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.

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.

Americans Feel Their Employers View Them As Disposable

A new DeVry University study conducted for Labor Day found that at a time when American workers should feel recognized and celebrated, more than a third felt their employers could take or leave them.

Thirty-six percent of DeVry respondents said that based on their employers’ actions since the start of the pandemic, they believe their employers view them as disposable. This perception resonated  more with younger workers than older ones, with 47 percent of Gen Z-ers (born after 1996) and 42 percent of millennials (born 1980-95) saying they felt disposable compared with 28 percent of Gen X-ers (born 1964-79) and 32 percent of baby boomers (born 1946-63).

Respondents agreed that in today’s workforce, tenure, education, and industry experience do not matter as much as hard work,  meeting goals and deadlines, and having a positive attitude.

If you’re an employee, being disposable is clearly not the ideal status as it makes you vulnerable to layoffs, consolidations, or random turns in your marketplace. Fortunately, you can protect yourself from natural evolution and future disruptions by focusing on your career durability, or your ability to sustain gainful employment over a long period of time. The five components of career durability include:

Soft skills are interpersonal attributes that you need to collaborate successfully with others at work. As machines take over more work tasks over the next 10 years, soft skills like empathy, intuition, diplomacy, judgment, and problem solving will set human employees apart. You can hone yours through personality assessments/recommendations, classic business books such as those by Stephen Covey and Dale Carnegie, and on-the-job experience.

Hard skills are those in a specific area for which learning can be measured (i.e. you either know it or you don’t). If you’re applying for a given job, employers will expect you to perform the requisite functions. For instance, if you’re a phlebotomist, you must know how to insert an IV. You can acquire the hard skills you need via degree programs, online courses, certifications/microcredentials,  and employer training.

Applied technology skills represent the ability to leverage people, processes, data, and devices to do a job more efficiently. In all occupations, digital technology exists to augment human work. But do you know, for example, what software is available in your role and how to use it? You might increase your base of applied technology skills with employer training, mentorship, solo exploration, and investigation.

Institutional knowledge is industry specific expertise gained through experience and/or tenure. Organizations are facing a brain drain caused by the retiring baby boomers. Some things can only be learned by facing similar scenarios multiple times over a career lifespan. You typically acquire institutional knowledge by staying with one company or in one industry and gaining cross-functional and adjacent expertise via job shadowing, informational interviewing, and volunteering.

A growth mindset is the positive attitude that influences how an individual sees their world, and that motivates them to learn and change. Today’s learner must be continuous and self-directed, and curiosity, agility, and drive to improve will win the day. You can enhance your growth mindset through self, peer, and manager evaluations, acceptance of failure, implementation of constructive feedback, intrapreneurship, and inspirational books and podcasts.

Employee actions are only one piece of the puzzle, however. What if you’re an employer, and you’re rightfully concerned that so many of your talent employees feel disposable? Improved benefits and greater pandemic safety measures are essential, but don’t get to the heart of the disposability issue. The key  is to show appreciation early and often. The DeVry survey respondents indicated that the most effective ways are through pay increases (69 percent), awards (34 percent), and greater schedule flexibility (30 percent).

This year especially, Labor Day is an appropriate time to take the right steps so employment is beneficial and satisfying for all sides.

How to Think Like a Futurist

Being a futurist means paying attention to new patterns or trends that are slowly percolating up through the market and/or society that have the potential to catch on in a major way. It's about coming up with possible scenarios for the future given these developments.For me, the ideal timeframe for futurist thinking is 5-10 years, because although no one can successfully predict the future, in this window you are more likely to be able to clearly see where things are going according to current operating models. Now, in 2019, I think anything beyond 10-15 years is reasonably futile because we bump up against the technological singularity (the time when machine intelligence becomes so sophisticated that it causes currently unfathomable changes to human existence).  

The simplest way to imagine and prepare for the future is to devise intelligent strategies that will serve your company well. You can do this by reading a ton and consulting experts in your field about what they're seeing. Futurists use tools that systematize these recommendations including scenario planning, environmental scanning, Delphi surveying, and individual software programs like Fibres, Futures Platform, and Athena.

Through your research, you will probably determine that financial markets and corporate structures are likely to change dramatically in the next few years. Blockchain will democratize, streamline, and improve the efficiency of ownership. Other potential developments in the financial sector include the increased use of algorithms to boost trading effectiveness, and the inclusion of machines and machine learning in individual and corporate financial planning.

For the rest of this piece, please see the Strategy Business site.

