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Posts tagged with Assumptions

What can United do now? We have some ideas.

Posted on April 11, 2017 by Leave a comment

It’s hard to estimate the damage done to United Airline’s brand from yesterday’s “incident” on one of its flights from Chicago.  (I’m tempted to describe it in more Draconian terms but there’s more than enough social media for that.)  First, there’s the proliferation of the multiple videos that have now been seen by tens of millions of Americans.  Second, that the man so violently ejected was Chinese has created a whirlwind of social media among many millions in China.  (Anyone for a flight from Beijing to LA?  I hear there are seats available.)  Finally, for today at least, is the tone-deaf response of United’s CEO, Oscar Munoz in which his use of the non-word, “re-accommodate” is getting its own share of Internet derisiveness.  Wow!  What a mess!

airplane-in-sky-with-contrailsIf you think this will all pass, consider this:  Today’s drop in United stock has already cost the airline about $600 million.  What a waste of brand equity!  So, let’s assume Mr. Munoz calls you up and asks, “What should we do?”  We can expect the usual mea culpas, compensations to people on that flight and perhaps some people will lose their jobs.  But that won’t stem the long-term damage so here’s a proactive plan to retrieve that lost brand equity.

  1. Send an email to all your customers worldwide. Apologize, but do more than that.  Ask them to answer a few questions that will help you ensure not only that this never takes place again but show United how it can improve its service to all its customers.  As to what questions should be asked, here are a few:

•  How did hearing about or viewing the incident make you feel?

•  How do you think an overbooked situation should be handled?

•  What is the most frustrating thing about flying from purchasing tickets to arriving at your destination?

•  How has this incident effected your willingness to recommend United to others?

Just those four questions – that’s all you need to ask.  They’re all that anybody cares about so don’t muck it up with marketing speak or other meaningless questions.

They are open-ended questions and they should remain that way because people will see that you really are interested in their opinions.  Yes, responses to open-ended questions can be difficult to analyze but don’t worry we have a solution (albeit self-serving) for you there.

  1. Send every person who answers those questions a thank-you email.
  1. Analyze the responses and create needs-based segmentations from the feelings and frustrations that are expressed. While you’re at it, create a lexicon of words that respondents used.  (Here’s the self-serving part.)  Oomiji can do all that.
  1. Create a separate response for each major segment. Compose an email of what you heard, what you learned and that you’ll respond to them again in a few weeks with all the changes you’ll make.  (Oomiji can do that for you too because we append every single sentence to their email address.)
  1. Make some real changes that help solve all the problems you learned about. By asking open-ended questions, you’ll hear some things you didn’t expect.  We’ve found that’s true for every client we’ve ever worked for.
  1. Write the respondents again and let them know the changes you’re making. Send each segment all the changes but put the ones most meaningful to them at the top.
  1. In a couple of months, ask them if they’ve seen any changes and their responses. Thank them again.  You might even reward them because ultimately, it’s the answer to the last question above about their willingness to recommend United that counts.
  1. Repeat this process regularly and make sure you dispense with corporate speak and open yourselves up to active listening, acknowledging and responding. That’s the Oomiji pattern and it works.

Will this get United’s $600 million back?  We believe it will and they’ll reap the bonus of creating a better airline at the same time.

You can learn more about Oomiji at oomiji.com or watch our intro video here.

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George Bush understood strategy. His brother does not.

Posted on November 16, 2015 by Leave a comment

After starting a war that has become a plague, which will likely last decades, and leaving the economy in shambles, I never thought I would feel complimentary toward President George W. Bush. But watch this CNN interview with Jeb Bush and see if you agree.

Screen Shot 2015-11-16 at 4.16.49 PM

In the interview with Jeb Bush, he says 5 or 6 times that “we need a strategy to deal with Islamic terrorism.”

When asked what the strategy should be, he lists a bunch of tactics including enforce a no-fly zone, give aid to the Assad opposition, etc. He never suggests a strategy.

The interviewer eventually shows a speech by former Governor George W. Bush in which he says, “The face of terrorism is not the true face of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.”

