Words from a humble Master of the Obvious: “superior customer care coupled with heartfelt kindness always muscle up to fuel a brands offense, defense and value. In essence, successful brands have boundless sensitivity, rugged constitutions.”

Leadership is smartest, most effective and competitive when it walks, talks and builds an unyielding demand for customer kindness, customer value. I truly believe and have applied for decades this trenchant rule for customer engagements: kindness and respect are your most valuable assets, your greatest competitive advantage, your most profitable business weapons of choice. Customer kindness builds leadership brands while opportunity obtested through weakness in customer care, arrogance, neglect and sluggish response portends failure in company vision, failure in financial results. Trust me, without naming certain companies we all have competed with, their lost sales and market share footing was as much about a blatant lack of customer kindness and valued experience as it was about the value of their brand, products and operational deliverables.

The Guardian Angels mission defines kindness, caring and smart leadership. Pictured: Mary, Curtis and Anthony Sliwa along with Peter and FrancesAnn Weedfald.

Our new social and e-commerce digital tools, instruments and levers are creating challenges and opportunities that are consumer invigorating. While the ancient valued power of customer kindness, respect and reflective actions may be considered e-old, they are still highly valuable as e-new and much easier to deploy. Customer kindness is still lacking and anemic in so many who compete with us, yet strong, flinty and fierce in so many who wish to defeat us. As we know in highly successful companies, customer kindness and customer service is not a department, it’s simply and smartly everyone’s job.

Some great leaders I personally study, highly respect and learn from I believe say it best:

Sam Walton, Founder of Walmart: “The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best, but legendary.”

Ross Perot: “Spend a lot of time talking to customers face to face. You’d be amazed how many companies don’t listen to their customers.”

Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com: “If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”

Peter Drucker: “Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.”

Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com: “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.”

JC Penney, founder of JC Penney’s: “Every great business is built on kindness, on friendship.”

If you care through formidable, kind and valued actions, through every capital aspect translated through your products, through your brand value, then over time you will be able to ask for a few more pennies for your products and your brand than your competitors. If you truly care about customers through your kind actions, trust me, they will in turn, care about you, your brand your future. Regardless of your social engineering prowess, your expensive advertising and marketing muscle in this new, highly exposed socially charged customer world of instant information, instant gratification isn’t what matters most. What matters most and competes best, is customer care in the language of customer kindness. As leaders, we must never mistake or accept weakness for kindness within our organizations or within your perceived brand value: your financial brand equity. Weakness is always an opportunity to improve. However, weakness can also be an advantage that you sadly hand to your competitors as they command smarter brand recognition and customer kindness through each and every touch point of their organization.

To best recognize, respond to and crush sales, brand and organizational weakness, Gen One Ventures offers these five customer centric relationship mistakes to avoid:

1. A silent refusal to be flexible with your business relationships to match each of your customer’s expectations and styles of engagement.

2. Misplaced weakness and lack of understanding in how to gain new business, not realizing or acknowledging your sales and marketing teams simply did not “earn the right” to ask for the business while your competition did.

3. A series of brand and product “fat claims” through your advertising, sales presentations, and marketing programs that your company or your brand does not pay off.

4. The inability to impress customers through leadership kindness defined as genuine and relevant organizational customer experiences of competitive excellence.

5. The kinetic failure to listen and respond to customer requests, problems, and opportunities with caring kindness, relevancy, and hyper-speed.

Many years ago when I competed on the streets of New York City, I realized through customer engagements that it was never good enough to simply offer better featured products with more aggressive pricing. It was never good enough to just deliver the products on time or proclaim our great advertising and marketing programs. The winning customer centric formula that worked again and again beyond better products and services was to be kind and caring to each and every customer, never weak, never late, always first rate creating mutually positive fate.

Believe it or not, I stay in touch with a multitude of customers as well as former company team members because they are kind to me and stay in touch with me even if we no longer do business together. This is mutual personal brand building, the power of kindness in customer and colleague engagements. My former customers mirroring kind leadership, reflecting warmly right back at me. The best part, is I know their kindness for me based upon our wonderful long term and well earned relationship, makes them also feel good, and also extends their brand kindness inside and outside their building for their own customers. Smart, urbane business leaders kinetically say ”never misunderstand kindness for weakness.” Without customer kindness, your personal brand, your team members’ results, and your company’s future potential will be weakened by those competitors who lead with better products, more caring services, and genuine, highly competitive customer kindness.

Leadership reflects and defines a company’s DNA for customer relationships. Gen One Ventures proclaims the need for the most formidable customer care, customer kindness to ensure your greatest competitive advantage, and your greatest brand value. Those of you that already play smart this way will surely call me the “Master of the Obvious.” Those who trust and lean into the birr of these words already smartly lead and care in kind action for your own customers. Sadly, those who do not find concord in these words unfortunately will continue their competitive journey without this market proven, most powerful and kind leadership advantage.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

Imagine the rough and tumble task to build a completely new brand, by a new entry company, within the consumer electronics “x-widget” product category. Imagine this, through a tough, over exercised North American marketplace: clearly not for the faint of heart, surely not for the faint of investment capital.

Peter Weedfald admires the offense and defense of two great leaders, Joe Torre and Rudy Giuliani.

We begin ad rem: to explore brand leadership disciplines relevant to tasks ahead, to clarify and expose successful brand offense and defense strategies. The basics? We recognize a brand is a promise. It is inclusive and righteously positioned on an x and y axis. The x axis correlates brand value/equity while the y axis represents afforded and smartly agreed to shelf line logic, bearing competitive market pricing. Brands are built on substrate stilts of products and services juxtaposed smartly versus competitive offerings. The formula to measure any brand versus competitive market dynamics:

PRICE divided by VALUE (brand and or product value) equals the real competitive COST the market will bear, the COST a consumer is willing to pay versus your shelf space competitors. Of course the greater the competitive VALUE, the greater willingness from consumers to pay a few extra pennies for your product, for your brand experience. The lesser your brand and or product value, the lesser consumers are willing to vote with their pocketbooks for your brand, for your wishful profitable product future.

Successful, apprehensible focused brand offense and defense strategies, especially when entering a new market include:

Brand strategy on the OFFENSE:

1. Expose, aim and ignite your product and brand advantage versus the #1 market leader’s position you wish to gain and attain, over time.

2.  Attain net price profitability through a smart modicum of SG&A overhead versus the leader’s hefty and mature infrastructure.

3. Explore, discover and study the market leaders brand weakness as well as their strength to prepare for changing product, pricing and market dynamics.

4. Focus resources, fight smartly: core down and heavy up all assets and gainful intentions narrow casted and focused for high impact, fast time to volume gains.

5. Attack through uncontested product areas and channels, when possible.

6. Move swiftly, secretly and aggressively to build key customer relationships and opportunities within your competitors camps. Speed and communications are the weapon of choice against formidable brand Titans.

Brand strategy on the DEFENSE:

 1. New brands entering the market should not play defense. New brands must stay focused aggressively on the trenchant offense, no exceptions. Forced to a bulwark position in your early stages? It  will surely be time to stop and go home.

 2. Expect and plan for the market leader to turn and play defense against your offense efforts. Pre-plan and auger these expectations, but again, do not defend the leaders defense, stay sharp on your calculated offense.

 3. Your best tenable strategy is to attack yourself, not the market leader. Learn and earn from your smart, hermetic self inflicted wounds, caused to strengthen your brand resolve, to fortify your defense strategy and tactics.

 4. Your best defense is an assiduous focus on customer opportunities. Focus intently on your customers success and they will in turn focus on you, your brand, your product. They will focus intently to ensure your success.

Target, lock and load a solitary, aggressively coherent vision to approach and quake the market; congener strategies, assets and enabling tactics as one. Align and plan the best way to build and make your targeted market, your best brand friend. Build short and long term best friends based upon better products and services with unyielding customer care, customer centricity. This strategy will fuel your brand promise, your brand equity.

In essence, your declared brand strategy should be clayed, cemented to attract, convert and retain targeted customers, early and often, aggressively and profitably. Of course building a new brand, with the cold steel of forecasted expectations in a mature and hyper-commoditizing market place includes conventional core structures and levers under the sturdy ribs of your sales, marketing, advertising and organizational leadership. Uniting your team on the offense, defense and core brand strategy before, during and after launching is the right competitive formula designed to attract, convert and retain customers, market share and profitable results, for many year to come.

