Brand Management with a holistic approach is something I recommend all my colleagues and direct reports as a way of doing ‘business-as-usual’. The holistic approach allows you to really get involved in every element that impacts your strategy thus helping you plan ahead for ways to Improve the impact of the strategy on the business’ results.

One of the biggest issues business managers face is ‘breaking the silos within the organization‘. This is avoiding the vertical (upwards) authorization and communication of every piece of information before it can go to another department (silo). Instead of helping your organization be synergistic, this behavior delays the decision-making processes. Sometimes this behavior prevents businesses to take advantage of clear opportunities.

With business, just as with people “Every head is its own world”. Hence, every business allows different employees behavior throughout it’s culture. You can help your business break it’s silo power by doing brand management with a holistic approach, just allow yourself to reach over to other silos and ask for information. Remember to be clear with how the information will be handled and  with whom it will be shared.

How to create strategic plans with a holistic approach?

1. Simplicity is mandatory: If your strategy is to be executed, it needs to involve most employees. They need clear knowledge of their part on the plan and not being clear about each role’s impact on the strategy is always terrible for business.
   1. Understood: clear plans need to be understood by all it’s players.
   2. Remembered: helping key players remember the strategy will easy the execution.
   3. Acted Upon: being clear on ‘what-to-do’ and ‘what-not-to-do’ will avoid any wrong doings.
2. Strategy needs to create, capture and sustain economic value.
   1. Create value.
   2. Capture new consumer or increase consumer use.
   3. Focus on sustainability by reducing cost.
3. You don’t need a doctorate thesis:
   1. Clarify Key Drivers. In all business’ departments (not just marketing).
   2. Identify Critical Challenges: I use the critical-path method to ensure execution. This is a 4 or 5 list of obstacles.
   3. Determine which are your ‘must-win’ battles and plan ahead how to win! This plan will need resources (human, economic, etc).

Remember that my theme is dark? You can read this post with perfect contrast at Brand Management with a holistic approach

I recently read a fabulous article of HBR on Gift Economies that really depicts how social marketing really works and why brands fail obtaining Social Media ROI. This article motivated me to write about the human (consumer) psyche behind the Gift Economies behavior.

To summarize the HBR Article:

1. You can’t pay for a service with treats nor should you pay friend favors with money (Pizza & Beer as payment for helping move).
2. Typical economy focus on transactions whereas gift economy focus on relationships.
3. Economic transactions are done with currency while people use social acknowledgment as a social currency.
4. Social media are fundamentally gift economies.

Why is social media a Gift Economy?

When the vast majority of people surf the web, share articles and click on acknowledgment (“Likes”, “Shares”, “ReTweets”, “Re-Pins”) their on a friend’s-mode  rather than a Purchasing-mode. They’re really thinking that their network would either appreciate the creation, or curation of digital content OR simply show appreciation towards some “friends” for doing the same.

If you take this out of the digital world, would be like having a party where friends talk about anecdotes, share recipe creations, talk gossip, etc. The social acknowledgment would be a combination of laughing, cheering, praising and in case of men (toasting with a beer drink). Now imagine that in the middle of such event, one of the ‘early newcomers’ (that represents your brand interacting in the digital world), comes to the party and only tries to sell stuff… This individual will either be ignored, reproached or have awkward looks shoved at her (him) for bringing this attitude and probably will not be invited to the next gathering.

Can Gift Economy show me profit?

The same way the interaction between friends may accept selling events (such as Avon or Tupperware product sharing), you can sell your products via social media, however you should learn to balance your content with relevant consumer content.

How?

• If your brand represents a Law Firm, you should create, share and curate legal advice content.
• If your brand represents Nutritional Food Products, youshould create, share and curate nutritional advice content.
• It your brand represents Technical Repairs, you should create, share and curate Tech advice content.

I think you get what I’m getting at, but you should understand that the trick is in doing it for free. Your ROI will come afterwards when you become a ‘thought leader’ and people ask you advice on how to do something. You might as well slip in your content some advertisement, but be aware that if you try to over-do-it, you might loose advocates.

