Posted by Ellen Hoenig Carlson on Mon, Jan 11, 2010 @ 07:37 AM
What Would Jake and Rocket Do?
This is the third of a four
part series for Consumer and Pharma/Healthcare marketers looking to
tame the rigors of 2010... In case you're just coming in now, here is
the first of the series: What Would Steve Jobs Do? And the second: What Would Google Do?
Who are Jake and Rocket you ask? Jake and his trusty dog Rocket have become icons of optimism, and Life is good ® America's little clothing brand that could-that is trying to spread good vibes all over the world. Having recently returned from a few days of holiday skiing in Vermont, and the proverbial t-shirt buying with ‘my three sons'... Life is good was all around us spreading their optimism and good cheer.
Here are some of Jake and Rocket's insights that all marketers-Consumer, B2B and Pharmaceutical/Healthcare - may want to pay attention to in 2010.
What Would Jake and Rocket Do?
1. Run like a dog. Dream on. High end destination.
Optimism, hope and dreams are crucial for human beings, healthy and/or sick...If you forget what it feels like to ‘run like a dog', take a look at: 19 Seconds of Pure Joy and Steve Woodruff's young dog experiencing snow for the first time! Or listen to Dr. Groopman speak about Hope and Medicine on NPR. You can also read Jen McCabe's blog on the importance of hope.
2. Consider yourself a lucky dog.
Go deep. Think out of the box. Don't knock something, build something. Create your own happy hour. This is not a year to wish you had more. Use any financial or human constraints to innovate...to build something big, to go deep. Constraints are not something to fear, but often spur innovation. Read 37 signals Getting Real: Embrace Constraints; a concept duly noted by Tim Brown and Matthew May's Change This Manifesto on Elegant Solutions (no.6 p 22)
3. Whatever you are, be a good one. Style points count. Get dirty. 
Successful people and companies raise the bar, and continually strive for excellence with every move they make...If you take nothing else away from What Would Steve Jobs Do?, think about the bar of excellence he sets and expects for himself and others at every step of the way.
4. Get outta town. If you don't go, you don't see. If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn. Who feels it knows it.
Reading Tim Brown's book Change By Design, I was stuck by this quote: "Good design thinkers observe. Great design thinkers observe the ordinary." How true it is that you have to get out to see and experience what your customers are doing and thinking, and how they're interacting with the world. Yet how many busy executives actually do? And then actually take the learning and insights and share them across the organization and find rightful ‘owners' to turn them into action? (Brian Solis often speaks to this very need of leveraging what you hear in social media throughout the organization by insuring rightful owners.)
5. Mix it up.
We seem to be stuck in a world of X OR Y, TV advertising or web, traditional advertising or social media, facebook or twitter, branded advertising or value-add conversations...when we could be mixing it up and thinking AND...The consumer mixes it up, why don't marketers?
6. The little things in life are the big things.
How true it is that what we most often remember is not the big things or the big/expensive presents, but those little special gestures that let us know that people really appreciate us, trust us, care about us, and know us. (You can also read Linda Kaplan and Robin Koval's Power of Small)
7. Takers may eat well, but givers sleep well. Sometimes the best conversation is a game of catch.
We all know that building relationships is a give and take. What better analogy for two-way conversation than a game of catch? When your catching the ball, you can't be throwing at the same time...it's a rhythm of give and take... While it's never this simple, much has been written about how the new world of marketing is no longer about ‘sell and tell' or ‘push', but give and take (with more emphasis on giving than taking), remembering to listen first - sell later, adding value via marketing with meaning), earning trust a la Brogan's trust agents, and ‘earning' customer love and word of mouth.
8. Hold a true friend with both hands.
This is the year for quality over quantity and this goes for relationships as well. Only those that add value to your life will get your time and attention. Who are your true friends? Who are your most loyal customers? What do they need and want? How can you help? How can you bring them value?
9. The best things in life are free.
If you are around kids, how many birthdays and holidays need to go by before we realize that it's not the most expensive present that people/kids like, but the box that it comes in...The concept of Free is everywhere and shouldn't be overlooked or taken lightly. The web is full of content... so it's critical to create content with value or to organize content to bring value: ‘elegant organization'...Think free or the minimum you must charge or take out of the system if you want to maximize growth and usage. Read Jeff Jarvis' What Would Google Do? or Chris Anderson's Free: the future of radical price if you're still are unsure....