Brand offense, brand defense or brand nonsense? Leave the nonsense to your competitors. Drive smart offense and defense brand strategies and you will exceed market demand and build valued competitive brand equity, always.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

Easy to say isn’t it? Brilliant as an opening line by a CEO, CFO, COO or of course the Chief Marketing Officer: “when we boost our brand’s short and long term value, competitive dominance and market demand, we will boost our overall earnings.” As we know and like to say repeatedly, brand is a promise. Brand currency is also a mettle which needs to be shined, primped, pruned and protracted competitively each and every day. A brands greatest strength and determined birr is concentrated and empowered by its products FAB’s (features, advantages and benefits), services, support, infrastructure, supply base advantages and most importantly, the ribs of the brand umbrella: emotional capital, the anoesis flame needed to build brand infatuation. 

The simple, standard formula for brand campaign effectiveness and measurement is:

Brand Campaign Performance ROI = Campaign Revenue X Profit Margin / Cost of Advertising

Painting brand infatuation & ROI, one planet at a time...

This simple ROI calculation is an incremental campaign metric to be juxtaposed against previous campaigns and results. The protracted formula is also useful for measuring pilot marketing campaigns, A/B splits, incremental brand value and sales measurements inclusive to consumer enhanced sale drive periods. Smart  focus on brand value ROI (return on investment) takes into consideration:

1. Brand Asset Centricity: Brand equity measurement, an intangible asset value, is determined through the incremental value of marketing as it pertains to increased or decreased brand awareness and purchasing to a given buying audience.

2. Brand Equity: Defined as incremental cash turns accrued to branded product offerings measured above and beyond cash flows resulting from same product offering, absence of brand.

3. Brand As Income: That brand equity can be measured and ascertained as future cash flow based upon expected competitive product earnings and profit pools related to maturing brand and product performance.

4. Brand Awareness: Managing, leading and measuring customer brand funnel stages in the language of: awareness – consideration – intention – purchase.

5. Brand Shaping: Marketers can only shape (market and advertise) consumer perception, drive engagements, or motivate sales by first establishing formidable and targeted market centric awareness, purpose and clarity of  brand position.

6. Brand Diagnostics: It is critically important to evaluate primary brand  performance and or under-performance with respect to specific marketing and advertising investments inclusive to competitive shelf pull and editorial exposure.

7. Brand ROI: Measurement is critical in the heat of driving brand awareness to evaluate customer behavior as a key articulator, course corrector and accelerator of marketing strategies. Smart ways to brand ROI review and effective reveal include:

A. Short term ROI: Measured lift results especially during product launch’s, consumer drive periods and competitively launched and threatening product introductions.

B. Pre and post campaign research: To reveal metric progressions or slimsy decreases in forecast to inventory turns, price elasticity and future product forecasts.

C. Juxtapose brand attribute metrics: Versus competitors based upon market data, shelf share data reported as “A, B,C products versus your brand” and market sell through results (from 3rd party research reporters).

D. Careful expense, asset and investment metric review: Drill down into each spend touch point to determine impact on conversion rates and optimization of the overall medium marketing mix.

E. Measurement: Must be tied to both strategic objectives and increased performance metrics. The ultimate brand ROI victory delivers greater awareness, impact, influence, conversion and customer valued propositions.

Proud to stand with masterful product and brand painting arbiters: Jason Briggs, Marc McConnaughey with Peter Weedfald and Mario Giovatto.

CEO’s and CFO’s have weathered this down trodden global economy in part by downsizing human capital, improving supply based economics, enhancing operations and  reining in costs across the board. With profits enjoying the protection of cost reductions it is now time to raise the roof on revenues, market share and brand value. Brand value is the pylon to profit torque: the core product to price competitive entry lever to ensure the gain of a few more pennies per product turn, per consumer purchase instance. Sounds like a smart and easy task, however, it is not. The (let’s call it what it is) near insanity of mammoth over populated broadcast mediums (400 plus TV channels), editorial based web sites (hundreds of thousands), over abundance of social networks, email marketing, magazines, radio, direct mail programs, etc. All with consumers working overtime to ignore or skip advertising, ignore and skip your brand messaging. The opportunity and environment for building, strengthening and promulgating your brand value has never been more difficult, more demanding, more confusing. Beyond advertising mediums, the needs, actions and buying habits of baby boomers are changing rapidly with aging, ethnic populations are rapidly growing and consumer product demands in the language of competitive features and benefits are nearly magical in mind, magical in performance, magical in unrealistic expectations. And oh yes, tablets and smart phones reveal instant plus-minus brand and product opinions, instant best pricing, instant buying engagements.

Through all the very good brand boosting intentions and relevant attention to medium and market changes, unfortunately, in many instances confusion becomes a most ill viable yet, triggered choice. And even within smart demographic targeting there is a slippery emergence, a confluence of additional consumer and market dynamics to avoid. Simply stated, consumer brand loyalty is dampened, decanted and eroding rapidly because of massive over messaging, a vast explosion of choice in products and brands, and an insane amount of media touch points firing off in succession to consumers eyes and ears through the first inch of a piece of home, business or mobile glass. Consumers today see and experience an average of 10 to 20 times more advertising messages each day then they did 30 years ago. Chief Marketing Officers and their team members are literally drowning in heavy duty, endless days in marketing workload orchestrations, measurements and course corrections attempting to gain best actions and reactions in brand building, brand advantaging chores. As I have professed again and again, the acronym CMO no longer stands for Chief Marketing Officer, but rather Chief Metrics Officer with financial “inventory and traffic” turn results pressured, demanded, monitored and dissected for advertising and marketing investments by the CFO. For CMO’s, kinetic pressure on: living on the edge daily, advertising metrics in front of advertising creative, mammoth choices in media, changing population makeup, hundreds of thousands of CPM considerations towards achieving profitability. Of course loudly choired by the united voice of expectation from the CEO, the COO and the CFO: “please stand and deliver on the actual incremental product and brand return on investment for the $1 million dollars advertising investment we gave you last month.” Think Billy Joel’s hit song: “Pressure!”

There are smart, effective methods to combat and reconcile these dizzying challenges. First, CMO’s need to build a sturdy, rigorous metric based information substrate. By strengthening all data utilized to plan, by adopting and respecting flexible statistical reporting techniques coupled with consumer brand personalities, marketers can develop  more relevant, more profitable brands. Second, mature consumer data mining and modeling (best administered through a well developed CRM backend) to develop the most valuable tangible and intangible brand attributes designed to attract, convert and retain specific market segments and demographics to gain positive ROI. Deep dive data mining will reveal profit pool opportunities and new market potential. It will expose profitable results and losses within specific consumer groups and consumer influences (advertising, marketing, promotions, pricing). In essence, enabling marketers to best sprinkle limited budgets into smarter more profitable market gaining opportunities. CEO’s, COO’s and CFO’s need to lean in to convince CMO’s to incorporate these proven approaches into their brand building strategies. It may mean the important hiring of CRM mechanics and infrastructure, market research managers and analytical polymaths to calculate the brand marketing spend, brand and product marketing results. Not a financial investment in human capital and infrastructure to be pondered but rather a financial investment to ensure the lucid examination and profitable determination to grow a smart, highly valued brand designed to gain long term profitable market dominance. CMO’s days of leading through career experience and or market intuition are long gone. Brand building equity now lives and breathes competitively hard through scientific market segmentation, through a smart daily dissection of quantitative and qualitative data mining techniques.

These critical brand building metrics and results should require changes within other parts of the business model. Potential changes prompted by keen financial metrics, smart analytical responses and data include but are not limited to: product development and cosmetic/feature designs, product buy-sell pricing models, supply based operations, customer touch points: service, support and contact development. As we know, creativity in marketing reveals competitive brand and product advantage while analytics regarding customer needs, demands, wants, actions and reactions captured through smart marketing tool kits allows for critical brand identity, development and profitable executions. The net, a CEO and of course the CMO’s ability to avoid costly trials, tribulations and errors in building a more efficient and profitable brand is more than essential, it is the cold steel report card of the P&L (profit and loss) statement. Gen One Ventures twelve principals to ensure a profitable brand boost and mirroring earnings include:

1. An assiduous deep dive of targeted customer segments in the language of: relevant market size, household income, age brackets, costs of engagements, estimates of consumption, loyalty grading, lifestyles, attitudes, individual and consumer like returns in positive revenue, profit and net margins.

2. Highly relevant analytical data gathering to predict and spot future trends, changes in market and consumer disciplines and demands: in behavior, product trends, demographic share shifting and evolution need to be identified, then company and market embraced.

3. Smart money is calculated money. Follow the money. With your research, consumer segmentation and enveloped analytics, probable impact across relevant market and consumer landscapes calculates and augers profitable segment marketing.

