Tag: strategy

New York Series: Bloomingdales – You’re Welcome, really.

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

The historically significant department store Bloomingdales do some pretty cool stuff. This includes the ‘Visitor discount’ they provide:

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Yep, if you’re from another country you automatically receive an 11% discount on everything you buy. Now, this isn’t one of those trick promotions, impossible to get, with 100 other conditions. You simply go to the visitor center pictured above and show them your passport, or overseas license and that is it.  And the discount is real, even if an item is on promotion or already discounted, you get the 11% on top of that. I was fortunate enough to get an incredible winter jacket which was already half price (end of winter discount, even though it was actually snowing outside) with an additional 11%. I was pretty happy. They also have a gift incentive if you spend over $200, and yep, I got my gift…

It get’s better, they also have personal shopping assistants, Multi-lingual assistants to take your around store and free hotel delivery for purchases greater that $250. You can read more about it here.

Sure, discounting isn’t always the path to profitability, but when you are taking one time customers, making them feel special, with ‘money to spend’,  under your wing, it’s pretty clear that they are ‘inventing revenue’.

What does your startup do to ‘invent revenue’?

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New York Series: Naming a Brand

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

This is the oldest marketing lesson in the book – What to call our brand. It seems it doesn’t matter how many times the story is told, but some businesses never seem to learn. Here’s a bad example of a clothing brand name which I saw in Bloomingdale’s today.

acne

Yep, Acne. Which means pimples here in Australia. I’m surprised it even made it instore. So here’s the startup blog rules for brand names. Which I’ll keep short:

  • Try to invent a word that currently has no meaning. (our job is to invent meaning under it)
  • Ensure you can ‘own it’ globally. (No confusion, registerable)
  • Make sure it doesn’t mean something ridiculous, in your country or another.

That’s all that matters in real terms. Other rules are made up by people who are focused on stuff which doesn’t really have much to do with brand building.

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Shifting advantage & contrarian actions

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Once upon a time savvy surfers would get down to the beach early. It was the way to get smooth, uncrowded waves. To step into the ocean at dawn and share the tranquil waters with a few other dedicated salty skin brethren.

This was such an advantage that more and more surfers adopted this method of soul (and sole) surfing. Until the point arrived when there were more people in the line up before there was any daylight. You could often arrive at your favourite surf break only to find the largest crowd of the day was between 5am and 8am. It got ridiculous, the crowd had caught on.  There is now zero advantage in getting up early to go surfing.

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I got so annoyed with the crowds, that I decided to sleep in on surfing days regardless. Why get to the beach early and be greeted with the largest surfing population the day has to offer? It wasn’t worth the effort. So I started heading down the coast at either 10am or 2pm. I still avoided midday, but shifted my surfing times to mid morning and afternoon.

Next thing I found was that my ‘contrarian’ actions had resulted in a boon. Uncrowded waves and a sleep in! Turns out most people rarely surf for more than a couple of hours. So even the early morning laggards start to exit the water mid morning.  My current example, was two days ago: I went surfing in a very popular location near Torquay, in 37 degree c warm weather, had perfect waves and only one other person in the water at 2pm. No surfer would believe this is happening.

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The point for entrepreneurs is; Like the waves, positioning advantage is constantly shifting. What is an advantage this year, will certainly change next year. But we will never know this if we always accept conventional wisdom of ‘where to be and when’.

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World of Venn

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

While we are bootstrapping our startups, it’s worth bootstrapping our lives simultaneously. We should be building projects with overlaps, to the extent that we end up living in a ‘World of Venn’. For the ‘un-nerds’ who can’t quite remember the Venn diagram, here’s a simple explanation:

Venn Diagram:
n.   A diagram using circles to represent sets, with the position and overlap of the circles indicating the relationships between the sets.

[After John Venn (1834-1923), British logician.]

