The basic answer can be summarized as follows: E-Mail campaigns are quite different in comparison to print mail campaigns. Different reading habits when reading “online” require different structures and concepts for e-mail campaigns. Due to research results we know the following reading habits:

• An e-mail text is more browsed than read in detail.
• The attention to read the entire text needs to be attracted with anchor words or even buzz words.
• Only the first 10 rows will be absorbed in total.
• The reading rates online is lower than offline.
• Customers expect that the sender gets to the point as soon as possible.
• Customers will not follow all arguments to the bottom line.

Taking these reading and abortion styles into considering the following rules and recommendations can be derived:

• Write to your readers what is most important right at the beginning.
• The entire text of your mail should not excess the half of the letters text.
• The line of arguments should have a maximum of three layers.
• Your e-mail should be clearly arranged. Hence your mail needs more paragraphs compared to a letter.
• Each paragraph should contain only one core message.
• Avoid nested sentences.
• The salutatory address should include the sir name.

Of course, there are some other features that are important for the success of your e-mail campaign, too. Since a large number of websites have discussed those issues I will just summarize other important features. Here they are

• Adress management
• Return address
• Subject heading
• Target audience appropriate content

Good luck with your e-mail campaign.

This week I read a newspaper article about much older news. As it seems, these can be quite interesting again. Most people, including me, did not even notice it: one of Germany’s most popular TV news formats – Tagesschau - has been broadcasting its own issues from exactly twenty years ago since 1993. So today you can see the news from May 31st 1989. These newscasts are exactly as they were broadcasted originally, including slips of the tongue and weather forecast. Unfortunately, the time of the broadcast is 3 a.m. in the morning and thus, not very convenient for me.

What has all this to do with strategy? I think a lot. A 20 years old news format is not only entertaining. It is more than a recall of fashion trends, dreadful haircuts and log forgotten events. At the original broadcasting date, all this was brand new information, often still incomplete. Commentators were speculating about potential future effects of latest events. Nobody knew were all this would end. Nobody knew if a particular event would even have any relevant consequence or not.

When we see all this today, we know what happened afterwards. This makes a huge difference. I often write about the importance of thinking about the future for good strategic planning here. The difficult thing is to get predictions of the future right. There are a few early signs, indicators and trends. The first problem is to identify them at all. Secondly, it is hard to derive the correct conclusions from these. In this context, an old newscast is an excellent exercise for thinking about the future. We already know the major events of the next six to twelve months following that newscast. Thus it is much easier to identify early signs of relevance. Did people of that time realise that their latest news were indicators for larger things to come? Did they draw the right conclusions? If not, why? Was it even possible to foresee later events? If we answer these questions by hindsight, we may improve our ability to think about today’s events as early signs for future developments. We might learn that things take unexpected turns more often than we expect. Or we might learn to pay more attention to the little things. At least this exercise will remind us that events don’t always take the most likely development.

We know that the Berlin Wall fell in autumn 1989 and that Germany was reunited in 1990. We also know that Germany experienced and economic boom as a result of this reunification, although the East German economy almost completely broke down. I remember that I was convinced that Germany would not reunite during the next decades even in summer 1989. However, was it possible to predict the fall of the Berlin Wall and the events that followed it already in May or June 1989? Why didn’t I see it? I guess I didn’t see it because these developments had been considered close to impossible for all my life. And yet they came.
On the other hand, today so many companies are caught by surprise by the current economic crisis. Was this crisis less likely than the fall of the Berlin Wall?

The truth is that most of those experiences can be proofed; furthermore there is a very high probability that you going to meet both types of consultants (the good ones and the bad ones) after several years in business. One typical kind of problem: Presented results look good on PowerPoint, but not in corporate practice. Process time is assumed to short; certain - in most cases hidden processes - have not been considered and hence do not appear in new flow charts. Essential details and former best practice will not be transferred to new solutions. (From my personal point of view in most cases those “details” and hidden processes make or break large projects, e.g. success of acquisitions, outsourcing). Another frequent problem can be observed in terms of knowledge that leaves the organization. Hiring external expertise for a certain period of time may solve your problems today (e.g. to implement a new IT system), but in some cases the organization will end up with a very expensive black box.

Similar problems can be observed when hiring interim managers for small period of time. The reason: Both groups (consultant, interim manager) are paid to deliver certain project results, but not to live the conditions and organizational surroundings they create. Hence the question is whether there is any chance that you can protect your organization and your team from those consulting dilemma (you need the external experience or the external capacities to fix your problems).