Therein lies a strategy. If you can position terrorists as not being Islam and acknowledge Islam as one of the world’s great religions, you can (1) put terrorists on the defensive in their cultural and social campaign; (2) rally the Islam world in showing support for their religion; (3) stand more chance of gaining support from Islamic political and religious leaders that we all need to fight against terrorism.

President Bush’s problem was that he chose the wrong tactics to pursue the strategy and that brought disastrous consequences. You can’t say you’re one thing and then, go out and act like another.  When he got his MBA, he must have passed the strategy course and flunked the one on implementation.

The next question to Governor Jeb Bush after showing his brother’s statements was “Is Islam peace, Governor?”

To which he responds, “You know what? I know what Islamic terrorism is and that’s what we are fighting in ISIS, Al Qaeda and all the other groups and that’s what our focus should be on.”

In this response, he first equates Islam with terrorism, which, if a strategy, is self-defeating as there are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world. That’s almost one-quarter of the world’s population. If you’re going to go out of your way to offend a religion, pick the Wiccans. I don’t know what they believe but they’re only 134,000 of them. (That’s up from 8,000 in 1990 so maybe we should be looking into their affairs.)

I think the lesson here is that if you’re going to run for President, don’t assume everyone you’re talking to is an idiot. Some of us understand that tactics without strategy is like running in circles. You might make a lot of noise, but you’ll never reach your objective.

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The rich get richer and poor get poorer. What, if anything, are we going to do about it?

Posted on September 28, 2014 by Leave a comment

With each passing day, it seems as if the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and while our economy expands, the divide between rich and poor gets wider and wider. Sound like an exaggeration? Perhaps not. Read Neil Irwin’s article in this past weekend’s NY Times, “The Benefits of Economic Expansions Are Increasingly Going to the Richest Americans”. Irwin cites data compiled by Pavlina R. Tcherneva, an economist at Bard College to prove this disturbing trend, although none of this should be a surprise.

Two charts in the article tell the story well. The first (below) shows the share of income growth received by the top 10 percent and bottom 90 percent of earners during periods of economic expansion.

InequalityI grew up in the 1950’s and 1960’s, began my work career in the 1970’s and reached a modicum of business success in the 1980’s and 1990’s. My father was a doctor. We went on family vacations when I was little. I went to good schools and ultimately raised a family and owned my own business. I wanted for nothing. Life was and still is good. As a child and teen growing up in inner city Detroit, it always seemed like the auto factories were humming, the shops were full and growth in prosperity, while not perfect, was being shared.

According to I.R.S. data, I’ve been among the 10% who’ve benefited from expansions for many years. Yet, it doesn’t take much other than a look at the daily papers or a walk around any American city to see that something doesn’t seem quite right. Shoppers seem well-heeled, coiffed and comfortable among my top tier peers. But why, I wonder, when I walk into Home Depot, Walmart or the local supermarket, I rarely see exuberant shoppers from lower and middle classes? You may think it’s the stores I shop in only cater to my types but I travel and like to walk around and check in on the retail scene to get a flavor of the local zeitgeist.

The second chart from the article (below) shows the share of income gains during expansionary periods that went to the top 1 percent versus bottom 99 percent. The trend in wealth gains becomes even more striking.

IncomeGains Before I saw these charts. I always thought things seemed to change for the worse in the 1980’s. That was when the idea of “trickle down economics” came into vogue and was put into practice. The idea was that if we cut taxes for the well-off, the additional amount they gain will “trickle down” to the middle and lower classes. But I always wondered how that could be. After all, I could only buy one car every few years, one boat, one house, etc., nothing like what hundreds, thousands or millions of people making less than me could do if they had the money. So how could the benefits that I and my fellow 10 percenters (alas, I’ve never made it into the top 1%) really make a difference in the prosperity of all. The answer as we can see from the data is that they couldn’t and haven’t.

Political forces on the right are quick to criticize programs that provide targeted job training, assistance to inner city residents and businesses, raising the minimum wage or any program that puts more money toward raising the lower class and taking away from the wealthy. Their answer is always to just lower taxes as the benefits will trick down for all. It’s been nearly 35 years since we’ve been practicing “trickle down” and we haven’t seen it trickle anywhere yet except to the top. In case you’ve forgotten Einstein’s oft quoted definition of insanity, it seems to fit here: “Insanity is doing something over and over again and expecting a different result.”