The reason for doing this is simple. By living in a ‘World of Venn’, we are building intellectual assets which have synergy. Assets which are connected metaphysically. Constructs with similar ideals which can be shared, borrowed or stolen. The people in these worlds often overlap too. They’re often interested in learning about and helping in other areas of our Venn worlds. And importantly when one set dies or withers, it has an overlapping intersection on which we can refocus our efforts without having to start from the beginning.

Here’s a sample of parts of my world and the Venn relationships.

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As you can see my worlds overlap and all build revenue streams.
–    Ideas and experiences from rentoid.com, give me great writing fodder and intellectual stimulation for this blog you are reading right now.
–    Startup blog has lead to more professional business writing I do for magazines and journals
–    My academic career at Melbourne University has lead to more Business writing and an upcoming book on marketing & investing.

The point is – they all feed each other, build on one another and leverage my personal areas of expertise.

Each success in one section adds credibility and strength to an overlapping area. The more overlaps we have, the larger our sweet spot becomes. When we have a great number of overlaps, life gets sweeter and the rewards are greater. This is why ‘work life balance’ is simply a hoax. Work is a large part of our life and should be joyous. To try and find time for things outside of work we actually ‘enjoy’, means we’ve got our life wrong. Once we live in a world of Venn our personal and financial growth is inevitable.

Venn is Zen. How Venn is your life?

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The Apple, the Orange & Weaknesses

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Apple: A crispy, crunchy yet sweet fruit, which can be eaten as is, with the peel still on the fruit. Can’t be broken into segments by hand – you need a knife to do this. Can even be used in cooking, on salads and also even great for making pie. Gives the teeth a little clean at the same time and freshens the breath while providing many valuable and healthy nutrients. Very difficult to make juice by hand with, but easy to pick the good from the bad as it’s bruises show clearly on the skin.

Orange: Needs to be peeled to be eaten, but can also be broken into nice little segments so you can share with a friend. No knife required. Not as crunchy as the apple, but juicier and more thirst quenching.  Provides it’s own unique set of healthy nutrients. Easy to make fruit juice from by hand. Not so good for making pie with. Hides it’s quality under the skin and could be a bad watery orange, and you just won’t know until you eat it.

These are some of the clear difference in the two fruits above. I’m sure you can add more.

But none of us would want a combined Apple and Orange into one type of fruit. An ‘Appage’ or an ‘Orpple’ anyone?

Comparing apples to oranges

We wouldn’t want this because we understand the unique benefits of each, and they both have their value as part of our diet. In fact we feel like, and need both apples and oranges at different times. To add the benefits of one of these fruits to the other fruit, would by definition diminish the original benefits. So why is it that we are constantly told to work on our weaknesses as if they are the holy grail of success in life? As entrepreneurs we are far better off focusing on our strengths the same way fruit does.

Should we try and improve? No doubt. But to obsess over a weakness is to ignore your given talents. What they don’t tell you is that anyone who has ever achieved anything, did it via leveraging strengths. And it isn’t without irony that the apple and the orange happen to go very well together.

Startup blog says: Outsource weaknesses, focus on strengths.

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Chief Mojo Officer

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Chatting with Chris Mander from docolo.com and he came up with an awesome idea – which every business should have.

The Chief Mojo Officer, or the CMO.

Sure, I asked him what they did and here’s what he told me: (with some embellishment)

“Firstly you have to believe in mojo. If you don’t believe in mojo, then forget it. If you do, the CMO is in charge of general “Vibe Strategy”. The CMO has to make sure that the ‘vibe’ is right. There are no real quantitative measurements for mojo – you can just feel it. The CMO is the type of dude who can just feel it. They’ll know when it’s out of whack. The CMO is in charge of things which are nebulous, but actually matter. When the CMO has the general vibe grooving, the mojo is right, and revenue happens.”

Good news for startups with small staff is that we don’t have to wait for the employee head count to justify a new CMO. We can  and should be doing it anyway. It’s our job!

But when you make it, I reckon it would be the best investment any company could ever make.