When Mike Tyson said, “everybody’s got plans… until they get hit,” everyone knew intuitively what he meant. Simply having a strategy is no guarantee of success.
Napoleon had a strategy till the Russian winter exposed its flaws. Pompey had a strategy until Caesar outfoxed him. The best laid plans are often laid asunder by the quirks of an uncertain and uncaring universe.
Winning, after all, isn’t a simple matter of merit, but one that is subject to the idiosyncrasies of chance and circumstance. So what to do? How can we pursue a purpose with vigor and meaning when we can never be certain about what fate has in store for us? Here are six principles that will help guide you on your way.
The New York Times Company released the first results of its paywall last week and showed that it gained 390,000 digital subscribers between the Times and the International Herald Tribune.
That’s a lot more than people thought it would get and a testament to both the strength of the brand and how well the paywall was executed. So is the paywall a success? Many people are saying so, but I disagree.
I wrote before that I thought the paywall was a stupid idea and I still think so. While the subscription numbers are impressive, the business itself is worse off and falling further behind. Some, like Henry Blodget, think the answer is to simply fire more journalists. I believe the solution lies in the NY Times learning how to build a digital business.
I recently attended a meeting where a marketing executive, in all seriousness, said, “we only present research results that we already know to be true.” Really? Then what’s the point of research in the first place?
Every year, millions of dollars are spent on research of varying quality. If you look hard enough, you’ll always be able to find something, somewhere that can back up virtually any argument. Yet by doing so, you are using data much like drunk uses a lamppost—for support rather than illumination.
That’s a big problem. Ours is a messy world, with lots of seemingly contradictory data and confusing logic. To glean the truth, we need to be careful. Make no mistake, choosing facts to fit your argument isn’t clever or professional, it’s sophistry and it’s fraudulent. Here’s a quick guide to spotting—and avoiding—some of the most common pitfalls.
What happened to the Death Star? It seems like just yesterday that they were so unstoppable that they held a stranglehold on the global computer market and faced antitrust suits around the world.
What a difference a decade makes. Their stock is at 30, right where it was 5 years ago. Their price/earnings ratio is about 10, or roughly half the average of the S&P 500. Rumors are rampant that Steve Ballmer will be fired. Goliath has become David.
So what’s the future for Microsoft? Possibly very bright due to their new Windows 8 platform and that’s not because I love it. In fact, I wrote in an earlier post that it’s bound to piss PC users off. However, Microsoft has proven before that strategy can trump product and, in this case, their strategy is dead on. What’s more, it shoots straight at Apple’s Achilles heel.
Marketing has no shortage of theories. Some say we should focus on rational benefits, others emphasize emotional bonds and still others insist that we stick to the numbers.
What we lack is any consensus or grounding. Unlike other professions, we don’t have well established principles. Someone clever says something clever, it sounds good and we run with it. That’s no way to run a trillion dollar industry.
Fortunately, it does have to be that way anymore. Neuroscientists have unlocked many of the brain’s secrets. Nobel prizes have been awarded for behavioral economics and a vast amount of research has documented cognitive bias. It’s time to apply to business what science already knows and break away from old myths and failed philosophies.
What’s the next big thing in digital? Mobile? Social? Online video? Those are things moving fast but the trend with the most potential for significant economic impact is, in fact, retail.
The sleepy, boring business of selling things to consumers is pepping up and becoming a hotbed of innovation. Technology and consumer trends are combining to create a shopping experience entirely different from anything we’ve seen before.
As Darrel Rigby points out in his HBR article, every 50 years retail goes through a major disruption. The rise of urban centers brought us department stores. Automobiles created suburbs and shopping malls. Then category killers and discount stores like Kmart and Wal-Mart challenged that status quo. Now retail is being reinvented all over again.
”Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore” wrote the French author Andre Gide. In very much the same way, we can’t manage strategy in the 21st century without discarding the comfortable dogmas of the 20th century.
Much of our strategic doctrine comes from an industrial age in which products were fairly uniform and success was highly contingent on the ability to move around men and materiel efficiently.
That’s still important, but not a source of sustainable competitive advantage. Today, we don’t produce products as much as we design them and that calls for a strategic shift. To embrace the future, we must, in a very conscious way, let go of the past and move from a planning mentality to one that integrates skills and information in an emergent context.
Who wouldn’t like to be Apple? They make great products, consumers love them, competitors fear them and they make a ton of money.
Yet for all that’s been written about Apple, nobody’s been able to emulate them. What’s more, little more than a decade ago, they were on the ropes. At one point Michael Dell said he would just shut and give the money back to the investors.
Steve Jobs’ secret wasn’t that he saw what others could not, although he certainly had vision. What made Apple special was that he had the discipline to not do what others would. He limited himself to developing one new product at a time and focused his energies on building out existing products and platforms. That made all the difference.
All of us want to know what the “Next Big Thing” will be, me as much as anybody. One of the best chances to do that is at CES, the Consumer Electronics Show
This year the show featured over 3000 exhibitors and 150,000 attendees. I had the opportunity to spend the past week at CES 2012 and toured the floor with Shelly Palmer, host of NBC’s Live Digital, so had a great vantage point to see what’s what.
While most of the action happened away from the convention center, in hotel suites and meeting rooms, the wares on display did reveal some important underlying trends. Most of the innovation wasn’t strictly with the technology itself, but how products interact with each other to enhance user experience. Here’s what I saw:
“I got an iPad for Christmas and didn’t even ask for one.”
“My parents bought me a Kindle for some reason.”
Over the Christmas holidays, I got a lot of emails from friends asking for advice on their favorite unexpected Christmas gifts: tablets and e-readers.
My lucky friends represent an important trend taking place in digital marketing: the increased adoption of Post-PC devices like tablets and e-readers that are changing how people consume media and engage with brands.
Here at Moxie we conducted a survey in 2011 on Post-PC Marketing and gleaned some interesting insights (check it out here), but now that the holiday season has passed we can take another look at how tablets and e-readers will change the digital marketing landscape in 2012 and beyond.
Or install manually
Copy and paste the following Google tag code onto every page of your website, immediately after the element. Don’t add more than one Google tag to each page.