 Our Congress can’t seem to do anything constructive to pass sensible solutions and our President can’t persuade them to because one party thinks it’s its job is to undermine his term. And we go to the polls and re-elect the same clowns who can’t interpret the data, read the charts or come up with any compromise that might try something different to help. In 1811, a smart guy named Joseph de Maistre, wrote “Every country has the government it deserves.” We often think that quote was intended for our “exceptional” America. It was actually directed toward Russia, a country, then and now, of rich oligarchs separated from the lower classes by their profligate wealth. Sound familiar?

 

 

 

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The challenges of Christmas

Posted on December 20, 2013 by 2 Comments

Everybody knows Christmas can be a challenging time.  Gifts, parties, family, travel, decorations, cards all can present vexing problems to solve every year.  For me, an appropriate card is probably the toughest thing I face.  Every year, my friend George and I develop a cartoon to use as our card and it’s not easy.

You see on the side, we’re cartoonists or I should say a cartoon team.  George draws and I write except when he draws and write or I change his drawings with photoshop and write or he draws and his wife writes or my wife and kids make suggestions.  But however it’s done, we come up with a collaborative effort every year that goes on our website GigundoIndustries.com

No doubt you’ve heard of Gigundo Industries, the largest, non-existent, virtual company in the world.  If not, you better visit the website as soon as possible for there are hundreds of cartoons there for you to peruse and even buy.

In a way, creating cartoons is similar to writing strategy.  You take a complex set of facts and distill them down into something simple that cuts through the clutter.  Only with cartoons, you place that simple statement in an unusual setting such as a psychiatrist’s office, caveman times, a prison, the North Pole or Santa’s workshop.

There was so much news this year that was fodder for our a year-end card.  Off course, most prominent and recent in our minds was the malfunctioning of healthcare.gov and that led to an idea that really didn’t require any drawing at all.

ChristmasGov

But we quickly nixed that idea because who could possibly make jokes about their government failing at something, let alone Santa?  I mean nobody wants the government to fail. Right? Yeah, right.

So then we moved on to the saga and embarrassment of Edward Snowden and the NSA snooping and came up with this:

Snow_Done

But not exactly an uplifting story and we were looking for something more upbeat.  So we moved on to a couple of positive stories.  First, the extraordinary first-ever resignation of a Pope got us wondering if that could ever happen to Santa.

Dual Santas

Then came the idea that the battle for gay marriage might even have reached the North Pole.  (No, this is not for you people at Fox News who think gay marriage may as well allow us to marry a goat.  Who’d marry a goat anyway?)

Bucks

We just weren’t satisfied yet and then read the news that “Selfie” was the word of the year and would enter the Mirriam-Webster Dictionary.  Santa can get in on that too.

Selfie

Finally, we hit upon it, an idea that would really take us into the future but have that bit of mixed message that might cause us to wonder whether things are as they should be.  2013 also became the year of the drone, for both reasons that frighten us and, thanks to Amazon.com, frighten us.  Just think if Santa employed some new technology.

Amazon

That’s our holiday collection for 2013.  They’ll all go up on our site at GigundoIndustries.com soon.  Let me know which you like best.  Now, it’s back to my day job.  Everyone at Futureshift and GigundoIndustries.com wishes you the best of Christmas holidays and a great 2014.

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Strategy? Why do we need that?

Posted on November 21, 2013 by 10 Comments

I went to a wine event today in New York for the Bordeaux wine region.  While there, I asked the representative of one of the wineries, “What’s your strategy for the U.S.?”  She responded, “Strategy?  Why do we need that?”  I gave her some reasons but the conversation didn’t go very far.

When I returned to my office, I got an email from the Pew Research Center titled “Experts rank the top 10 global trends.”  When I clicked on the link, I found a report from the World Economic Forum on the 10 most important global trends based on a poll of 1,592 leaders from academia, business, government and non-profits.  Here’s the list:

  1. Rising societal tensions in the Middle East and North Africa
  2. Widening income disparities
  3. Persistent structural unemployment
  4. Intensifying cyber threats
  5. Inaction on climate change
  6. Diminishing confidence in economic policies
  7. A lack of values in leadership
  8. The expanding middle class in Asia
  9. The growing importance of megacities
  10. The rapid spread of misinformation

So what do these trends have to do with something as everyday as buying a bottle of wine?  Plenty.

