Drilling for Diamonds

Who would have thought that Mattel’s Barbie would ever fall from her throne. Since its launch in 1959, Barbie has sold over 1 billion dolls.

Then along came the Bratz doll line. Launched in 2001 by MGA Entertainment, the Bratz targeted precocious older girls who had grown tired of Barbie.

The Bratz look like street-savvy teenagers younger girls like to copy. Bratz has become the top lifestyle brand for girls aged 7 to 14.

Popularity: 7% [?]

My daughter Amy emailed me this joke:

This is how business is done!

Father: “I want you to marry a girl of my choice.”
Son: “I will choose my own bride!”
Father: “But the girl is Bill Gates’ daughter.”
Son: “Well in that case…ok”

Next — Father approaches Bill Gates

Father: “I have a husband for your daughter.”
Bill Gates: “But my daughter is too young to marry!”
Father: “But this young man is a vice-president of the World Bank.”
Bill Gates: “Ah, in that case…ok”

Finally Father goes to see the President of the World Bank.

Father: “I have a young man to be recommended as a vice-president.”
President: “But I already have more vice-presidents than I need!”
Father: “But this young man is Bill Gates’ son-in-law.”
President: “Ah, in that case…ok”

Moral: Even if you have nothing, you can get anything if you know how to negotiate and sequence your offer in the right order.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Read this extract from the introduction of a must-read new book The Three Tensions by Dominic Dodd and Ken Favaro.

“A manager argued that he could either increase his business unit’s margins or its sales, but not both.

His chief executive reminded him of the time when people lived in mud huts and faced the start choice between light and heat: punch a hole in the side of your hut and let the daylight in, but also the cold; block up all the openings and you stay warm, but sit in the darkness.

The invention of glass made it possible to overcome the dilemma — to let in the light, but not the cold.

How then, he asked the sales manager, will you resolve your dilemma between no sales growth and no margin improvement?

Where is the glass?”

The challenge for marketers is not to become more profitable or to find new sources of revenue. The challenge is how to do both at the same time.

Popularity: 10% [?]

What makes an entrepreneurial venture successful?

In a recent survey, fourteen venture capitalists picked marketing as the key business function - above technical superiority and product innovation.

The venture capitalists, who have backed over 200 ventures, ranked marketing 6.7 on a 7.0 scale.

These same venture capitalists said 60% of venture failures are caused by poor pre-venture marketing analysis.

Popularity: 9% [?]

It doesn’t take long for businesses who fail to deliver what customers want to suffer disastrous decline.

Remember when Japan was the world’s exemplar for business success? in 1994, Japan had 149 corporations listed in the Global 500 with $38 trillion in total sales. Then, sales plummeted to 82 corporations with $2.2 trillion in sales in 2004.

Failure to adapt to changing markets spells disastrous for firms and nations alike.

Popularity: 8% [?]

What is your value proposition?

Bill Wilmot, the co-author of Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want has an elegant definition which can be reduced to NABC.

A value proposition if the statement of an important unmet customer and/or market opportunity
(Need)
that proposes the way to use resources
(Approach)
to deliver superior customer value
(Benefits per costs)
when compared to others in the market
(Competition and/or alternatives)

NABC is a simple but elegant formula. I like the way it starts with the market need. Wilmot’s NABC definition is practical and insightful.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Leading competitive intelligence consultant, Leonard Fuld believes FORTUNE 1,000 companies together spend over $500 million on competitive intelligence each year.

When I first wrote about Fulds pioneering work on competitive intelligence in a 1990 book on negotiation, competitive intelligence was a fledging industry. Today, many major companies appear to have special units devoted to gathering competitive intelligence.

The gathering of competitive intelligence is perfectly legal, if confined to analyzing public information.

Fuld predicts that the budget for competitive intelligence will balloon to $10 billion by 2010.

How much time and money are you spending on systematically gathering competitive intelligence? How much are your competitors spending on analyzing the information you release to the market place?

Popularity: 8% [?]

The most dangerous C-level job in business according to Fast Company is the Chief Marketing Officer.

A who’s who of Corporate America has watched their CMO depart within the last 12 months. The exit list includes Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Gap.

Research by executive-search firm SpencerStuart shows the average work stay for a CMO at a top 100 consumer branded company is averaged at just 23 months. By contrast, CEO’s hold onto their jobs for 54 months.

CMO’s are soft targets. Everyone seems to know why marketing works - or more particularly, why it doesn’t work. CMO’s might enjoy better job security if they knew the precise costs of acquiring, holding onto and growing each customer.

Do your marketing measures allow you to precisely calculate what it costs to:

1. Acquire a new customer?
2. Retain an existing customer?
3. Up-sell more products to a customer?

If you’re a CMO and can’t calculate these three figures, then you better start.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Listen here to my interview on artful persuasion, with Chris Laidlaw on Sunday, 3 June 2007.

Popularity: 11% [?]