How New Businesses Secure Funding

Funding can be a major hurdle for business owners. While many owners traditionally turn to banks, loans are increasingly harder to obtain thanks to increased regulations. From credit cards and grants to self-funding and venture capital, entrepreneurs are finding creative ways to make their business dreams a reality.

We asked three small-business owners—Nick Gentry, CEO of Iconic Solutions in Raleigh, North Carolina; Wesley Mathews, co-founder of High Level Marketing in Detroit; and Hesam Meshkat, CEO of Guzu in Los Angeles—to share their experiences with funding and their advice for securing enough financing for their businesses.

How did you initially get funding for your company?

Nick Gentry: At first, we pursued every funding option available, including applying for credit lines; giving up equity for convertible notes and seed investments; and even government-sponsored grants.

We chose to bootstrap our operations and fund everything ourselves.  After discussing our business model with key advisers, we realized that a large cash infusion significantly limits how you're able to pivot the business as time goes on. We knew that we would have to evolve our offering as the market changed, and with outside investors this would be more difficult. 

Ultimately it comes down to deciding if you’d rather own your own business or partner in a larger, potentially more successful one. We knew that an external investment would provide operating cash, business expertise and connections, but it also meant loss of control and ownership of our business. 

Wesley Mathews: High Level Marketing was self-funded via credit card. I bootstrapped about 40K to get things going and float expenses for the first six to nine months. This was the only option I considered.

Hesam Meshkat: Initially when we launching Guzu, my partner and I decided to self-fund so that we would maintain ownership. The pro is that we had more control, but the con is that we were personally liable for the business.

Looking back, what’s one key lesson you learned about accepting and using funding?

Meshkat: Since we launched, we did receive a small funding round. The most critical lesson is to allocate those funds to marketing campaigns and expenses that directly connect to revenue coming in.

Mathews: Make sure you have a plan for the dollars. Have a clear vision of what the money is for and how you are going to use it, track it and repay it. Stick to a playbook.

Gentry: After launching multiple products, I’ve learned that it always takes more money and more time than initially anticipated to bring something to market. Make sure there is a clear understanding of cost and timelines, as external investors want their return as quick as possible and will be less likely to fund a subsequent round if they begin to doubt the delivery.

For more where this came from, check out the full interview on the AMEX Open Forum.

How to Network to Find New Customers

According to the 2015 U.S. Bank Small Business Annual Survey, "67 percent of small-business owners reported that they maintain a social media presence for networking and marketing purposes." But in-person activities, such as belonging to and attending community or Chamber of Commerce events, were less common, despite the fact that using both may help answer the age-old question of how to find new customers.

I tapped three small-business owners—Sunny Bonnell, co-founder of branding agency Motto in Dallas, Texas; Blake George, founder of design firm BMG Media Group in Detroit, Michigan; and Matthew Manos, founder of business consultancy verynice in Los Angeles—to find out how small-business owners can use networking to find new customers.

Why is networking important for small-business owners?

Sunny Bonnell: I've always believed that the best relationships come from exploration and experiences. Networking is imperative as a small-business owner because it forces you to get out and interact with people who can help grow your business.

Blake George: Networking is a great way to expand your sales team without carrying the overhead. More than likely, the individual you talk to may not need your service in the short term. You may think it’s a dead lead, but ultimately the goal is to get that individual educated on your product or service enough to remember you in the future.

Matthew Manos: Many small-business owners have unrealistic expectations when it comes to networking. The thought often is, “Oh, cool, I’m going to go to this event, and then I’ll get a new client tomorrow.” Immediate satisfaction or return on effort is not the point of networking, and frankly rarely happens. Networking is a valuable tool for small-business owners because it allows them to showcase their skills by being of service to others, developing their network’s network and becoming a friendly and familiar face.

What activities do you engage in to keep a continuous pipeline of new customers?

Manos: At verynice, our approach to engaging an audience and keeping a continuous pipeline of new customers and opportunities comes down to creating value, helping others and being present.

George: Engaging current customers is key because the best leads are referrals—your customer base provides credibility on your behalf. Additionally, targeted advertisements on social networks are a great way to advertise to your perfect customer at the budget you can afford with no monthly commitments. 

Bonnell: At Motto, we are incredibly socially minded and PR driven. We are hyperactive on Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat and love sharing our work. Small-business owners need to understand what they are trying to achieve and what avenues they must travel to get there. For example, we’re in the early stages of our first book, and a strategic roadmap will be an essential tool to support that initiative.

How do you find time for proactive outreach when you’re incredibly busy?