It’s great that a provider of any product or service believes theirs is the best but neither consumers nor b2b markets think in linear terms.  Every decision is made in relation to another.  If I’m nervous about the state of the world, that will effect how I make decisions, and what and when I buy.  If I’m an importer or distributor and concerned about unemployment and the impact of economic policies, I may want to hedge my bets with tighter inventory control.  As people focus on the macro trends that affect us all, how companies approach the environment, social responsibility and their own governance (ESG) effects our perceptions of their brands.  It goes on and on whether you’re a consumer or corporation (remember, somebody once said, “Corporations are people, my friend.”)

If you don’t have a strategy that helps you wind your way through this maze or a brand with values that reassure consumers and customers, you’re dead in the water and it won’t matter how many fancy events, e-newsletters or facebook followers you have.

5year copy copySomething else was interesting to me at today’s Bordeaux event.  As I went around and asked people about their wines and what makes their winery better than the rest (to which there were a lot of blank stares), nobody asked any questions about me, about my tastes, concerns, or needs.  They may as well have been Enomatic wine dispensers with an information rack underneath.  Most handed me a sheet of paper about their wines in answer to my questions anyway.

There was neither strategy present nor any attempt at customer engagement.  I imagine the woman who asked me why her company needs strategy poured a lot of wine today.  At the same time, it wouldn’t surprise me if at the end of the day, she moaned about some of the trends on the list and how they were making life more complicated.  That’s too bad.  Strategy is the direction that helps us wind our way through and around those trends and we all give our loyalty to those that help us do that.

FutureShift asks a lot of questions and listens carefully so that brands and strategy resonate with customers to increase their engagement and loyalty.  It works.

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Dancing on Michael Porter’s grave

Posted on January 15, 2013 by 3 Comments

No, Michael Porter is not dead.  Only the consulting firm that he co-founded in 1983 is gone.  Today, the global accounting giant, Deloitte, announced that it had completed its acquisition of Monitor, which had filed for bankruptcy this past November.  As reported in The Economist last November 14th, the once proud firm, was able to compete with the likes of much bigger McKinsey, the Boston Consulting Group and Bain.”

No mention was made in the announcement of what role Porter might play in the newly formed division of Deloitte but he remains a highly regarded professor at the Harvard Business School.

Businesses come and go all the time and acquisitions are a daily occurrence.  What is of note here is that Monitor was founded by a man acclaimed as one of the great business strategists of the past century, and more importantly by his principles, best known as “Porter’s Five Forces”.  Under the guidance of the Five Forces framework and Porter’s fame, Monitor’s legions of consultants found millions of dollars of billable work among foreign governments, multi-national corporations and commodity boards.  That work began to dwindle in 2008 when Monitor had to seek a series of loans from its partners and venture capital firms in order to stay afloat.

In the November issue of Forbes, contributor and business author, Steve Denning, uses his rapier-like writing skills to tear apart both Monitor and the philosophical approach behind it.  In other words, he does some dancing on Porter’s grave.  While the article is now two months old, it makes for compelling reading if you were a believer or doubter of Porter’s framework.  Put me in the latter camp.

I first read Porter’s seminal article in the Harvard Business Review, “How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy” in 1979. I was one year out of business school and a loan officer in a commercial bank.  My mantra was a phrase coined by another business guru, Peter Drucker, and known as “Managing by walking around.”  The idea is that by engaging with people both inside and outside an organization, managers can best understand how their companies, products and management styles are perceived, how they perform and what to do about them.  That’s a simple concept that one could explain in an elevator between the first and second floors.

It served me well then and has since as I’ve made the practice of engaging with both internal and external audiences to find the intersection between internal capabilities and external needs as the place to find the sweet spot for successful strategy.