There is no general solution at all…however: The general recommendation is to organize at least an “internal resource” that reviews consulting results in terms of their feasibility and that manages the knowledge transfer from the consultants to you organization. (Of course you can expect that not all consulting firms will like this idea). The size of this resource depends on the size of your organization and the scope of the consulting project. A business model reengineering project of a medium size organization should be reviewed at least by 2 persons (no full time jobs, but 2 people with around 50 % capacity for this job would be great). In the matter of organizational hierarchy those people should not belong to the top management team; a middle manager and a colleague can be a good solution. Why 2 people? There are 2 different types of jobs to do! The most critical task of them is to see and to understand the entire picture of all consulting results as well as the secondary effects within the organization. Most project management structures are good at reviewing single projects (at least) or to get a clear picture whether the single project is able to deliver the expected results, but fail to describe secondary effects. It can also observed in practice that a good solution for project A does not cause a good condition for project B automatically.

But in some cases it can be essential to discuss small details in projects – but not all project review meetings are prepared to do so, in particular when the cycle of project reviews in one moth or even longer. In this case (this is the second type of job) you need a “process and data cruncher” (I derived this expression from number cruncher) who is able to test PowerPoint-good-looking workflows. Finding this person can be a hard job, but it is worth the effort. People with several years of experience in different roles and jobs in your organization can be a good point to start.

As a reminder – Porters model of Generic Strategies basically says that you should follow one of these generic strategies:

• Price leader / cost leader – Sell your product for the lowest price in the market. Don’t add bells and whistles; your customers are price sensitive. Examples are the cloths you can buy at Wal Mart.
• Differentiation – Have a unique product and sell it for a premium price. This is often equivalent to quality leadership (but not necessarily so). Examples are Gucci stores.
• Focus – I prefer the term niche strategy since it is more self-explaining. Have a product with a fair price that fulfils the needs of a customer segment that is not larger than a market niche. Examples are the cloths specially designed for carrying babies in a wrap or a sling, e.g. extra-wide coats or fleece covers for the baby

If you don’t follow one of these strategies you are ‘stuck in the middle’. There you will have a problem since there always is somebody with a product that has either a lower price or more attractive features than yours.

Of course, this is a model. Like all models it is a simplified description of reality. Doubtless, there are other strategies that can lead a business to success. You may, for instance, stick in Porters ‘middle’ but have a brilliant customer lock-in. Thus your customers stay with you despite lower prices or higher quality products around. On the other hand, I think it is not a bad strategic position to

• be well known for very competitive prices or
• to have the ‘must-have’ product everybody wants to get for whatever reason or
• to have a reputation as an excellent supplier in a particular market niche.

Coming back to where I started – why should these strategies be less viable during the current financial crisis? At first glance we may think that when the economy is down, Wal Mart’s cloth sales may be less affected than those of Gucci. Nevertheless, there are also good arguments why a strong brand is very important even during a crisis.

I already wrote that a good strategy may be even more important in a crisis as it is in a boom phase. A good strategy is always one that fits your company’s capabilities and competences. To use a bit of textbook terminology - these core competences should be the basis for your competitive advantage. On this basis you can develop a strategy that takes into account your current business environment and the expected future change of it. I think this is much easier than the other way around – determine a strategy to prosper in the current business environment and than develop the competences needed to implement that strategy (Although, of course, this may work too).

So if you have the capabilities to produce something at very low costs – fine! Go for it! Adjust your marketing efforts or anything else and offer your crisis-shaken customers an opportunity for savings.
If you have a long reputation for the excellent quality of your products – also fine! Make sure your customers understand that the lowest price does not necessarily mean the best value for money in the long run.
If you serve a niche – you may even be one of the lucky few whose market is not even affected by the crisis.

OK, those last examples are oversimplified. But I am sure you get my point. During a crisis it is more important than ever to have a good strategy. This may or may not be one of Porters Generic Strategies. But these strategies may or may not be good for a particular business in boom times too. So I don’t think that the phase of a business cycle has great impact on the viability of a general strategic approach.

ROBERT HALF INTERNATIONAL (RHI) is a global organization that is specialized in consulting and staffing services; its network includes more than 400 locations worldwide. It announced its new “Global Financial Employment Monitor 2008 – 2009″ that informs about current trends in hiring finance specialists. The report summarizes three major findings:

• Talent shortage: 56% of participants reported problems finding skilled staff, unchanged from the 2007 report.
• Staff retention: 58 % of participants are concerned or are very concerned about retaining top performers. In 2007 only 43 % were concerned.
• Flexible staffing: 31 % of participants “currently employing interim professionals reported increasing their use in the last three years.”

