Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Everyone Can Have Good Brand Positioning

Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management professor Philip Kotler made a career breaking down brand management into its component parts. His 2003 book Marketing Management defines brand positioning as the act of designing the company’s offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the mind of the target market. Brand positioning is at the intersection of brand and product, and business owners must focus on both.

Why Companies Should Lead With Brand Positioning 

Simply changing an offering or releasing a new one may not be enough to affect purchase behavior because the customer has no reason to trust you. “Many companies put the product at the center of their organization. They lead with a laundry list of product features, and if the company has more than one category or wishes to expand, it can be tough to get customers to shop the whole brand,” says Sunny Bonnell, co-founder of branding agency Motto and co-author of Rare Breed: A Guide to Success for the Defiant, Dangerous and Different.

"Plus," Bonnell continues, "when product overshadows brand, the company is always at the mercy of the market.” By also considering the mark a brand’s image makes on a customer’s heart, effective brand positioning primes customers to view new and improved products as favorable and credible choices. “A better bet is to put your brand’s point of view at the center of the business. The brand is the emotional hook that ties everything together, superseding the product," she adds. 

“Brand positioning is essential because it captures your unique proposition, value statement, essence, aesthetics and appeal,” says Liem Le, CEO and founder of virtual community Little Lion. “Often, it may be your first interaction with the customer, and you want to make an ‘amazing, I can't look away and want to hear more’ first impression. It may be your only chance to ‘pitch’ your audience, so you can’t skimp.”

“Brand positioning that means something special and appeals to your audience creates tremendous value and can work wonders for your bottom line, employee morale and customer loyalty,” says Bonnell. “Strong brands are like a magnetic force. They draw people in and become revenue-generating machines, yielding benefits like ability to charge a premium.”

When they feel connected and close to a brand, customers are also more likely to accept product mishaps and foibles. This is why some argue that you perfect your brand positioning before you adjust an existing product or experiment with a new one.

For the rest of the piece, head over to the AMEX Business site.

Could the Pandemic Be a Springboard to Sustainability?

Large companies and organizations have been making good on their recent commitment to corporate citizenship by dedicating resources to help the globe overcome some of its most pressing challenges. Sustainability has been among these key areas of focus, leading to environmentally friendly corporate initiatives from Apple’s commitment to closed-loop supply chains to the development of Patagonia’s next-generation responsible business venture capital arm.

While it’s crucial for these organizations to make top-down commitments to sustainability, business units, groups and even individual teams within them can take their own steps in playing a key role in sustainability in the new normal.  

1. Commit your team to your corporate purpose.

At the corporate level, a clear statement of purpose from executive leadership has become a critical tool in supporting sustainability. The same concept can be borrowed by unit and team managers to empower their employees to find ways to take action.

The process of defining purpose makes it clear that businesses exist to serve society and not the other way around, and the link to sustainability becomes clear,” University of Pittsburgh School of Business professor CB Bhattacharya wrote in a May 2020 article for the World Economic Forum.  

In the pandemic era, Bhattacharya recommends that companies bring their purpose to life by pursuing concrete sustainability goals and focusing on a few material areas. Unit managers can follow up on that commitment in their daily work by asking themselves questions such as: What new sustainability developments will affect demand for our products and the supply of our raw materials? What type of sustainability do stakeholders expect from our part of the business?' By adding a sustainability variable to the business unit decision-making equation, middle management can help make good on big corporate promises. 

One way to do this is to evaluate your immediate team’s carbon footprint. Although you might have policies in place already, application may need some ground-level execution. You can start by examining how your electricity, gas emissions output, and water intake were measured in the past, and consider re-measuring with a new reduction target in mind.

Encourage your senior leaders to reiterate your corporate purpose, sustainability objectives and reduction targets to all constituents, but especially the employees who will be implementing them "on the ground." 

2. Empower your employees.

Getting employees buy in to sustainability measures is critical. Motivate your employees—and build enthusiasm for your efforts—by explaining why sustainable business practices benefit everyone. Tell them how they can make a difference by incorporating these new processes and tools into daily operations.

