The End of Work-Life Balance Mitch Joel B:11”
S:9.75”
T:10.75”
OFC
What Exactly is Content Marketing John Jantsch
The New Age of Consumerism Doug Stephens
The 3 Things All Humans Crave Christine Comaford
The Startup World’s Big Miss Jonathan Fields
Jonah
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BERGER Viral’s Secret Formula
What Motivates You?
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Contents 05 - Featured Contributers
06
06 - In Defense of Sales Q&A With Daniel H Pink – Dan Levy
09 - The Soft Stuff is the Hard Stuff – Chester Elton
20
12 - The New Age of Consumerism Reimagine Your Business – Doug Stephens
12 30 - Looptail: How One Company Changed the World by Reinventing Business – Bruce Poon Tip
33 - Brand This Way: 16 - The A List:
3 Road-Tested Marketing Moves Ripped From Lady Gaga – Martin Lindstrom
12 Books on Our Radar
36 - The End of Work-Life Balance
17 - The Connection Between Vulnerability and Innovation – John Gerzema
20 - Don Draper is No Longer in Charge
– Mitch Joel
38 - What Exactly is Content Marketing – John Jantsch
41 - Content Marketing as the Remedy for Content Marketing–Loni Stark
– Tom Fishburne
22 - Viral’s Secret Formula – Jonah Berger
26 - Actionable Summary: Adam Grant’s Give & Take – Jill Donahue
33
44 - The 3 Things All Humans Crave & How to Motivate Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere – Christine Comaford
47 - The Startup World’s Big Miss
The Editor’s Letter
– Jonathan Fields
50 - Gadgets 51 - What is The Dreaming Room? – Michael E. Gerber
54 - The New Digital Consumer – Jennifer Dunn
57 - How to Work 1 Hour a day While Maintaining a Thriving Business – Stephen Shapiro
51
60 - The Artists
Scott Kavanagh, Editor
If content is king, then context is god. - Gary Vaynerchuk A frequent speaker at The Art Of, Gary Vaynerchuk has identified that although content is extremely important, context is what makes it matter. Our team at The Art Of believes that ‘our’ king is customer experience. If we are able to give our customers what they want when they want it, support them in creative ways, improve the quality of their lives, and do all of this at a reasonable value, we have won. Context defined is the circumstances and facts that surround a situation. When it comes to content, context is the way you’re publishing, distributing and promoting your content. If you’re trying to connect in the wrong context, it doesn’t matter how good or bad your content is. It’s not going to be read, shared or discussed. Whether we are curating an event, conducting an interview, producing a video or writing a book, we strive to be well informed of what our readers, followers and attendees are looking for. We don’t consider it our job to tell you how to consume our content, it is our job to give you plenty of options. Scott Kavanagh, Editor
62 - From Donuts to Dynamics: Making Marketing Easier – Rob Adams FALL 2013 | 3
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FEATURED CONTRIBUTORS John Gerzema EDITOR Scott Kavanagh
New York Times Bestselling Author, Social Strategist & Former Chief Insights Officer at Young & Rubicam
PUBLISHER Christopher Novais DESIGNER Joey Van Massenhoven HOW TO REACH US The Art of Productions Inc.
Bruce Poon Tip
46 Sherbourne Street 3rd Floor Toronto, Ontario Canada
Award winning Founder of G ADVENTURES & Author of Looptail
M5A 2P7 ADVERTISING Ron Bester - Director, Business Development 416-479-9701 ext. 322 ron@theartof.com SUBSCRIPTIONS Visit www.theartof.com/magazine Email magazine@theartof.com
Jonah Berger Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania & New York Times Bestselling Author of Contagious
Call 866-992-7863 (In U.S.A and Canada) Write to The Art Of, Subscription Services 46 Sherbourne Street, 3rd Floor, Toronto, Ontario, M5A 2P7 Our subscribers list is occasionally made available to carefully selected firms whose products or services may be of interest to you. If you prefer not to receive information from these firms, please let us know at privacy@theartof.com or send your request along with your mailing label to The Art of Productions Inc, 46 Sherbourne Street, 3rd Floor, Toronto, Ontario, M5A 2P7
Jonathan Fields Award-Winning Author of Uncertainty, Entrepreneur & Founder of The Good Life Project
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In Defence of Sales: Q&A With Daniel H. Pink Dan Levy, Editor at Sparksheet Not everyone works in sales, but we’re pretty much all salespeople. That’s the message of Daniel H. Pink’s latest book, To Sell Is Human. We spoke to the bestselling author about what this means for brands and individuals. As the title of your book suggests, the word “sales” gets a pretty bad rap. Why do you think that is? A lot of us think of sales as sleazy and slimy and manipulative because for a long time, most of what we knew about sales came from an age of information asymmetry. The seller always had more information than the buyer. When the seller has more information, the seller can rip you off. This is why we have the
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principle of “buyer beware.” I think that’s changed. We’ve gone from a world of information asymmetry to one closer to information parity. This transition – from buyers who don’t have much information, not many choices and no way to talk back, to [buyers who] have lots of information, lots of choices and all kinds of ways to talk back – has changed the game, moving us from a world of “buyer beware” to one of “seller beware.”
And this all happened in the last ten years, thanks to the internet and social media? That’s been a big force. I think sales has changed more in the last decade than it did in the previous five decades combined. The shift in the information balance between buyer and seller is like nothing we’ve ever seen before. You focus on two industries in the book that aren’t usually front of mind when you hear talk about sales: education and health care. Why is that? I was trying to explain why people are reporting that they’re spending a lot of time moving, persuading and influencing people. You’d get this pretty high number in the U.S. at least, 41 percent [of workers surveyed]. One of the things that really jumped out at me was where the jobs were. If you look at the U.S. labour market data, the jobs are coming from education and health care services. Talk to any teacher and they’ll say, “Oh my gosh, that’s what I’m doing. I’m selling the idea of paying attention in class, I’m selling the idea of doing your homework.” And in some ways, medicine is, “I’m selling you on the idea of quitting smoking, I’m selling you on the idea of exercising more,” and so forth.