The research summary can be found as pdf-file on this site.

The first question is easy enough to answer – What makes a good business plan? I wrote an article with exactly that titlesome years ago.

Than he asks: How do you develop a business plan when change in the industry is imminent? How does innovation fit into a business plan? I firmly believe that a good business plan should describe a good strategy. This in turn should be developed on the basis of a thorough internal and external analysis.
Such an analysis would reveal, for instance, if change in the industry is imminent. If this is the case, the business plan has to consider that. It should at least describe the expected change and suggest some course of action for this scenario (scenarios). Depending on how certain or uncertain the expected change is, the business plan has to be more or less flexible. If the outcome of the industry change is unclear, scenarios are a good tool. The strategy and business plan can than take the form of a decision tree – if the industry takes a particular development, the strategy will be adapted to a respective direction too.
The innovation issue is very similar. Your external analysis will reveal the extent to which the industry is driven by innovation. Your strategy will implicitly make a statement about innovation as well. If your industry is highly innovative, you should be too. Otherwise, you could choose the strategy to outmanoeuvre your industry peers by being far more innovative than the rest of the industry. In any case, your business plan has to take this into account. It has to describe what you plan in the field of innovation (directions, activities, objectives etc). Moreover, your financial plans have to consider the cost of innovation. Thus, a business plan addresses innovation almost automatically. Even if it does not mention innovation at all, this is a statement too. It implies that innovation is not an issue for your business. As long as this decision is the result of a thorough analysis, this is absolutely fine.

The last question was: What distinguishes a good business plan from a great one? I am afraid I don’t have a satisfactory answer on that. A great business plan is that one that works out and leads to the expected results. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to distinguish the plans that will work from those that won’t in advance. So you will only know the difference in hindsight. Nevertheless, you can do some things to increase your chances to develop a great business plan: Take it seriously. A business plan is nothing you write down in two hours. Take your time and think it through in every detail. Think in options and alternatives. Don’t go for the first option that comes to your mind. Think about alternative paths and than deliberately decide which one you want to follow. I can only repeat myself – a thorough internal and external analysis is the starting point of everything. Make sure to do something with the results of your analysis. Make your business plan precise enough that it really tells you what do, yet flexible enough to react to new developments.

All this may read like common sense. Well, to me it is. Unfortunately I have seen more than one business plan that obviously did not follow this common sense advice. So I love to repeat myself with this. If one follows this advice, he at least has done a great deal to develop a great business plan.

Change is easy? Well, the basic answer is yes, if…. According to various research results change is not an easy business, hence you have to be sure of the following three issues before implementing change.

1. Change is really necessary. You and/or your organization should identify the strategic story that is establishing the need for change, e.g. the need to protect the competitive advantage. But you have to keep in mind that there can be situations where “doing nothing” can be an approach to protect (or to maintain) the competitive advantage (e.g. an traditional restaurant which is appreciated by its customers because it has remained unchanged for long periods of time and the cook did not change his or her famous recipe).
2. The need for change is understood. Your organization at all including yourself (!) should understand the drivers that create the need for change. It should also be clear what the negative effects (without change) and the hot issues that will damage your competitive advantage. Furthermore you should be able to make a distinction between the real problem and its symptoms.
3. The right solution has been developed. There are many advocates that will promote the right the solution from their own point of view – but in most cases not all are able to see full facts and attributes of the case. Your organization has to design the solution which is the correct answer to the problem that has been identified before. I have to mention that correct answer does not mean the “perfect” solution. In many cases “85 percent”- solutions with the right timing have been proofed their ability to fix the problem. The correct answer includes the right solution in technical terms + the right organizational solution. The latter one requires that your solution addresses cultural issues within your organization, too.

You can summarize the last issue a little bit: You should manage every change project as an organizational change project. In many cases technical issues represent only the facilitator of change, but cultural / organizational change is the main driver to overcome possible resistances to change.

Here is Naseem’s article:

The Nine New Mega Opportunities of 2009

The daily cinema living
The hunger for moving pictures, like a global conspiracy or an underground movement, has almost killed the flat and still imagery. Every marketing or propaganda message now has to move in dimensions or it will be considered boring or dead. This change has already made a very positive impact on screen-based mediums, from hand held devices, wall size TVs to building size electronic billboards. The streets and shopping malls will eventually look like the insides of cinemas. As long as these new mediums can project and show things live and in color the world will keep on moving. The entire interiors, walls, corridors, hallways floors and ceilings would be nothing but screens with projected moving images. The dramatic reductions of the cost of projection, availability of dynamic animated contents will keep customers enticed and ring the cash registers. The more available surface the better, tackle the new shape and style of imagery, create new business models and watch the show.

