Circus Acrobat

These are people who are highly skilled and talented yet they are not valued much (in terms of what consumers are willing to pay to see their performance). I thought more the scarcity better the value, but these people are scarcely available (what these guys can do very few people in the world can copy) yet not valued high. Why?

I think the problem is positioning, instead of positioning themselves as mass entertainer available for large middle class population at 100 bucks a show, they should focus on positioning themselves as niche expensive entertainers for upper class audience performing only in private parties, thus becoming a symbol of esteem for upper class to have them perform in their parties. This also means that number of performance would be limited (not 3 per day but few per month) giving the Circus Acrobat time to hone their skills, making them even more scarce, valuable and full of variety.

And probably the acrobat should rename themselves from Circus Acrobat to Elite Acrobat as the word Circus is related to masses and easy affordability while the positioning we want is niche and expensive.

Even scarcity can benefit only if you know how to position it in your market place.

Don't worry but work through

It is natural to get worried when things don’t go the way we want; effective way to come out of the worry zone is to work through the problem than just over think, whine and regret about it. Simple way to start would be to write down the problem statement and possible reasons and resolutions we can think of. Now based on our day-to-day learning we should refine the reasons and resolutions which we wrote last, this way eventually we can have the best possible solution, deeper and better understanding of the given problem, and the ability to overcome it. 

Pizza Hut – Happy bell

If you are happy with the service and food, you ring the bell as you leave the restaurant but what if you are not happy, how would Pizza Hut know about it? Sure, there may be a customer feedback book kept at the POS station, you can ask for it, take a pen, think over, frame sentences and express your unhappiness. 

While the expression of happiness is so simple (just ring the bell and get off), why isn't there an equally easier way to express unhappiness about service or food? Like a red push button, which you can press before you leave if you are unhappy. 

By making the process simple Pizza Hut is at least getting the feedback in the first place, otherwise there may be customers just walking off swearing not to come-in again and Pizza Hut would be totally oblivious to it. My point is make the process of getting feedback as simple as possible especially when you are targeting mass consumers.

Creativity

You would have said to your team, be on-time, get your numbers right, be on top-of-things, know your customer better etc etc but how many times do you ask them to be creative? Creative in their approach, creative in solving problems? Seldom, I would guess.

Start embracing creativity; it can help your team get out of difficult situations; can help change status quo; bring in a better way of doing things; etc

Have you or your team done anything creative today? This week? This month? This year? Well may be we can start measuring too.

Simple Analytics

Though a lot of us know that data analytics can really help your decision making skills, a very few number of people use past data to derive helpful information (I am not talking about complex statistical methods or anything like that but simple ones).

I have seen companies going through the same set of problems again and again (like a vicious circle), in spite of having all the data in hand, which can help them with new insights, provide visibility into the root causes, help them setup relevant process etc but they fail to take advantage of data analytics.

If you have bunch of data, doesn't matter which departments (Sales, Marketing, Finance, Project Management), put them all in an excel sheet and try to view the data in different dimensions (sum, average, relative comparison, by category etc) I am sure you will get insights you didn’t expect. Stop the temptation to make quick calls and take some time to analyse the data you have.

Most companies would have the data to answer these questions, but they won’t know the answer for it because they miss simple analytics

1.       What % of your customers are costing you money than yielding you profits? Do you see trend?

2.       Top 5 reasons for your success last year, last quarter? Can you now enhance those further?

3.       Profits margins by product line? Is one eating into the other?

4.       Attrition % in your top 20% of employees vs middle 70% vs bottom 10%

5.   % of sales lost due to poor salesmanship, % lost on internal delays, % lost on price, % lost on incompetency  

6.       Top 3 reasons you lost to competition? Can you narrow the gap now?

7.       Top 3 reasons customer bought from you? Can you repeat now?

8.       Efficiency vs Effectiveness  (On-time vs Quality)

9.       Return on training investments? Quality of training? % relevance to business impact?

10.   Do you have a differentiator compared to competition? How much? 2 fold, 5 fold, 10 fold?

11.   Lead generation to conversion % company-level, service-wise, product-wise, geo-wise, resource-wise

12.   Company-wide process compliance %?

13.  % of revenue leakage across the board? Late entry into the market / inefficient process / execution challenges

Insights are right in front of you!! Try Simple Analytics!!!

Tiger Woods - Personal Credibility

Companies like Accenture, AT & T and Gillette never marketed Tiger woods' personal credibility (Tiger being good, honest, faithful, trustworthy etc), Accenture showed up Tiger's Photo and had a tagline..."High performance delivered", but when the scandal happened Accenture terminated the contract with Tiger.  He was still a top class player, aligning to the endorsement tagline, then why was his personal credibility given more weightage than his professional performance? Why can’t these two be mutually exclusive?

When someone starts performing well, gets to the top rank in sports (or any other field), we start liking them and like lead to trust invariably. So when someone slips on personal credibility (even though it may not impact their professional performance), trust is broken which leads to dislike. And if someone is disliked by masses; you don’t want your product or service to be endorsed by them. 

Worldview and Frame

Was reading all marketers are liars.....and I came across these two words, Worldview and Frames. It says if you can understand worldview (group of consumers having same belief about something) and frame your marketing strategy around it, that may help you get attention from consumers and possibly a sale.

And I see some of the marketers adopting this strategy

1.      Nihar oil ad says 2% of its revenue will be spent on children’s education – are they trying to target consumers who believe in charity?

2.      Red Label chai, tasty bhi aur healthy bhi – are they trying to embrace consumers who think tea is good for health or change the view of consumers who think tea is bad for health? Or both?

3.      Ad on Tata unpolished dal – are they trying to attack the worldview that polished dal is good?

4.      Flipkart, Ebay everybody seems to be talking about 100% guarantee on products – are they attacking the worldview that online buying is not safe?

5.      Small IT companies claim to their prospects about personalized attention – they are targeting the worldview (group of prospects having same view) that biggies cannot provide personalized attention to customers.

Interesting to see how companies are framing their marketing strategies around worldview.