Porter’s Five Forces, on the other hand, require a much longer elevator ride. The idea is that by managing a framework of five market forces, a company or industry could find sustainable competitive advantage.  “The state of competition in an industry depends on five basic forces…The collective strength of these forces determines the ultimate profit potential of an industry.”


I can’t say I fully understood it in 1979 and I can pretty much say the same today.  I looked at the model then as I do now and ask, “Why is the competition at the center?  Why not the customer?” Drucker taught that the only valid purpose of a business is to create a customer.  Yet, here was Porter, saying that it’s all about dominating the competition.

I had a memorable meeting at Monitor’s Cambridge headquarters in the early nineties.  At the time, I was doing some consulting for the government of Chile on export promotion, inbound investment and tourism development.  Monitor had built up a practice in consulting in these areas and proposed a partnership.  I felt this might add some prestige to the project.  At our meeting, one of their senior consultants explained how they would apply the discipline of the Five Forces to the project.  He drew lots of squares and circles on the board labeling them various types of competitive clusters and argued that it was winning against competing countries, not customer perceptions that would win the day for Chile.

I left there confused and unconvinced that the focus should be on “competitive clusters” rather than matching what Chile offered with customer needs.  If you spend your time focusing on rivalries, you’re losing time creating more innovation to meet growing market demands and before you know it, your competition will be your problem.  As the famous baseball pitcher, Satchel Paige, said,  “Don’t look back.  Something might be gaining on you.”

As Steve Denning notes about Monitor, “Its consultants were not people with deep experience in understanding what customers might want or what is involved in actually making things or delivering services in particular industries or how to innovate and create new value.”

Today, factors such as globalization, the Internet, and the growth of social media have heightened the importance of building strategy around customers.  Now that the world is flat, customers decide who wins in every industry and political arena.  As Denning ends his article, “Monitor was crushed by the single dominant force in today’s marketplace:  the customer.”

It’s hard to argue against the man who is one of the most cited scholars in economics and business and whose ideas are widely used by business and government leaders around the world.  But we are in a different time where the key is satisfying customer needs for innovation, whether they be in features, quality, service, or value.  Companies like Apple, Amazon, Fresh Direct, and Kayak are just a few of the examples of how our flattened world has given power to customers.

Our consulting approach is to put customers at the center and to understand their frustrations.  After all, a frustration is simply an unmet need.  Find the innovation to serve that need, erase the frustration and you’ll find a successful business — that’s a short speech in any elevator.

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Chief Little Turtle and the Second Amendment

Posted on January 4, 2013 by 1 Comment

I recently ran my “Should we politicize tragedy post?” on a University of Michigan alumni discussion group on Linkedin.  There were a lot of interesting and reasonable comments but overall, I was stunned by the vitriol that came my way from people who believe we are one step away from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union – and yes, the two were mentioned in the same angry post without any sense of irony.  There also were stern lectures from many who absolutely, positively knew what the framers of the constitution had in mind, even though that was 223 years ago.

A lot of these people would like to think that the authors of the second amendment were wise, prescient men looking far into the future and recognizing that there could be a need for armed insurrection against tyrannical (perhaps even Socialist or Fascist – take your pick) governments, that would require assault weapons for every man, woman and child in America. You may need to read that again to fully absorb that.  Those people are out there, sure of themselves and if you’re one of them reading my blog, you may wonder where you took the wrong turn.

What seems to make sense to me is that times then were not a lot different than they are now in one respect. People often did things for their own interests and to serve the needs of the present day or in the case of the second amendment to organize the U.S. military and defeat Indian tribes who were preventing us from acting like most colonial powers (defeating the natives, occupying lands and annexing territory, i.e. our history). I know that’s anathema to all the faux Constitutional scholars and volunteer armed guards out there who lectured me but to others, you might take a look at this essay written by my friend, Eric George, after doing some historical research.  As with the title of this post, it’s called, “Chief Little Turtle and the Second Amendment”.

“During the American Revolution there emerged a great Native American military leader.  His name was Michikinikwa in the Miami-Illinois language; the closest English translation was Little Turtle.  Born into the Miami Tribe in what is now Illinois, he came of age fighting French troops allied with the Continentals in the Northwest Territories (present day Ohio and Indiana).  In 1780, General Augustin La Balme, after a successful raid against the British, made the grievous mistake of burning down a Miami village.   Little Turtle tracked down La Balme and killed him, along with many of his men.  He was by now a War Chief; he proved invincible in battle and his stature rose dramatically over the ensuing decade.