The real-time-societies
Think, feel, produce and deliver all info in real time. The financial meltdown demands real-time and not yesterday’s numbers. There is a constant need to see the portfolio swings in real time all over the world. The recession has become depression and depression has turned into compression of data into online streams of global news delivered via new medium. Some 100 major newspapers in the West are on sale now and majority may not make it. The newspaper cemetery will keep on getting larger. A quick jump from Newspaper-to-web-portal is one of the last ways left to survive. Asia has extra-ordinary customer base and massive distribution to hold on a bit longer. Keep away from old medium and embrace new cyber-opportunities, study the trends and create new services, use global standards and global branding quality even for the smallest venture, like a fire you could be on top, just ignite new ideas.

The new office-less offices
The digitized hyper flow of information after colliding with miniaturization of the hardware has now liberated the people from their offices and linked them to massive sources while opening their eyes for good. The traditional millions of fancy offices around the world are slowly turning into invisible office less teams showing off their magic measured in clicks and instant revenue streaming for their relative projects. The beanbag offices of the hippy past are now empty.
while office buildings slowly becoming flee markets. Customers simply will not pay extra for expensive offices and uncomfortable art-deco furniture. Discover hassle free and mobile working and fill the new HR needs based on these changes

The no-logo branding
99% of the logos of today simply evaporate as now it is more to do will name-calling or name-typing and not logo-scanning or logo screaming. Just ask 10 people around if they can recall the logos of any thing major created in the last 10 years.
Can you recall the logo of Youtube or Facebook? The logo masters should channel their energies on much broader graphical services and forget about global logo identities, use logo as a playmate like Google changes it daily. The free logo contests via net are becoming very popular among businesses when a single online appeal on a portal or blog gets hundreds of submissions from all over the world and some even better than what Madison Avenue currently produces. Some contest are even asking the entire image and advertising campaign, with copy, theme and the works. Invent large-scale free contests for right customers, award talents and all at no costs. Ride the new shifts of the industry.

The new agencies
Methodologies to create instant surplus cash for clients will be the real measurement and critical test for advertising and branding agencies. These agencies will be expected to deliver a finished building and not just a conceptual drawing.
The dying ad industry in this global recession could get dramatically compressed like a bullet and get fired into a brand new state of the art image delivery service not yet expressed in all of the overly flashed websites of the trade…a brand new model will certainly be squeezed out. The old fashioned model of 1000 offices worldwide offering 1000 similar services to the same client will be forced to attempt a globally-dedicated-single-client-agency-model. Graphic and slogan based branding will defuse into same-day-quick-printing-services. Study the click society and rediscover real marketing power, become a leaders under new models.

The new infantries
Websites will be totally re-invented; Brand mangers will be reshuffled and Brands will be dry-cleaned, the message re-distilled and finally end-users once again respected. India will become a hot spot, with a million plus technology experts, an infantry with English fluency and free spirited creative and entrepreneurial mind on hand it would acquire the centrality toward a global ad and design center.
Discover Hinglish. The Eastern model is very dynamic and there are far too many new services yet to be created for the entire Asian market.

The new cyberspace
Focusing on global image and cyber-branding trends, the option to purchase exclusive global rights to a name of your choice, now available in May 2009 from ICANN for an $185,000.00 USD fee on a first-come-non-refundable basis is a mega revolution.
The price per name is high, but nothing compared to all the other traditional costs that companies pay to create a global imagery or millions fighting trademark and domain battles to secure a global position. It is the best new way to build global brands and hold cyber domination. This revolution may also be the greatest salvation for the entire advertising, branding and PR industry worldwide. The new debates over popular name targets as listed by ABC Namebank are becoming hot marketing topics. This platform is about to cut 95% of the traditional brand building costs and 95% of excessive time it takes to create global visibility.
So embrace the facts, approach it correctly and lead the charge.

The new image shift
The sudden worldwide disappearance of major brands, and industrial icons will not only fuel the new creation of branding and imaging in Asia but dramatically increase the level of confidence necessary to take charge of the refined science of global image building strategies, once only reserved for the West. The meltdown of thousand plus monster brands will change the global landscape of world-class name identity holders. Asia will lead and it is time to study the region and plant new ideas. Monumental sea changes on HR training and internal placement issues are pending. Capture the essence and expand.