4. A deep and relevant understanding of each identified segment’s future economic potential is critical for competitive brand success. Time to volume intensity in the language of opportunity, capital investment requirements, earnings in potential profit pools needs to be carefully evaluated, carefully planned.

5. Insights, insights, more insights. Insights determine and guide marketers which segments to target at what time, with what product and price point. These insights not only guide company success, they also map out smart channel, consumer and advertising triggers to ensure highest competitive relevancy, highest profitable returns.

6. Careful assessment of brand growth opportunities based upon fast or slow consumer product demand within commoditizing market forces.

7. A smart, everyday review and assessment of your promised brand position, market relevancy and competitive brand value for course corrections, potential enhancements and corresponding new market opportunities.

8. Brand disciplines, staying the course in positioning and purpose is competitively essential. Too much brand proliferation based on changing product value or anemic competitive positioning is dangerous to the core, vilipends opportunity.

9. Clearly and competitively define who and what your brand is, what it stands for, purpose, role and emotional advantage.

10. The goal in brand building is to uncover, aggressively reveal and measure the relevance of your tangible and intangible brand attributes with respect to segments, with concise exposure and emotional distinctive degrees of competitive advantage.

11. Define which, where and when media touch points garner best individual and aggregated brand and product advantage in the language of profitable investments. This important daily task is derived from data base mining and analytical review.

12. Do the math. Modeling needs to apply multivariate statistical analysis to quantify critical relationships between product and brand benefits. This work is to reconcile and measure product benefits for best in class, long term consumer engagements. Identifying the correlation between brand preference, brand intangibles, brand associations and brand to price elasticity through dynamic analytics is in itself modeling of profitable incremental engagements.

Chief Metric Officer’s can multiply success through core accounting and metric investments, through exercising quantitative and qualitative analysis as the key driver for marketing investments in a sea of massive media opportunities. The marketing goal and opportunity is to defend, amend and proactively present metric results to departmental heads to  aggregate company assets into united company profitable returns. Broad company buy in, consensus and union is in itself, competitive advantage. With metric reveal and cross company buy in, the CEO, COO and CFO will become brand arbiters and champions based upon the language they understand, warrant and respect: metrics, accounting, research and shaping forecasts into sharing profit pools. Companies can truly boost their brand and earnings smartly for less money with sharp segmentation, sophisticated back end fiduciary measurement tools,  precision in planning, refulgent brand shaping: all designed to muscle up competitive advantage.

Painting brand infatuation one planet at a time? Surely and always, yes. Remember, brand is the end game to boost earnings smartly. Brand infatuation, the heralded end game, can be born, matured and effective as a mighty competitive weapon when created, measured and muscled by smart daily exercising analytics. The dismal, remora alternative, brand evaporation, is clearly not the end game; it is simply the end of a brand.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

“Living On The Edge” A song by Arrowsmith and Steven Tyler

“Tell me what you think about your sit-u-a-tion
Complication – aggravation… Is getting to you”

I was recently asked by a formidable and successful CEO just what, in my opinion
a CMO should be focused on to ensure profitable investments, profitable asset
turns towards mirroring projected and promised company growth. Of course, as
you can imagine, I took a big gulping breath, smiled courteously while curtailing my own personal mixed emotions of always living on the edge through my sales and marketing career. In a momentary flash I rewound my profluent thoughts to long hours and even longer days through my career as CMO of Viewsonic, Samsung Electronics and Circuit City. In each of these roles I was privileged to be leading the competitive offense in both push and pull leading the charge in both sales and marketing opportunities. This duopoly in responsibility offered my teams the intended dignity and discipline of push and pull book ends designed to aggregate successful return on investment. In each of these roles I quickly realized and promulgated the acronym “CMO” really and truthfully stands for “Chief Metric Officer”… hardly ever “Chief Marketing Officer.” As you know, in business, it’s all about the cold steel of the P&L (profit and loss): it’s all about profitable turns: it’s all about identifying and hyper-capitalizing on potential profit pools: it’s all about competitive advantage warranted by smart, relevant profitable investments. As Steven Tyler croons so well: it’s really all about managing and leading “complication, aggravation”… always improving the competitive situation.

Peter Weedfald honored to listen and learn from the musical genius of Steven Tyler... Yes, always "Living on the Edge"...

Just like the prophetic words from this twist and shout rhyme and reason song, Chief Marketing (Metric) Officers also have a perpetual, sometimes uncontrollable situation. The aggravation is sometimes shoved rudely, crudely and unfairly by a CEO, COO or CFO when sales are down, when store or product traffic is weak, when product  demand is anemic, when market share is dampened or lost, when return on investment is not obvious, not realized. And sometimes marketing aggravation is more like a sharp twist and yelling carp, more like a whirling dervish or maelstrom of unfair, unqualified, un-quantified charges ignoring truth and justice of the matter: poor early investing in market research, poor product planning, weak product cosmetics, uncompetitive feature sets, too little, too late. In essence it’s not the wrong ambient marketing plan as charged, it is rather the wrong product developed and delivered by product management, the wrong brand to price proposition, the wrong decision at the genesis of product development perhaps even the wrong sales channel strategy. In point of fact, if the product is competitively wrong then all the expensive attention and demand building both in sales and marketing will simply stuff and snuff the engines of product productivity, brand profitability. Then the cycle of aggravated despair kicks in, product pull fails, products are returned by the channel for credit… yeah, that’s right, just another CMO “living on the edge”…

So, let’s dig in and talk very specifically regarding advertising ROI. Your ROI calculation should measure incremental revenue generated by the advertising campaign, the gross and net profit margin on the items sold along with marketing enhanced expenses. The advertising campaign measured should be extracted from below the line P&L expenses, not related to channel marketing programs as part of negotiated retail terms. The standard channel delusions and enhancements should also be measured of course however, I highly suggest separately and post related to below the line advertising and marketing pull investments. This alembic separation will best deliver measured and accountable performance within sales and separately within marketing. Of course, the best results will always be garnered by uniting the forces of sales and marketing generators, both focused on pulling product sales, garnering incremental profitability.

Also, to best quantify revenue and profit gains, supposedly generated by the invested advertising campaigns, accounting responses need to be in the language of incremental performance versus current averages, YOY or MOM (year over year or month over month) with respect to heightened ROI. There are two calculations to consider for best review and deep dive assessment to either step on the gas, or tap on the brakes in terms of continuance. Perhaps two measurement slices allow for our best investment examination:

1. GMROAE = Gross Margin Return on Advertising Expense

Gross margin or gross profit margin is the difference between production costs excluding overhead, human capital, taxes and sales revenues. Gross margin expresses the greater relationship between gross profit and COGS (cost of goods sold) in essence, measuring how productive each dollar of a company’s input cost is utilized to cover operational and overhead expenses. Then we associate the advertising expense as an incremental measurement with respect to net sales gained or lost. The gross margin portion within GMROAE is equated as: Gross Margin = Net Sales – Cost of Goods Sold / Revenue

2.   Simple ROI = Campaign Revenue X Profit Margin / Cost of Advertising

This simple ROI calculation is designed as a standing incremental campaign performance metric against a mean control and or juxtaposed comparative versus previous campaigns and results. The protracted formula is also useful for metrics of pilot marketing campaigns, A/B splits and varying consumer enhanced sale drive periods. Of course, your CEO and CFO will rightfully suggest all costs associated with running an advertising department including: salaries, benefits, office space, computers, software, share of infrastructure bills (heat, rent, electricity, etc.), plus all of the direct campaign costs must be additives to realize the axiom of advertising ROI. All of those costs added together would give the absolute “cost of campaign” metric to be loaded into this formula. And of course this discussion leads to the CFO’s dreaded out sourcing words: “perhaps we could improve our ROI if we out sourced the entire marketing and advertising department.” Hmm… back to Steven Tyler and Arrowsmith’s Livin on the Edge song for all CMO’s.

As we know and can agree to, the expectations of advertising, successful advertising, is
to generate kinetic, incremental profit for our business. When we can generate an increasing profit margin over time, we are progressing as expected, we are driving incremental revenue, profit and market share. When the cost to acquire our next customer is lower than the cost of acquiring our previous customer, we are building a winning strategy, delivering tactical ROI as promised in forecast.

Today’s global world of ROI (return on investment) advertising measurement and appropriate course corrections is not a role for for the faint of heart. Advertising investment measurement returns have become increasingly more complex with the introduction of new digital channels and devices, a whole new host of mobile and social channels plus much more: blah, blah, blah. Additionally, trying to land your product and or brand message with impact, with consistency, with consumer relevancy, with size, color and determination at the right place, at the right time, to the right target for the right price is a dauntless and fastidious task. Especially if you are marketing high tech products with hyper-changing, short product life cycles.

