In my conversations with some friends today, I gathered the following:
The best kinds of leaders are those who see a future that goes beyond what is and what will be in the immediate term, capture that future in a vision of what could be, enroll and enlist others to that vision, and empower them to reach that vision on their own . That's what leadership is all about.
Thoughts?
A few more interesting links about Zaltman's Metaphor Elicitation Approach can be seen here. I think what is intriguing here is the use of metaphors and psychoanalytic concepts and techniques to understand what really goes on in the minds of the consumers - it's going way beyond what consumers think they think and dives deep into their subconscious mind. Zaltman's website should contain more information.
How far will this technique go?
I think this could go far.
Alongside fMRI which is now being deployed in the field of marketing and consumer behavior/decision-making modeling, as well as physiological psychology or biopsychology being used ot help model behaviors and responses to different messages, brands, and situations, I think this could go very far.
Of course, one has to be conscious of the typical questions and reservations that biopsychologists/physiological psychologists had with Freudian, Jungian, and similar approaches.
I have always been interested in attitudes that people have about certain phenomena that they encounter everyday - and how these attitudes are formed, how these attitudes influence and shape their own behaviors - and those of others.
This is something that I picked up from the Harvard Business School's blogs - the use of psychoanalysis (and/or similar techniques) to get to the bottom of one's relationships with and perceptions of brands in general. Unlike in ethnology where a researcher may be relegated as an observer and the 'subjects' and their interactions and their expressions observed from a distance, this technique developed by Jerry Zaltman, uses interviews that are founded on the psychoanalytic disciplines of psychology/psychiatry. (Think Rorschach inkblots or word-associations or draw-a-tree/person test.)
Interesting approach.
Here's a link to the video.
There is a fine, fine line between questioning a person's professional capabilities and attacking her/him personally. There's also a fine, fine line between "client service" and being a "client's doormat". Between service and slavery. Between being demanding and being unreasonable.
For awhile now, I have been holding this thought in my mind. A lot of marketeers think of agency executives (like myself) as "mere agency people" - "people who take my orders (or my boss') and get them done because we want to get things done".
For a long time, I have thought that this was the responsibility (the fault?) of agency people - both current and past players in the world of advertising, media and communications planning, and even research and other allied services.
Then it dawned on me that no, it's a shared responsibility.
We all have a shared responsibility to treat each other respect.
Agency executives ought to demand respect from their clients - and clients ought to respect their agency teams, regardless of whether they are from the media company, the research,or the creative teams. No amount of "incompetency" is sufficient to warrant a 'personal attack'. Specially if such attack is based on preconceived notions on races, genders, age, skin color, and types of passports.
Not because they deliver the goods and they get things done "the way we want to get things done".
But because it's the right thing to do.
Simply.
We all come into this world naked. And we all die, too. We breathe the same air - and we look up to the same moon at night. What makes you different is just in your head. And life is too short to be concerned about your next bonus, the boss' accolades, or winning the next 'political bout' in the office.
It's quite interesting how things have been in the past few weeks. The past few weeks have perhaps been the most relaxed that I have been - and most driven. With my imaginings and thoughts running wild, I had the time to look at things that are working and things that were not.
And I guess, I am ready to get on with the world.
Hopefully, wiser. Though only time can tell.
For now, I can only hope.
(And as opposed to my AsiaWorks Advanced and Leadership Program Trainers - "There is hope... There will always be hope. Without hope, we are nothing but mere flesh and bones. But with hope, there is humanity in us. Without hope, we are mere automatons - it is hope that drives us, it is hope that makes us dreams and that moves us.)
Picked this up from David Cook on imeem.com.
This is a very interesting video from Yahoo! Tech Ticker, an interview with Jonathan Yarmis of AMR Research conducted by Sarah Lacy. Yarmis believes that there are four pillars to disruptive technologies that will define the future - not in silos but in terms of how each pillar interact:
1. Social Networking Phenomenon, powered by the technology
2. Cloud computing
3. Mobile access to data
4. Monetization beyond the traditional search ads
Yarmis also suggests that "paid search ads in a social networking phenomenon" (and I will add, in other technologies - for example in mobile access to data on a phone or a wireless device) are not the only way to monetize all these.
