All posts filed under: Leadership

Don’t plan to be a start-up. Plan to be an upstart.

By Mark Di Somma

By Mark Di Somma You should never start a business unless you are deliberately planning for others in the industry to be dismayed, surprised, outraged or alarmed by what you are doing. “Start-up” has become a synonym for starting-out. It implies not just being at the beginning, but needing to catch up to someone more established in order to prove oneself. Launching an upstart on the other hand is all about putting a business in play that really challenges what everyone else has accepted as the rules. That’s because a start-up focuses on getting a product or an idea to market, whereas an upstart focuses on an “enemy” (be it an attitude or a standardised approach) and looks to a product or service to change that. Without a business model trained on defying and disrupting the status quo, you are destined to be another player trying to get a footing in another overplayed market. A feature, no matter how beneficial, is not a disruption. If all that stands between you and your competitors is a …

Where do you stand on fair pricing? A conversation starter

By Mark Di Somma

Buyers have convinced themselves that they are entitled to deprive brands and shopkeepers of a degree of the asking price profit in the hunt for a bargain – yet in almost the same breath, they’ll tell you that businesses need to be responsible and to behave ethically and that they shouldn’t take shortcuts that compromise people or safety. But there are prices to pay for things being cheap. In fact, one could go so far as to say that once prices get below a certain point, someone has to suffer. Some of the side-effects are obvious and horrendous: child labour; unsafe working places; the flourishing replica and fake markets; food scandals. Some are less obvious but still telling: the ongoing effects of over-production on environments and economics; the free-fall decline of high street retail in the face of online trade; and declining employment in the retail and service sectors. You don’t have to look far for predictions that retail is about to close its doors. In this interview on Pandodaily, Marc Andreessen says, “Retail guys …

Brands as operating systems

By Mark Di Somma

In this post, Nigel Hollis explores a fundamental misalignment. Brand owners tend to view customer experiences in isolation, by channel, whereas customers of course view and grade their experiences cumulatively. Tom Asacker captures why customers think this way. A brand, he says, is “one, interdependent system of behavior”. The problem is that in too many organisations the “system” has many masters and each wants independent control of their domain. CMOs, who might be expected to have responsibility for the overall experience as of right, do not. That’s because large chunks of the interface with customers, and the factors that influence that interface, remain for the most part outside of their control. They do not fit neatly into the “normal” org chart definition of what constitutes marketing. And when multi-lateral ownership makes contact with a unilateral expectation, just as at Penn Station, the scene is set for disappointment. As a result, there is significant potential for the system to jeopardise itself at any time, at any weak point – through bad training, bad coding, bad quality, …

The future myth

By Mark Di Somma

Transformation isn’t about plotting a meeting point for your brand with the predicted future. It’s not about getting to where the puck will be, to paraphrase Wayne Gretsky. Because depending on the arrival of the next big thing or that breaking wave, that hot new trend, the long-awaited demographic or anything else for that matter is conjecture. Banking on it is simply speculation. To evolve successfully, brands must grow out of what they have into what they need to be. They cannot shape the future. They can only shape their future. That is what they have control of. That is what they are responsible for. The customers they take with them into the future. The actions they drive in the future. The products they will make. The culture they build for the future. All strategists and decision makers can and should read out of the macro-trends, and even the supposedly “specific” future trends for that matter, are the broad indicators of the change that’s coming and perhaps a sense of where it might be coming …

The global challenge of doing business openly

By Mark Di Somma

Congratulations to All Good Organics, the first New Zealand company to make the prestigious Ethisphere Institute’s World’s Most Ethical (WME) companies list. All Good may be tiny but this ranking puts them in some great company – one of just 145 companies, chosen from more than 5000 entries. Judge for yourself. In the light of this win, interesting to read Raz Godelnik’s take on the difference that CSR actually makes for companies in this post on TriplePundit: A MIT Sloan Management Review and BCG survey showed 40% of executives polled believed the greatest benefit to an organisation in addressing sustainability was “improved brand reputation”. Godelnik goes on to cite evidence that CSR initiatives help companies retain stock value when facing corporate governance scandals and product recalls, and that firms viewed as having weak CSR suffered stock declines twice the size of firms viewed as having strong CSR after riots surrounding 1999 WTO meetings in Seattle. While consumers might not be willing to pay higher prices for greener products, he says, they will more likely purchase …

Whose buying – and whose purchasing?