George: Just like anything else, you make time! Maintaining priorities and efficiency on your current tasks is a game changer. Fine tuning the perfect amount of task delegation to your employees or automated software will help lighten your schedule. Most importantly, don’t procrastinate.

Manos:  As the founder of our organization, a major part of my role [and] job description is to serve as the face for our company. As a result, I speak at an average of 100 events per year. That sounds like a lot, but in reality, this takes up about four hours of my time every week. Those 300 hours per year generate 75 percent of our business leads, but only add up to about two months of full-time effort.

Bonnell: You have to be mindful that work can never be taken for granted and branding, outreach and creating awareness for your business is a labor of love. Sometimes I get up an hour earlier. If I have a little downtime, I'll jot notes down or use Anchor to capture my ideas.

For the rest of the interview, head over to the AMEX Open Forum.

Creating a Memorable Brand

When we think of brands, we tend to picture the big ones. We forget that a powerful brand can be important to every company and especially small businesses that hang their hats on customer loyalty.

According to a recent survey by Rosetta Consulting, engaged customers (those who are strongly attached to a brand) buy 90 percent more frequently, spend 60 percent more per transaction and are five times more likely to indicate it's the only brand they would purchase in the future. All these factors can lead to engaged customers delivering three times the value to the brand over the course of a year.

I talked with three small-business owners with experience in creating a memorable brand: Deborah Peters, founder of the Neuro Engineering Institute in California; Aalap Shah, co-founder of SoMe in Chicago; and Jason Zickerman, president of The Alternative Board (TAB) in Colorado.

How would you describe your brand?

Aalap Shah: The SoMe Connect brand is open and honest with clients and infuses a mix of heart and soul into our creative and copywriting, delivering online community engagements that matter.

Deborah Peters: Our brand is unique, evoking feelings of stability, groundedness and timeless wisdom.

Jason Zickerman: Our brand promise is that joining a TAB Board will help a business owner achieve their personal vision of success and run a better business.

What was your process for developing this brand?

Zickerman: A brand is defined by customer experiences. Our brand image was developed by gaining an understanding of what our members felt, what they believed and what they had to say about us.

Peters: There was a great deal of introspection. I bought several feet of art paper and colored sharpies and pastels. I designed a flow chart for my business, including who we would reach/teach/coach, what media we would use and how it would all eventually have an impact.

Shah: We started with internal brainstorms on our core values and offering to see what our internal stakeholders thought and felt about our brand. We asked our clients how they'd describe it. We then developed a brand description to inspire our team and clients.

What activities did you undertake to promote the brand?

Peters: Thanks to social media, the brand is everywhere now, and we continue to up-level our avenues to ramp up awareness. We are finding that joint ventures in which we cross promote and cross leverage our offerings is extremely powerful. It’s a win for everyone.

Zickerman: In our industry, 50 percent of business comes from word of mouth, and our brand expansion strategy takes that into account. We encourage our corporate team and franchisees to promote our brand through personal interactions and relationships, providing business advice and insights, and consistently delivering value to their TAB members and referral networks. We also take an exclusivity approach to our membership. Not every business owner is a right fit for a board, so we direct our brand promotion to business owners who are.

Shah: Our largest efforts are around our SoMe Insight series—a monthly lunch and learn series that promotes both our brand and also open communication. We bring in industry leaders to lead a conversation for 30 to 45 minutes around topics like “building online communities,” “creating an offline/online brand,” and “how to find your golden purpose.” The discussion and content that flows afterward is invaluable for both the attendees and the community and helps us convey what we do and how we can execute on these ideas.

For the rest of the interview, check out the AMEX Open Forum.

New Job Preparedness Study Emphasizes the Importance of Integrity and Adaptability

The Career Advisory Board that I established by DeVry University recently released the fifth annual Job Preparedness Indicator survey. This year’s findings indicate hiring managers are receptive to candidates changing careers, especially if their previous experience can be applied to the new position; but above all else, integrity is the No. 1 trait that candidates should possess.

Our annual research surveys 500 hiring managers in the U.S. to identify gaps between job candidate attributes and the applicant traits for which hiring managers are seeking. These gaps are identified by assessing desirable skills that are least common among entry-level, mid-level, and senior-level candidates. Here are some of our key takeaways:

Do your research, especially for a career change

• Hiring managers are increasingly more willing to consider candidates changing industries, with 38 percent stating they were very likely to consider a career changer with the right skills. Eagerness to learn is an asset, as more than half of respondents want to hire people who show willingness to gain the right experience and further develop their skills.
• The top concerns cited in the survey about career changing candidates included a lack of industry experience and an inability to assimilate into the organizational culture. However, 60 percent of hiring managers noted that these candidates can improve their chances of serious consideration for employment by devising a concise and sensible explanation for the change.