Empowering your team requires stepped up communication. It's something the leadership team at major home health product manufacturer Sunstar learned first-hand during COVID-19. 

“The pandemic developed with unprecedented speed, and the amount of information created confusion,” says Julia Linz, senior director of HR at Sunstar. “We tried to provide regular and clear communication to our employees—especially when conveying tough messages.”

Sunstar set up a dedicated online channel to share best practices on sustainable business practices, remote work, and other timely topics, to post updates on health authority regulations, and to provide a space for confidential questions. Company leaders have also learned to seek multiple perspectives on managing the crisis from local market leaders and departmental managers.

Encourage employees or teammates to brainstorm and implement new ideas that serve customers in a more environmentally friendly manner or generally make the office a greener space. A few examples employees can take ownership over include embracing electronic file sharing to reduce paper and ink cartridge use, using reusable coffee mugs and water bottles, or even bringing plants into their workspaces to recycle stale air. They may seem like minor contributions, but if enough employees across the globe deploy them together, the benefits can add up.  

Fracture, a medium-sized company in the Inc. 5000, allows customers to upload digital photos, have them printed on durable glass, and shipped in an eco-friendly, ready-to-mount package. According to CEO Abhi Lokesh, the organization’s employees are researching ways to offset the company’s carbon footprint from raw material shipments and receivables. “Fracture is also working with We Are Neutral, a partner helping us neutralize carbon emissions through offsetting and reduction initiatives like tree planting,” he says.

For the rest of the article, check out AMEX Business.

Managing Your Data in the New Normal

Amid social distancing, stringent lockdowns and a second surge of COVID-19 cases, business owners can no longer rely on splashy launch events, mom-and-pop friendliness or a dynamite location to build customer relationships. Today, every business is competing for eyeballs and purchases made on digital channels.

Data-based approaches can help you stand out more effectively.

To successfully stand out, you’ll need to understand data optimization basics, including gathering customer information, responding to real-time feedback and reducing inefficiencies that lose revenue and diminish trust.

Gathering Customer Information

Data optimization commonly refers to collecting all the information at your disposal and maximizing the speed and comprehensiveness with which business-critical information can be extracted and analyzed.

If you have a website, this could be the most sensible place to start data collection. You likely have a handle on how many people are visiting and what pages they’re viewing, but are you using an analytics tool to assess where they are coming from, the content they spend the most time reading, and which page prompts them to leave? Do you know where your most active visitors live, how old they are and what products or services they most frequently purchase? These questions form the foundation of your business, and therefore are critical to your data-optimization efforts.

Feedback forms or emails are essential, but in today’s climate you’ll likely want to be more proactive about seeking out qualitative information about how customers value your offerings and their experience with your organization.

You don’t have to invest in a pricey or unwieldy customer survey to do this. Instead, try pushing a few questions to targeted visitors based on the defining characteristics above. You can also use analytics features embedded in the big four social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter) to ascertain what people are saying and the general sentiment around your brand.

If your customer relationships are rich with engagement points, CRM software can be a wise investment. These tools help monitor your interaction with current and potential customers, leverage data analytics to track customer history and details and suggest data-driven strategies to grow relationships.

For more where this came from, check out the full article at AMEX Business.

When You're Looking for a Job and All You Hear is Crickets

A reader from CollegeRecruiter asked the following question:

Graduation is fast approaching and I’m stressing out as I don’t have a job yet. My career service office is focused on jobs from local employers and so isn’t of much help as I attend an out-of-state school and want to move home after graduation to be close to friends and family. I’ve applied to dozens of jobs but after weeks I’ve heard back from only a few and those were automated responses confirming my applications. No interviews. No emails from recruiters. No job offers. Help! I love my parents, but I don’t want to share a room with my little sister again.