The above-mentioned-article also gives good advice:

1. Build relationships.
2. Earn status.
3. Create social currencies.

Related articles

• How to Thrive in Social Media’s Gift Economy – Mark Bonchek …
• The Trouble with Gift Economies

Remember that my theme is dark? You can read this post with perfect contrast at Social Media as a Gift Economy

During these times of Community Manager blooming everywhere, and this new career being very different to all, we have to help both Human Resources and Business Leaders understand the purpose of a Community Manager, hence here’s my contribution.

A community manager works online, so he should be an IT guy

I 100% disagree with this line of thinking!

Although community manager work online and have to be tech-savy, it is not entirely necessary that she knows how to write code. You’ll be able to find people that love technology almost in every industry (photografers that use photoshop for incredible things – I love this video, Ilustrators that create new wonderful things, Finance guys running custom-macros for excel, etc). If she loves what she’s doing, she’ll learn whatever she needs to become better.

The objective of a Community Manager:

The most important piece of information that business leaders have to understand is that having a community manager withing the organization is no longer a trend, nor just a very junior intern that is just talking BS with an average consumer. Real Community Managers have real impact on a companies reputation both online and offline, so I’ll recommend to you that you give as much though of this role as you give to any marketing, key account sales or finance managers.

Here’s a list of typical objectives that Community Managers have:

1. She should be the responsible for building and maintaining the brand’s reputation online.It certainly helps if she’s a thought leader and knows about social media tools and best practices (and keeps learning).
   1. To achieve the above, she will be responsible for developing social media strategies.
   2. co-create and publish brand-related content to create inbound leads. (you need a creative agency as well).
   3. She will find opportunities for proactive and reactive engagement with consumers.
      1. Either looking for a purchase opportunity.
      2. Or resolving any consumer issues or claims.

After reading the above list you will probably think, you already know this stuff and that I’m full of crap, but what you’re missing is thinking through what that means in terms of responsibility, decision making and empowerment (continue reading if you’re intrigued)

Who will the Community Manager become?

Your community manager will become:

• A Public Relations guy that helps spread business news to journalists and thought leaders.
• A Consumer Research guy that tries to understand what the consumer needs and wants.
• A Marketer to understand how to create more impact.
• And a very important role As Customer Service Manager.

Skills you need from a Community Manager:

• Know how to look for relevant informationWriting and Editing Skills (we will work a lot with consumers by writing stuff).
  • Blogs, tweets or comments appraising or complaining about a product.
  • Consumers interacting with products.
  • Potential consumers comparing or looking for products.
• Passionate
  • About your brand and your business.
  • About social media and it’s tech-related trends.
  • About consumer satisfaction.
• Resourceful
  • This type of guys that no-matter what it takes, they’ll find a solution.

What to avoid from a Community Manager:

• Pretentious or ‘know-it-all’ guys that will love to push his every idea to the consumer (whether the consumer likes it or not).
• Very doubtful or reactive people that will not seize an opportunity to create a special bond with a consumer.
• Shy people. In social media, you have to share on a personal level.
• ‘Speakers’ : you need someone that listens at least as well as she speaks and writes, after all, there’s a lot of research and monitoring going on in this role.

What the Community Manager needs from the organization:

• She will need business leaders confidence on what she’s doing and how’s she dealing with the consumer.
• She will need power to execute customer service actions to repair online claims immediately.
• She will need to be on-the-loop of every business news and NPDthe company has on it’s pipeline.She will need creative content from Marketing and Adv Agencies.
  • Avoiding not-knowing something about the company is a must.
  • Your community manager is the voice of your brand online.
  • You don’t get 24hrs to answer a difficult question. After 10 min it could be viral!.
• She will need the attention of your research dept (being one of them).

Recommendation:

Whenever is possible, try to fill the role with someone from inside, that know how to deal with stuff in your company and that you already know and have confidence on to manage this role. It would be easier for you, and better for the consumer.