One word we hear about a lot in the digital content world these days is “curation.” You suggest that curation is the key to being a successful salesperson or brand as well. Can you unpack that? I actually resisted using it because it’s so prominent in the world of content. Folks in online businesses have heard that word a gazillion times but most civilians have not. The idea is this: It used to be that having access to information was some kind of advantage, but now everybody has access to information. If I want to know the GDP of Sweden, I can
find it in ten seconds. So having access to information doesn’t matter. What matters more is being able to take that information and make sense of it, not only on your own behalf but also on behalf of other people.
Is that related to your idea of “problem finding” versus “problem solving”? Yes, it’s an important concept, too. If you know exactly what your problem is, then you can find a solution without a salesperson, without anyone else. If I know my problem is that all I need to do is find the GDP of Sweden, I don’t need any help. Where I need help is if I’m asking the wrong question, or if I’m wrong about my problem. There has been a move from problem solving to problem finding, from solving existing problems to identifying problems people don’t realize they have. In the sales context, if you know exactly what your problem is, you don’t need a salesperson. So problem solving still matters, but it matters relatively less. Problem finding is a more valuable skill.
Are we seeing the roles of what’s traditionally seen as a consultant versus a salesperson blurring? Yeah, and that’s been happening for a while. There’s a whole move towards what’s called consultative sales. I think what’s really going on is something that others have written about as well, which is this move from selling products and event services to selling insights. It’s particularly true in business-to-business sales. One of the things that comes out with all the interviews with B2B salespeople is how much you need to understand the customer’s or prospect’s business, and so it is tiptoeing a little away from peddling products and a bit towards management consulting and generating insights.
when you say that we’re all in sales? Should they be worried about their industry being disrupted by amateurs? It’s a great question. There’s been a little bit of that, but less than I would have thought. Where I’ve gotten some distressed emails is from salespeople who say, “Oh my god, I can’t believe that people have such a dim view of sales!” Part of the argument of the book is that we should take sales more seriously – that sales isn’t the glad-handing, slick, somewhat duplicitous profession it’s stereotyped as, but that it requires a great degree of intellectual sophistication and insight. So for everyone who says, “Oh, I can’t believe you’re allowing people to say sales is so grim,” I have a couple more who say, “Wow, I’m glad you’re taking sales seriously.”
Should they be worried about their industry being disrupted by amateurs?
Have you got any pushback from actual professional salespeople
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Chester Elton Not long ago I was on a flight from Las Vegas when I overheard a fascinating conversation. The flight attendant who had welcomed us on board was energetic and upbeat, a true ambassador for the airline. He was so atypical, in fact, that the two men seated behind me asked if they could speak to corporate and get him recognized. His good nature faded as he grumbled, “Please don’t bother. We have a recognition system, but you need about three billion points before you can get anything worthwhile. I have maybe two hundred and eighty thousand points, which I think is like a $50 gift certificate.” Here was an amazing employee who was persevering despite the airline’s lousy job of thanking him. Did he have more to give? Maybe. Was he dissatisfied, disheartened, and even dismayed with the lack of acknowledgment for his great work—and did that make him a potential turnover risk? Without a doubt. A 2011 survey of working Americans found 65 percent of people admit they would work harder if they just received more praise for their efforts. That’s it. Not more pay or stock options, just some specific and sincere thanks now and then. We have spent the past twenty years trying to convince businesspeople that
The Soft Stuff is the Hard Stuff Chester Elton is the New York Times bestselling Author of All In: How the best managers create a culture of belief and drive big results. Learn more at TheCultureWorks.com.
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recognition engages teams. Some have listened and prospered; others haven’t. The problem is this: The soft stuff is the hard stuff for most managers. But there is good news. We’ve seen appreciation done right in some of the world’s best companies. This has solidified a culture of constant reinforcement. After all, culture is about behaviors, plain and simple, and recognition is about reinforcing the right behaviors. That’s why it is so important to your organization’s success. Most managers want to create cultures where their teams perform up to capacity, but few grasp that for a culture to really take off, teammates must encourage each other on a daily basis too. The answer is in rooting for each other: having each other ’s backs, appreciating strengths, and recognizing what we value the most about each other—for every worker on every line, in the field, behind every desk, answering every phone call. To know they are on the right path, workers need acknowledgment not only from you, their immediate bosses, but also from peers. Many companies in recent years have amped up the top-down type of praise, and we applaud their efforts, but manager-to-employee and peer-topeer recognition fulfill separate human needs. Workers want to know that their bosses see their effort and truly value it. This ties in to feelings of job security, well-being, and opportunities for development. But employees also need the affirmation that their coworkers see them as trustworthy, dependable, and creative. This reinforces that they have friends at work, that they are accepted, and that others have their back. When we visited Zappos.com headquarters, leaders explained that most of their recognition programs are peer-topeer. For instance, call center managers Rob Siefker and Maura Sullivan told us about SNAPS recognition, which happens in their
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customer loyalty teams. “SNAPS” stands for “Super Nifty And Positive Stuff.” Siefker said, “The lead supervisors and managers hold Zuddles [Zappos huddles] with our teams. It’s quick—what’s going on in the call center, are there any bigticket items we need to discuss, big news that we need to pass down—and then at the end we do SNAPS. There’s a little box in the call center and people write things that someone else did that was really cool. These are read during the Zuddles and then the person is publicly recognized on the spot. It’s peer-to-peer. Then we all snap our fingers.” (Sullivan and Siefker demonstrate for us and it’s 1950s Greenwich Village poetry-reading cool.) What we are describing here is an entire ecosystem of appreciation and rooting for each other that mitigates natural infighting and jealousies. Imagine going to work in an environment like this. The work is demanding, of course, but along the way you are encouraged by not only your boss but your coworkers. There are celebrated milestones everywhere that keep you glued to your job. You want to stay and make a difference with people you like and who like you.
