GOOD AT OPENING DOORS

Walt Disney Co. (DIS) can fire up one of Hollywood's best-oiled marketing machines to promote Hannah Montana or High School Musical. But when it comes to one of its latest profit centers, Steamboat Ventures, the media giant dials down the publicity. Located in a nondescript building two miles from Disney's Burbank headquarters, the $575million venture capital firm has quietly nurtured 25 startups in an aggressive effort to seed new ideas.

Taking cues from technology companies like Intel (INTC) and Qualcomm, Disney launched its own in-house VC fund in 2000 to find emerging entrepreneurs and products in media. It wasn't good timing. All around, dot-coms were imploding. The idea, though, was sound, and now other industry players are following Disney. Last year, NBC Universal started a similar vehicle, hiking its size from $250 million to $1 billion in April. "Media has become a hot area," says Paul Kedrosky, a senior fellow at think tank Kauffman Foundation. "Disney just got there first."

Named after Steamboat Willie, the 1928 Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat operates like a traditional VC fund. John Ball, who used to head up Disney's corporate development group, and his team scour conferences and work the phones, looking for media startups in the U.S. and China with promising products, technologies, or services into which they can plow $2 million to $15million. Once they decide to invest, a team member will often join the company's board or make hiring suggestions. After buying a piece of Move Networks last year, Steamboat pushed the streaming video firm to get a new chief financial officer, which it did.

By design, Steamboat keeps an arm's-length distance from its parent, maintaining its own legal and public-relations teams. Although Disney executives have oversight through a six-person committee that includes Disney CEO Robert A. Iger and CFO Thomas O. Staggs, they have yet to overrule an investment idea. "We decided that if we were going to get into the VC business, we had to do it in a way that looked, smelled, and behaved like a disciplined venture capitalist," says Ball. Translation: The team members, who get a percentage of the fund's returns, had to be free to swing for the fences without Disney second-guessing them.


Of course, being part of Disney has its benefits. Steamboat sometimes taps Disney executives to help scout investment opportunities. It called on folks from the theme parks' retail crew to help vet Pure Digital Technologies, which makes disposable digital cameras. Disney used its hit ABC (DIS) show Ugly Betty to promote the scrapbook site Scrapblog, a Steamboat investment. "They're really good at opening doors for you," says Michael Yavonditte, the former CEO of online ad company Quigo Technologies, another holding.

It hasn't always gone smoothly. The fund lost money on photo restoration service PhotoTLC, which shut down in March. In October the fund cut ties with Industrious Kid after a disagreement over how much merchandise its social-networking site, imbee.com, would sell; the tech firm didn't want to be too commercial.

So far, though, the hits appear to outnumber the misses. Disney says it made $37 million on an estimated $6 million investment in Quigo, which AOL bought in November. Steamboat also made money on a stake in flat-panel display maker Iridigm Display; (QCOM) the entire company was sold to Qualcomm (QCOM) for $188 million. Overall, Steamboat's first $75 million fund is expected to return at least $150 million, according to sources familiar with it. That's a middling return in the VC world but not bad for a fund started in the depths of the last bust. And as it often does with box-office hits, Disney has sequels in the works: It's pouring money into a $200 million U.S. fund and planning another focused on Europe.

Activity Based Performance Appraisal

In a typical corporate environment, one has to get things done through interaction with a number of people from various internal departments. Though your work depends on contributions from multiple heads, only a few directly report to you and many don't even indirectly report to you. Sometimes situations become tricky when pleading, badgering, threatening, cajoling, praying, etc. don't seem to work. The only respite in such situations is escalating the matter higher up with possible onset of another set of problems like departmental blame game resulting in even more friction in intra-department working relationship. Is there a way out from this dilemma?
Take an example of a Brand Manager. He has to interact with various internal departments like sales, R&D, finance, packaging, and purchase over which he has hardly any direct or indirect control. Yet the poor guy is expected to get things done (after all he is the CEO of his brand) by playing hard-ball or soft-ball with all these agencies. Sometimes things move smoothly while many times too much heat gets generated from friction. Personal egos emerge and personal agendas come. Yet, like Titan, he is expected to slaughter all obstacles. This poor guy's life would be much easier if the people he regularly interacts with have some proportion of their performance appraisal based on how they help this brand manager achieve his goal. What I am talking about is - Activity Based Performance Appraisal (ABPA). Wow, it seems I have coined something fancy and hopefully useful!
So, what happens in Activity Based Performance Appraisal? Let's see using the same Brand Manager example. For the sake of illustration, let's assume that six people are in play – Brand Manager, Packaging Development guy, R&D guy, Finance guy, Purchase guy, and sales guy. Typically, a brand manager would be handling one brand while guys from packaging development, R&D, Finance, Purchase, and Sales would be working on many brands (say, 5 brands).
In this example of Activity Based Performance Appraisal (ABPA), 50% performance appraisal of the Brand Manager would be done by the guys from packaging development, R&D, finance, purchase, and sales while the balance 50% would be appraised by his immediate boss. Similarly, 50% of performance appraisal of guys from packaging development, R&D, finance, purchase, and sales would be decided by various Brand Managers for whose brands they work in the ratio of time spent on each brand while balance 50% of performance appraisal would be done by their immediate supervisors based on quality of their work related to their technical area.
Of course this is just an idea. For making it work, it would need company specific judgement and refinement. But once implemented, Activity Based Performance Appraisal (ABPA) would ensure that no one takes the other for granted. Things would move smoothly and lesser degree of follow-up would be required to get things done. Democracy will come to organizations!