10. Change your perspective.
Experts in education suggest that adult learners should "jiggle their synapses a bit" by confronting thoughts that are contrary to their own..."bump up against people and ideas" that are different. (NYTimes: Neuroscience-How to train the aging brain) If you are a ‘social media' guy, look at the world through other lens...most of the world still doesn't know what RSS feeds are, let alone use them...email is still the most widely used way to send others information...Marketers, look outside your industry for ideas, seek different perspectives that may bring new value to your customers' and patients' lives. Look to other disciplines, from science to design, for new thinking.
11. Write on. Read ‘em and reap. Keep Growing.
They say 2010 is the year that Content is King. We know that Links create value. Creating valuable content and acting as a ‘content curator' are critical new marketing and leadership skills...think "elegant organization".
12. Simplify.
With the number of emails, blogs, tweets, friends contacting us, more and more it will be critical to simplify and focus on what's most important. Only a few can stand out. Focus on less and make each ‘friend', ‘contact', ‘tweet', 'program' more impactful and valuable...both simplify and 'elegance' are at the very core of both Steve Jobs/Apple and Google's success. Do You Have a Stop Doing List? (Also read Power of Less or Mathew May's The Elegant Solution)
13. Laughter has no foreign accent. We will never know all the good a simple smile can do. Celebrate.
Let's promise each other that we won't overlook a little laughter and smiles in our busy lives this year...(You can also read Dave Murray's 11th Lesson of Life)
Marketers: Which ones are most meaningful for you this New Year?
Which ones would most help spur growth and innovation for your brand and business?
Pharma and Healthcare Marketers: Which ones would most bring growth and innovation to our industry? Which ones would help bring back hope and trust? Value to our patients?
Stay tuned for part four of 4...What Will Pharma and Healthcare Marketers Do? What Will Champs in New Marketing Do in 2010?
Posted by Ellen Hoenig Carlson on Fri, Jan 08, 2010 @ 06:18 AM
What Would Google Do? What would the fastest-growing company in history and a model for thinking in new ways do? Even this week, Google makes waves with their launch of their new android-based Nexus One (MIT Says Yes).
Welcome to the second of a four part serious for Consumer and Pharma/Healthcare Marketers looking to tame the rigors of 2010... If you missed post 1, read: What Would Steve Jobs Do? And by all means, I hope you'll stay tuned for What Would Jake and Rocket Do? And What Would Savvy Marketers Do?
"Once upon a time, all roads led to Rome. Today, all roads lead from Google." - Jeff Jarvis
What Would Google Do?
1. Focus on the user and all else will follow. Design with simplicity. Google strives to provide the best user experience possible—from the user/customer’s point of view. Google often forgoes paying for marketing and instead focuses on creating something so great that customers distribute it—it goes viral.
2. Don't try to control content and distribution. Instead think about creating open networks that sit on platforms. Think in distributer ways. Go to your consumer whenever and however you can. This is the opposite of most companies (even still) that think centralized and make consumers come to them. They spend large dollars to advertise to attract consumers. Many try to make their home pages into destinations. In sum, while many internet sites think of themselves as an end- Google thinks of itself as a means. While many see the job of their home page is to take you to where they want you to go, Google sees its home page as the way to get you to where you want to go. Google distributes itself. It puts its ads on millions of web pages it does not own, earning billions of dollars for these sites and for itself. Google enables others to use tools as they wish. They know their own needs.
Think of your site as ‘answers for every question you can imagine’.
3. See yourself not as a product, but a service, a platform, a means of enabling others. Help others build value. Google has many platforms to help its customers. e.g.: Blogger for publishing content, Picasa for pictures, Google docs etc.
4. Cede control. Embrace ‘Publicness’ and openness. Transform your relationship with the public in every quarter in the organization. You may extend this new relationship in many ways from blogging, interacting with bloggers, enabling customers to critique your products or services (hard to do in Pharma) and sharing ideas. Overtime, you may even truly involve customers in the real-time design process for products and/or services…
But 'Publicness' is about more than having a web site. It's about taking actions in public so people can see what you do and react to it, make suggestions, and tell their friends. Living in public today is a matter of enlightened self-interest. You have to be public to be found. Every time you decide not to make something public, you create the risk of a customer not finding you or not trusting you because you're keeping secrets. Publicness is also an ethic. The more public you are, the easier you can be found, the more opportunities you have. (For more on privacy (and publicness) read this insightful blog by Jeff Jarvis.
5. Bring them "elegant organization". Ask how you can bring constituents, customers, community-even your competitors- elegant organization. Create value through links. Replace focus on mass market with focus on mass of niches. Understand that the economy is made up of a mass of niches-the aggregation of the long tail. Small is the new big.