(Think of it this way: If you are talking/networking with your friends on your PC or on your mobile device, would you really click on a text ad that's irrelevant to what you and your friends are talking about?)
The internet, Yarmis says, will remain to be free - and I do agree. Capex from tech companies that are funding these "free" internet services won't be able to maintain these levels of interest. Monetization will be critical. However, most companies are still very much stuck to the old "advertising mindset" of capitalizing on "inventory" rather than creating new ways of monetizing these.
Seth Godin always has a way of writing that makes it seem he's writing based on the past events of my own life. Of course, that's preposterous and as my friends would say, "very assuming". But one of his latest posts did just that. In his blog, Is It Worth It?, he writes (after asking a lot of questions):
The object isn’t to be perfect. The goal isn’t to hold back until you’ve created something beyond reproach. I believe the opposite is true. Our birthright is to fail and to fail often, but to fail in search of something bigger than we can imagine. To do anything else is to waste it all.
The past few weeks (when I was on holiday - and I am still on holiday!), I have been thinking about the same question - "Will these new adventures and ventures be worth it?"
I left a pretty good (read: 9to6, 8hours-a-day, no-stress, no-working-on-weekends) job and took on a 1month break (and counting) with nothing but my savings in the bank to search for new adventures and ventures that I could be part of.
For four weeks, the thought - and yes, the fear - of having nothing to come back to after my holidays was there. And the thought of "will these things that I am thinking about be worth it?", I would admit, keeps on coming to me - whilst lying by the pool, whilst swimming, whilst doing the rounds in my apartment, whilst running errands, whilst playing with my best friend's kids...
And then suddenly, I realized: I wouldn't know if any of these will be worth it unless I get myself into doing any of these.
The object is no longer to find the perfect situation to grow in - or the perfect company or venture or partnership or business to get myself involved in.
And as Seth wrote on the 17th of June: The object isn't to be perfect.
And in the same manner, my object isn't to be in a perfect situation - whatever and however that situation may be.
My object is to find a system - or systems - to which I can be committed to, whose vision is aligned with my personal vision, and whose values are interlinked with my values.
And I believe I have found it
Tags: SethGodin, Excellence, Arete, Remarkability
This is a piece of interesting news that I picked from the NYTimes: a company in the US, called Sense Networks (in NY), has launch an analytics program that will help analyze data on people's movements, routines, and trips - and potentially encounters with other people (or crowds), ads, and the retail shop. This comes after NATURE published a study on how people of an unnamed city roam around their city/locale using cell-phone signals.
From a research perspective, this is a lot of data - a treasure trove of data.
From a marketeer's POV, this is a something like a dream come true: knowing where your consumers are, what kinds of media/communications they encounter with on the street, how they behave alone versus in groups versus in crowds of people, and how they behave inside the store en route to buying your product. A savvy marketeer can immediately see the value (I hope) of such information - and how it can be deployed to improve one's investments across different kinds of media and non-media channels.
I can imagine, for example, a marketeer or a media planning company in NY tagging all their outdoor sites, bus-/train-ads with GPS data - alongside shopping centers that carry their brands or their competitors.
I can also imagine marketeers and data-miners having a grand time consolidating information in-store with those gathered from these troves of consumer- and ad-/media-locator data - and creating predictive models and algorithms that would make brand campaigns more effective.
I can also imagine how these sort of data will move adspends away from TV and potentially other in-home media, including the internet because "the last golden mile" in retail marketing is still the most important part of the buying process...!
But I am also pretty sure that this will attract a lot of controversy: privacy and individual anonymity.