After the British ceded the homelands of their Native American allies to the United States at the Treaty of Paris in 1783, Little Turtle responded by forming a new Confederation of his own.  He allied the Miami with the Shawnee under Blue Jacket and the Delaware under the command of Buckongahela.  Their resultant victories against U.S. militias (the Continental Army having been largely disbanded after the Revolution) helped to expand their Federation to include the Ottawa, Wyandotto and even some of the fearsome Iroquois.

After the Confederation defeated the 1400-man force of General Josiah Harmar in October of 1790, a thoroughly irate President George Washington had had enough He ordered General Arthur St. Clair to march against Little Turtle with a combined force of former army, conscripts, and militia numbering over 2,000 men, to begin by the summer of 1791.  The ill-equipped force did not leave Fort Washington (think Cincinnati) until October.  By early November, fewer than 1000 troops remained due to desertion and disease when they camped deep in Miami territory. The result was as predictable as it was disastrous.  Confederation warriors surrounded St. Clair’s loosely guarded encampment under the cover of darkness and slaughtered over 600 men (and probably another 200 camp followers) at first light. Nearly all survivors were wounded.   By comparison, the Colonies had lost 88 men at the Siege of Yorktown, the last major battle of the Revolutionary War.  St. Clair’s defeat stands as the worst loss of life by U.S. forces in all the Indian wars.  The casualty rate, in percentage terms, remains unsurpassed by any other conflict in any war to this day.  In a matter of hours, the Western Confederacy had annihilated one quarter of what remained of the U.S. Army. The staggering loss of life generated both public fear and outrage; George Washington fired St. Clair and the first-ever Congressional investigation into the Executive Branch was initiated.

It was no small wonder that scarcely a month later, on December 15, Congress adopted the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  The Amendment read:

“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”

At the time, the right to bear arms was a given, as was the existence of now extinct militias.  Probably the most important words in the above Amendment, at least in 1791, were “well regulated” for Little Turtle had conclusively proved the new Nation utterly lacking in that department.

By word and deed, the Second Amendment was effective.  Five months later, in May 1792, Congress passed the Militia Act, setting minimum standards of readiness.  Among these were “a good musket, a sufficient bayonet, two spare flints, a knapsack, and a pouch containing at least 24 cartridges.”  In other words, just showing up was no longer acceptable.

In the summer of 1794, the Legion of the United States, well equipped and better trained, defeated the Western Confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, near present day Toledo, Ohio.  Casualties were modest on both sides.  Little Turtle eventually became a peacemaker; he finally met with Washington, and later on with John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.  He died in 1812, and was honored with a full military funeral.

The young nation that finally defeated him would clearly be unrecognizable to him today.  It has grown to have dozens of cities with more inhabitants than most of the original States in their entirety.  Its economy has become the world’s largest, an innovation engine for the entire planet.  The venerable militias have long since been replaced by State and local police forces, and a professional military that rules the land, sea and air.  The United States has become the most powerful Nation on earth. Its citizens now have little to fear, except each other.  For the Second Amendment that was written in large part to defeat Little Turtle and his Confederacy has now enshrined the use of a different sort of musket by our populace.

Weapons with a destructive force that our Founders could not have envisioned are now ubiquitous in America. With roughly nine guns for every ten civilians, the U.S. dwarfs all other nations in per capita gun ownership, with the possible exception of Yemen.  To the astonishment of the developed world, we trade assault rifles and semiautomatic handguns freely in unregulated markets. Our firearm related death rate last year was forty times that of our Founders’ old adversary, Great Britain.  Mass killings have become commonplace.   In the world’s most wealthy and powerful country, parents are now afraid to send their children to school.  Chief Little Turtle won a far greater victory over the White Man than he ever imagined.”