Keep in mind that most job openings aren’t advertised because a lot of businesses prefer to hire from within the company or through word of mouth. If you’re coming in from off the street, you could be out of luck.  Instead of working harder, work smarter. Use online resources and business trade publications, such as The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Fast Company to target desirable companies in your home area. Then, prepare to infiltrate these companies by making the transition from outsider to insider. Here’s how:

• Get to know individuals already employed at your target company who are in a position to hire you. 
• Apply for an internship position that will land you inside the company and provide you with an opportunity to build your skill portfolio.
• Secure referrals from anyone you know in your chosen field—either people with years of experience behind them, such as old professors and your parents’ friends, or recent graduates who will have sympathy for your plight and might also be more familiar with a company’s lower-level job openings.

Using a combination of these approaches, you are much more likely to gain access to unadvertised job openings in the companies you desire. However, it probably won’t happen overnight. Be persistent and don’t resort to laziness, even if you’re not seeing immediate results. Keep your expectations realistic and remind yourself of the end goal every day. Above all, don’t doubt your own abilities. Ignore all of the folks who tell you that the market sucks and that you should take any available job, even if it’s not what you want or need. Learn to take rejection with a grain of salt—it’s all part of the process. If you take the right action patiently and efficiently, an opportunity will come along that’s a good fit for your skillset.

For answers from other workplace experts, check out the full article on CollegeRecruiter.

Learning Resources to Help You Keep Up With Your Growing Business

Effective strategies for managing a growing business change all the time—the onus is on the owner to develop a mindset of continuous education. It's in your best interest to identify learning resources in a few key areas that are critical for growing your business.

Let's focus on debt consolidation, business loan attainment, supply chain  management and sales and marketing tracking because they all affect your ability to generate positive cash flow and ensure that your operations solidly support your growth objectives.

Debt Consolidation

When growing pains hit your business, you could unexpectedly find yourself in a mountain of debt.

Rather than letting the situation get out of control, you might consider debt consolidation, which involves taking out a new loan to pay off the debt and associated interest across your accounts. Debt consolidation loans are typically installment-based, meaning you pay them off monthly over a set time period.

Provided you procure a loan with a lower interest rate than that of your other balances, debt consolidation may make sense for you. Learning resources that teach the ins and outs of debt consolidation include a local credit union, CreditKarma, Debt.org and NerdWallet.

Business Loan Attainment

Once upon a time, getting a business loan meant walking into your local bank branch and convincing the lender to take a chance on you. Fortunately, there are more online options than ever before, but you must know what to look for.

 

Your growing business can benefit from a variety of financing solutions with low interest rates. Some common solutions include term loans, in which a lender provides a lump sum that you may back over a specified time period of one to five years; and business lines of credit, in which you borrow a maximum credit limit and pay interest rates on only the capital borrowed from the credit line.

And unlike the loans of yesteryear, you don't have to wait very long. Most online business loans get you the money you need within a few days. If your business needs a capital infusion to keep up with industry changes, check out learning resources like the Small Business Administration and Fundera to identify the loan that best addresses your business requirements and unique financial situation.

For the rest of the piece, check out the AMEX Business site.

Time-Saving Ways to Stay Up to Date on Market Trends

Business success today depends on understanding, in real time, what your customers need and what types of competitive strategies are the most effective. After all, there’s nothing worse than spending precious resources launching a new product or service that ultimately flops in the marketplace.

Fortunately, advancing technology makes it possible to conduct competitive market research more rapidly than in the past. Let’s explore how to conduct a market analysis efficiently, as well as strategies that facilitate quick learning of key market trends.

How to Conduct a Customer Needs Analysis

The first step is getting to know your customers, which we’ll discuss in more detail in the next section. You should use the information and feedback collected to divide your customers into segments. Segments should share a common characteristic (such as age or location) and be large enough to warrant individual marketing attention.

Within each segment, it’s helpful to develop buyer profiles. Thanks to the below information on how to conduct market research, you’ll hopefully have a complete understanding of your target buyer’s needs. Picturing her as a flesh and blood human, you’ll describe her demographics and background, her motivations and challenges, what she spends her life doing, how she communicates with businesses she patronizes and the messages that are most likely to appeal to her.