Related articles

• How To Measure Your Community Managers Success(ignitesocialmedia.com)

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• 15 Signs of a Great Community Manager(adriandparker.wordpress.com)

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• Community Manager: When Are You A Real One?(mycmgr.com)

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Remember that my theme is dark? You can read this post with perfect contrast at Recruiting a Community Manager

This post goes in response of last week’s Business Case Interview post.

Every HR partner or Marketing interviewer for that matter will tell you that there are no right or wrong answers to a business case interview. This is true, they’re just looking at how does your mind work and try to predict your behavior in real business cases.

Having that said, I decided to share how I had answered the business case.

With so much information, it might be easy to miss the most important piece of data available: Fixed Purchase (and projected sales) cases at 100K. Missing this will probably lead you to do more analysis than is really needed. 100k cases = 1.200.000 bottles is about 0.14% of the projected UK’s wine market. I was able to calculate this by multiplying the population by segment to how many bottles per month they drank.

With these piece of information (and is very easily overlooked), you should be able to:

1. Determine that your marketing strategy should be one of a niche.
2. You can’t bring every wine type of every cellar as it would be too little of each.

If you missed this and as a lot of people would, start by looking at a versatile portfolio to ‘please’ everybody, you would use your time to juggle how to integrate an easy to drink red, wine and rosé. This will ultimately mean shared marketing efforts (loosing focus) and twice or trice as much finance work as you have to build more than one P&L from scratch.

As my volume projection is very little (a case’s limitation), and building a good image on North African Wines for the future is not a bad strategy I selected the best possible wine available for my strategy: La Pièce sous le Bois.

It’s easy to think about a marketing plan of a premium product, including targeted ads in magazines and tv, direct mailings, guerrilla marketing on wealthy neighborhoods and a spokesperson are just in my top-of-mind. With lots of history, AOC and Premier Cru medals supporting a premium image would not be a hassle.

Now that you know which wine, determine the price by building a P&L

Although you don’t have all the information available for building your P&L, using common sense will help you deliver and justify some great assumptions to your business case. You can either build your P&L from costs-up or from price down. I know i was given a table with current prices (but I don’t remember the numbers).

Although Marketeers are taught to build a P&L from the consumer-down, My experience tells me that being able to conjugate the business’ needs with the consumer wants is very important, hence the use of scenarios.

Last Word of advice:

Remember that my theme is dark? You can read this post with perfect contrast at Answers to Business Case Interview

Is Kickstater.com funding creative projects or scammers?

kickstarter.com

Today, I was reading an article regarding Seth Godin’s latest venture that involves a kickstarter.com project about a new book called “The Icarus Deception” on which sounds very seth-like (you’ll either love it or despise it). It accepts pledges until Jul 17^th so hurry if you’re interested.

This article of course is named “Is Kickstater.com funding creative projects or scammers?” because of legitimate projects such as the above, but after pledging to the Icarus Deception, I kept surfing Kickstartes’ website and found a great scam.

This irritates me because while being a great supporter of new, innovative, ground-breaking ideas, I hate to see how some smart-asses (and PLEASE pardon my English) are scamming a community by using them as a pre-sale retail store instead of a real new product development.

About the questioned product:

The Pocket TV: Makes any TV a Smart TV in short is a USB that turns your not-so-smart-TV into a very-smart-TV through the use of an Android 4.0 mini PC. Here’s the project’s video:

The product from the picture on my right is

MK802 Mini PC Android4

an MK802 Mini PC Android 4.0 dongle, IPTV / smart android box with 1GB of RAM (if you read the original project they were selling the 512MB, now their 7^th update was to tell people they could get a 1GB version – No wonder!).