Attitude is everything

• Interestingly, for the fifth consecutive year, hiring managers say attitude outranks skill – especially when it comes to personal ethics. This year, however, integrity was ranked the No. 1 most important trait for a jobseeker to possess at any level.
• Candidates should keep in mind that hiring managers are naturally skeptical. Job seekers should be prepared to share examples of themselves being authentic and transparent in the workplace.

Adaptability is key

• In today’s business environment, change and evolution are constant. Hiring managers want to see candidates demonstrate adaptability and flexibility to changing situations.
• Job seekers need to articulate how they have adapted to change, with positive outcomes resulting because of their adaptive nature.

Make a good impression

• Technology allows hiring managers and candidates to connect virtually; however, face-to-face interviews remains as the preferred interview method – meaning job candidates need to know how to make a connection and hone their interpersonal skills for in-person interviews.
• As 46 percent of hiring managers surveyed cited strong interviewing skills as an important trait, candidates need to engage the interviewer in the conversation and not just answer their questions.

For full study results, head over to CareerAdvisoryBoard.org.

 

How to Be a Standout in Your Field

Brand strategist Scott James of publishing firm Greenleaf Book Group knows something about making a name for yourself in a field where everyone is smart and at the top of their game. He’s come up with the four questions that separate experts from pretenders.

Scott James believes there’s a clear line between experts who have built a platform and brand around their expertise and experts who are great at their work but haven’t figured out how to do this. What does this line look like? James says it’s the ability to answer the following four questions off the cuff. It shows that experts with big ideas think about specific, high level gauges of success, progress and growth all the time and guide their actions and initiative accordingly.

What’s Working? 

Experts know the answer to this because they measure everything. Those who build a business around their expertise know which email approach adds the most to their bottom line and they know if flying to a certain city for a meeting is the right move. They have a system in place to keep track of such things, and they take the time to assess and understand their data. Every successful expert can rattle off the two or three things they do that drives their business and expands their audience—and they can do so without thinking about it too hard.

What is Making You Stand Out?

Experts with strong personal brands know that they are swimming in a crowded ocean, and they can pinpoint what it is about what they do that other people get excited about, and they know how to talk about what they do in a way that honors their uniqueness and targets the specific needs of the people they want to influence.

What’s Next?

Experts think several steps ahead. The ability to be deeply in the project that is happening now and already be thinking at 50,000 feet (and how today is laying a foundation for three years from now) is a difficult mental tightrope to walk. But whereas some people get buried in the details of their current project and let everything else go, experts can walk that tightrope because they know it’s critical. Experts can’t afford to wait until after their current project is finished to think about what’s next.

For the rest of my tips, have a look at the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

Brian Solis on the Customer Experience

To business futurist Brian Solis, capturing an audience’s heart, mind, and spirit is mandatory.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Brian Solis, principal analyst at Altimeter, a Prophet company, who has written a book that’s not really a book. X: Where Business Meets Design looks more like a sexy app than a business how-do, but it still does a great job explaining why customer experience, more than any other business priority, defines a company’s brand and determines its outlook for the future. Here’s what Brian had to say during our recent phone conversation:

Your definition of customer experience is a little different, and how does X provide a new experience from what business book readers may be used to?

Brian: Depending on who you talk to, you’ll get a different interpretation of what customer experience means. It is sometimes thought of transactionally, and related to CRM, support, or journey mapping. In general, customer experience is misunderstood and underappreciated. My feeling is that customer experience is the sum of all engagements. It’s not about customer experience, but all experience. In this business world, we need to think more holistically because everything is connected.

Of course, it would be ironic to tell people this in a traditional book format, and I think that authors who write about disruption should disrupt themselves. For X, I considered what a high school student would take delight in learning from. I wrote tweetable sentences with lots of visuals and white space, and the result was a cross between an app and a beautiful coffee table book.

You say that having a great product is no longer enough. What happens to great products (and their companies) that don’t have creative marketing and stellar customer service behind them?

It seems obvious to make a great product backed by great marketing and service, but without a conducive culture, it doesn’t always happen. Many incumbent businesses are built on 60-year-old models and are slow to change and in danger of being left behind. Startups are taking over because they get to reimagine everything. When culture, product, and service are aligned, the result is immersive and empowering. You’ll create a living community around your brand that becomes bigger than any one product.

For the rest of Brian's interview, visit Intuit's Fast Track blog.