Your last customer needs analysis step? Connect each target buyer’s needs to a product or service. Call out your benefits, why the target buyer would or would not choose you over a competitor. If there are holes, consider refining your offerings to better address critical customer pain points.

How to Conduct Market Research without Spending Months or Millions

You don’t need to spend a fortune with a prestigious market research firm to gain valuable customer insights. There are a number of low cost, time-efficient ways of examining market trends – many of which are online. One go-to strategy is crowdsourcing. You can use social media or online surveys emailed to your database to collect feedback about what’s working (or not) for your existing customers. Be sure to ask the tough questions, encourage honesty, and reward customers for their participation via coupons, discounts, or gift cards.

In some cases and especially if you are developing a new product to service, you might want to access the larger market. Online services like TYLM (Tap Your Larger Market) and Gutcheck allow you to use targeting criteria like gender and income to ask a series of open and closed questions to millions of pre-qualified individuals. In addition to completed surveys, these tools can capture customer emotions via one-on-one video responses and can analyze and summarize the results so you don’t have to spend time sifting through raw data.

You might also deduce market trends through the use of text analysis software. These tools help business owners gain insights from structured and unstructured text data using natural language processing (or a program’s ability to process human speech patterns). Leveraging data from a variety of sources including public reviews, emails sent to your organization, surveys, and phone transcripts, text analysis software can pull out key language patterns that get to the bottom of customer sentiment. As an example, Thematic gathers customer feedback from your existing data sources and, by distilling common themes, analyzes your best route to keeping customers. Similarly, Chattermill takes unstructured input and translates it into clear actions meant to improve customer experience. And best of all, many steps can be automated!

Of course, your market trends analysis won’t be complete without competitor monitoring. If you’re not sure how to find competitors of a company, searching them out via Google and comparing and contrasting the features and benefits listed on their websites is an excellent place to start. A number of paid tools also help with competitor monitoring, including SEMRush, which provides data about your current online performance as well as that of your competitors and helps you accurately assess the search terms leading to your company and competitors. A second option is SpyFu, which allows you to search for any competitor and download their keywords.

While conducting a customer needs analysis and market trends research doesn’t have to take over your life, it may still be worthwhile to hire an intern or freelancer to employ these strategies on your behalf. While you should probably repeat your analyses annually, you will also get more proficient at minimizing time spent!

A Reskilling Plan Has Become Essential

Back when I graduated from college, one was expected to leave school with nearly all the basic skills needed to succeed in a career. Maybe your employer did a more comprehensive orientation, maybe it provided access to the occasional professional development training course, and maybe you picked up a few things passively while engaging in job responsibilities or talking with your boss or mentor. But overall, you didn’t have to go too far out of your way to learn the skills or competencies you’d need to be successful.

Today, we live in a different world. Regardless of the industry, organizations and markets are evolving quickly. The way we do things one day might not work the next. There’s no such thing as a long-term strategy. Rather, every plan must be revisited – and goals adjusted – annually to ensure they’re still relevant and applicable. And this means that individuals must keep up and master new areas for which employers are willing to pay for expertise. 

Skills Gaps Are Everywhere

It’s probably not a surprise that according to research I conducted with DeVry University’s Career Advisory Board in 2017, most managers feel that employees generally lack soft skills. At all three levels of employment – entry-level, mid-level and senior-level – managers cited soft skills and traits like integrity, problem-solving, interpersonal ability and adaptability as essential but not nearly common enough in the employee population.

Here’s where it gets interesting, though. In a follow-up study last year, we asked 500 hiring managers about the skills human employees need in a world with greater machine participation. That’s when we discovered the desire for greater applied technical skills, or the ability to understand the technology available to do run an organization or do a job more productively. Of our respondents, 75 percent said employees should know how to use technology to inform and drive business decisions, while 84 percent claimed employees who know how to use the right technology tools in their fields are more effective.

For the rest of the piece, head over to the SilkRoad blog.

Can You Balance Multiple Gigs?