More curiously is the remote/keyboard that they’re using that resembles very much to this “4 in 1 iPazzPort 2.4GHz Mini Fly Air Mouse Wireless Keyboard”. The first product costs about $70 and the second about $37 (at the time of writing this post) equaling $107. Both manufacturers actually offer scale (bulk) prices, so if you would order, let’s say 2.400 units* you should have a very interesting saving.

wireless keyboard

Big difference: TIME

You probably have heard that time is money, but think about it… they’ll have for 90 days $331,588 to invest in a bond or something and make at least a couple of thousands extra on top of the actual difference with alibaba prices ($68.000) plus the scale prices discounts. So they’re at least gaining $70.000 dollars in 3 months’ time from the scam and during this time, the product might even drop prices on the market as new technologies arise.

What frustrate me about this the most is not that it didn’t occur to me, but that when the people learns about this, they’ll blame the unscrupulous marketing stunts for the scam and taint all the profession and its members (including me) for unethical behavior.

Conclusion

Although Marketing a products is about building awareness , reputation and selling stuff, the profession at first doesn’t differentiates between right and wrong-doing, hence it’s the consumers’ responsibility to research, evaluate and trust both the brand and its reputation.

A quick search of either the concept would have led to my findings or a background check on the company (Infinitec) would have led to their previous work’s review (Infinitec Infinite USB Memory Drive) as “we can’t recommend the IUM unless you’re fond of pain.”

Remember that my theme is dark? You can read this post with perfect contrast at Is Kickstater.com funding creative projects or scammers?

One of the things you have to prepare to while being unemployed is on resolving a Business Case Interview. This is a ‘typical’ business situation that requires a lot of analysis and a justified proposal to demonstrate both you analytical strengths and your presentation skills.

I’ve been silly not to write more like and I promise that as I come across more like this, I will keep posting them.  I know I’ve search for them to prepare for an interview and almost always failed to acquire what I was looking for.

Bellow, is a Business Case Interview that I came upon some weeks back at an Interview in London’s J&J HQ

Obviously I wasn’t able to persuade my interviewer to handle me a copy of the business case, but as I rode my train back to the airport, I wrote on a notebook what I remembered from the case. So, without further a due, here is my first

Business Case Interview

You represent a very important distributor of liquors in England and are required to assess the company on a new opportunity to represent one or many new wine brands from northern Africa. This region accounts for very little presence in UK’s marketplace but globally are beginning to grow rapidly.

You are presented with 5 wine options from different cellars:

(names are for reference but not represent reality).

La Pièce sous le Bois

• Very rare red wine with great body.

  

  Cabernet Sauvignon

• Hand crafted through a very traditional production process and French oak.
• Winery with lots of local history and proud owner of a Premier Cru** AOC*.
• The wine is made from Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah.
• Price: 11£/case

Champ Chevrey

• Very easy to drink red wine
• Produced by a combination of traditional methods and automatized equipment.
• Very little history to account, offers wine through their brand or via Private Label.
• The wine is made principally from strains Carmenere and Merlot and very little from other unknown strains.
• Price: 10£/case

Côte de Fontenay

• Very easy to drink white wine
• Produced by a combination of traditional methods and automatized equipment.
• Very little history to account, offers wine through their brand or via Private Label.
• The wine is made principally from Sauvignon Blanc.
• Price: 8£/case

Montcuchot

• Very easy to drink rosé wine.

  

  Sauvignon Blanc 

• Produced by a much automatized process.
• Very little history to account but owns AOC*
• Price: 8£/case

Pointes d’Angles

• Very easy to drink red wine.
• Produced by a much automatized process.
• Some history to account for, good reputation and AOC*.
• The wine is made principally from Cabernet Sauvignon.
• Price: 8£/case

* AOC stands for Appellation d’origine controlee or “controlled designation of origin”.

** Premier Cru: wine term corresponding to “First Growth” represents the 2^nd highest classification level after Grand Cru.

Shipping and Customs

Every winery offers 12 bottle cases and are brought to UK’s ports with a charge of 2£/case. To comply with legal requirements, custom duty are 15.6£/case.