The Innovation Value Chain

In this article written by Morten T. Hansen and Julian Birkinshaw, it's depicted that how managing innovation is like a series of steps that need to be arduously followed.

Managers need to take an end-to-end view of their innovation efforts, pinpoint their particular weaknesses, and tailor innovation best practices as appropriate to address the defi ciencies.


The innovation value chain composes of three main phases of innovation:
Idea Generation (for ideas inside your unit; looking for them in other units; looking for them externally)
Conversion (selecting ideas; funding them;)
Diffusion (promoting and spreading ideas companywide).
Managers can pinpoint their weakest links and tailor innovation best practices appropriately to strengthen those links. Companies typically succumb to one of three broad "weakest-link" scenarios. They are idea poor, conversion poor, or diffusion poor.


Rarely do executives examine their company's innovativeness--the capacity to conceive, develop, roll out, and improve new offerings--as a whole.


Read the full article here. Do share your comments on innovation value chains of leading firms.

New Product Development

New product development is always a tricky business. A certain degree of uncertainty is intrinsic to the process. Some new products click while many fail. Yet, despite the uncertainty and risk, chances of success can be improved to a large extent with some commonsense.

I am often surprised to see that again and again new products fail in market not because of lack of resources to market it or the product's attributes and features, but due to marketer's inability to understand the consumer and her need - obvious or hidden. The problem starts with marketer's myopic thinking. The culprit is 'company centric' view of a consumer. This 'company centric' view of consumer comes in various flavours, all equally lethal for company's health and well being. Below are some samples:

Marketers try to make a product that they feel is best for the consumer and then go and try to sell it to them. Most of the time this approach fails because how a marketer views the needs of a consumer is often vastly different from how a consumer views her needs!



Marketers get a brain wave for a new product idea. They develop the product after investing lots of money and resources. Once the product is ready, they start searching for consumers who could buy it. It's like shooting arrows in a blind allay in the wild hope of hitting the bull's eye. Seldom have they succeeded.



Marketer sees a product at some far away land and feels that the product seems so nice. He comes with a sample and hands it over to his R&D people to develop a similar product for his market in his country. Once the product is ready, he starts searching for consumers to sell it and then finds that the overall market for the product is so low that there is no business sense to launch the product.
Successful product development has few basic features apart from the luck factor. From what I have observed in my career so far, great and hugely successful products are built around following pillars;

They are backward engineered from consumer. Hence, when developed they have a ready or at least, a latent market to tap.



They are simple from consumer's point of view and satisfy her needs in a simple way sans complication and at a price and experience that gives her maximum utility value and satisfaction.



They have a 'consumer centric' DNA.
New product development requires simplicity. It needs to put the consumer at the center of the gravity and then develop itself around the consumer. This is perhaps the only way I know to develop great products that are loved by consumers and are commercial success.

In the world of marketing, only those products end up with consumers which start with consumers.
Labels: Brand Management, Customer, Marketing

Leadership Mantra

"Leadership is action not position."


Noticed this beautiful quote on the wall of a multiplex in Mumbai. It succinctly sums up the essence of leadership.


Very often people complain that they were unable to bring about change because they didn't have the authority or the position to execute. Perhaps this is the biggest excuse for avoiding action. The truth is that anyone, irrespective of position and authority, can practice leadership. Leadership is all about action and action is neither big nor small. True leadership is about taking action for what one feels is right. It starts with self and gradually influences the surrounding. It's like an expanding circle, starting from the center (you) and gradually moving outward to increase the circle of influence to lead more and more people to desired action.


Mahatma Gandhi once said, "Be the change you want to see in the world." Great leadership always starts with personal leadership - action guided by a vision. Every action creates a ripple of change. More the action, the more ripples of change are formed to influence larger and larger mass of people. But everything starts with an action just like a long journey starts with a single step.


Even if you are a nobody, you must act. Embrace action to lead yourself to your vision. Sooner than later, the world will follow you. Lead the world by leading yourself through action.
Labels: Leadership

One Story; Multiple Brands

One Story; Multiple Brands
Everyday while driving to work, I get to see huge billboards advertising products and services on the road side. Today, a thought crossed my mind. Isn't the space too big for a brand? Annual lease for such billboards run in lakhs of rupees. Isn't it possible to have more than one brand in one hoarding in such a way that there is one story about two or three brands and not separate stories? It sounds absurd and blasphemous but may be there is some value in this madness.

