Who gets to decide what you want?

When George Washington was a teenager, did he really, really, really want a car?

Unlikely.

In order to want something, you probably need to know it exists. But my guess is that it surely helps if you’ve been marketed to.

One definition of happiness is wanting the things you’re likely to get (or, conversely, not wanting the unattainable). One definition of marketing is persuading the world it wants what you have, regardless of whether they can afford it or not.

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What Do We Do to Get Income?

When we consider the amount of time we spend imagining and pursuing success, is the accounting a fair balance?  Putting it another way, do you spend too much of your time working to get income?

Pondering the difference between what we want and what we have can lead us to inspiration.  The gift of human ingenuity and creativity is a blessing.  That is the truth.  There is joy in bringing our ideas to life.  Hours of refining our vision, laying out a plan for monetization and developing our product bring great satisfaction.  The aroma of success lingers with each accomplishment along the way.  We taste it when we get income as a result of our efforts.

When we look up from our work, what do we see?   Has our success changed us and, if so, is the change positive?

Take a few minutes to watch this video.

 

The video evoked a strong emotional response.  It seems appropriate to share it with my readers for, no matter what you are dreaming of, I don’t want you to ever lose the fire in your belly that inspires you to continue to create more.

The problem with doing it by heart

The following does not appear in the Star Spangled Banner:

“Babe Ruth through the night…”

When you do something by heart, it bypasses some of the common sense processing we use to navigate our day. Of course Babe Ruth wasn’t even a sparkle in Mrs. Ruth’s eye during the War of 1812, but if you’re singing by heart, you don’t think about it.

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Spare no expense!

The problem with customer service is not a new one. It’s about balancing between serving a lot of people a little, or dropping everything to serve a few people a lot.

Getting a lot of benefit for a lot of people for not so much money isn’t particularly difficult. In the chart on the right, for example, (a) represents the cost of good signage at the airport, or clearly written directions on the prescription bottle or a bit of training for your staff. It pays off. Pay a little bit and you help a lot of people to avoid hassles. The utility per person isn’t huge, but you can help a lot of people at once.

(b) is the higher cost of a bit of direct intervention. This is the cost of a call center or a toll free number or an information desk. You’re paying more, you’re helping fewer people, but you’re helping them a lot.

(c) is where it gets nuts. (c) is where we are expected to spare no expense, where the CEO has to get involved because it’s a journalist who’s upset, or where we’re busy airlifting a new unit out to a super angry customer. The cost is very high, the systems fall apart and only one person benefits.

Of course, if you’re that one person, you think it’s not only fair, but appropriate and right.

This “spare no expense” mantra is extremely difficult to avoid, because in any given situation, when the resources are available, your inclination is to say, “make the problem go away, spend the money!”

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Interview With Katie Freiling On How Your Mindset Impacts Your Business

Click here to download the audio-only MP3 [ 61 MB ]

Katie Freiling is an up and coming internet marketer who currently focuses on social media and blogging, however she came to my attention after watching a video she did about Eckhart Tolle.

She’s only been on the internet marketing scene for a couple of years, but is already earning six figures and just recently did a blog related launch and made $30,000 in a couple of hours.

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“We don’t compare ourselves to other airport restaurants”

Atlanta brags about having the busiest airport in the world. Like most municipal facilities, they don’t brag about having the best, the most pleasant, the most engaging or the most remarkable airport in the world.

That’s a shame, because airports are great opportunities to create value. Lots of curious, alert people with money to spend and connections to make. Yet the lowest-common-denominator is served, relentlessly. If you like fried meat, plenty to choose from. You’d think that rather than cater to the center of the curve 100 times at 100 concessions, they’d pay attention to some of the outliers now and then…

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How to Analyze Competition for Entrepreneurial Success

As a seasoned entrepreneur, it is clear that having knowledge of business basics provides a competitive edge.  Regardless of the scope of your vision, if your intention is to use it to obtain financial freedom, having a solid plan is critical to your success.  As a former colleague of mine once opined, a plan is something that you can use to measure your progress. Also, if you are seeking to secure investor funding, you must have a formal business plan to present for their consideration and it must include detailed market research.