It’s a nice story that our Constitutional authors sat around pondering the future and how we might need to overthrow our government but the reality is that we had just finished overthrowing Great Britain, were bogged down fighting Indian Wars and dealing with the spectre of other adventurous European military forces.  Rather than think about how these men saw the future, we might ask what motivated them in the days in which they lived.  So, thank you Eric for this essay.  I enjoyed it and hope it gets some comments but please, save the vitriol for other venues.

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Over the fiscal cliff

Posted on November 12, 2012 by Leave a comment

Years ago, I saw a cartoon in the New Yorker called what lemmings believe.  It showed hundreds of lemmings charging off a cliff but instead of going down to their death, they were flying up to the sky.  Why else would they be so sure of themselves?

Being a part-time cartoonist (see GigundoIndustries.com), I thought of this cartoon the other day when reading about “the fiscal cliff” and the debate about whether going over it will harm the economy or is sure death…or perhaps, is the only sensible thing to do.  I spoke to my illustrator partner at our cartoon conglomerate and the following cartoon was the result:

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3 social media/research enhancements you’ve never seen before

Posted on October 25, 2012 by 3 Comments

In the mad dash to build Facebook and LinkedIn communities, something has been missing.  Companies have been campaigning for as many Facebook “likes” as possible but now, they’re asking, “How do we know if our message is getting through?” and “Is there any way to tell whether (1) awareness is being raised; (2) brand loyalty is increasing; and, (3) social media is having an effect on sales?”

They’re good questions to ask and now there is a way to answer them.  With a simple link on your social media page, you can gather comments and get key strategic questions answered by your social media network.  With our DirectLink™ software, you can ask them questions about their understanding of your brand, unmet needs and the information they’d really like to have from you.  They can be open-ended questions that allow people to write as much as they want and then you can apply these three new tools:

1. See what they’re writing in real time – as they write it!

Now, you can actually monitor what your community is saying about you and how they’re answering your questions.  Take a look at the example below for one of our clients that is a wine producer.  The question asked is “Please describe the qualities that you find in our wines that differentiate them from other wines at any given price level.” With one click on the button on the upper right that says “Get Verbatims”, everything written in answer to that question immediately appears.

And if you want to see all of the text responses quantified, you simply close the verbatims screen and bar charts appear showing how all of the answers have been categorized.

In other words, we’re quantifying qualitative information – conversational text – and enabling you to see the actual words behind the data.  It’s like listening in to hundreds of conversations about all the questions you want answered about your brand.

2. See the key words they use while they’re using them.

When considering the key needs among your customers to address, it helps to know their top-of-mind thoughts.  Word clouds can provide a quick look at what any customer group is saying about your brand.  With one click on the “Word Cloud” button, you’ll see your word cloud develop before your eyes.

DirectLink™ automatically throws out the meaningless words such as articles, pronouns and other common words that might improperly skew the response.  Still, there will be words you’ll see in the word cloud that get through the screening process but don’t provide insights.  DirectLink™ enables you to quickly toss out those words.  For answers to the same question as above, “Please describe the qualities that you find in our wines that differentiate them from other wines at any given price level.”, we tossed out seven additional words to get the picture above.  It’s as easy as clicking on the words you don’t want and the word cloud quickly reforms.

With this feature, you see the top-of-mind thoughts your customers have and the descriptive words they use.  Every product or service creates its own lexicon of words that both the trade and consumers use.  Now, you can see what those are and use them to talk to your customers.

3. Segment your customers instantly and respond immediately.

A common reaction to seeing what people say about you is to think “if only I could talk directly to these people about their beliefs.  Then, I could convince them.” Now, you can!

To the same question above, we wondered if the media that follows the wine and spirits industry might have different topics on their minds.  So, we quickly selected only the media respondents, clicked on the Word Cloud button and this picture appeared: 

Whereas the top-of-mind words used by the larger audience were “food, fruit, price, friendly, oak, aging”, the media has prominently added “complex” and “smooth”.  If we were to speak about these wines to a journalist then, we might stress both the complexity and smoothness of the wines as being key factors that make them so good with food.  It’s this type of parsing that can enable you to tailor your response to any particular trade or consumer group based on factors that you define.

Now, let’s go a step further because DirectLink™ makes a seamless connection between survey responses and direct marketing.