It's easy to understand why entrepreneurs start multiple businesses. Taking risks and innovating are in their blood. However, even the savviest entrepreneur is human, and we can only focus our energy and resources in so many directions before our cash flow takes a hit.

Let's explore some tips for getting promising new enterprises off the ground while keeping a watchful eye on the business that currently earns you money!

1. Manage your cash flow.

If you need to put aside money for a side business, it's important that you appropriately navigate cash flow in your main business.

Ensure that you have a cash-flow-management plan in place, and review all of your accounts at least once a month so that you can optimize your spending in real time.

It's risky to funnel main business funds into side businesses because if the main business experiences an emergency or setback, you'll need a parachute. You may want to consider using small business loans to help cushion your businesses.

2. Mind your working capital.

Working capital is the difference between a business' current assets (cash, accounts receivable and inventories) and its current liabilities (accounts payable). Your amount of working capital reflects your business' financial health and operational efficiencies.

Ideally, both your main business and side businesses should have strong working capital at all times. Work with a human professional as well as accounting software to gain an immediate, up-to-date and accurate picture of your working capital. If you need to infuse a side hustle with capital, plan for the fact that some sources—such as small business loans—take time.

For the rest of the piece, check out the AMEX Business site.

Agility Strategies to Keep You Sane

In today’s rapidly changing business world, an agile business is a successful business. But how do you know when the best thing for the project  is to change the plan, and how can you execute and communicate changes without destroying team motivation and momentum? The following strategies may prove helpful.

Any major strategic initiative should involve the upfront establishment of goals, milestones, and success metrics. But, as Tim Berry pointed out in his article for the Small Business Administration website, assumptions should also be considered in your initial planning. “Tracking your results, you want to be able to compare them to what you had planned or expected to see,” he said.

“Get your team members together once a month to review your plan and its results. “Take a hard look at your underlying assumptions and assess whether or not they’ve changed. If they have, there’s no virtue whatsoever in sticking to the plan you built on top of them.”

Berry suggested you look at the difference between what you planned and what actually happened. Some results will be better than planned, and some will be worse. “For each key difference you discover, and all of them combined, use your best judgment to determine whether the differences were caused by false expectations or unexpected good or bad execution.”

“Also, consider external and internal factors that may have influenced the results. Maybe your expectations were too conservative, or too optimistic. In that case, you revise your plan,” he said.

Common sense, remarked Berry, is critical.  Although the project may be close to your heart, you want to remain pragmatic: for example, asking yourself if you were you wrong about the whole thing, or just about the timing? You also want to consider if something else has occurred in the market to change your assumptions.

For more where this came from, check out the full piece on HR.com.

 

 

 

The New and Improved Performance Review

What good is performance feedback if it occurs in isolation? It's just like the saying: "If a tree falls in the woods..."

“This is where it’s important to have a system that enables a company to join up performance feedback simply and in one place, where they can get a quick view of everything,” says Cheryl Johnson, chief human resources offer at payroll company Paylocity.

Paylocity uses a proprietary tool that stores multiple data points related to the performance review cycle. Employees and managers journal regularly to keep quick notes and recap conversations or meetings, and feedback is consolidated in periodic reviews so employees always know where they stand. “We also maintain performance goals and recognition awards within this same system, so when we sit down to look at the holistic perspective of someone’s performance, we have all data points in the employee’s profile,” explains Johnson.

Johnson is quick to point out that certain data points carry more weight than others, so both leaders and employees need to understand how points are weighted in the overall context of performance.

Paylocity’s Johnson has mastered the notion that different departments have different feedback needs. “Many of our departments leverage the journaling function, which makes giving and receiving continuous feedback informal, yet documented in a place where it’s easy to access when the time comes for formal conversations. Some departments have these formal conversations monthly or quarterly; others have them annually. The cadence aligns with when individual departments can collect insights that improve performance,” she says. And over time, Paylocity has adjusted its continuous feedback approach so it doesn’t require overthinking, is less cumbersome, and is more focused on input that matters – as opposed to providing feedback for its own sake.

Have you improved your performance management system recently? What did your changes entail?