All posts filed under: Transformation

It’s complicated

By Mark Di Somma

I really like this thought from Lars Bjork, CEO of QlikTech, in an interview in the NY Times: Love order, hate bureaucracy, he says … “Order is where you put a process into place because you want to scale the business to a different level. Bureaucracy is where nobody understands why you do it.” I’m constantly intrigued at how systems take on a life of their own. Everybody witnesses it. Everyone agrees it happens. What starts out, innocently enough, as a way of checking something soon grows its own mandate. It invades other areas. Then it gets a righteous title or attaches itself to a critical area (compliance, operations, efficiency, policy, framework etc), spawns a budget, a project team and a management structure, and suddenly it’s part of the war on chaos. It stalks the organisation gathering strength and credibility with every meeting. Before long it’s part of the sign-off, and once legal and HR take it under their wing, it’s part of the furniture. The sign-off gets longer, harder, more involved. ‘How’ overtakes ‘what’ …

The Feynman principle

By Mark Di Somma

A review of a review about scientist Richard Feynman in the Freakonomics blog caught my eye this morning because it also provides a simple but telling thought for every brand owner. The author of the blog post, Sanjoy Mahajan, comments “It’s not quite true that Feynman could not accept an idea until he had torn it apart. Rather, the idea could not yet be part of his way of thinking and looking at the world. Before an idea could contribute to that worldview, Feynman wanted to turn over the idea, to see why it was true, from any angle that he could find.” We don’t have to look far to see what Feynman was fighting against. Once something has been widely accepted as fact, the temptation is to absorb it unquestioned and to work with it on that assumption. What Feynman did though was to say “you may very well think that, but before I can think that, before I can actually absorb any thought into my worldview, I need to prove it to myself”. …

Which north?

By Mark Di Somma

Yesterday St John asked whether north meant true north or magnetic north. Good question. As I said, most people have a sense of what the company they work for should be like. It’s natural for people to look for tangible ways to improve things. As we all know, it doesn’t take long for employees to offer a multi-point to-do list. Listen very carefully to what you are being told. But, at the same time, be careful how you treat this information. Chances are what you are hearing is, at some level, a variation on today. It is magnetic north – the reality they are naturally drawn to. Taken literally, it’s probably an improvement on the reality people are part of – rather than an indication of where you truly need to be heading in order to be competitive. As Henry Ford so rightly pointed out, if he had asked people what form of transport they wanted before he delivered them the automobile, they’d have asked for a faster horse. Don’t get me wrong, many of …

Travelling north

By Mark Di Somma

Keith Yamashita has a phrase I love. He talks about companies and brands finding their northern star. The term isn’t astronomical, it’s aspirational. He’s referring to an ideal of your company or brand that burns bright in front of you and your staff, that leads you on, that fires you up and that you never let out of your sight … It’s the brand and the culture you dream of being. It’s what your people long to be part of. And it’s who your customers always hoped you would be and that your competitors can’t be. It’s what a company’s vision should be all about. At Audacity, we call it your ambition. Without it, you drift. So many people can see that north star in some form. When I ask people in workshops about the company or the brand they dream of working for, they can tell me, sometimes in amazing detail, what it looks like, how it feels to be part of that , what it’s renowned for. They can see it. At times, …

What’s a brand problem?

By Mark Di Somma

I’m always fascinated when people tell me they have a brand problem – because I’ve seldom encountered one. I’ve encountered a whole range of business problems however that addressing the brand can fix. One of the real concerns I have with many “brand strategies” is that they work in too small a circle. The vicinity of their reasoning is marcomms, which is important of course and immediate, but what gets lost with such a restricted approach is the wider thinking needed to really address and resolve the matter at hand. And unless you take that broader approach, unless you actively build the widest context into your consideration set by really understanding what’s happening to and within the business, you’re just dealing with what’s in front of your nose. There’s also a very real risk that the brand strategy is actually little more than an elaborate but ultimately isolated justification for the communications approach.

