Startups

Nov 09 2010

Why Should Honda and the Big Names Have All the (Failure) Fun?

Honda is doing something interesting, and we thought we’d “dive in” too.

If you check out Honda’s page on Facebook (link to Honda on Facebook here) you can learn that last week was “Failure: The Key To Success Week.” (Digression: since we just learned this today, does it qualify as a failure because we missed the whole week of programming, or is that failure a success?)

There are some interesting videos: from the Uber-marketer Gary Vaynerchuk, from The Brand Builder, Olivier Blanchard and from Area 224’s personal favorite, Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek.

Somewhere on the site they do say that they (Honda) want this to be “our discussion, not theirs.” So Dave from Area 224 thought he’d do his own video on Failure. And, importantly, learning from it.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BoQ4w4arpI

Nov 09 2010

Insert Social Media Here

Thanks, simplesbm.com

It is that simple. Right?

Love to think back to that time two years ago when Area 224 was just getting rolling as a marketing consultancy. Back when we were having tons of meetings with tons of businesses and trying to find out what was on everyone’s minds.

The everyone we met with on this particular day was the Chief of Sales for a B2B Concern. (Again, protecting the innocent here.)

This particular person (may have been a man, may have been a woman; protecting the innocent) wanted to buy a “solution.” “Viral marketing,” said s/he, “will solve our problems.”

And…what are those particular problems?

The long silence was deafening.

Seems the CEO had seen a video on YouTube and thought “we should do that.”

Seriously.

The knee-jerk response, two years later, from the C-suite, seems to be “Social Media will solve our problems.”

This possibly brings about the opportunity for us to help you – or for another top-notch marketing consultancy to help you. BUT not before you figure out what the problems are.

What business problem are you attempting to solve?

Dave from Area 224 used to work for a very smart guy who abhorred busy work. And, in the “pre-social media epoch” (right before the YouTube era), he’d ask the above question all the time. Saved us a lot of busy work, but also saved the organization a lot of wasted effort on things that just didn’t make strategic sense.

Your job – as a marketing executive, as a C-suite aspirant, as the guy or gal who needs to translate all this stuff for the bosses (or for yourselves if you’re one of the bosses) – is to ask these questions first. And here’s a little how-to guide.

Why are we doing this? Doesn’t quite matter what the “this” is – could be a video campaign, could be getting the boss on Twitter, could be blogging. The objectives for each could be radically different. You want a video so the CEO can show how passionate s/he is about the business so that your startup can raise its next round of capital. You need to Tweet because it’s the most laser-focused way to reach the 15 influencers you have targeted for relationship building. Your blog has to be launched because you have a network of people who can write insanely well and you want to be the centerpiece of a budding community.

What will happen if we don’t do this? Seriously – you need to think about the alternatives. You may even have to negotiate with your bosses.

Roger Fisher and William Ury wrote a best-seller called “Getting to Yes,” and they coined the term “Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement,” or “BATNA.” Consider the BATNA in your social media planning.

If we don’t get social with our marketing – will our competitors do that? If our competitors do that, will they be able to effectively tell the story that we can tell better? Will they win market share if they beat us to the market?

It might be likely that your competitors are NOT in the position to win lots of eyeballs and market share. It might even be likely that, while they focus on “social,” your focus on product excellence, or distribution channels, or fine-tuning your message could be the best thing for your business.

Upshot: Insert Social Media Here at your own peril – and not without some serious thinking and planning first.

Oct 26 2010

The Strategic Imperative: Using Strategy to Avoid Actual Work

While this could make sense as part of our “Buzzword Watch” series, we’re thinking “strategy” is in a class by itself. Follow along.

Sports analogies – “sport analogies” for the British in the crowd – are an awesome way to make sure you understand some of the business nuances. Such as “strategy.”

Objective: Win the game.

This brings us back to the title of this here blog post. And to an age-old question: why do you do what you do.

Not just in business, but in life.

A couple months ago, we did a four part series on the Marketing Martini Glass. It’s a series that turned Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs on Its Ear. And it reminded us of some business discussions we’ve had over the past (gasp) 20 years – discussions with really smart people in really good organizations.

