board illustrations as requiring as much effort as graphic design, video, or web work. It’s easy to look at a story board sketch and know that it’s not the final deliverable. When you do website concepts, even though they are probably Photoshop files, they look just like the final website. A lot of executives that I’ve seen can’t grasp the void between polished mock ups and the final deliverable. They do not understand the level of effort required from a programming, testing, and troubleshooting point of view. They only see the surface. And for some reason they don’t seem to think that the time copywriters and illustrators put into sketches cost as much to the agency.

I think a lot of it stems from each firms internal DNA. We are basically an interactive firm with a long history of film/video. While the other agency is group of ex-ad agency guys that spun off and started their own firm. Traditional ad agencies are solely focused on coming up with a break-through idea. If they can sell the idea to their client, they find the right production team to execute it. Interactive firms, on the other hand, do most of their production in-house. They come up with the idea and produce the deliverables themselves. A lot also depends on the size of the project. We would have done a lot more if the project was seven or eight figures instead of six.

So looking back, what would I do differently? I would probably leverage our relationship more to truly find out what would have impressed her and her team. We did what we do naturally. We focused on the deliverables that made the most sense to us. We were looking at the foundation (brand identity and website) and the other firm was looking at the paint and carpet. We focused on long term branding and information delivery while they focused on short term awareness. Both are important. In the end, I think both firms missed opportunities. If we can find a way to work together, the client will get the best of both worlds. That’s the best way to win – meet the business objectives and keep client satisfaction high.

technorati tags > advertising, branding, strategy, business, development

Seth Godin, David Armano, Cre8tive Group

Published on August 28, 2006 in management and strategy. 0 Comments

A recent post by David Armano (Logic+Emotion) got me fired up about my company’s value proposition. I’ve stayed away from this blog being a Cre8tive Group corporate pitch, but I also call out good work when I see it.

For the last two years we’ve used a combination of “Balance” and “You know it when you see it” as our external value propositions. Both David and Seth Godin have covered these topics recently. So mainly, I’m just pumped that my firm is thinking two years ahead of these industry heavyweights that we all look to as new media leaders.

Here is how we have tied the two thoughts together:

(image source: http://web.qx.net/nrice/images/cre8tive_group_it.jpg)

Seth takes a different approach. He doesn’t believe people know it when they see it. I partly agree because the vast majority of people are not visionary thinkers. They have a hard time seeing something that is outside of their box. Over the years we’ve become pretty good at reading between the lines with our clients. Once we understand their business, their audience and their goals; we don’t need to be told exactly what to do. By balancing those tensions above, we often have clients look up during an engagement and say “that’s it, you nailed it”. That’s what we mean when we say “you know it when you see it”. Most clients seem to like and appreciate that approach. And even if they cannot “see it”, they like to think that they can.

Like a lot of small firms, we are constantly trying to separate ourselves from the competition. One of the biggest things that set us apart is the fact that we only work with 8 clients at a time. That’s how much we value quality over quantity. It’s about giving our clients the level of service and thought required to make a difference. We’ve also leveraged the 8 symbol across a lot of our communication touches. It’s a unique way to bring consistency to our materials.

We’re betting on the fact that great experiences along with a consistent image & promise will improve our brand.

technorati tags > seth godin, david armano, logic, emotion, value, proposition, marketing, strategy