Consumer Research:

Consumer Research Figures

Problem to resolve:

If you know that you can place 100K cases and you have the following fixed costs:

• 80 K£ for labeling
• 180 K£ for sales force wages
• 90 K£ for secondary distribution
• VAT of 8%

1. Design the purchase strategy by cellars, wine strains and price.
2. Identify the marketing budget you’ll require and how will you spend it.
3. Build a P&L of your proposal and estate the year’s end profit.

Feel free to comment how you would answer such a case! thanks!

Remember that my theme is dark? You can read this post with perfect contrast at Business Case Interview

Image via CrunchBase

If you still wander if an Internet campaign is suitable for your brand, or if social marketing is a bubble, don’t read this article. For me it’s incredible that there are people that still think that “you have to go to internet”. This article called App Marketing is about using Apps to build upon your brand, not about selling Apps.

Smart phones are very common in our marketplaces with up to 54% penetration in Singapore,  35% in Spain and the US or about 30% in UK. (source: communities-dominate.blogs.com) and NielsenWire shows the correlation between age and income to Smartphone penetration (Younger or Wealthier Population have more Penetration). There are several different brands of Smart Phones including Apple’s, Blackberry’s, Nokia’s & Android’s systems and according to the leading manufacturer (Apple):

15 billion apps have been downloaded from its revolutionary App Store™ by the more than 200 million iPhone®, iPad® and iPod touch® users worldwide. The App Store offers more than 425,000 apps and developers have created an incredible array of over 100,000 native iPad apps

Hey, and the above is just statistics from Apple iOS, and Apple is not even the leading OS as Google’s Android holds 50.1% in Feb-12 while Apple holds 30.2% and RIM just 13.4% (source: ComScore).

Is your Brand on your consumer’s SmartPhone? What are you waiting for?

Angry Birds (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s no news that SmartPhones serve as a gaming platform for it’s consumers, and games such as Angry Birds are so BIG that they’ve come to the real world with dolls, movies and even a theme park. But SmartPhones are also used to search for addresses, listen to music, upload files to a cloud and be social. Here’s a TIME’s article on the 50 Best iPhone Apps of 2011.

Smart phone consumer connect more & more through their phones but the actual “physical” space (in terms of pixels) that are shown to them are very limited so reaching your consumer through their social accounts is probably not enough, advertising is probably more difficult than ever and impacting them will become more & more difficult.

If you could manage to have your brand on your consumer’s devices and engage with them exclusively for over 1.5 straight hours twice a week would you think of an opportunity?

Remember that my theme is dark? You can read this post with perfect contrast at App Marketing

I’ve worked with people with different backgrounds (Latin Americans *from Mexico to Argentina*, Western Europeans *From Portugal to The Netherlands* and some Americans) and all have shown the same negative reaction towards leadership without background.  According to my observation, people like an expert of a given subject to direct and manage; hence a vertical career is admired.

The negative reactions appear when employees don’t understand decision taken. So the difference between a good leader and a lame one is not the former experience she has, but the ability to listen, understand and talk-through her team in the direction of a given goal. And I’m not saying justify. A manager should need not justify to her reports, but help them understand why a certain decision was taken (keeping them in the loop).

Donald Trump yells ‘you’re fired’ (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

It doesn’t matter if the boss has no experience in a specific area or she’s a guru. In either case she might be great leader or not. The latter (Guru), is a great source of knowledge and if you’re very junior you should try to absorb as much as possible. The other (no-experience boss) might be more ‘open-minded’ than a Guru, hence bringing fresh ideas to the table. However what separates good leadership is the ability to listen, understand and motivate her team.

Having dealt with both types, I must admit that I have challenged the perception of an experience-lacking manager by telling my colleagues and reports to give the boss a chance (the benefit of the doubt) when not taking the expected action because her opinion might have a component that we don’t understand. Often if we ask the proper questions we can learn something and help.