TAKE A STEP It’s time to turn the tide. The power of effective recognition can spread throughout a culture faster than a speeding bullet, creating a place where employees are willing to give their all and put down roots because they know their contributions will be celebrated. A key starting point is making regular award presentations to your staff when they go above and beyond—these happen at least daily in the best teams we studied.
A TIP: When you or one of your employees presents an award, remember our acronym STEP: • Tell a STORY about the person’s accomplishments. What did the person have to overcome, what tough customer issue did they face, etc. • Gather people TOGETHER. Praise is public, criticism is private. The team in attendance will learn as much or even more than the person being thanked. • EMPHASIZE one of your core values. Ensure your award ceremonies recognize only results that are important to the organization. • PERSONALIZE the moment. What award can you present that the person will value? Where can you hold the presentation that is meaningful? What colleague could you invite to add color to the achievement?
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The New Age of Consumerism Reimagine your business Doug Stephens
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The pain your business might be feeling at the moment isn’t just a hangover from the worst recession on record. Frankly, that would be a piece of cake compared to what we’re going through. In fact, what’s really happening is that we’re running headlong into the end of the industrial era of consumption. Boom! Over. You see, for at least the last 100 years our contemporary model of consumerism has been largely unchanged. Large, institutionalized companies made massive quantities of undifferentiated products, to sell to huge swaths of consumers, whose needs were loosely grouped into “segments”. And most often, these products were sold through retail distribution in an effort to most efficiently reach those segments. The retailer earned their cut of the profits by supporting physical store locations in the market, offering some product knowledge and delivering some sort of service experience to the consumer. Makers made, retailers sold and consumers consumed. It all worked nicely. Today, however, every aspect of what I just described is now being completely upended. The digital era of consumerism is taking hold and the paradigms we, as consumers or businesspeople have operated on for more than a century are being steadily and mercilessly obliterated. Here are just a few harbingers of this new era.
Segmentation of one With our growing capacity to manage, store and decipher massive amounts of data it’s increasingly possible to understand and even anticipate product needs - down to each and every individual consumer. Retailer Target, for example, can accurately determine when women are pregnant (sometimes even before their family members know), simply by correlating their changing purchase behaviors. You and your specific needs can now be understood and even potentially predicted through the use of what is being termed “big data”. And the capacity for businesses to gather and de-code that data into customized products and services will constitute a powerful new competitive advantage. Furthermore, with the mainstreaming of technologies like 3-D printing, it will soon be possible to make one unique thing, just for you, with relative ease. In essence, manufacturing efficiency will cease to be solely tied to making thousands or millions of things that suit most owners adequately but also be about making single units of unique things that suit each owner perfectly.
The sharing economy Home-sharing network AirBNB now has more rooms for rent than all Hilton Hotels combined. Not bad for a business that’s a little more than 4 years old! They are just one of dozens of companies pioneering what is being termed, the sharing economy. The entire concept of acquisition and ownership is being called into question, as increasingly networked consumers are able to connect and share the things they already own. Cars, household items and private jets – yes even private jets are all being shared by consumers who want the use of these items without the cost or hassle that owning them often brings. As we become further digitally interwoven as a society, our ability to organize and collaborate to loan, share and rent the things we have will only increase, reshaping much of our consumer economy.
eBay Now lets customers shop from their mobile devices and have their order delivered – anywhere they happen to be!
The store is everywhere In 2012, European grocery subsidiary Homeplus, quietly installed virtual stores in the subways of South Korea in an effort to raise their brand presence in the market. Using high-resolution posters of realistically merchandised grocery store shelves, they allowed busy, commuters to conveniently shop using their mobile devices and have their grocery orders delivered to their homes later the same day. Homeplus rocketed to the number one spot in the market and in doing so put all retailers on notice. The store could now be taken directly to the customer…wherever they were. Since the Homeplus experiment, dozens of major brands have followed suit:
things we have will only increase, reshaping much of our consumer economy.
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• Fashion brand Kate Spade and eBay recently partnered in New York to create the Kate Spade Saturday window shops. Each window shop features a dozen or so products that shoppers can order from the street, using a touchscreen interface. Items are then delivered 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. • eBay Now lets customers shop from their mobile devices and have their order delivered – anywhere they happen to be! I actually tried this service out recently in New York City. I actually ordered and paid for a Yankees baseball cap while sitting in Madison Square Park. It was delivered to me, in the park, in under an hour. • YouTube recently announced partnerships with major brands to create shop-able videos. Users can watch a video, learn about the featured products and buy those products directly from the video. It even does the comparison-shopping for you, showing prices at major retailers.
No barriers to entry Square Inc. was launched by Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey in 2009. Today, it’s a multi-billion dollar enterprise that’s giving established payment processing companies ulcers. Warby Parker was founded in 2010 by Wharton School of Business students Neil Blumenthal, Andrew Hunt, David Gilboa, and Jeffrey Raider and since then has been rocking (what was) the prescription optical monopoly with their uniquely physical/digital model of selling eyewear. In less than six years Andy Dunn turned Bonobos into the largest apparel company ever to launch online. The company has since established an offline Guide Shop concept – physical stores where shoppers can try on clothes and then later buy online - and is also being sold in Nordstrom stores. Apart from success, what all of these entrepreneurs have in common is an almost total lack of direct experience in the categories they now play
in. They were merely smart, ambitious people with a compelling vision of how something could be done better. What this means for your business is that your real competition likely isn’t who you think it is. When there are no barriers to entry, everyone is a potential competitor.