Of course improved measurement standards, techniques and measurable return on investment emanating out of the CMO’s office tightens and couples CMOs and CEOs into closer partnerships. And for those who may ponder or wander about, wondering what the
eyes and ears of the C-suite of CEO, COO and CFO are focused on regarding below the line advertising metrics, here is a glimpse of the core accountability CMO’s must be focused on:

1. ROI standard and historic based measurements with conventional, expected bill of fare sales conversions: daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly.

2. All forms of profitable traffic generation in-store, on-line, unique visitors, page views, returning or not customers and the short and long view for the size of the prize: the overall basket of sales per instance, per engagement, versus budget. In retail, add revenue and profit per square foot measurements along with basket profitability.

3. CRM: a weekly tracking report based upon digital database mining of your best customers revenue and profit performance versus last month, versus last quarter, versus last year. The same tracking with respect to over stimulating targeted customers, those who have proven they have the will, the need and means to purchase based upon past transactions, but have left your business stale, are scant in their visits and transactions.

4. Customer satisfaction: Measurement metrics and enhancements feed successful product assortments, selections, pricing and supply chain enhancements. Even more importantly, best in class customer satisfaction delivers best in class customer ROI.

5. Qualitative and quantitative metric feedback inclusive to auguring and recommending projected investments based upon data realization relevant to business
strategies, forecast targets and company growth goals.

6. Reveal on personalization actions and chores, attempts and metrics along with A/B testing techniques and research results for solicitous forward investment

7. Specific social-media platform measurements through such sites as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn is very difficult to quantify with respect to traditional impact touch points and ROI. Qualitative feedback should reveal social media is generally used to build
awareness and generate engagement as a supporting role, amplifying other marketing related investments. For example, invested and designed specifically to drive web site traffic.

8. Mobile advertising will be important in the future advertising mix however current tracking and measurement is generally hard to ascertain.

9. e-mail costs with a keen eye on brand equity enhancements coupled with product, services and support ROI. Meanwhile, e-mail, the mother application of digital marketing, continues to be a urbane ROI asset designed and crafted to retain, stimulate and enhance existing customers while hunting for the next, again and again.

10. Loyalty programs especially during heavy promotional and consumer drive period enhancements are designed and tooled for aggressive, long term competitive advantage. Prove it!

And yes, the CFO consistently pulls out black ink on white paper to scribe and report fiduciary measurements in the language of costs, efficiencies, incremental responses in
revenue, profit and market share: profitable returns of these costly engagements. Assiduous accountability, core measurements and ROI reporting is the daily breakfast, lunch and dinner for all CMO’s.

As we know, increases in product productivity should expectantly deliver increases
in company profitability. We also know product acceptance creates over time
brand acceptance which crafts the core base of competitive advantage stimulated
and advantaged through preferred brand experiences, desired product preferences. Products, in congress with maturing and overvalued brands, enveloped around tuned rhythm impact and pricing advantage is in itself competitive mantle advantage, profitable competitive brand promise. And that promise allows for a few more productive product turns then competitive offerings, allows a product to protract and stretch comparative shelf value, gaining a few extra pennies in price over direct competitors offerings. This is the refulgent language and metrics of accountable return on investment. This is the rough and tumble metrics of all CMO’s, 24 hours a day.

Of course, if we listen closley we can hear the prophetic, sometimes demitting words of CEO’s and CFO’s all over the world as they sing to their CMO’s in perfect harmony to the words and music of Arrowsmith: “Tell me about your advertising ROI sit-u-a-tion. Is the complication and aggravation getting to you yet? I want you to know mighty CMO that your last GMROAE results tell me you and your job are surely and clearly living on the edge”…

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

“Product Depth or Product Death?”

Amongst hyper changing short product life cycles is mammoth push and pull opportunity.
Proven again and again through the formidable likes of Samsung Electronics, Apple, MONSTER Cable, Intel, HTC, Amazon and certainly a few more. As we know and experience daily, risk never sleeps. Risk for so many competitors who miscalculate product designs, miss the consumer demand mark based on product cosmetics, uninviting product packaging, disadvantaged FAB’s (Features, Advantages & Benefits), weak competitive brand value, off the mark pricing, miss-read market trends, hyped-unrealistic forecasts and poor product demand generation translates on the P&L as dumped, lumped and grumped global museums of failed products: at ten cents on the dollar. With respect and clarity, assiduous leadership in the language of smart competitive product development, design and technology advantage is leadership proud and aligned to deliver profitable results.

Staying the leadership course in changing business, technological and political climates. Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Peter Weedfald: honored to stand, learn and benefit with and from this great and caring leader!

The mantra of our consumer electronics industry today is convergence across technologies, products, software, wireless, Omni-connected, internet based: across traditional market disciplines. Profit is no longer defined or derived efficiently in product but rather  in “d-o-w-n-l-o-a-d-s” of apps, widgets, movies, music, games, etc. Digitalization, miniaturization, low cost glass for access with wireless mobility are driving this dramatic and dauntless change in profit opportunity, change in consumers home, mobile and business lives. Further, intensive predatory competition is leading to commoditization of the industry, pressurizing margins, destroying slow moving product slugs. Manufacturers, frankly our entire industry stands at a technology crossroads. The lucent opportunity fork in the road offers an expensive choice: “innovate to survive or search for alternative avenues of growth.” Kinetic game changing onslaughts from highly formidable South Korean goliaths and global companies such as Apple are reshaping the industry demand curve with disruptive, highly comsumer demanded innovations. These companies clearly innovate to grow, innovate to survive. In contrast, many of the struggling Japanese consumer electronics firms are focus shifting, attempting to add new profit pools and shadow portfolios of non consumer electronics products such as green energy products, environmental products, healthcare products, personal care products and infrastructure products for businesses: clearly alternative avenues for growth. The net: hyper changing, demand generating competitive brand and product ascensions cause disruptive and blurring brand and product de-censions. These changes also cause a crises of confidence through corporate hallways, a confluence of factors causing demand for something to change, something to compete with. 

These disruptive and perpetual technology and manufacturer changes are against a widening backdrop of: a global recession, intensified cost competitiveness, technological innovations lead by a few global leaders, internet and applet transparency in product pricing, emerging markets as the key drivers of the consumer electronics industry’s potential transformational growth. Profits for the global technology leaders are bountiful while those seeking alternatives for growth are experiencing declining margins, higher channel distribution costs, higher transportation prices due to rising fuel costs, slower inventory turns, faster price erosion, tough love in terms of shelf pull. Also jams up a once proud and fast paced profitable supply chain; slams down future upgrades and new cosmetics, new product advantages. Commoditization and price disintegration is causing some technology companies to shift hard to services, support and software (think IBM): some to alternative products in alternative industries (think of so many in former consumer leaders in transition). In all this change is opportunity. And as we know, the very best opportunities lie in danger, otherwise everyone would be successful in the consumer electronics market. But just how did so many major consumer electronics brands arrive to this rough and tumble change opportunity fork in the road?
 
It’s all about the pillars of successful pull-through defined as consumer demand, defined as those with the will, the need and the means to vote for your product, your brand: willing to pay a few extra profitable pennies for the experience. Or, it’s all about the opposite:
no consumer demand, no profit, no future; time to move on to another industry opportunity, time to lower your brand-to-price value in the language of earth scorched pricing, attempting to compete. The four opportunity or loss pillars caused and experienced by all consumer electronic competitors across retail and internet shelves are:

GOOD-BUY:

The only real competitive, sustainable advantage in business is your ambient
product and brand reputation. The social promise of smart brand and competitive product leadership is each consumers experienced report card aggregating and morphing into either more or less sales opportunities. The daily and hourly goal is to polish the mettle of your performing winner. The metric relationship between brand-product value to price is your greatest competitive advantage. Now just engine with promotional advertising and “here come the profits.”

TROUBLE:

Entering a new market without brand recognition, without proven push and pull spinning shelf space, without product differentiation-advantage, but hyped by niggling,
purse proud price advantage, is difficult at best.

TOUGH LOVE:

You gain shelf space but product turns are nothing more than tombstones in the eyes
and pocket books of consumers. In essence, you now have the largest museum of
failed products on the planet, you are respectfully in the profit recession business.