It's going to be - hmm - intrusive. It could very well be the start of conspiracy theorists' and privacy advocates' nightmare: Big Brother On The Loose. I can't imagine what would stop governments using this kind of technology (if they don't already have it - now that sounds a little like a conspiracy theory...) to track down individuals of interest to the state/nation in order to "protect" and ensure the safety of the public.
So - given these imagined possibilities, what should we think of these developments?
Well, I think we need to carefully think through this one very carefully. Whilst it is great technology - and it could benefit marketeers (and, marketeers would argue, it could also benefit consumers), I think that it furthers the questions on privacy, ethics in marketing research, and corporate social responsibility:
However, there are also repercussions that come with the availability of these kinds of data.
Tags: Data, Analytics, Research, Marketing Research, Media Planning
Picked this up from the Yahoo! news RSS - and as a user of Yahoo finance, I will have to agree that yes - it is indeed a great resource. Significantly better than Google's Finance Pages, Yahoo Finance's pages (US-based, I think, but accessible to SG-users) are a great way to learn about investing - and well, invest. The real-time prices and the technical graphing capabilities are awesome.
I have been trying to put a "dollar value" to my day. This is part of my personal goal of setting up my own shop - an advisory shop for small to mid-sized entrepreneurs in Singapore and in other countries in Southeast Asia on how to break-through their respective markets and create compelling stories for investors.
For the past several days, I have been looking at different ways of doing this. I first looked at the idea of "direct salary costs" + "overhead/capitalization" + "preset profit margins". But quickly, I saw the weakness in such an attempt. My salary - or at least, my former company's salary - could not be a benchmark, because that is not necessarily the value that I can bring to the table.
I tried a different approach - benchmarking. I started calling friends who have been in the business of consultancies (the closest I could get to "advisory") - and started to rack my brains in search of memories that could lead me to a number. I then compared my credentials with their own credentials, their clients with my target clients... But then again, I realized,well, mine is an entirely niche target altogether. My credentials - or anybody else's credentials - are not a sure-fire way to measure value. And besides, how does one quantify the value of one's credentials - and those non-dollarizable values?
Then I recalled I had this book called "The Business of Consulting". I started to look at the advice the author gave - and devised my own way of looking at how I should be charging - or perhaps, 'dollarize' my time.
1. Start treating yourself as a company. So list down all your possible expenses - knowing full well that you now are a company, not just an employee.
2. Determine how many days in a year will you be working to create noticeable value. This may or may not be 8hour days. There is no "number of hours" involved - the ultimate goal is "noticeable value-creation" for clients.
3. I had to be realistic - this would be a stressful endeavor. So I figured there should be days wherein I will do nothing BUT nothing. There will also be days when I will need to catch up on readings and learn new things. And there will be days when I will have to market the company - well, that's also creating value, but not to the clients that I will be serving.
4. Only then did I arrive at a number. It seemed high - at first.
5. I immediately tried it out with a trusted business partner - and told him what my rates are going to look like for the projects that I will be doing for his team. Of course, I had to show him the value of the projects that I will be working with him on - and how these could potentially lead to better processes, better returns, better people. He said yes.
So - value proposition versus pricing proposition? I think looking at 'dollarization' from both angles is perhaps necessary. "Pricing" however, tends to undervalue the "real value" - because "we have to be competitive, we have to get more sales volume, we have to get more pick-ups and empty the shelves, we have to have more sales units sold!"
So I am going to say, it's all about dolarization should never be driven by what's cheap, what's in the market, what the rest are doing, and what we think would make people buy ("People love cheap prices!" - to which I say, "Not really...")
And funnily enough, Seth Godin in his latest blog talks of this thing. He says -
Your sales force and your customers may scream that you need to lower your price.
It's not true.
You need to increase your value. If people don't want to pay, it's because you're not delivering enough value for the money you're charging.
You're not selling a commodity unless you want to.
Coincidences. How I love them.
(I would like to say "great minds think alike..." but then again, I don't think I can compare with THE Seth Godin...! Haha!)