Among the DirectLink™ features on the control panel, you’ll see that there is another button on the upper right that says “Get Emails”.  Clicking this button immediately downloads an email list of only those people who responded to the question or multiple-questions you selected.  You can send them an email using the words they’ve used in response to your question that is specific to their ideas, perceptions and beliefs.

Who can use these 3 features that come with DirectLink™?

  • Brand marketers trying to understand what people think about their products.
  • Sales managers who want to improve and tailor their sales pitches.
  • CEO’s who want to test a new strategy with their customers.
  • HR managers who want to assess employee morale or improve internal services.
  • Trade association managers who are seeking ways to raise awareness and open doors for their members.
  • Foreign trade development officers who want to better understand what makes their country attractive.
  • Tourism departments that want to know what will motivate consumers to visit.
  • PR and ad agency account executives who want to know what’s on their client’s customers’ minds so they can address them in marketing communications.
  • University and college administrators that want to understand and respond to student or alumni views.
  • Non-profit development directors seeking the keys to increased fund raising.
  • Political campaign managers who need to understand what voters want.

The list goes on and on.  All of the above have used DirectLink™ in the past and now these new features make it even more effective and faster.  We can make your social media programs more effective and improve the ROI of research or direct marketing programs.  If you’d like to know how DirectLink™ can help you and see an online demo, let us know.

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Political Myopia: Piercing through the nonsense and casting your vote

Posted on October 22, 2012 by 2 Comments

It’s “silly season” – so sayeth the politicians.  It’s time to throw every piece of mud at the opposition simply because a lot of people will believe it.  Fox, MSNBC, pundits who claim to know everything but in reality know nothing, and thousands of horrid political ads – it’s all a lot of noise that provides no reliable indicators on which is the best way to vote.

Can we look at some of the realities of the situation and some of the facts?

REALITIES:

  • Romney:
    • We don’t know what Romney would or would not do. Unfortunately, he’s changed positions so many times, it’s hard to figure whether he’s conservative or moderate.  The “etch a sketch” metaphor has been mentioned and fair or not, it was created by his own campaign manager.
    • Yes, he did a great job with the Olympics.  He had support and money from the government that he says isn’t working.  It’s unclear how he did as governor of Massachusetts but one would think that if he did a great job, he’d easily win the state this time.  Polls show he’s 15 points down.  You want to tell me that’s meaningless?  Please explain.
    • The only thing Romney has been consistent about is that he is a social conservative.  He’s supported the idea of overturning Roe v. Wade, favors DOMA and won’t take a position on the Lily Ledbetter Act.  If that’s what you want and you’re okay with his other murkiness, you should vote for him.
  • Obama:
    • Four years ago, we were headed toward a full-on depression.  We’re not now.
    • Corporate profits had risen more than with any other president.
    • The stock market has risen 14.7% a year under Obama.
    • Housing values had fallen one-third on average at the end of the Bush administration.  They’re rising again and have recovered much of the loss.

Now that we’re here, who can take us further?

FACTS:

  • The U.S. economy has done better with Democratic presidents than with Republicans.
  • Personal disposable income has grown nearly 6 times more under Democratic presidents.
  • Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has grown 7 times more under Democratic presidents.
  • Corporate profits have grown over 16% more per year under Democratic presidents (they actually declined under Republicans by an average of 4.53%/year).
  • Average annual compound return on the stock market has been 18 times greater under Democratic presidents (If you invested $100k for 40 years of Republican administrations you had $126k at the end, if you invested $100k for 40 years of Democrat administrations you had $3.9M at the end).
  • Republican presidents added 2.5 times more to the national debt than Democratic presidents.
  • The two times the economy steered into the ditch (Great Depression and Great Recession) were during Republican, laissez faire administrations.

Don’t believe me?  Why not read the self-proclaimed “Capitalist Tool”?  The above facts can be found all over the Internet but click here to read this article from Forbes magazine.

Investment managers always point out that there’s no guarantee that past performance is an indicator of the future but given the choice between uncertainty and past negative performance versus a record and past positive performance, logic should say to select the latter.  But when did logic and facts determine a U.S. presidential election?

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