GOOD-BYE:

Your forecasts are legitimately and dramatically diminished by the retail and or
.com merchant based upon anemic unsustainable failure… your price point
continues to fall to try and re-engine pull… “sorry says the merchant, your
brand and product are wasting valuable and profitable shelf space:” And then
the dreaded and dream crushing words are spoken:“good-bye!”

As the former SVP of sales and product marketing for Samsung Electronics and also
formerly the SVP, chief marketing officer for Circuit City and CircuitCity.com, I have been privy and schooled from inside the hallways of manufacturing as well as retailing both in store and on line; an honor and privileged experience only a few have enjoyed and benefitted from during their careers. And now as President of Gen One Ventures, a sales and marketing consulting company, I can offer a viewpoint based on tried and true push and pull blocking and tackling through a multitude of profitable win-win retail engagements. As we know, retail shelf space, at least brick and mortar space (as opposed to the endless aisles available on the internet) is a fixed, highly valuable and expensive resource for both retailer and manufacturer. For those manufacturers familiar with just how shelf space product-brand assortments are derived you can easily stand and deliver on the pecuniary relationship between the push onto the shelf and the pull expectations off the shelf with respect to managed turns, margin and forecast metrics, competitive price drops and drive period promotional stimulants. From a merchants perspective, across the cold steel of the P&L, there are several key shelf management metrics they depend on to best auger potential opportunity, to best ensure a win – win successful product engagement. These merchant valued shelf model management metrics and corresponding planning views are not for the faint of heart. They are based on tried and true accounting and product marketing practices including fastidious and dauntless reviews. Best of breed merchants, true retail pantheons are the heart and soul, the profitable engine for both the retail organization as well as for manufacturers engaged and hunting on the shelf. Just what do professional merchants examine and metric to ensure bi-modal retail and manufacturer success? I offer twelve profit centric touch points for merchant consideration, merchant banking with respect to profitable win-win product-brand-consumer-competitive concords. Please let me know, from your smart perspective, if there are more to be added to this list to survive and thrive in the competitive jungle of shelf space:

1.   Shelf space dimensions in the language of space costs,
product turn expectations, product profitability (profit per square foot).

 2.   Competitive line logic tied to price and profit margin elasticity and daily throughput especially with respect to consumer drive periods and competing market forces.

 3.   Careful and logical product forecasts tied to productive turns in the language of profitable return on shelf investments.

 4.   Differences tied to line logic between brands-product lines in the language of brand positioning, pricing, item profitability, brand maturity and market demand.

 5.   Associated costs for selling, stocking, storing and transportating especially for new untested product categories and or brands.

 6.   Incorporation of shelf space elasticity and cross competitive elasticity among brands in the same category, competing for the same consumer.

 7.   Careful consideration and understanding of consumer brand loyalty with respect to each and every product sku to best determine pricing and inventory forecasts as well as expected demand to inventory management cycles.

 8.   Ensured and determined product value to brand value pricing and profit strategies with respect and in congress to in-store and .com competitive product assortments.

 9.   Solicitous review of all demand generating programs from manufacturers with a keen eye and discipline for all retail advertising touch points to be included and matured weekly.

 10. Ensure manufacturers commit to varying and aggressive 12 month drive period advertising – promotional programs  with respect to pricing and special product offerings for each tent pole drive time for best, profitable returns.

 11. Ensure retail profit opportunity is based upon stated dollars per product sale, not based as a percentage of product pricing during and through price erosions, competitive price downs and or end of life cycles.

 12. Offer highly profitable value add co-op programs to manufacturers to stimulate sales such including end cap locations, in-store signage and promotions, social and email marketing programs, Sunday circulars, TV and radio advertising.

Highly professional merchants best auger and ensure results through a deeper profit
possibility dive: marginal analysis modeling the relationship between a products share of space and its current market share. Clearly, geometric programming to category space allocation with profit maximization is a key multimodal objective across all on and off line shelf space. Other considerations are shelf space responsiveness based upon store location, size of space, competitive throughput or lack of, advertising commitments to ensure traffic and sales pull through. Of course retail is based on the 3 A’s: authorization, allocation and advertising: retail is also based upon profitable product engagements think: “increases in productivity delivers increases in product profitability.”

Disruptive, refulgent and perpetual global manufacturing leaders in the consumer electronics marketplace, those who are smartest and can constantly articulate product profitability through advanced, fresh technology on retail and internet shelves will: continue to thrive, continue to drive their once formidable competitors into other markets, into unrelated market opportunities, into tired museums of failed products and intentions.

“Product depth or product death?” You decide through this highly competitive product and brand jungle, after all, you are the mighty consumer: it is always about you, the consumer. Not about the retailer, not about the manufacturer who together are afforded the opportunity to declare across store and cloud shelves: ”Good-buy or Good-bye!”

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

I believe all of us at one time or another have been pachyderms. Sensitive to our raw feelings and emotions, improvising our defensive response and reactions unnaturally,
unhappily. Frankly, we should be appreciative for those “leaders” past who ridiculed us, those who caprice our early brave resolve, for those who unwittingly made us sharper, thicker skinned, strengthened our personal mettle and reversed our defense. The best of us reengineered solicitously against the din of poor leadership evolving into “can do, will do, done” offense mode. World class leaders are defined, measured and graded through their protractions, their actions, their reactions, their contractions and their natural, formidable attraction. Superior, proven and trusted leadership is also powered by kinetic, highly relevant learning’s and improvisations based on experience, based upon crisp critical thinking, business judgment and sales motivation.  

The Wonder & Thunder of Stevie Wonder. FrancesAnn & Peter Weedfald with wonderful Stevie...

If you polarize a supply chain array of disciplined and focused leadership under the ribs of clear strategy, tactics and courses of action, you will reveal and can juxtapose the substrate of their business DNA; the fabric of their commitment, the speed and agility of their capabilities. Leaderships polarized commitment and capability chain links measure, metric and medium whether the leader is:

De-active – Inactive – Reactive – Active – Pro-active – Hyper-active – Super Active. In each case and or as aggregated together, the ability to steer and  merit success, to act offensively regarding opportunities is as important as digging in defensively regarding threats in competitive share, changing market conditions. Great leaders are created, not born. Superb leaders, highly effective leaders, self develop, self medicate with knowledge to docent themselves through a never ending thread of self regulated study, relevant education, training and applied experiences. It is the Wonder of superior leadership that augers and creates the Thunder of orchestrated victories.

Having said this, we attempt to gain consensus by defining leadership as: the ability to
influence, stimulate and energize others to focus on and accomplish a greater goal. Highly effective leaders story, plan, influence, energize and upgrade
the common goal, into the demanded dream of one team. The lucent report card of
leadership is best graded by the caliber and business judgment of followers, by
the ability and measured results of said greater goal. While the influence of intelligent leadership is best fueled by moral and royal values, trust worthiness, ethics, character and the spirit of generosity, it is the smart knowledge of leadership that grounds united logic for the team, commonplaces clear determination to achieve or exceed the goal.

Of course management and leadership vary greatly. Think of management as the position of an assigned boss designated to deliver results while leadership is the role
designed to focus on and achieve the highest possible goals, together. Think of leadership in the language of honorable business and moral character coupled with selfless service and support for the organization, for the team. Think of leadership responsibility as a guiding light, respected and warranted by followers who demand a greater sense of purpose and direction, who wish to learn and competitively achieve higher ground. Team members want to respect, hold and duplicate fond and refulgent leadership. To perhaps one day earn the right to become the leader; they themselves. To ensure we fulfill our responsibilities to teach, train, inspire and build future global leaders I
offer 11 Gen One Ventures leadership guiding principles to build, mature and orchestrate an army of highly effective business leaders for today and tomorrow:    

1.    Deliver trust, offer confidence and commanding capabilities for your team members.

2.    Preach, teach and unleash your overall business strategy to your team.

3.    Openly and consistently reveal fiduciary progress or lack of achievement with respect to targeted goals individually and companywide.

4.    Help each employee define and road map how they can personally contribute to the goals from both a pecuniary standpoint and with respect to team engagements.

5.    Communicate often and always across all viable channels.

6.    Reveal, promulgate and portend a competitive, fun cultural spirit of determination.

7.    Be actionable, be measurable, be accessible, not just professorial.

8.    Know your team members history; help plan the dream of their future.

9.    Through your personal leadership always unleash capacity, never punish productivity.

10. Learn and earn to deliver and share the dignity of knowledge with your team, the spoils of financial success with your entire organization.