The new innovative nations
Nations with enforced education on the pragmatic side of life will have a chance to shine, people with new skills will have the new jobs and employers with global vision will lead for the new world, while the rest will stay very dry in very harsh surrounding. Global recession will force innovative thinking all around and to the farthest corners while ecommerce will get even more popular, deeper and powerful. Image and a new advance level of brand image marketing will become increasingly more important. Despite all the problems, there will be resilience and human skills will further sparkle, brighter new ideas will emerge while the world gets somewhat more open and wisely offers a mirror to each nation to correct itself. Change fast but stay on course, adopt world-class rules but stay very frugal and only go for the best in everything. The world overall has turned itself into a massive junkyard and therefore the true quality will always shine. So know the difference and make the difference, transform today and become an agent of change.

There are other mega trends and I would welcome your thoughts. nj@njabc.com
—————–
Naseem Javed, widely recognized a world-authority on corporate nomenclature and global image issues. Author of Naming for Power, Naseem introduced The Laws of Corporate Naming in 80s and currently is lecturing on global cyber branding and the new ICANN platform. nj@njabc.com

First of all I would like to reconsider the basic principles of strategy. A situation (e.g. the financial crisis) when the corporate environment can be described as very unstable, is not that new. During the so called “New economy” (do you remember?) the concepts and ideas of strategy it its broadest sense including strategic planning were treated as less important. There seem to be no time for strategic thinking; “business operations were started with an experimental approach in order to adapt them later on market conditions”. Another reason was that experience for such a situation of technological changes did not exist and therefore organizations did not know how to consider them. At first sight there seems to be some kind of conflict between strategic thinking and dynamic environments (?). But: The learning effects were that the future is still unpredictable - but a “try and error approach” did not fulfil the expectations as well. The loss of significance of experience in times of large changes does not mean that strategy is less important – indeed strategy has to be considered more seriously. Hence an analyzing walkthrough and long term planning are still worth to be considered.

Hence we have to understand the basic ideas of strategy. Since there is a number of definitions available, I selected one for the purpose of this post. There is a famous statement – some would argue it is one of the oldest statements in terms of strategy:

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” (chapter 3, axiom 18 (c. 490 B.C.). Sun Tzu (ca. 6th century BCE) Chinese general)

Taken into account this old military explanation of a strategy one can basically identify two modules for analyzing: the own organisation and the organisation of the others in the market place. The first module should be considered to recognize the internal resources and capabilities of the organisation. The latter focus can be extended into the environment, hence the competitors and other external factors are considered. Only after these analyses it becomes clear what level and type of competition exists and which general options for achieving a better position might exist. In principle the distinction of these two modules for analyzing can be found in modern definitions of strategy. Do you see any reason why this concept should not be valid in a dynamic environment?

Of course it is not recommended to tackle strategic planning without considering the (market) dynamics. Hence I would recommend considering a specific issue to improve your strategic planning process. In order to develop a successful and sustainable strategy, organizations should also apply an approach that considers the impact of so called secondary effects. Furthermore planned systems and structures should also be in place for tomorrow’s environment. AVILA et al (1995) recommend taking a dynamic view of the marketplace. Therefore organizations should anticipate competitive reactions and explicitly incorporate them into their strategic analysis. This dynamic view is in line with the recommendations by FARRELL and ASSOCIATES (1995) who stress that organizations’ strategy analysis should include products, markets and channels of both today and tomorrow.

Having this in mind I have to recommend to “think strategically” – in particular in those dynamic times.

Also the headline might be confusing. Enterprises, people, and governments have to manage the results of a large financial crisis that started as a crisis related to US subprime loans in 2007. A great year? A couple of days ago I discussed this issue with some friends and colleagues: “We” had to learn a lot: “to big to fail” – we do disbelieve in this statement in 2009. Zero-interest rates in Nippon only? – The Western civilization can have them (or try to use their hopefully stimulating effects), too. Negative growth rates in gross domestic products – not only an issue in text books.

In economic terms it was a very dramatic year.

But what did touch us really? In personal terms it was a very, very beautiful year – thanks to our “sweet sunshine” Stella Christin, who was born in 2008.

An ancient saying (I am not sure whether its origin is German) argues: A farmer who always looks back (on the groove behind him) when tilling his field is not able to keep straight on. In order to find the right path and to make straight grooves he needs to look forward.

In this spirit we wish our readers all the best for 2009, luck and success (both in private and professional life) and the courage, not to look back. May the New Year bring you and your loved ones joy and happiness.

Best wishes

Dagmar and Oliver