However I’m not a suck-up that is always defending higher power. In fact, I’m unemployed among other things because I challenged my boss’ decisions after my team gave clear recommendation (with proper background) of action towards avoiding huge expenses and seeing that boss stalling. My team and I thought he was looking for responsible (other than himself) and so I felt responsible to ask what was taking so long.

I was right, and he did found a responsible (ME). A couple of weeks later I was asked to ‘stand-up’ against the big fish (the country manager) and justify the taken actions, my boss acted as a shooter on the squad wall and asked me the same questions I’ve been asking him for the past months and unprepared to this ambush, I defended my reports (that did what both my boss and I told them) and assume some of the responsibility. It’s a shame that someone with 10 years’ experience in the area, good credibility and the decision maker of this project going wrong pointing the finger towards newly come manager (6- months) to save his ass.

Bottom line:

If you are a boss, listen to your team, ask the proper questions *start with why* and keep your team on the loop.

If you are the report, ask for feedback, accept your boss’ experience and open your mind.

Related articles

• To Build Trust, Competence is Key (blogs.hbr.org)
• Why “Big Picture Only” Bosses Are The Worst (fastcompany.com)
• Manager vs. Leader (leanlogisticsblog.leancor.com)

Remember that my theme is dark? You can read this post with perfect contrast at Knowledge as the foundation of Leadership

I’m not quite sure when, but very recently Facebook announced that from March 30th all Facebook Pages will migrate to Timeline feature. With this announcement some innovation adverse people are blogging about how to stay with the old look, some are focusing on the very basic (such as the Cover Image or how to highlight a post for 7 days or even the best image size for new uploads), but what happens with the old stuff?

Apparently the brands are focusing so much on other things that are wasting precious space and sometimes image (in terms of branding) that to me is very valuable. With Timeline, your tabs can use up to 810px (from 520px) almost 300 extra pixels that even the most innovative companies are filling with white. Here are some examples:

PEPSI

COCA COLA    

WALGREENS

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

I’m really intrigued as to wether this is the result of poor community management, lack of programming resources, disinterest or unawareness of the possibilities. I know, big companies have standards and when the rules change, there is a lot of bureaucratic to handle before an update on this policies is agreed; but in a marketplace as competitive as the FMCG or Retail’s for that matter, keeping your image and brand awareness to the fullest should be more important than a promotion.

Now, I know that I’m a poor website writer (I’m doing this while someone recruits me for my worth), but I have updated (alone) and with limited resources my managed facebook pages. Here is an example:

MILLES

Truth be told, this is REALLY easy to do, and with a big agency behind it should be live by now.

But what really is incredible is that some brands don’t even cover the very basics:

PEPSI HOME PAGE

 What is a Huge company such as Pepsi forgeting to change the images on the TABS? How about using some photos of the X-Factor o anything that makes the BASICS look good?

Although I’m a fan of strategic thinking, “GOD (or the devil) is in the details”

PS: If you go right now to milles fanpage we haven’t moved to Timeline not because we are not prepared, but because we want to keep using the FanGate feature (directing all incoming users) until possible.

Remember that my theme is dark? You can read this post with perfect contrast at Time to update your facebook timeline tabs!

A lot of guru’s are speaking a about winning in Social Media. They talk about earning fans or followers (which can be bought) or about reaching virality (being a TT on Twitter). But what really matters in social media is engaging with your consumers.

If your brand (or your community manager) is able to find the brand’s Influencers (key people often considered referents in your field [and every field has its distinct influencers] who command the respect of the online community) you should be able to have a conversation with them, building credibility and respect. Who know, if you’re good at it the might become evangelists.

Here’s a great example of Social Marketing. Airlines, Restaurants, Coffee Shops, Any business with passing customers should watch and learn.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqHWAE8GDEk

And as a Bonus Track, Here’s another great Marketing Stunt, that can go viral and generate a lot of buzz (By KLM), mixing ‘massive’ stunts with one-to-one conversations is definitely the strategy for KLM.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9A-WiHr59Q

Remember that my theme is dark? You can read this post with perfect contrast at Social Marketing – Great Example