Light my fire

By Mark Di Somma

What do you do if you’re one of the world’s most famous lighter companies and the number of smokers is dropping?  If you’re Zippo, you look for ways to capitalise on your ‘cool’ image and extend your brand into products ranging from watches to leisure clothing. Zippo hit its zenith around the mid-1990s with 18 million lighters a year. Today, that figure’s dropped to around 12 million lighters a year and the hunt is on for products that are, in the words of president and chief executive Gregory Booth, “rugged, durable, made in America, iconic”. It seems to be a standard operating procedure these days. Brands hit a certain scale and then look to diversify in order to fish in other waters, or else, their iconic products hit their use-by date and they start looking for ways to sweat their assets, or someone brings a brand back from the dead and looks to add product lines to what they hope is its revitalised equity. Sadly, many of these diversifications don’t strike me as strategic. They …

What’s in the box?

By Mark Di Somma

Marc Levinson’s book The Box explains why a “soulless aluminium or steel box held together with welds and rivets, with a wooden floor and two enormous doors at one end” was able to revolutionise trade. As Levinson points out the container is about much more than what it does, it’s about what it now represents to all of us living and buying in the global economy: an extraordinary system for moving goods between places at minimal cost and with as little complication as possible. Along the way, the humble container literally changed the world around it: new ports became valuable; just-in-time became possible; international trade accelerated; loading and delivery times shrank; trade became standardised; supply chains extended. But the economic benefits that arose from the container didn’t come from the box itself, clever as it was. The real innovation came from entrepreneurs who, over time, discovered how they could apply the potential of the container to their commercial advantage. It was those people who saw that this box with “all the romance of a tin …

Reaching the social consumer

By Mark Di Somma

New media guru Brian Solis has filed this excellent article on what some are predicting to be branding’s next key customer: the social consumer. Based on research from attendees at The Pivot Conference, there are a number of key out-takes: Social media has a strong in-house bias and is the biggest responsibility for marketing/advertising teams. But while marketing dominates social media responsibility right now, Solis’ view is that “social media will extend the capacity of any business unit or division affected by outside behavio[u]r.” So expect to see social media making its presence felt in PR, sales, customer service, even investor relations … If Solis is right – and there’s no reason to doubt him – that means companies will need to hard-wire social media into their lead and sales generation processes and into their customer and stakeholder response systems. My view is that some functions will find this easier than others. The significant benefits of course are timeliness and efficiency. But based on research I’ve seen in the investor relations’ space for example, this …

Work in progress

By Mark Di Somma

Didn’t work – Something was tried, and for reasons known or unknown, results were disappointing. Doesn’t mean that the same outcome would happen again, or that whatever is being proposed shouldn’t be tried again. This is a statement of history, often made blithely without the investigation of context, input, resource, influence or wider climate. It presumes a track record of past and therefore continuing disappointment. Won’t work – Doesn’t mean it can’t work or that it hasn’t worked or even that it’s not working now, only that it will not work in the future in the way it is being framed or the way things are projected or with the allocated resources. In other words, it could work but it may require revision going forward. Can’t work – Unfeasible. You’d have to be a fairly confident person to be making this statement. It states categorically that something will not work no matter what happens in the market, with customers, to the business, within any timeframe. Never. No debate. No right of appeal. Will never work …

Coffee’s cold …

By Mark Di Somma

I’m getting some mixed messages off Starbucks’ decision to par its logo back to an emblem. I’d like to think this is a sign of evolution. And at first glance that’s how it looks. Dolly up the icon, drop the name, drop the association with caffeine. Simple, clean, single minded, international. On reflection though, I’m more than a little concerned that Starbucks have once again lost their way and are trying to bridge their way to another strategy. I just can’t for the life of me put my finger on where or why. The market’s already been told that Starbucks is looking to diversify. This from the company blog dated 5 January: “… we see a world in which we are a vital part of over 16,000 neighborhoods around the world, in more than 50 countries, forming connections with millions of customers every day in our stores, in grocery aisles, at home and at work. Starbucks will continue to offer the highest-quality coffee, but we will offer other products as well – and while the …