The consumer In control All this amounts to an historic powershift to the consumer. No longer can brands and retailers dictate the path to purchase, the choices available to consumers or the terms of engagement. In a world of one click convenience and connection, it’s the customer who’s clearly in the driver’s seat. It’s already clear that companies who will succeed and enjoy the rewards of this new era are those who aren’t afraid to spit in the eye of old paradigms, take stomach-turning risks and above all, go first. Because the surest way to survive the disruption in your market is to be the one causing it.
• American Express and Twitter recently teamed up to enable consumers to purchase products simply by replying to a sponsored tweet! • And perhaps most incredible of all; this year Chinese grocer, Yihaodian is opening 1,000 virtual stores that can only be seen and shopped on a mobile device.
Doug Stephens the CEO of Retail Prophet and of the world’s foremost retail industry futurists. His clients include Walmart, Home Depot, Disney, Intel, WestJet, Citibank, Razorfish and Air Miles.
• So, the notion of a clearly defined path to purchase, with consumers beating a path to their local store (online or offline) is simply outmoded. The store is wherever the consumer wants or needs it to be. Any brands unwilling to accept this had better begin planning for obscurity.
Doug is the author of the groundbreaking book, The Retail Revival: Re-Imagining Business for the New Age of Consumerism. He is also the retail contributor for CBC Radio and co-host of The Future in Store. He speaks regularly to major brands and organizations across North America and Europe.
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THE CONNECTION BETWEEN VULNERABILITY AND INNOVATION by JOHN GERZEMA
Dr. Ijad Madisch kept getting ‘stuck’ in his experiments. Madisch, a Harvard-trained virologist with a PhD, wasn’t failing as much as sensing inefficiency. “For most scientific researchers, time has the highest value, and asking for help can save you lots of it,” he told me over tea in his office, a two-story loft-like space in East Berlin. “I always tried to network when I couldn’t get a problem solved,” recalled Ijad. “Instead of working four or five months to solve something, I’d try to find someone who understood it already and could explain it to me in a couple of hours.” Yet when he reached out to his colleagues for help—he was promptly chas-
tised. Big-time scientists were supposed to project an image of supreme competence. There was no room for showing weakness. What science needed, Madisch suddenly realized, was a global community where the work could take precedence over ego. So he started one. ResearchGate, envisioned as a social network for scientists, already has more than two million members from two hundred countries sharing more than eight hundred thousand papers. Turns out, scientists are often good communicators who are competitive, but also collaborative. And they are far less critical than Ijad had feared. “I expected negative things, with people saying, ‘Ah, you’re stupid.’ Instead it’s really helpful. People ask, ‘Did you try this? Did you try that?’ Scientists are generally good people who try to help.” “Every small result is contributing to the big result,” Madisch said. His hope is to crowdsource a Nobel Prize where the winners scroll like credits at the end of a movie. At the very least he is helping to accelerate scientific discovery by getting millions of scientists out of their cubicles. Innovators like Madisch already recognize a sea change that’s occuring. There is a shift toward traditionally ‘feminine’ traits and characteristics in the underlying structures that drive capitalism, public policy and society. In
our new book, The Athena Doctrine, we surveyed thirteen countries from Mexico to Indonesia. And two thirds of people think the world would be a better place if men thought more like women. When pressed to articulate traits of exemplary modern leaders, ‘selflessness’, ‘patience’, ‘collaboration’ and ‘humility’ were highest correlated and also seen as ‘more feminine.’ (‘Pride’, ‘Aggressive’ and ‘Independent’ were the least correlated and most masculine.) In the social age, empathy and humility are new forms of currency. Technology, the financial crisis and globalization mean we live in a world that’s increasingly open and interdependent. Millennial values are also a catalyst. But what really surprised us (Michael D’Antonio my co-author and I) is how the most innovative men and women were attacking intractable problems by being flexible, empathetic and collaborative. After completing the research, we spent two years traveling nearly four times around the globe to eighteen countries, interviewing world political leaders from Shimon Peres to Maria Damanaki – an EU Commissioner whose sympathy with the plight of unemployed fishermen resulted in a novel program to have them fish for plastic. Placing a bounty on refuse was but one of many sensitive, yet creative solutions we encountered. We met executives,
FALL 2013 | 17
entrepreneurs, social activists, scientists, educators and city planners. We met Zoe Palmer in Hackney, who runs The Golden Company, where disadvantaged kids from east London teach Investment bankers about bee-keeping (and custodial behavior and connection to the poverty around them). The bankers were so impressed they installed a beehive on the top of the London Stock Exchange. We met Major General Orna Barbivai, the highest ranking woman in the Israeli Defense Force. When I asked her how she approached military strategy, she said as a ‘mother’. Engage first, and if provoked – attack. She piloted a program to have women man checkpoints, including two of her daughters. In every country we found innovative men and women who are deploying empathy to great result. In Reykjavik, we met with constitutional committee members of Iceland’s new government, who repaired public trust by crowd-sourcing a new constitution. In Japan, Kohei Fukuzaki, a student explained to us how he created
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an Airbnb-like non-profit called Room Donor to help displaced families find shelter from the earthquake and Tsunami. In Peru’s capital city of Lima, issues of rape or domestic abuse are often placed on the backburner—or dismissed altogether. As director of Women’s House, Silvia Loli took a stand against injustice by creating an all-women’s police unit. With perseverance, Loli forced reforms allowing women into the police ranks— and convinced lawmakers to approve legislation making domestic violence a serious offense. Through Women’s House, she operates counseling programs and legal aid clinics that are available to everyone. And as a byproduct of including women, she also reduced corruption in the police force by over thirty percent. Silvia’s strides point out how society has imprinted a ludicrous notion that the way women think is somehow “less important”. And yet this is completely opposite to what is driving today’s growth and prosperity. We live in a sharing economy, one where value creation is increas-
ingly based on services, which requires listening and understanding. In our data, countries whose citizens think in a more feminine way have a higher per capital GDP and higher quality of life. And 81% of people told us that man or woman, you need both masculine and feminine traits to thrive in today’s world. It’s worth noting that we are both dads living in all-female households. We believe the best way to advocate for the rights of women and girls are for men to model their approach. Empathy, flexibility and kindness are traits we all possess and a new form of innovation. That 64,000 people around the world described them as ‘feminine’ speaks to the opportunity for all of us to deploy them for creativity and competitive advantage.