Why the idea can work?
In a cluttered world, more than anything else brands get noticed by the simple yet engaging story they tell. It is all about the story your brand can tell, with or without the spoken words, in the few seconds of attention a consumer grants to open an opportunity window.

Unlike products stories are not physical. Stories are a communication medium; a kind of bridge between message sender and message receiver. They are all about integration of thoughts and ideas in a coherent way that conveys the intended message. Due to this nature of story, it is very much possible to weave one story on two or more brands without diluting the essence of any of the brands involved. It's all about right synchronization of the story and the participating brands.

The key to such experimentation is the degree of maturity level of respective marketing team and their advertising agency. The higher the level of maturity in understanding their own brand, better their expectation from one another in their marriage on billboards!

How it can work?
For this to become a reality, advertising agencies will have to show guts to experiment. It will not only take a high degree of creativity to execute a campaign but also persuasive powers to bring all the stakeholders together to solemnize the marriage of brands on the billboard. The problem is easier to solve if the advertising agency is common to all brands involved. If different agencies are involved it will become a tough nut to crack and will require a high level of collaboration and check on creative ego!

Absurd as it may sound, my gut feeling says that it can work, not only in outdoor media but, may be, in electronic and print media also if some out-of-the-box thinkers indulge in out-of-the-box creativity. Any takers?
Labels: Advertising, Brand Management, Marketing

NEW MARKETING AGENDA

The New Marketing Agenda
We have always been trained to hard-sell to customers through various marketing vehicles. This worked well in the old economy. But the big question is - will it work in web 2.0 world? I predict it will not. In the last 10 years, world has witnessed a shift from scattered islands of civilization to a highly sophisticated network of seamless human interaction. Suddenly, we are finding ourselves at the center of the universe with ability to tap into endless choices and resources. In this networked era, hard-sell sounds like a pre-historic concept. When the reach of customer was limited and choices few, hard-sell made sense. But with endless options to choose from and virtually entire universe to tap into, hard-sell makes no sense at all. Everyone is hard-selling and creating noise resulting in a cacophony which only irritates customers.


In this changed equation between customers and marketers, the rule of hard-sell is giving way to the rule of being found. The essence of this rule is to strive to generate that 'aha' moment we feel when we discover something amazing. The new marketing challenge is how to play the game of treasure hunt and help customers discover products and services and let them feel the 'aha' moment more often.

There are four factors driving this shift to the concept of findability.

Suspicious customers
Today's customer is suspicious. She thinks that all marketers are liars. From the time she wakes to the time she sleeps, she is bombarded with sales pitch to buy something. Naturally, not everything she is pitched with is good for her. Some may be good and some totally harmful. How can she trust? How can she decide? Suspicion, as a result, is at the highest level and every sales pitch is viewed with utter distrust. The problem is that the confidence level of customers in products or marketers is at its lowest ebb. The only way to engage such a customer, who is high on distrust and low on confidence, is to help her find what is best for her without active sales pitch or hard-sell.

Miracle of network
World has become a highly connected network, thanks to the internet. An average customer has access to information across culture and geography which her forefathers could not have even dreamt of. Network has jettisoned her to a world of plentitude where she may not like 99.9% of what she encounters. But 0.1% is something that can fill her with a sense of joy and satisfaction that only she can feel and understand. And, this joy of discovering that 0.1% is hardly related to satisfaction of her basic need. It is something higher. Her ecstasy is because of the satisfaction derived from her ability to serendipitously discover a fish, she could relate with, from a vast ocean. It’s a joy of discovery; no less than the joy of discovery Euclid felt in the bathtub which made him run on the street shouting "Eureka, eureka."

Virtual neighbour
Customers may love their neighbour or hate them but they indeed hear them. Since ages neighbours have played a role of adviser and influencer in purchase decision, apart from being the agents of "neighbour's envy, owner's pride" syndrome. Earlier, neighbour was a localized phenomenon confined to surrounding households. But now, thanks to the power of network, concept of neighbour has acquired a global status. Today, we have 'virtual neighbours'. These days customers find the neighbourly advice on internet all too often in the form of recommendations, user feedback, rants, blogs, discussion boards, groups, forums, et al. The challenge before marketers is to find ways to use the 'virtual neighbour' syndrome to their advantage.

I am what I am
Every customer is part of a larger group yet she is also an individual. The individual aspect is increasingly making its presence felt in decision making. It doesn't mean the end of mass production or mass marketing rather it means a new challenge for marketers to include individuality to mass marketing campaign. It's like designing a marketing program to appeal to the masses yet emanate some subtle individualistic theme with which the customer can connect. Here, the essence of the brand remains same though how an individual customer experiences it may be different. It's like conveying "there is something for everyone to relate to."

In light of the above, the new challenge before a marketer is to devise ways in which his brand can get discovered by the customers and in such circumstances that they feel an 'aha' moment and emotionally relate to it.

Building an "architecture of discovery" can be the solution to this challenge. But that is going to be the subject of another blogpost.
Labels: Brand Management, Future, Management, Marketing


posted by Mayank Krishna at 9:27 PM 2 comments