By Mark Di Somma

At first the question appears nonsensical. But only if you assume that buying and purchasing are synonyms. Most financial systems treat them as exactly that because, from their perspective, the result is the same. Income. But there is a difference – and being able to define and quantify that difference is important. Semantics doesn’t just split hairs. It splits customers. It isolates loyalties and behaviours. And in so doing, it potentially defines different actions. But it only does so for those prepared to look for the nuances. As big data hands marketers and decision makers more and more detail, the ability to read between the lines and find the nuances of behaviour in the numbers will be more important than ever. In this case, being able to tell the difference between your buyers (“the people who actively choose to buy from us”) and your purchasers (“the people who happen to have bought from us”) reveals two very different parties in terms of inclination. The first will be back. The second may not. Things become a …

What do you have: a brand or an identifier?

By Mark Di Somma

Contention #1. A true brand coalesces people around a business model – to buy, to work, to judge, to invest. True, it is, as Adrienne used to say, “the total experience of doing business with you”. But the experience is not the end – it is the means. The experience, just like all the other elements of the business model, works to generate trust, connection and distinction. It must do so deliberately, carefully and responsibly. It does so to deliver a premium. Brands exist to earn margin beyond the going market rate. That’s their role, not their by-product. That margin can of course take various forms. It can be literal, in the sense of what consumers are prepared to pay. It can be cultural, in the sense that people with more talent are drawn to one marque over another. It can be financial, in the sense of enhanced EPS (earnings per share) for investors. A brand that doesn’t generate, or intend to generate, that above-normal market rate is a brand in decline or no brand …

Can you innovate too quickly?

By Mark Di Somma

What is the right pace for a brand to transform in an iterative economy? So often we’re told that success will stem from pushing the innovation accelerator flat to the floor. As proof, we hear about those companies that failed to innovate or didn’t respond quickly enough – and were buried. But is that true? Is innovation just about turnover, or is it more complicated than that? Where should brands take their cues – from their own development programmes, from their competitors, from the media, from their own marketing demands? Where do you look for prompts when you have new work in the wings? There’s a theory for this (of course) – diffusion of innovation. It revolves around two key aspects: an adoption process that generates critical mass (a.k.a the bell curve); and Professor Everett Rogers’ five influential factors concerning take-up: Relative advantage – how much better the innovation is than its predecessor Compatibility – how easily the innovation can be assimilated into everyday life Complexity – how easy or difficult the innovation is to …

Seeing past the problem

By Mark Di Somma

By Mark Di Somma Every transformation programme I have ever worked on has been set in motion by a problem. And in every case the issue that has galvinised action and that everyone is so focused on answering is not the real problem at all. As Simon Sinek has observed, people intuitively deal with what they know before they deal with the things they don’t know or feel less comfortable dealing with. The easiest question, and the place most people start is “what?” They deal first with the symptoms they can see and quantify. And often they address them with a “how” that is equally familiar – the methodology they always use. But while a particular problem may have set off the trip-wire, in reality that problem is probably a symptom of what’s really happened rather than the real cause. It’s the prompt. And just having a way to address that problem does not guarantee any quality of answer. It simply provides a process for everyone to map to. Do you know the lovely story …

Shifting brand responsibility

By Mark Di Somma

By Mark Di Somma Let me make a suggestion to brand owners in the interests not just of transparency but of greater consumer belief. Stop communicating your efforts in sustainability, diversity, traceability, environmental contribution, fair trade etc as corporate social responsibility obligations. Instead, act on them, and account for them, as differentiating inclinations. And frame those inclinations within a broader, singular superset: your brand’s distinctive sense of its responsibilities. To that end, let’s stop talking about reporting. It smacks of obligation and compliance rather than commitments and contributions. And I would suggest, change the way your responsible actions are shared to make them more involving. Less paperwork, a wider range of sincere and honest conversations, with more people, across a broader range of platforms. In other words, make the discussions around how you behave ongoing, less formal and truly “social”. Just so we’re clear, I’m not for one minute advocating that the activities identified above go unaccounted for. Quite the opposite. I am advocating a change in spirit. I am suggesting that the underlying question …