John Gerzema is a New York Times Bestselling Author, Social Strategist & Former Chief Insights Officer at Young & Rubicam
imagine this ad if the play button worked
DON DRAPER IS NO LONGER IN CHARGE TOM FISHBURNE
Marketers all want to generate word-ofmouth. But we sometimes forget that this inherently means giving up control. We need to remember that advocates are every bit a part of the marketing team as the marketers themselves. Recently, the Nutella brand discovered a Nutella superfan named Sara Rosso. On her own, Sara started World Nutella Day. She shared Nutella recipes, wrote stories, and posted fan photos. Over a few years, she built up an audience of 40,000 likeminded Nutella aficionados on Facebook. She was basically doing the content marketing job on behalf of Nutella, yet she wasn’t on the payroll. How did Nutella respond when they discovered Sara Rosso, content marketer extraordinaire? They sent her a cease-anddesist letter. Eventually, Ferraro (maker of Nutella) backed down. But their knee-jerk reaction
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reflects the command-and-control mindset that drives most forms of marketing. It is time for marketers to recognize that brand owners never really own the brand. Our customers do. Marketers are traditionally trained to repeat our single-minded proposition over and over until consumers buy whatever it is that we’re marketing. In an effort to get our features and benefits across, we often lose sight of what’s actually valuable to our audience. Great marketing turns the mirror on the audience. One of my first marketing roles was with Green Giant, a top advertising icon of the 20th century. When I joined the brand team, I found a brand brief literally written by a young Leo Burnett. In the early days of marketing, brands were crafted by men like Leo Burnett and Don Draper. Every point of brand communication was carefully scripted and controlled.
But with the explosion of marketing channels and the rise of empowered consumers, command-and-control marketing is over. Don Draper is no longer in charge. We can’t script the creative force of brand advocacy, but we can channel it. The Philippines recently developed a marketing campaign that gave up control of the message to its fans. To increase tourism, they decided not to simply generate content about the region themselves, as most visitor bureaus do. Instead, they created a simple app called “more fun in the Philippines.” The app allowed anyone to upload any picture and write any message about what they found “more fun in the Philippines”. The app then generated a single shareable image that combined the picture, text, and name of the contributor. Creativity erupted and #morefuninthephilippines became the top trending topic on Twitter. Submissions included a house made entirely of tropical flowers and the tagline, “Home Improvement. More fun in the Philippines,” and a photo of a barbecued pig on a platter and the tagline, “Planking. More fun in the Philippines”. The more provocative submission was a cockfighting photo and the tagline, “Angry Birds. More fun in the Philippines”. The tourism department of the Philippines certainly wouldn’t endorse cockfighting, but they allowed even that communication. As a result of handing over the content marketing reins to their audience, visitors increased to the Philippines by 16%. Rather than command and control, our job as marketers is to inspire and amplify.
Tom Fishburne is Marketoonist and Founder of Marketoon Studios (marketoonstudios.com), a cartoon studio that helps businesses like GE, Vodafone, Microsoft, Kronos, Baynote, and Guidance Software reach their audiences with cartoons. Follow his cartoons at his Marketoonist blog or on Twitter @ tomfishburne. FALL 2013 | 21
Want to know why things go viral? I have a secret for you. It’s not luck. From the Harlem Shake to Rutgers basketball coach abusing his players, hardly a week goes by without some video or news story going viral. And viral has a huge impact on businesses, large and small. Blender company Blendtec’s sales shot up more than 700% a few years ago after videos of them blending things like iPhones were shared. But what makes something go viral? If you ask most social media “gurus,” they’ll tell you it’s all about getting lucky. Viral isn’t a strategy, it’s like buying a lottery ticket. Or they’ll talk about cats. Lots of people share videos of funny felines, so it must be the reason things go viral. All these theories are great, except, well, they’re not really backed up by anything. No data. No analytics. Just old fashioned guesses based on looking at a couple particularly noteworthy successes. It’s like the idea that the Earth was flat. It seemed right until someone actually looked deeper and showed, well…it wasn’t. I’m happy to tell you there is a better way. Virality isn’t luck. It’s not magic. And it’s not random. There’s a science behind why people talk and share. A recipe. A formula even. My colleagues and I analyzed thousands of news articles and hundreds of brands, all to understand why some make the most emailed list or get more word of mouth. Again and again we found the same principles at work. Six key drivers that shape what people talk
VIRAL’S SECRET FORMULA JONAH BERGER 22 | FALL 2013
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Virality isn’t luck. It’s not magic. And it’s not random. There’s a science behind why people talk and share. A recipe. A formula even. about and share. Here is one of them (for more detail on the rest, see my recent New York Times Bestseller, Contagious: Why Things Catch On). New York City is a tough place to open a bar. Competition is fierce and it’s hard to cut through the clutter. Dozens of options around every corner. But a few years ago Brian Shebairo launched a place that’s been packed since the day it opened. In fact, it’s one of the most sought after drink reservations in the city. Bookings are only available day of and people frantically hit redial again and again hoping to snag a spot. Yet he’s never advertised. Never spent a dollar on marketing. How’d he do it? He hid his bar inside a hot dog restaurant. Walk into Crif Dogs in the East Village, and you’ll find the most amazing hot dog menu you’ve ever seen. A Tsunami dog with pineapple and green onions, a Chihuahua dog with avocado and sour cream, and a Good Morning dog wrapped in bacon, smothered with cheese, and topped with a fried egg. In one corner off to the side is an oldschool phone booth. One of those rectangular numbers that Clark Kent used to use to change into Superman. Walk inside and you’ll see a rotary dial phone on the wall. Pick up the phone and dial the number 1.