Assuming that you believe that the money or time you are investing or plan to invest in your business is valuable, you will find it easy to appreciate the need to analyze your competition but you might be asking yourself how to go about it.  Essentially, competitor analysis involves two basic activities:

1. Obtaining information about important competitors
2. Using that information to predict potential competitor responses

Casual knowledge about your potential competitiors is normally not enough.  Using a systematic approach to gather a wide array of information permits you to make informed decisions about how to best position your new product or service or how well the business you are planning to join is positioned.  The objectives and assumptions of competition are indicators about what they are doing and what they are capable of doing, which defines their strengths and weaknesses.  As you uncover market risks from studying competitiors, remember that one person’s risk can become another person’s advantage.

There are many sources of public information for you to use while gathering your intelligence.  If competition is organized and traded publicly, you can review documentation required for them to sell stocks.  This includes shareholder reports, 10K reports, analyst interviews, management statements and press releases.  Most of this information is available on sites like E*Trade.  Another good resource is to scan press releases from PRweb, a site you might even use in the future.

If you understand the business objectives of your competition, you can more accurately predict their response to various competitive moves.  As an example, a business focused on short-term financial goals will not be willing to invest financial resources in response to an apparent competitive attack.

You can determine what is important to your competition by learning more about their structure.  An organizational overview will reveal a lot.  The functions that report directly to the chief executives are those that will, most likely, be given priority.  If your idea targets functions with lower priorities to your perceived competition, it is your advantage.

If you clearly understand the assumptions of your competition, you can predict their reaction to your interference.  Imagine that the company has previously suffered a product failure which has caused their executives to determine there is no market for that product or service.  This knowledge presents an opportunity to be explored.  Little known companies like Honda have leveraged advantages just like this!

Evaluating your competition’s resources and capabilities provides insights into what competitors are capable of doing in response to a threat.  You can delve further to determine how quickly they will be able to react too.

After gathering information about your competition’s objectives, assumptions, strategies, and capabilities, compile it into a response profile of possible moves they might make against your idea.  Like pieces on a chess board, you can use these profiles to anticipate the possible moves on the board well in advance of the plays and have a plan of action that keeps you in the game.

We all are aware that that there is competition in any market.  Whether your business idea is online or offline, it is critical to evaluate competition, as well as buyer behavior.  In fact, some schools of thought suggest that one ought to evaluate consumer behavior prior to analyzing anything else, which makes sense.

Michael Porter, the man who imagined strategic analysis, was a business thought leader in the early 1980s but … well … his stuff was written in the early 1980s.  As we all are aware, business has changed significantly since then, partially due to major advances in technology.  A couple of theorists named Brandenburger and Nalebuff extended Porter’s work to include evaluation of consumer activity using something called the Six Forces Model in the mid 1990s, and their work involves game theory.

If your product is internet based, there are many tools that measure what people are searching for and some even offer statistics about consumer behavior but, without knowing what data was used to calculate it, the onus falls on you verify assumptions you have made about the market niche you want to reach.  The next post will provide more details about this topic, so stay tuned!

If you are enjoying my articles or find them valuable, please leave a comment and let me know.  You also might want to share them with your friends on your favorite bookmarking site or social network.

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The massive attention surplus

There was an attention drought for the longest time. Marketers paid a fortune for TV ads (and in fact, network ads sold out months in advance) because it was so difficult to find enough attention. Ads worked, so the more ads you bought, the more money you made, thus marketers took all they could get.

This attention shortage drove our economy.

The internet has done something wacky to this situation. It has created a surplus of attention. Ads go unsold. People are spending hours on YouTube or Twitter or Facebook or other sites and not spending their attention on ads, because the ads are either absent or not worth watching.

When people talk about the problem with free online, they’re missing the point. Free is creating lots of attention, but marketers haven’t gotten smart enough to do something profitable with that attention.

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