There’s a maxim, going back those 20 years, that rings true, still:

The higher you are in an organization, the more you can throw around the word “strategy” and use it to avoid doing actual work.

Think strategically. Let’s be strategic. It’s important to think about the strategic reasons for doing this. We need a strategy session.

Uh, no.

What you need are actual business objectives.

The actual business objectives – the why you do what it is you do as a business – are not only imperative to develop BEFORE your strategy session, they can be pretty darn liberating.

Back to the sport(s) analogies so you can see what it is we’re talking about.

Even the different disciplines within, say, a football coaching staff can have their own objectives. Objective, still, is to win the game. The Offensive Strategy might well be to “keep the opposition’s defense on the field by effectively running the football.” Tactics? Those are the plays the Offensive Coordinator calls: “off-tackle fullback dive,” or some such.

Quoting Sun Tzu: “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”

So how do the really savvy avoid work?

They throw around the word “strategy.” AND they keep it in the nebulous cloud between “objective” – which there may not be for whatever it is they’re doing – and “tactics” – which they may not fully understand, or have a grasp of, or be able to execute on.

The title of this blog post is tongue in cheek. There aren’t folks who are deliberately using strategy to avoid actual work.

But it can be pretty easy to do – having a Strategic Imperative without proper direction from above, or help from the trenches.

Great way to get out of doing actual work.

Oct 20 2010

The Cubs Hire a New Manager – 4 Things CEOs Can Learn

How to take two seemingly unrelated topics – the hiring of a guy named Mike Quade as Cubs Manager, and your own management challenges – and blend them together? Leave it to Area 224.

We’re headquartered in Chicago’s North Shore, Evanston, IL, to be exact – where a guy named Mike Quade was born. Same guy who took over the Chicago Cubs as their Interim Manager earlier this season – and the same guy who got the job for keeps yesterday. What can CEOs learn from all this?

1. Be Thorough, But Not Deliberate. The Cubs interviewed a few people, did their due diligence, made sure they had talked to everybody. BUT, if they didn’t act now, they’d have to wait until early November – after the World Series and its moratorium on major announcements. If they were deliberate, they’d miss the opportunity to get their guy – and, if Quade was their guy all along, they’d make it seem like he wasn’t.

2. Be Prepared to Lose the Runners-Up. When Jack Welch hired Jeffrey Immelt to be his replacement at GE, it was expected that the other two candidates – both GE folks – would leave. They did.

The Cubs may have missed out on Ryne Sandberg – Hall of Famer, guy who toiled in the Cubs organization riding buses and tutoring minor-leaguers for the past five years – ever becoming their manager. Whether Sandberg ends up managing the Milwaukee Brewers (just miles up the road, in the same division) or someone else, the Cubs will have to live with that fact.

3. Be Decisive. The Ricketts family – who bought the Cubs earlier this year – and their deputy, Jim Hendry, the GM, stand behind their guy 100%. Sandberg would have been the easy choice, given the fact that he’s popular and has a retired jersey. Even a guy like Joe Girardi would have been worth pursuing, since he grew up saying he wanted to manage the Cubs.

But an October 19 announcement while the post-season is in mid-swing, that is decisive. And the full support – “this is our guy” – keeps people from wondering if there’s a trick up the Cubs’ sleeve. There isn’t.

4. Trust Your Gut. Never in my 20+ years in business – sportscaster, junior PR guy, VP of Global PR, startup CEO, guy behind digital agency – has my gut failed me. When I walked away from crappy business relationships, I slept better at night. When I didn’t – even though my gut was telling me there was something flat out bad about what was going on – I regretted it later.

There’s a gut feeling about this guy that just says “winner.” Maybe moreso than any Cubs manager since Frank Chance?

This could have been a long, drawn-out, painful process. But it wasn’t.

Next time you’re looking to make that key hire, make that key business move, make something happen, consider taking a page from the Cubs playbook. At least the off-the field playbook.