Someone will pick-up the other line and ask you if you have a reservation. And if you do, the back of the phone booth will open and you’ll be let into a secret bar called, of all things, Please Don’t Tell. Has Please Don’t Tell violated some “traditional” laws of marketing? Sure. There is no sign on the street, no mention of it in the hot dog place. In fact, they’ve worked hard to make themselves a secret. But there’s a funny thing about secrets. Think about the last time someone told you a secret. Told you not to tell another soul. What’s the first thing you did with that information? You probably told someone else. And the reason is something called Social Currency. People talk about things that make them look good. Sharp and in-the-know. Smart and funny rather than behind the times. If people go to a place like Please Don’t Tell, or even if they just hear about it, they tell others because it gives them status. Social Currency isn’t just about hidden bars. It’s why people brag about how many twitter followers they have or their kids SAT scores. Why golf boast about their handicaps and frequent fliers spread the word any time they get upgraded. McDonald’s used social currency to help the McRib sandwich take-off and RueLaLa used it to turn a struggling website into
a hit. It’s even why people took to twitter a few months back to crow that their profile was one of the top 5 or 10 percent on Linkedin. So one way to get people talking about you is to make them look good. Make them feel special, or like insiders, and they’ll tell others—and spread word of mouth about you along the way. Social Currency is only one of the six key drivers of word of mouth. Will following these six principles guarantee that 10 million people spread your message? No. But it will increase the number of people who pass it on. Encourage customers to tell two friends instead of just one. It’s like a batting average in baseball. No one hits a home run every time, but by understanding the science of hitting you can boost your average. So the next time someone tells you that going viral is about luck, politely tell them that there is a better way. Science. Word of mouth isn’t random and it’s not magic. By understanding why people talk and share, we can craft contagious content. And get our own products and ideas to catch on.
Jonah Berger is a Marketing professor at the Wharton School and author of the current New York Times bestseller Contagious: Why Things Catch On. FALL 2013 | 25
CTIONABLE
GIVE & TAKE By Jill Donahue
SUMMARY
Focus attention and energy on making a difference in the lives of others, and success might follow as a by-product.” At 31, Adam Grant is the youngest-tenured and highest-rated professor at Wharton. Within seven years of achieving his Ph.D., he published more papers in organizational psychology (the study of workplace dynamics) than colleagues who won lifetime-achievement awards! When organizations like Google, NFL, the US Army and Navy and the United Nations want to figure out how to get the most out of their employees and when people want to figure out how to get the most out of their jobs, it is Grant who has the answers. His 2013 book Give and Take compiles his research and stories into applicable ideas that we can use to make dramatic change. Below are just three of the top ideas I garnered from his book which is chock full of great ideas.
GOLDEN EGG - Which one are you Adam Grant divides people into three reciprocity styles. He discovered that patterns of success based on these reciprocity styles are remarkably clear. Here’s how he categorizes them.
1
GIVERS “I’m happy to share my time and energy with those who can benefit.” • Prefer to give more than they get • Focus and act on the interest of others • Help others without expecting anything in return
2
TAKERS “If I don’t look out for myself, no one else will.” • Put their own interests ahead of others • Help others strategically when the benefits to themselves outweigh costs • Believe the world is competitive, dog-eat-dog place
3
MATCHERS “I’ll do it if I’m pretty sure I will get something in return.” • Strive to preserve an equal balance of giving and getting • Operate on principle of fairness • Have relationships governed by even exchange of favours
26 | FALL 2013
In fact, the patterns of success based on reciprocity styles are remarkably clear.” You don’t fit into just one category? That’s normal. The lines between these styles aren’t hard and fast. Which category do you think ends up at the bottom of the success ladder? The verdict in his classes was nearly unanimous. Givers. When he asked them who rises to the top, the students would equally choose Matchers and Takers. But Grant’s research proves otherwise. His intention was to teach his students to become better leaders, managers and negotiators. He believed that the way to do that was to adopt a ‘giver’ style. But they simply didn’t believe him. So he decided to prove them wrong. This book is that proof.
GEM #1 - In everything we do, serve Adam Grant did an experiment with call centre employees. He randomized them into three groups with the exact same conditions except for what happened five minutes before their shift. Each group read a different story.
1
GROUP 1
2
GROUP 2
3
GROUP 3
read stories from previous call centre employees explaining how the job had helped them by teaching them transferable sales skills (the personal benefit group)
read stories from university alumni who had benefitted from the donations raised by the call centre group. They talked about how the scholarships had helped them (the purpose group)
The defining quality of a top pharmaceutical salesperson was being a giver.”
read stories that had nothing to do with either personal benefit or purpose
THE RESULTS? The personal benefit group had no change in dollars raised while the people in the purpose group more than doubled their dollars raised! After seeing the same results after five replications of the study, Grant concluded that the testimonial from the scholarship recipient bypassed the subjects’ conscious thoughts and went straight to the subconscious source of motivation. While they could not pinpoint the source of their motivation, it was driving their behavior. A five minute exercise that doubles productivity!? Why don’t we do this?