11. Focus leadership on your customers and they in turn will focus profitable, long term leadership on you.

Great leadership inspires team greatness. Great leadership challenges the process,
challenges the strategy, challenges the team to inspire victorious results. Great leadership utilizes superior business judgment, critical thinking and team motivation to steer around competitive business remoras, competitive advantage. Inspire others, enable others, model others, energize the hearts of others and encourage others to become the leaders they pine to be, to continue their demanding role on the offense, to deny the bulwark distracters they met and feared so many years ago on the defensive side of leadership. And of course, unleash your competitively aggressive business and market offense by unleashing your highly trained and aspiring leadership team members.

The Wonder and Thunder of Leadership. Go ahead and create some or get some… or be kind and just get out of the way! 

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

Sounds esoteric? It’s not! Sounds like fun? It is, especially and only if you master and command these two very distinct yet highly complementary business engines and can
bespeak your negotiating and selling prowess across the table. Just like baking a magnificent, happy, delicious and award winning layer cake!  The logic of articulating the right ingredients, at the right heating temperature with the right timing requirements in perfect congress delivers award winning logical results. Baking a cake is all about logic. Cutting and sharing large slices of your perfectly baked cake with friends, colleagues and
family is what stimulates palatable, savory passion. Based on the logical process, foundation and completion of baking your cake you are able to evoke and frankly command the passion and greater creative participation you originally sought. Always first, the mature and relevant creation of a logic award winning foundation. Then when baked to completion, we add the accelerant called passion to cause and stimulate those across the negotiation table to lean into your side to enjoy together a delicious piece of business cake. Professionally speaking, methodically folding and baking logic and passion into your negotiations delivers and exposes the dream of mutual success and happiness. After all, who wants to argue against sound, mutually beneficial business logic? And just who can run from the passion and dream of a delicious slice of business cake? Especially when the price is right, the logic is sound and the cake is creatively very warm, very delicious.

Paying homage in my office to the brilliant, logical and highly imaginative Albert Einstein.

By the way, please do not treat folding in the passion ingredient as simply conclusive. Rather, you must take personal responsibility to stimulate, aggregate and affiliate creative business passion, layered on top of your hard earned logical substrate, through smart, relevant and mutually profitable advantage. Albert Einstein said it best: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” Relevant to our thinking and mindful to the great physicist Albert Einstein, knowledge is logic: imagination is creativity. Don’t simply be prepared in negotiation through your knowledge and logic as a subject matter expert. Rather ensure your complete proposition is projected through a stimulating vista of imagination and creativity highly relevant and enveloping to the market you intend to serve. Creative passion is your best competitive advantage as it super fuels the engines of logical, well proven business opportunities.

In business, the birr of emotional capital congeners logic and passion into a highly competitive yet quid quo pro advantage. Emotional capital, the impactful duopoly of logic and passion, favors the prepared mind, the energizing creative and passionate articulation of the possible based upon business facts. Emotional capital stimulates and builds long term fair and equitable partnerships because when logic and passion unite and spark between two parties, big, viable and long term businesses are negotiated and built.
Coupling business logic to business passion can turn any partnership from
provider of standard and sturdy products to creator of competitively advantaged
and consumer desired products. In addition, we know from historical
results, that consumers are willing to pay a few extra pennies for the burnished
feeling of emotional capital.  Think Apple, a company thriving by coupling the logic of its highly competitive, integrated product offerings with the passion of its creativity, imagination and dream weaving content. This is just why they are so tough to compete with. This fierce and flinty competitive union of logic and passion deliver consumers the emotional capital to want, to desire, to pay extra for brand and product Apple, again and again and again. This well baked Apple emotional capital cake delivers brand infatuation to a global market, a formidable weapon of choice few companies have ever been able to achieve. My goodness Mr. Steve Jobs, how heavenly brilliant your vision truly was!

So let’s now explore the power of logic for the purpose of business negotiations. Decision making logic is woefully underleveraged by some, yet the foremost business weapon of choice for highly successful others. Internally identifying all aggregated, pertinent options and advantaged opportunities with a keen auger for potential outcomes is hard, but smart work. Illuminating corresponding, complimentary and profitable decision paths designed to strengthen the logic of desirable quid quo pro opportunity is the breakfast, lunch and dinner of business Champions. More advanced “Chess Master” business sharks assign probabilities to opportunities, sometimes in micro seconds across the negotiation table, calculating the likely returns on investment from alternative decision paths. This is baking the cake of leadership logic: superior and exercised logic at its business best.

To many times we advance vetted business opportunities through a series of collected projects as opposed to an advanced, over arching strategy foundation based upon ambient logic. Articulating a position of strength through the stems of projects sometimes
forces you to negotiate against yourself, causing your potentially continent strategic construct to be bamboozled by your own hand. We always negotiate to win, we are clearly tuned and prone to victory in our daily business lives however, there can be no significant victory without a formidable and profitable strategy enveloped by the durable steel of advantaged logic. Logic, as your core backbone foundation allows you to unleash capacity, steer and command opportunity and advantage tough negotiations before, during and after the exchange. Once your mind has engulfed and captured your negotiating opponent through the course of your venerable business logic, it is then your further responsibility to broaden the joint opportunity by reigning in a united, prosperous and passionate construct. It is this secondary ingredient of business passion layered on top of your business logic that advantages both you and those you negotiate with into a fairly equitable and profitable partnership. Then, as I mentioned, we fold in creative, relevant and market making passion.

Painting emotional capital with smart logic and creative passion: slowly, globally!

The key to applying competitive advantage across the negotiation table should start and stop with a well tested, well researched and calculated decision tree analysis, prior completed. The dignity of knowledge and the ability to apply smartly should be tested in varying options and potential outcomes through a series of related and weighted decisions. Assigning probabilities and weighing-grading alternative decisions will map out best and most likely predictable results towards ensuring mutual profitable opportunity. Structuring the logical proposition, based on critical research and knowledgeable assessment in preparation for the negotiation is in itself competitive advantage at the table.

To be clear, first advantage and secure your winning hand through smart, sound and calculated logic. Logic is defined as: logic (noun) loj-ik: convincing forcefulness; inexorable truth or persuasiveness: the irresistible logic of the facts. Then immediately, without hesitation, move and position your “logic chess pieces” to obligate, weight and complement your earned victory to favor your former opponent by folding in highly relevant passion, expressed through brilliant and market relevant creativity. Once baked, this union of logic and passion should deliver emotional capital for the negotiators, emotional capital for the market you are about to serve. Exercises to perfect the art of irresistible persuasiveness through a foundation of business logic and passion should begin with:

- Carefully identifying and examining all feasible, viable alternatives and opportunities in favor of your stated business strategy. Then cross study the same for the company you will
negotiate with as if you would be representing their business, not yours. Audit the found gaps and fissures to your desired goals and outcome followed by preparing your smarter case on the offense with highly relevant proof points and broad based market evidence.

- Auguring and jockeying potential post negotiated outcomes to best pre-focus on variances and road blocks towards achieving your ultimate and desired outcome. As an example, the price you wish to gain for your contracted services through negotiation should be backed with already memorialized and financially tested good, better and best
pricing scenarios. Do not treat this basis of choice as pre-packaged backup to handle a pricing objection but rather as a formula to gain traction on the negotiation offense offering “choice not chance” excellence in services, support and pricing based on needs, not based on down trodden negotiating.

- Diagramming in the language of decision tree construction is essential to ensure the value of your logic in business negotiation is equal or accelerates the value of your
profitable goals. These smart trees need to calculate and reveal essential demands and outcomes to include 1. acceptable decisions and situations 2. investments, costs, expenses and returns 3. Probabilities, revenues, profits and timing.

- Certifying potential financial returns from each permutation, combination and supposition discovered within the decision tree exercise. All costs (real, hidden, potential and expected) along with all income (current, projected, rejected and protracted
based on market conditions) from each viable limb of your decision trees.

- Calculating with certainty the good, better and best financial scenarios with 5% positive and or negative certainty.

- Refine, potentially recertify your results and proposition through a logical review both as the negotiator and by simulating your review as the company you plan to negotiate with.

- Creativity and passion in business are the united disciplines to turn opportunities based on sound logic into highly competitive actions and financial results.

- Passion in business is the creative ability to turn logical business options into
successful and highly motivated revenues, products, brands and market share.

- “Creativity is seeing what everyone else has seen, and thinking what no one else has thought.” (Albert Einstein)

 - Passion coupled with relevant logic and highly competitive creative is always the negotiating weapon of choice, the secret sauce in becoming a market maker as opposed to a market follower.

  - Uniting logic and creative passion should be viewed with an ultimate eye of creating emotional capital at the negotiating table, for the market you intend to unite and serve, together.