6. Extract the minimum value from the network so it will grow to maximum size and value. In other words, charge as little as the market will bear.
7. You don't need to be at your desk to need an answer. Google is looking to fuel greater innovation for mobile users everywhere with Android, their free, open source mobile platform. It sure feels like 2010 will be the ‘year of unprecedented mobile growth'...
8. Move faster-not slower. Most companies say this in reference to making sure they move fast to develop new products and services. Google means this from a user experience because they know how valuable time is to their customers.
9. Do one thing really, really well. Google does search, and in their continuous focus for improvement of search, it spurs other applications and new products/services. But they never seem to forget the role search plays in their business strategy.
10. Great just isn't good enough.... Being great is a starting point, not an endpoint. Ultimately, our constant dissatisfaction with the way things are becomes the driving force behind everything we do.
Is Google the only one who knows how to survive and prosper in the internet age? Stay tuned.
Posted by Ellen Hoenig Carlson on Mon, Jan 04, 2010 @ 07:36 AM
What Would Steve Jobs Do? This is the first of a four part series for Consumer and Pharma/Healthcare Marketers looking to tame the rigors of 2010...by taking a closer look and asking ourselves what three incredibly successful people and companies in business today would do...
The genesis for this series first came while reading Fortune's CEO of the Decade and The Decade of Steve, and thinking about the question that Apple executives asked themselves over and over during Steve Job's six month leave of absence in early 2009: What would Steve Jobs do? Recently, I picked up What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis (great book)... I hope you'll stay tuned for What Would Google Do? And What Would Jake and Rocket Do? And What Might Marketers Do in 2010?
As you're developing new products, services and/or marketing plans this year, here's a question to ask yourself at each major milestone and decision point...
What Would Steve Jobs Do? The threshold for moving forward: Would it pass Steve's test? In the past 10 years alone Steve Jobs has radically and lucratively reordered three markets --music, movies, and mobile telephones--and his impact on his original industry, computing has only grown.
"There's an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.' And we've always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very very beginning. And we always will." - Steve Jobs
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." - Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci
1. Know what consumers want. Paint a big-picture vision that will WOW your consumers and competitors. Create new experiences that can change the world...create a story. Create an adversary and a new way to win. In every story there's an antagonist-the hero fights the villain. Introducing the antagonist (the problem) rallies the company and audience around the hero. In Job's case, create and act upon a ‘digital lifestyle' strategy...He was a very successful ‘David' fighting Goliath... iTunes new paradigm, Macintosh launch in 1984 against IBM
2. Make it your business to know everything about your product area and company. Small details matter and are not to be overlooked. Steve is known for being involved in details you wouldn't think a CEO would be involved in. He's also well known for "One more thing".
3. Take full responsibility for the user experience. Apple is about being a system... In 2002, Steve told Time, "We're the only company that owns the whole widget -- the hardware, the software, and the operating system. We can take full responsibility for the user experience. We can do things that the other guy can't do."
4. Design is critical and must be perfect. He's a perfectionist to the nth degree. He has a willingness to be a pain in the neck to what matters most to him. (Time 2005) The company believes in "deep collaboration" and "concurrent engineering" so there are no hand offs...just flawless design. (You may also want to read Inside the Apple Ecosystem and Tim Brown's Change by Design)
5. Master the message. Simplify complex information. The message to the public is always consistent, simple, breakthrough, and expert at bringing the benefit(s) to life. E.g.:it's not just a 5GB iPod, it's 1,000 songs in your pocket; iconic "think different" campaign. Jobs practices the message over and over and only a few deliver it. He is also careful to avoid overexposure, preferring to speak only when he has new products to promote. He crates 'twitter-like headlines'. E.G.: Macbook air. The world's thinnest notebook. iPod. One thousand songs in your pocket. (You may also want to read Carmine Gallo's: The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs slide share and book.)
6. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. Lessons he learned after he found out that he had pancreatic cancer. "Your time is limited so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma-which is living with the result of other people's thinking. Don't let the voice of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." - Steve Jobs
Healthcare Marketers:
What if Pharma and Healthcare products/services took full responsibility for the user (patient) experience?
What if Pharma and Healthcare designed the product and user experience to simplify the complex and encourage participative medicine?
What if Pharma and Healthcare mastered the message and dialog so patients and their caregivers immediately and easily understood the benefits and risks and could discuss it with their doctor and family?
Stay tuned for What Would Google do? (WWGD)...