Everything I do is focused on helping pharmaceutical people improve patient outcomes so I was especially intrigued to read Grant’s reference to a study by Jaramillo and Grisaffe. They studied 600 pharmaceutical sales people. The reps completed surveys to identify if they were givers, takers or matchers. They were assigned to a new product with no existing client base. While initially there was no difference, each quarter the givers pulled ahead of the others. By the third and fourth quarters, the givers were bringing in significantly
more revenue than the others. It didn’t matter whether the sales people were conscientious or carefree, extroverted or introverted, emotionally stable or anxious, open-minded or traditional. The ones who focused on helping the physician to help the patient succeeded. Yay! Being ‘patient focused’ isn’t just morally imperative, it contributes to increased sales! Adam Grant, through his research and writing, is saying that people work better if they feel like they are helping others and making a difference. This might be the number one secret to moving others.
GEM #2 - Why some givers burn out while others are on fire Some givers end up exhausted and unproductive while others end up passionate and successful. Grant calls them successful givers and failed givers. You can likely picture a few of these dramatically different givers in your network. What do you think causes the difference? FALL 2013 | 27
Grant found that the successful givers aren’t just more other-oriented than their peers, they are also more self-interested. Successful givers are just as ambitious as the takers and matchers. The failed givers are completely selfless – to a fault. They have high other-interest and low self-interest. And this ends up hurting them. It reminds me of the instructions on the plane to put on your own oxygen mask first so you are able to help those around you. If takers are selfish and failed givers are selfless, successful givers are ‘otherish’, Grant says. They care about benefitting others and they match that focus with ambitious goals to advance their own interests. In other words, they are still willing to give more than they receive but they are aware of their own interests which become their guide for choosing when, where, how and to whom they give. They do well by doing good! When your focus on others is coupled with a healthy dose of concern for the self, givers are less likely to burn out and get burned. They are positioned to excel, help others and help themselves. If you had giver tendencies before you read this, you will be encouraged to continue and perhaps slightly adjust your approach to ensure you become a successful ‘otherish’ giver. If you didn’t have giver tendencies, you likely didn’t choose to read this summary anyway! I encourage you, wherever you sit, to grab Grant’s book and sit down with it. My copy is marked by dozens of dog-eared pages – evidence of its tremendous value for me. Many people reserve their giver tendencies for their personal rather than their professional lives. By shifting even slightly in the giver direction, you just might enjoy work more, find greater meaning and create longer lasting impact!
Success involves more than just capitalizing on the strengths of giving: it also requires avoiding the pitfalls.”
Jill Donahue is a guest writer for Actionable Books, a Canadian company dedicated to providing business leaders with the tools to improve their own organizational health through conversation and action. Learn more at ActionableBooks.com.
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BRUCE POON TIP
LOOPTAIL
HOW ONE COMPANY CHANGED THE WORLD BY REINVENTING BUSINESS
30 | FALL 2013
When I started G Adventures in 1990, the travel industry looked quite different than it does now. “Packaged” experiences were the norm and travel companies went out of their way to ensure that westerners would be awarded all of the comforts of home while in exotic locations around the world. This was the farthest thing from what I wanted to do with my business. I’ve always maintained that if you want the comforts of home while travelling, you should probably just stay at home. I wanted to build sustainable travel experiences for travellers who were not content with seeing the world from the back of a tour bus. I wanted to immerse people with other cultures to provide truly life-changing experiences, without western influence. At the time that we started our business, we were the pioneers of ecotourism and sustainability. The beginning of my Looptail came in 1997. I was leading a trip through Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan, which wasn’t uncommon for me at that time. During this particular trip, my adventure travel company was facing certain doom. With mounting debt exceeding our assets and payroll not being met, we were edging dangerously close to bankruptcy. Needless to say, these were troubling times for me personally as well as my business. At a hostel on the trip, I traded in my copy of the notorious John Belushi biography Wired for a copy of Great Ocean, the authorized biography of the great fourteenth Dalai Lama. This would prove to be a game changer for me, both in business and life. I had read about Tibet and His Holiness the Dalai Lama prior to the trip but hadn’t really studied or absorbed the full impact that he had on his people, or the violence and pain that his community had experienced over the years.
