"Purpose" as a source of differentiation as opposed to "promise" (read brand)!

Today customers know more about suppliers than they did in the past. Markets have become more transparent with sharing of information, experience and knowledge amongst customers. All this while the actual difference between products and services is vanishing quickly.

With a huge range of products and services, customers face a classic problem - to borrow the term from Alvin Tofler - its the problem of "over-choice". Its tough, as a customer, to mark out the real difference (if any) between products available. In many industries, mostly, everything can be commiditized and that too very quickly.

Today, to build and sustain 'differentiation' companies have to create variety in actual product or its promises (read brand) or some times both. There are serious problems with both the options. Product variety is adding little to customer satisfaction but adds further complexity to the problem of overchoice. While it might be fun to create promises around your products its relatively tough to make the products deliver on those promises.

With China still going strong its mostly suicidal to get into price based differentiation.

While marketers explore for other factors on which 'differentiation' can be loaded..."purpose" of the company, to produce and reach out to customers with the a particular product, remains hugely untapped and a highly meaningful factor for differentiation. For example, every product of google has a simple undercurrent and users can almost immediately identify with its core purpose - organizing information to provide better search results for you!

Its difficult to take customers for a ride with purpose as a key differentiator - a purpose has to be honest in both - its argument and realization. But it does not take any effort to keep customers with you once they identify with your purpose...

Offcourse many of today's products, as a first step, will find it tough to identify a 'purpose' for themselves in the market... i mean imagine what could be the purpose of feeding someone an areated drink? further, difference between purpose of feeding someone with coca-cola as opposed to pepsi? seems farcical...

While the large established companies continue to experiment with 'promise' as source for differentiation the relatively smaller companies can take on the larger ones on 'purpose'. (If you cant defeat the enemy on the battleground try changing the battleground and you stand a better chance.) Smaller companies or new products in commoditized world can start on a totally different plane by focusing the marketing message on their 'purpose' as opposed to price, product features and promise!

Well, just a thought....what do you say?

New year resolutions or wish lists?

"Resolution" is firm determination to do something in a certain time frame. Wish lists are like must-do tasks with no particular implementation date. So why do most resolutions often end up as items in a wish list?

Resolutions without an appraisal naturally gravitate to wish lists!

Appraisal, especially self appraisal, is tricky. The rating forms in annual job appraisals is the time when we come closest to structuring a self appraiasal. A new year, for most of us is about resolutions...appraisals can wait.

But then resolutions will start falling apart from next month. We forget some, cant hold on to most and never start with the rest. Appraisals can be of great help in uncovering the obvious.

Simply put, imagine this year we are out for a journey and we have our vehicle. Resolutions are the destinations that we intend to reach. And what we do is simply start driving ....without really checking how far one has to go? is there enough fuel for the journey? What about battery, air pressure, shocks (crucial if we intend to take the bumpy road) engine maintenance? Do we have the map? Have we figured out how and where to ask for help to get the right directions?

And the disaster begins, for most journeys the fuel ends mid-way, for others you are not sure about the road and so on...Appraisals can help in testing things you already know and uncovering issues which could be critical but are currently hidden from you.

Do a self-appraisal and check your fitness for each of the resolutions that you have taken up for 2010.

Happy New Year!

Productivity Paradox

IT is everywhere but in productivity...that is the great productivity paradox!

While evaluating a CRM software for my earlier employer, I realized there was little or no difference between most of the software products that we had short-listed. The only difference (aggressively made visible by product companies) was in features and the price associated with it. However, none of us were in a position to comprehend how does the difference matter to us....?

We set out to do a must have, good to have and nice to have categorization of features and again realized that all software products ranked the same. Eventually, we selected the brand that was most reputed and the cheapest; ended up using very little of the product features and marginally improved our productivity.

Some days back I attended the demonstration of a software product developed to manage 'ideas' in a company. It had features where you could post ideas, classify them, vote and accept, reject or reward the best ones. Most of these were a mix of bookmark, email, share and tag features in google ad-ons and other similar applications. Do we need a separate tool for managing ideas now? I am not sure!

Both these instances were a realization to C K Pralhad's view that "technology has produced great diversity and choice in products but has contributed little to increase the satisfaction"

Perhaps, we need more IT companies that think about and advise customers on how to get the most out of a particular software tool than to develop more of these tools!

As customers we need to focus more time on implementing the software than evaluating IT ;)!

Any other ways to get rid of the productivity paradox?

Urban Infrastructure in India - All Planning No Expertise!

Most of the leadership at state as well as center level in India has its mass base (or roots) in rural India (Bharat and all). Their political thought, aspirations are woven around the rural fabric. In fact a pro-urban stand for many of these would be suicidal. So who is taking the cause for urban India? corporates and NGOs?

Again, the rest of the leadership from urban areas has little or no authority in assembly or even center. Besides they have a limited understanding of the scale and depth of urban issues leave apart expertise to solve the problems.

The muncipal councils operate at a tactical level and are seldom seen taking any pragmatic decisions. Unlike panchayati raj, the urban civic system allows little or no public participation....result an alienated and ignorant urban civilian.

Add to this an unprecedented growth, migration and the urban infrastructure will collapse in absence of a rapid upgrade that match the demand. But given the lack of leadership, expertise and a platform to drive the up-gradation of urban infrastructure, the disaster seems unaviodable....

Time for some serious leadership and representation for urban India?...

Consulting by large firms - one size fits all attitude?

Can advise from large consulting firms do any good to SMBs?

Today, I got to hear another story where a small regional media firm hired a large consulting firm and on changed lot of things too quickly on their advise only to leave its employees and customers confused ....and to invite huge losses for itself

SMBs especially the family manged business have a difficult to change type DNA, and it appears the large consulting firms either ignore this reality or just expect these companies to suddenly behave like "professional" large ones...the consulting firms typically sell the newly foreign educated second or third generation leadership team from these SMBs a big dream, do a brainwash to change their traditional business measurement matrix and give them a lot of aggression for a huge fee ...and SMBs are set for disaster

the problem here is most SMBs were/ are started by entrepreneurs for a "purpose", the mission that goes well beyond growth and profitability and stakeholder return...in most cases, I bet, the the SMB leadership itself has limited cognizance of this "purpose" leave apart the ability to articulate it ...however, its seen in their actions, again not necessarily through policies. This is where the large consulting firms miss the point! Rob or confuse the person of his identity and you set him on the path for self destruction...

The large consulting firms are very quick to dislodge any such "purpose" under the pretext of not mixing emotions with business...and rob the SMBs and founder entrepreneur of their identity. With original identity and purpose devalued the SMB stakeholders find it tough to allign and bring in the same levels of passion for the new matrix focused purely on monetary aspects and thus begins the journey to self-destruction.

But then like of all destruction..here too, in the end, there is no one left in the game to take the blame ..