It is always time to fold in highly relevant business passion on top of smart business logic to portend new, dynamic approaches to over achieve jointly on negotiated covenants. Creative productivity and action as the ribs of your logical proposition in negotiation will always ensure mutual agreement, mutual growth, mutual and long term profitability. Remember, first win your case, your opportunity, through logic. Then share the expected
victory by orchestrating jointly captured passion to accelerate and muscle up balanced support to over achieve on mutually agreed to goals. Negotiations are not about agreeing to projects but rather enjoying and fueling logical, strategic business opportunities folded onto passionate, creative shoulders to garner the weapon of choice: emotional capital. Should you bake and fold in both smart logic and creative passion in every business negotiation? Surely yes, if you always play to win.

How smart is your logic? I personally believe, very smart.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

“To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands” SUN TZU

Success breeds success. Failure also breeds success, if we are smart enough to capitalize on the assets of failure to breed personal and team investments ahead of our future. Vince Lombardi once said “winning is a habit, unfortunately, so is losing.” As we know through personal experience, repetition is not the guide post for winning. Missing the same receiver in football through repetition does not breed quarterback advantage, does
not signal the teams fertile road to more yards gained. Commanding a released ball that actually spins aggressively and hits the receiver is called successful vision, smart practice, not repetition. Intelligent practice breeds competitive opportunity; competitive advantage. Practice, warrants and garners the issuance of success. Study everything around you, build relevant and competitive muscle memory for every opportunity and treat defeat along the way as nothing more than a learned disability to be respected, to be shed. Practice makes perfect while repetition is simply the refuge of the unsure, of the unguided.

Pictured: mighty NY Giants Super Bowl leader # 10, Eli Manning with Peter & FrancesAnn Weedfald

As I like to say, winning is all about ensuring the dignity of knowledge while creativity allows you to escape the sharp teeth of business failure. The three legged stool of competitive leadership and market advantage is built on practice, knowledge and creativity. The seat of the  stool steadies and defines your personal leadership brand. And as we know, brand is a promise. It is your promise of competitive advantage towards winning in business. And your brand promise is fueled through assiduous practice, crisp business knowledge as a subject matter expert and smart, highly relevant creativity. Think coach, quarterback, team and playbook. The knowledge of opposing team members for next week’s game is studied in game videos. Beyond the intense skills of each of your own team members it takes creativity found in coach’s play book, matured through intense practice to defeat the opponent ahead, to earn the right for success. Building competitive business advantage is the same. Leadership’s promise in the language of this three legged stool, seated by your personal or company brand, is graded through team success, team failures.

As the mirroring formula for football and or any sport - business success is practice,
knowledge and creativity our confidence and determination levels are competitive assets fueled by preparation. We understand how to practice, we understand how to gather relevant knowledge, but how do we create? And how do we know how to build, mature and amplify creativity? Leaders should teach creativity and imagination in sales and marketing to best prepare their teams to escape and steer around the predictable. The predictable? “We do not need another product in this category on our retail shelves.” The predictable? “Consumers are just not voting with their dollars for your product or brand.” The predictable? “Your competition has better products, better brand value.” The predictable? “We now have the largest museum of failed products in the history of this business.” The predictable? “Your fired!”

Creativity with football giants! Pictured: Boomer Esiason, Peter Weedfald, Troy Aikman, Steve Young & Dan Marino

I personally believe it is the responsibility of each and every Chief Marketing Officer to own creativity, to teach creativity, to super fuel the competitive prowess of their teams. To ensure daily practice, through the distinct knowledge of their corporate brand and market, through the features, advantages and benefits of their products. Most importantly, through creative executions designed and tuned for competitive performance. I believe the exact same practice, knowledge and creativity is the responsibility of the sales EVP and all sales team members. And that creativity is the real competitive advantage that allows products and brands to sing and dance across shelf space, to hop into consumer wagons on the way to the cash register and to gain hard fought market share by aggregating sales and marketing as one. In essence, creativity is the chief catalyst for return on investment (ROI), return on reputation (ROR). I
believe the winning formula in business is to have a CMO and EVP of sales as
one person, not two people. And for that one person to drive creativity through
the energizing veins of united sales and marketing leadership: to view, calculate, orchestrate and monetize push and pull as one, not as two. To view creativity in sales and marketing as one, not as two. Afterall, back to my starting metaphor, there is only one quarterback commanding the offense and coaches creative playbook on the playing turf, not two.

The Beatles said it best “all together now… all together now.” Sales and marketing creativity: home grown, home sewn, all united and super toned as one entity through sales and marketing. Not two, but rather one. For the ”washed,” you know those of you in sales and marketing who utilize creativity as your daily best weapon of competitive choice, you will surely call me “the Master of the Obvious.” For the unwashed, those who are not primary drivers in either sales or marketing with creativity as your most visible and aggressive weapon of choice, you will most likely call me over stated. For those new, smart and energized sales and marketing leaders, I am sure you are curious and wondrous of just how you can be more creative. You’ll ponder “just how do I anoint and teach creativity through the sales and marketing teams and how do I unite two organizations to compete as one?” Please feel free to share your thoughts and or your requests for more information
within the comment section of this blog and I will offer suggestions on just how you can be a creativity maverick to augment and complement strength in practice, determination and knowledge. Just ask us your question and trust me we will be honored to deliver you a highly relevant answer because your request for knowledge, practiced by so many who wish and demand to succeed, proves you are already on our creativity leadership team.

“When is one better than two?” Easy, when 2 separate organizations within sales and marketing unite as one muscled up tour de force, one competitive juggernaut, one creative jet stream, one team united to ensure push and pull harmony, profitability while gaining long term market share together, forever. One, in my humble opinion, with respect to sales and marketing, is always better than two. And whether in the game of football or business, if you have two, three or more quarterbacks on the playing offense trust me, you have no quarterback on the playing field, game over.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

Brand Infatuation Or Brand Evaporation? The Choice Is Yours!

Tom Cruise’s acting career is brand leadership amazing. Building instant, career
kinetic emotional capital while simultaneously exceeding box office results,
Tom crafts brand infatuation for both his personal brand and for the outstanding
movies he has lead such as Risky Business in 1982 or Top Gun in 1985 where he burnished
his brand as a world class action star. Tom also proves his amazing brand versatility
in ferly movies like The Color of Money and Rain Man. In each and every Tom Cruise
lead movie across the big screen we must agree, his personal brand (his leadership anthem) and his personal performance (his leadership pillars) enlisted
our prehensible demand for more, layng down our credit cards to be part of his dream weaving through various big screen, epic movies.

Peter Weedfald enjoying the refulgent brand infatuation of Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise during the Olympics. Notice Tom is holding my pen after I asked him for is autograph!

And so, that is the point. And that is also the question of this month’s Gen One
Ventures blog. Question: is your own personal brand (anthem and pillar), your
actionable leadership highly demanded inside and outside of your company
offices like Tom Cruise and his movie projects are among Hollywood fans? Are
you demanded and wanted as much as your company’s brand and products
flourishing throughout the market? Is your brand highly demanded, company titled
and compensated based upon your ability to build brand infatuation for your own personal
leadership? Is your personal brand reputation admired? We both know it should
be, can be; we both know we all work for it to be, pine for it to be lionized.

Company brand missions focused on revealing and accenting valued attributes, declared
target market priorities, competitive juxtaposed strengths and determined metrics
should initially focus on strengthening leadership measurements in the school of
personal brand development and assessment. Let’s title this important personal inventory, self inspecting, self evidencing, evaluation as “mission possible in the language of
building brand infatuation.” That before you can build and lead a company, a brand, a
product, a team, a department, an enterprise, you must first lead yourself,
lead your team. After all, your personal brand value will make or break any
leadership efforts, commands or directives based on the same numerator and
denominator of smart school taught brand and product management. As your company brand is a promise to consumers, your personal brand in essence is a promise to your
employees, employers, customers and stock holders. Both brand promises must be
as durable as steel, complementary and congener with a gleaming, smart and
burnished business heart for your customers and your team members.

To be clear, a brand, as treated in the substrates of conventional marketing wisdom,
is the anthem of your company’s reputation. As a consumer brand is a measured promise in commerce, a promise revealed, monetized and measured through revenue and market
share results, so is your personal brand. And as any product or service for
sale should be viewed as the pillars under the company’s brand anthem, the
pillars under your personal brand anthem will be measured, compared and either
monetized through your ability to lead and compete in a market or business
recessed and degraded within your core mission to drive demand, drive
profitable forecasted results. The latter result is well known as accelerating
towards brand evaporation. The net? Brand is a promise, what’s yours? Brand is
a promise, what’s your personal brand worth inside the hallways of your company, as well as through the eyes and ears of your competition?