Posted by Ellen Hoenig Carlson on Tue, Sep 22, 2009 @ 03:37 PM
This has been quite a year for pharma and marketers: big market changes and budget cuts, not to mention a continued explosion of noise, with less time to absorb and respond.
As we head into quarter 4, I've been asking myself,
What disciplines would take good care of our brands in this vulnerable moment?
Creativity gives the brand wings. David Ogilvy is famously quoted, "Give me the freedom of a tight creative brief." When the strategic core is strong, it serves as a foundation to produce the richest creative that can make your brand soar. The triangle's three points: meaning to consumers; elegance and balance; and rigorous execution act as foundational questions to help marketers check-in with their brand and test new strategies and tactics.
My prescription is: mind the strength of your strategic core.
The practice of keeping a strong strategic core has become very popular with consumers in recent years, with rapid growth in both Yoga and Pilates, and now next-generation offers like Barre 3 and PiYo. The techniques improve condition and balance by building core strength--Checking in with their core before taking any action enables people to move better, feel better, look better, and lead more productive lives.
In a chaotic world, the discipline to strengthen core strategy and keep it strong is a formidable challenge. The noise in the marketplace is a din; changes in social media alone in the last 6 months have many marketers in a spin. As the noise increases with the plethora of new tactics to distract us, those with the discipline to stay grounded and centered on brand core, to ensure that each tactic is informed by core strategy, will enjoy stronger brands.
How are you keeping your brands' core strong and focused?
With all the noise and distractions, and little time to stop and think, how are you holding an unwavering stance to power your brands' core?
Posted by Ellen Hoenig Carlson on Fri, Sep 04, 2009 @ 11:15 AM
Pharma and Marketers alike, as we approach the end of summer, perhaps a little introspection is warranted?
In the latest McKinsey Quarterly, Dan Vasella, CEO and chairman of Novartis, shares his personal approach to management and leadership, and discusses health care reform, the economic downturn, and executive compensation...During the discussion on compensation, he poses an interesting question worth pondering:
"...I think it much more important to ask, 'How do you use what you have?' It's like with talents you have, do you really use them for the best of society? Do you give something? How do you use the money you have? Is it just to have more zeros on the bank account at the end of the year? Or do you do something right with it?"
So in these tough economic times and with healthcare reform looming, might it not be important for each of us to ask: How does our business, or our brand(s) use what they have?
How do we use our talents to add maximum value?
How do we use our financial and human resources to create maximum benefit with the minimum effort? [loose definition of an elegant solution. For a more comprehensive one: "marked by concision, incisiveness and ingenuity; cleverly apt and simple, as an elegant solution to a problem."- Webster's New World Dictionary]
What should we stop doing? What should we keep doing? Do we need to add something to the mix? [Ideally, we choose to stop doing more than we choose to add and we should actively question keeping 'sacred cows' in the mix...]
How do we use our budgets to do something right for our customers in addition to generating a positive return financially and/or qualitatively?
During planning, it is typical to look to reach for the maximum budget we can get...we're all used to thinking that innovation comes from big budgets and big resources...but what if that wasn't true?
The vast majority of the millions of innovative ideas have zero budget (Toyota is a great example of this). Looking for the killer app can be a deadly trap if your bias is something other than realizing that the greatest innovations in the world generally spring from resource constraints...
Lesson: if you want to change the world, you need the ability to see extreme resource constraints as the very source of sustainable innovation. - Matthew E May Author of Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing
For me personally, across my 20+ marketing and consulting career, the times I've innovated most successfully have been due to having the toughest constraints going in...
And by the way, if you haven't read Matt's second book, In Pursuit of Elegance, you should pick it up and find out why elegant ideas have four characteristics: Symmetry, Seduction, Subtraction, and Sustainability.
It also has perhaps one of the most elegant forwards I've read in a while, by Guy Kawasaki-Author of Reality Check and co-founder of Alltop.com
While brevity may not cause elegance, long-windedness certainly prevents it. In that spirit, here is a 140-character foreword. Why 140 characters? because that's the limit of a Twitter "tweet."
"Less is the new more." Easy to learn: symmetry, seduction, subtraction, and sustainability. Very valuable to do. Step 1: Read Matt's book!!"
Also for a good summary of Matt's thinking, read Guy Kawasaki's interview with Matt: In Pursuit of Elegance: 12 Indespensable Tips
Any thoughts you want to add?
Posted by Ellen Hoenig Carlson on Sat, Jul 04, 2009 @ 09:01 AM
Happy Fourth of July from Sarasota, Florida...Home of one of the greatest American iconic images ever!
