Category Archives: Business Strategy

Tidal Waves

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Death of the caterpillar is the birth of a butterfly. Someone should mention this to the publishers of every major magazine. Pew Research, the busy bodies constantly reporting on what we people are doing, recently noted that magazine advertising rates are sinking faster than congressional approval ratings. Advertising pages in the top magazines have dropped an average of 18% in the last year, repeating an annual trend that began in 2008, two years before the original iPad was introduced. At this rate magazines will soon pay you to read them in the distant hope that advertisers will care. Every market changes, but some change very fast (the iron ore industry moves a bit more slowly than high tech and publishing). Established franchises can disappear when their markets rapidly change if they fail to see, accept and respond to the change. Microsoft has publicly confessed that they were slow to respond … Continue reading →

Analyze This

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Now is the time to get good at math, you crazy college kids. I was browsing an Accenture report concerning the state of the analytics market, the field where advanced math is applied to business problems. Accenture predicts a dearth of data wizards in the coming decade, which means rapid salary inflations for anyone with education or experience in statistics and research methodologies, and who can apply that knowledge to huge data repositories. Digitally divining new profitability will be in demand for all but the most mundane of industries, which makes a great fit for gigantic multi-national firms with ample budgets. Small players will benefit too, but differently. Like life, markets find a way. In the analytics market we see several common business models. Some vendors provide customized services to help enterprises gather, process and profit from data. Others provide both packaged and client-specific modeling. A few of the brave … Continue reading →

Bad News

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“Sometimes, I think my most important job as a CEO is to listen for bad news. If you don’t act on it, your people will eventually stop bringing bad news to your attention and that is the beginning of the end.” – Bill Gates, former world richest and Microsoft founder Someone should tell Gates that Ballmer is bad news. In Silicon Valley, “IPO” has been replaced by “pivot” as the most popular and over used word. Pivoting is changing the direction or even the product a company offers when it becomes painfully apparent that the original concept isn’t selling. Some pivots are minor, such as retargeting to new segments. Others are major, like when I assisted one post-IPO company transition from being a hardware vendor into a software supplier. Nearly every pivot is instigated by bad news. Something within the product-to-customer pipeline gets stuck, meeting friction or outright resistance. Sometimes … Continue reading →

Homicidal Salesmen

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Great leads keep sales people from poisoning your morning coffee. A set of recent surveys show that marketing folks are split in their lead generation intensions and how they measure campaign success. Approximately 50% of aggregated respondents use lead quality and quantity to gauge campaign effectiveness while 70% claim their content marketing efforts are all about generating a large quantity of leads. In other words, their actions and their measurement means are not aligned. This exposes an enduring truth about marketing and the divide between them and potential sales assassins. Some marketers think their job is to send as many leads to the sales team as possible, then let salesmen sort out the good from the bad from the oh so very ugly. This is way some sales people are two steps away from becoming serial killers, because they are overworked in the sorting processes and earning less per unit … Continue reading →

Apple Worms

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Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it is also the cheapest form of revenue. Apple has devolved from being a generator of disruptive innovations to instigator of imitations. This week’s iOS 7 preview is meeting with weird-not-rave reviews noting that the mobile operating system borrows design elements from Microsoft Vista and Google’s Android. The big hype is that the UI design is completely overhauled, meaning that Apple is now copying Microsoft’s mode of destroying what people have become accustomed to using, and by jettisoning that investment may also jettison customers. One commenter rudely said: “Say what you want about Apple products, but at least they always had their own vibe. The new update eliminates that. Now, iPhones and iPads will look like more expensive versions of their Android cousins. That green felt and wood aesthetic that Apple was so excited to discard at least allowed Apple to … Continue reading →

Pricing Pugilism

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I once raised the price of a product as more competitors entered our market and they were lowering their prices. My boss looked at me as if something were growing out of my head. The COO publicly second-guessed my decision for a year. Our competitors made it a selling point. Yet our top-line revenues rose, unit sales increased, and we drove two top competitors out of our market segments and one into bankruptcy. Pricing is mainly science, but it requires a bit of black art. Measuring the market and triangulating the three major pricing perspectives is essential to ballparking product pricing. But in ever shifting markets and especially in those where there are both young and mature players, pricing also requires thinking beyond mechanical elements and entering the mind of the market itself. While composing a customer satisfaction survey, I decided to add a pricing measurement. I did so mainly … Continue reading →

Neglectful Listening

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I got a great surprise after a poor response to a bad surprise. After updating Android on my cell phone, Google Maps began aborting. Being a reformed tech guru, I naturally wasted a lot of hours combing through message boards to determine if I could fix it myself instead of throwing the phone at my carrier and demanding that their technically suspect store clerks do the repairs. After a while it became clear that the bug was in a new graphics driver, and thus was caused not by my carrier, Google or even the handset maker. I penned a letter to the president of the carrier company, politely explaining that as the vendor and integrator of record, they needed to fix their products, regardless of who broke it. Realizing that the solution lay somewhere between Google, the chipset vendor, the handset maker and my carrier, I was not expecting quick … Continue reading →