The formidable ribs under your company’s anthem leadership umbrella should either
reign or shine upon your personal brand reputation. And the pillars of your
personal competitive engine is your ability to lead through your vision, your
determination, your teachings, your discipline, your team expectations, your
measurements and the speed of your course corrections. In point of fact, your
company’s brand anthem and under pillars should be an absolute reflection of your own
personal leadership. As goes the value of your leadership mantle, as goes your
company’s reputation, your company’s future net worth. Let’s dig deeper
together, let’s drill down with a bit more relevant detail on your company’s
branding chores. As we do, please metaphorically enlist and mirror this
information to access, reflect and better understand your own personal brand
(anthem) and product (pillar) leadership skills and merits.

Company value demonstrated through deliverable consumer experiences enlists or
dissuades exposure for your anthem (brand) and or for your pillars (products),
over time. Brand recall relates to the auto retrieval recognition of a brand
based on exposure to products within your brands market category. Recognition,
based on prompting, is easier to process than direct recall from memory. The
competitive advantage of commanding strengthened recognition and recall is
vast, especially at the last three feet of the sale in a retail environment
where both varying products and brands are juxtaposed as opposed to an
advertisement where your brand and products are united as the solitary reveal
in a category. In either case, the product itself is constant as the working
hero while your brand performs and acts as the emotional hero. To
elevate, promulgate and create emotional brand value, always authorize and
drape your product with highly relevant and energizing creative competitive
advantage. As brand, in many cases is the refuge of the unsure, product as the
object of consumer desire must be anointed and called out as the hero of this
dynamic relationship between anthem and pillar, must be over amplified and
pumped above the din of competitive brand and product noise. The stronger the
hero (product), the more relevant and magnetic the emotional capital for the
brand (anthem). Think of Tom Cruise as the product hero, Mission Impossible as the emotional capital. Metaphorically, the stronger and more competitively valuable your personal leadership deliverables, the more enlisting and inviting the emotional capital to climb under your leadership umbrella, the more responsibilities, promotions and dollars lean in your direction. Personal leadership that unites and develops refulgent rhythm impact and kinetic results through advantaged anthem and pillar deliverables is leadership that wins time and again building valuable brand infatuation. Leadership that fails
competitively, fails through the stated mission, unfolds fast and furious,
widely recognized and acknowledged brand evaporation. Evaporation because the
team, the executives, the HR department and your customers all wish this particular
leadership would simply disappear, evaporate forever.

In either the case of building your company brand or prinking your personal leadership
brand, the ability to value expose attributes and benefits that over satisfy,
overwhelm your competition will warrant a positive overall comparative brand
attitude. It will also build brand elasticity and desirability translating to
steady demand in product preference, product deliverability. The staging for
successful competitive brand and product duopoly is the ubiquitous opportunity
to build lasting attention, interest, conviction, desire and corresponding
sales for your brand X, for product X. To amplify and enlighten this discussion
we underline ten proactive, protective and meaningful attributes of building competitive
and lasting brand prowess, ensuring life time personal or company brand value.
As you read each of these descriptive brand anchors think of brands you
personally associate with, you respect and you have purchased over time.
Further, as your own brand litmus test, consider whether your personal brand
DNA is viewed and appreciated by customers, peers, reports and executives
positively through each of these core brand value elements.

In order to ensure lasting brand infatuation, to ensure you will receive a few more pennies
versus your competitors brand on the shelf, to ensure you build personal brand infatuation, you and your company’s brand experience must be (and frankly your personal brand foundation should be) inclusive to the following 10 reflective brand mettle
elements:

 1. Personable.

 2. Exorable.

 3. Transferable.

 4. Protectable.

 5. Adaptable.

 6. Meaningful.

 7. Valuable.

 8. Defendable.

 9. Affable.

10. Memorable.

Whether you are focused on varnishing your own personal leadership brand or focused on
your company’s brand and product building chores keep in mind this critical competitive chore is all about meriting and muscling up long term profitable equity. The most formidable and frankly smart report card for your company’s brand efforts is: what consumers think about your products, if they only knew about its brand name, only exposed by brand logo characteristics without product. As your competitors branded products are never static, always developing, always enhancing, a formidable and durable brand position both protects your current family of products as well as sustains your buying fans to wait for your next product launch in response to competitive offerings. I
respectfully suggest the same mokie formula and examples within apply to your
personal business brand building chores and corresponding measurements.
Building formidable brand leadership through your own personal actions can also
build the same for your company brand and family of products. Brand infatuation
begins, accelerates and competitively matures best when in direct congress with
personal brand leadership across the sales and marketing organization. Think
Tom Cruise, think the various blockbusters he afforded audiences, created brand
infatuation with.

Mission Impossible? Me thinks not. Tom Cruise I believe proves again and again the
mammoth toothsome power of uniting push and pull, anthem and pillar through assiduous brand leadership. Remember, brand infatuation is a choice, it is a discipline, it is an art form. It is also not for the faint of heart. It is not easy to frequently and consistently deliver personal brand infatuation because if it was, all business leaders and all companies brands and products would be highly successful, be highly demanded. They are not. As an example, many good Hollywood actors and producers with very good intentions have been unfortunately dragged down the maelstrom of brand evaporation despair. I would mention a few for you however, I’ve forgotten who they are as they have evaporated from my mind and I am sure yours as well.

How about you? Personal brand infatuation or personal brand evaporation? The choice and mission possible, is all yours.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

“Nothing is so common as the wish to be remarkable” Shakespeare

Amazing times as we march together into 2012… This is an important time of confidence to believe in the art of the impossible in business, government and on a personal basis. That the appetence art of determined results can best be articulated and navigated through a highly viable and professional sales thread and formidable exchanges. If  you are not personally vested and trained in the art of professional selling… if you are not in greater command of relevant, competitive knowledge, crisp to deliver your scotching point of view, then I suggest your ability to win in business is not tuned for best results. Is not tuned to accomplish the business impossible in 2012 or beyond.

And yes Shakespeare said it best, we all want to be remarkable. But we know it takes personal determination to study, to practice, to rebound from the wounds of failure too become a highly relevant business leader. A leader who delivers on the promise of his or her words through the art of the deliverable, with competitive vigor, advantage and resulting benefits. You can ensure such consistent, positive results relevant to the demands and opportunities of your own business and home life; if you truly practice the greater command and skills of professional selling, professional leadership. We are all in fact, nothing more than carpenters of words. Some “carpenters” dream of remarkable deeds while others can actually move and craft mountains of pedestrians to their point of view. Be big and be bold in 2012, go ahead and even begin preparing to stand and deliver in Times Square to usher in 2013. Demand within your own personal resolve will build demand for your valued business contributions.

Peter Weedfald honored to stand and deliver for a mammoth, intense crowd in Times Square, New York.

As I like to say, “if you want to be the leader, act like a leader.” There are a multitude of business, government and personal examples of energizing and effective leadership. In each and every case I suggest the individual proves their greater leadereship articulation by first creating and commanding personal demand to succeed. By drawing and painting viable disciplines through their viewpoint camp, through the mettle of their determined words and actions. This is professional selling, professional leading at its best. This thinking I believe breaks the commonality point Shakespeare so well articulates and grinds against our business and personal egos: that there are truly remarkable leaders who have moved from wishing to accomplishing the impossible. The real question is just what are we waiting for to carve our own remarkable accomplishments, not just our own remarkable dreams.

To be remarkable in Business America is no easy task. Competition is fierce, targeting and subjugating market leaders with unbridled optimism and personal demand to succeed. And ignoring the lessons of leadership failures is potentially as dangerous and punishing as losing business itself. Remember, risk never sleeps, competitors never give up and there is no leadership mission without profitable margins. Teach your team to lead through their smart minds coupled with highly relevant economy of language. Teach them the habit to win through your selling victories, through disciplined demand to win, everyday. I believe the great Vince Lombardi said it best when he said: “winning is a habit… unfortunately so is losing.” And we all agree; winning is everything, losing is sadly, nothing.

Well… these are my humble and market experienced thoughts from a sales and leadership perspective with respect to the great orator and author Shakespeare. My next blog will focus on the greater bi-modal competitive advantage of uniting sales and marketing as one fluid business muscle, as the weapon of choice for successful business leaders and their company teams. Thank you all for your generous review and thoughts and best wishes for a very successful, healthy and blessed 2012.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post