"Unconditional Surrender," a 25-foot, 6,000 pound statue created by world-renowned artist J. Seward Johnson, commemorates perhaps the most famous image of World War II victory--"Unconditional Surrender" is a three-dimensional interpretation of a photo taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt of a Sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square, New York City on Aug. 14, 1945, following the announcement of V-J Day.
"This statue brings back so many memories of peace, love and happiness," said Edith Shain, the nurse memorialized in Eisenstaedt's photo. "There is so much romance in the statue; it gives such a feeling of hope to all who look at it."
"During the moment of the kiss I don't remember much, it happened so fast and it happened at the perfect time. I didn't even look at the Sailor who was kissing me," Shain continued. "I closed my eyes and enjoyed the moment like any woman would have done."
To many this sculpture represents hope and freedom...And is a great example of the power of icons for branding and marketing elegance...
It's a great addition to the Sarasota landscape.
Enjoy your July 4th! ...And don't forget to give someone a KISS!
Posted by Ellen Hoenig Carlson on Fri, Jan 30, 2009 @ 09:31 AM
As we were developing our website to pay off: "Elegant Prescriptions for Leading Performance", I stumbled upon Matthew E May and his book The Elegant Solution, and went on to read his two "Change This" manifestos:
Elegant Solutions: Breakthrough Thinking the Toyota Way and Mind of the Innovator. I was struck with Matt's insight and unique perspective on Toyota's ability to continually innovate and produce elegant solutions. I was instantly a fan...
Matt wrote a blog to usher in 2009 that has stuck with me since I read it a few weeks ago--so much so-- I would like to share it: "2009: Don't Just Do Something." It flips on its ear how we often approach problems and life: ...always looking for what to do, rather than what to not do.
He recounts a story told by business guru Jim Collins (of bestselling Good To Great fame). It was called "Best New Year's Resolution? A 'Stop Doing' List."
Collins told the story of how, in the throes of his early post-Stanford Business School career at Hewlett-Packard, his favorite former professor redressed him for a lack of discipline over a busy yet unfocused life. Her words rang true: at the time, Jim was aggressively chasing his carefully-set stretch goals for the year, confident in his ability to accomplish them. Still, his life was crowded with the commotion of a fast-tracking career. Her comment made him pull up short and re-examine what he was doing. To help, she did what great teachers do, constructing a lesson in the form of an assignment she called "20-10": Imagine that you've just inherited $20 million free and clear, but you only have 10 years to live. What would you do differently-and specifically, what would you stop doing?
The exercise did exactly what it was intended to do-make Jim stop and think about what was important to him. It was a turning point, for three reasons: First, he realized he'd been racing down the wrong track spending enormous energy on the wrong things. Second, the assignment became a constant reminder of just how important and precious his time is. He now starts each year by choosing what not to do, and each of his to do lists always includes "stop doing" items. Third, the strategy helped him identify what factors led the companies he was studying to become "great" while others remained merely "good". The great companies routinely eliminated activities and pursuits that did not significantly contribute to the following criteria: profit, passion, and perfection. Profit meant engaging in only the activities that would result in value for both the company and the customer. Passion meant having a sense of noble purpose beyond just making money. And perfection meant focusing on flawlessly executing each task in such a way as to make the competition irrelevant. All three criteria had to be met in order for any activity to remain in these great companies' repertoires.
For Matthew May, this was a thunderbolt of insight:
"A great piece of art is composed not just of what is in the final piece, but equally what is not. It is the discipline to discard what does not fit--to cut out what might have already cost days or even years of effort--that distinguishes the truly exceptional artist and marks the ideal piece of work, be it a symphony, a novel, a painting, a company, or most important of all, a life."
"As soon as I shifted my perspective, the vaunted Toyota Production System became for me a study of what wasn't there, and of how and what to stop doing. The Lexus line of cars, which had by then become America's leading luxury nameplate, was suddenly a shining example of eliminating anything that lacked passion and perfection. The singular thought that what isn't there can often be as or more powerful than what is presented me with a completely different view of the world."
How often do we all look at the problem or the opportunity taking a natural and intuitive approach: looking at what to do, rather than what to not do?
It's tempting to want to do everything that our competitors are doing, and more, but maybe it's time to only do those things that provide profit, passion and perfection...In these days of intense budget and resource constraints, this may be the single most important perspective we can bring to our marketing planning, teams, companies and our life...
I've started my "Stop Doing" list; won't you join me?