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The Chief Outsider
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Recent Posts
Does Your Contracting Pipeline Live in the Owner’s Head?
Relationships matter in construction, and most subcontractors have good ones. The owner or president carries the key customer relationships, and the project managers carry everything else. That arrangement can work well. It is also fragile. In our last post, we asked whether you know by name who owns each strategic account. This one looks at what happens when the answer is the owner.
New Challenger Brand Tees Off with Hilarious Video
Thu, Apr 7, 2016 — As they say, “Dumb as a fox.” Attitudinally provocative “Challenger” brands have long been around for decades using contrarian positioning (The UNCOLA!) to separate them from the more normative incumbent brands in a given category. But in recent years with disruption strategy almost becoming the expected method of launching every new product, we seem to see more brands becoming the champions for disaffected consumer segments by promising a substantially better product or deal and by attacking the category leader with advertising featuring a loud, irreverent or downright outrageous brand persona. More or less censorship free online media have also opened the door to the use of profanity and lowbrow bathroom humor by some Challenger brands to create even greater juxtaposition between the new upstarts and the brands they mean to steal share from.
Creating a Logo 101
Tue, Apr 5, 2016 — Branding began with cattle during the Industrial Revolution. The more goods people produced, the more they needed a simple way to identify ownership. If you knew that John Smith had the best cows in the village, how could you find his cuts at the city butcher? How to know which cow was which, who it belonged to, how it was raised? People started branding cows with paint or pine tar or, yikes, hot iron. Perhaps not a cheery picture, but the most memorable logos of today could be easily converted to a traditional cow brand. Nike. Target. NBC. McDonalds. Playboy. What do all of them have in common? They are very simple and they use primary colors.
What Nemo Knows About Organizational Success: Six Steps to Mastering the Power of Team Alignment
Mon, Apr 4, 2016 — I keep thinking about the pivotal scene in Finding Nemo when the school of fish is caught in a big, menacing net. Nemo takes the helm, shouts “Swim down!” and the combined downward force of the school detaches the net from the ship. Because of Nemo’s quick thinking, and the school’s trust in his plan, they’re able to escape out of the net to fish freedom. If just a few of his schoolmates had traveled upward or sideways – they’d be fish sticks.
Product > Market Alignment: The True Sign of a Startup Unicorn?
Tue, Mar 29, 2016 — For those of us knee-deep in the startup world, we’re inundated by Unicorn noise – first their rise and more recently their fall (or, at least their right-sizing). Any number of factors have played into this trajectory: from FOMO venture capital activity that drove unsustainable valuations, to startup growth hacking techniques that indicate initial hyper-scaling, but often run out of steam - exposing the startup’s gap between product and promise.
Your Brand Promise RX: The Keys to Delivering an Amazing Customer Experience
Mon, Mar 21, 2016 — In late December, a young mother with a cranky infant in tow boarded a Southwest Airlines flight headed for Islip, New York. It was her son’s first-ever trip, and the plane ride home was the only time he’d been awake on an airplane. As soon as they boarded, a confident, caring flight attendant scooped up the anxious mother and baby, carried their bags, helped them find an aisle with an empty seat, and even cooed the little boy in her arms during the flight.
Pricing “SaaS”: What’s the Right Price for Your Service?
Sat, Mar 19, 2016 — The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model is flourishing, expanding, and boldly going where it’s never gone before—how do you know the right price for your service? The pay-as-you-use model that is widely employed by SaaS offerings has even propagated into areas like manufacturing, where such “value-in-use” strategies are gaining wide acceptance. For companies trying to ensure that this model is as remunerative as it can be, a SaaS offering has to ensure a properly balanced pricing structure. Furthermore, which attributes of our offerings support the highest value needs from our prospects, and how can we look at historical data to inform this pricing model?
Big-Brand B2B Executives Finally Opt In to Email Marketing
Thu, Feb 25, 2016 — It’s no secret that email marketing is a top driver for sales and customer growth. A vast majority of marketers say that it is their primary channel for lead generation. And despite the many claims that “email marketing is dead,” it continues to not only dominate, but also reinvent itself as new tools and technologies allow it to remain more relevant than ever for businesses of all sizes. Even more surprising is the fact that many large business-to-business (B2B) brands have not yet tapped into the potential of email marketing. From what we’ve experienced across our client base, some of these firms are finally turning to email to breathe new life into their marketing initiatives. However, what these newcomers are finding is that breaking into the “king” of all marketing channels is way more complicated than it seems on the surface. And that may be one factor that keeps some businesses from getting started.
Marketing…the big “M” and the little “m”
Mon, Feb 22, 2016 — When it comes to understanding the function of Marketing, there are often common words that enter the equation like “website”, “brochures”, or “sales collateral”. While these are tools that typically originate from the Marketing department, they only scratch the surface of what Marketing encompasses in total. A wise person once characterized the poorly understood function in the terms of “there is a big 'M' in Marketing and a little 'm'”. Wow, that is profound. So, what do we mean when we say the big “M” of Marketing?
How to Brand the Service Component of your Business
Thu, Jan 28, 2016 — In the two previous posts I discussed the concept of branding a service delivery process and some of the benefits of pursuing this approach. Then I offered some real-life examples of effective service and discovery process brands. In this final installment, I will present steps to guide you as you create your own service process brand. In the simplest terms, it means standardizing and naming an existing process, then promoting it to customers.