For me, reading Great Ocean and meeting and bonding with exiled Tibetans on this trip provided an object lesson in what passion and purpose really means. Looking back, it helped set me on my way to what I wanted to achieve as a business leader. As an entrepreneur, I consider myself a (mostly) logical person who makes decisions based on evidence, but what happened when I returned to Canada defies logic. Despite the fact that at the time, we were perilously close to bankruptcy, which was obviously not known at the time, a popular Canadian business magazine had sent me a letter to tell me that we had been nominated for a feature article on “Canada’s 100 Fastest Growing Companies.” At an event to launch the issue, I discovered that I was going to be on the cover and we had placed fourth on the list of 100 companies. I was absolutely blown away and inspired to lead our company to be even bigger and better. My Looptail had started. At the time, I had no idea how big this moment would prove to be for me or G Adventures. Fast forward 18 years to today - G Adventures has grown to become the worlds most successful adventure travel company, operating in more than 100 countries, on all seven continents, serving more than 100,000 customers every year. We’ve also got more than 1,500 employees globally. Revenue has typically grown by 30% each year and in recent years, that figure has grown closer to 40%. Why is this happening? I’ve been quoted many times as saying that there is a glass ceiling on how well a company can run a trip – there are only so many ways that one can see Machu Picchu in Peru or the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. What truly differentiates us from our competition is our people and our company culture. Happy people love what they do
and deliver the best customer service. Passionate people derive their happiness through creating happiness for others and it is our job to help people discover more passion, purpose and happiness. Our culture IS our brand at G Adventures. Embracing the entrepreneurial spirit and allowing autonomy amongst our employees creates innovation and happiness and the results have been staggering from this approach. One of my biggest “holes” as a leader is the fact that I have never really had a traditional job, as I founded G Adventures at a young age. I’ve been told that this has also allowed me to think in untraditional ways and not be stymied by established leadership methods and techniques. I have always been driven to put a large focus on innovation, allowing our company to grow in new and unique ways without the influence of what has been done in the past. An example of things that we have done that I write about extensively in my book Looptail: How One Company Changed the World by Reinventing Business is the evolution of our business model. It’s not only about the bottom-line. We choose to focus on happiness, freedom, culture, karma and community. Another key moment for G Adventures success and evolution to a social enterprise was the launch of our NGO arm, Planeterra in 2003. In addition to running amazing trips and creating life-changing experiences for our customers, we were now helping to solve social problems and find business solutions in the local communities that our travellers visit. Planeterra now has more than 40 life-changing projects on the go. We’re building sustainable business solutions around the world - With the creation of Planeterra we have found a differentiator for our business – something that makes us stand out amongst
our competitors. Please visit planeterra.org to learn more about our social enterprise at work. My motivation in writing Looptail is to inspire people to greatness in business and to show the world that the old way of doing business is over. Now is the time to embrace the global community created by tools like social media and join the modern social revolution. Simply caring about profit is not enough for businesses anymore. All of this happiness and paying-itforward has Looptailed once again - His Holiness the Dalai Lama has recently agreed to write the foreword for my book. This is the first time that His Holiness has endorsed a business book that is not directly related to his teachings. To say that I am humbled and thrilled would be an understatement. I hope that Looptail will be a starting point for many readers to find success and happiness. I believe that in order to truly be happy, one needs to find their passion and purpose in their work and life.
FALL 2013 | 31
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05FAD13B
Brand This Way: 3 Road-Tested Marketing Moves Ripped From
Lady Gaga Martin Lindstrom There is much the corporate world can learn from this 25-year-old diva, whose talent for building a brand might even surpass her formidable performing chops. On July 12, 2011, Lady Gaga’s private jet touched down on Australian soil. She was in town to promote her new album. The only formal gig planned for her was a mini-concert at the Sydney Town Hall. The venue was renamed Monster Hall in honor of her fans, who she regularly refers to as “Little Monsters.” Within hours of her arrival, she put out her first tweet: “Thinking of going out in Sydney tonight. How I wish we had a show. NEVERMIND, don’t listen to me. Maybe I’ll just go for a walk in the pARQ.” So, had Lady Gaga traveled 20 hours for just the one concert? As the hours ticked by, her many Sydney fans pondered the deeper meaning of her cryptic tweet. By late afternoon, they’d cracked it. Nevermind and Arq are the names of two popular Sydney nightspots. The fans began gathering at these venues from early evening. And then, around 11 p.m., she entered the club Nevermind stage and did a one-hour show, followed by a show at the club Arq. The crowds were ecstatic. Once again the fans had found their Lady Gaga--or was Lady Gaga finding her Sydney audience? Lady Gaga has a thoroughly sophisticated understanding of direct consumer
communication. She came from seemingly nowhere in 2008. (Well, okay, from the nowhere of New York City.) In four short years, she’s become a global phenomenon. Not many others can claim 47 million Facebook fans and more than 18 million Twitter followers. Her vast reach should inspire even the most skeptical of marketers out there. There is much the corporate world can learn from this 25-year-old diva whose talent for building a brand might even surpass her formidable performing chops. Here are three things businesses should borrow from the woman christened Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta:
1. Connect--and stay connected--to creativity. Have you ever wondered where the idea for Lady Gaga’s meat dress came from? The dress, made out of fresh beef, surprised people across the world. It later went on to be preserved by taxidermists, and is now on display at the Women Who Rock exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Another question to ponder is how Gaga’s scant 1,234 tweets generated millions and millions of fans. The tweets did not in fact come from Lady Gaga herself, but from Haus of Gaga, her behind-the-scenes creative team. This is not a clever exercise in renaming. The Haus of Gaga is made up of individuals
that inspire her, pick up on trends, travel with her, and help create her outfits and shows. What they all have in common is that they each have direct access to the performer. The distance from idea to action is merely one conversation away. Lady Gaga has been quoted saying that taking away her creative team would be her downfall. It is interesting to note that the downfall of many brands has been exactly that. Steve Jobs made good design synonymous with every Apple product. It was one of his priorities. As such, it is a well-known fact that Jonathan Ive, the head of design at Apple, reported directly to Steve Jobs. Every creative idea went straight to the top. Sadly, few companies realize how important creativity is for the survival of their brand.
2. Create a direct pipeline to your customer’s soul. Lady Gaga’s ability to get so very close to her audience and understand their needs, as well as cater to their hopes and musical tastes, is far from a coincidence. One of the secrets of her success can be found in a nondescript van that follows the concert tour, going wherever her team goes. Most top performers produce their music at recording sessions in discretely luxurious studios. Lady Gaga does things differently. She takes along a mobile FALL 2013 | 33
recording studio wherever she goes. A recording team, on call 24 hours a day, staffs this mobile studio. As a result, most of the songs she produces are recorded within hours of leaving the stage. She does this to capture the zeitgeist of the moment, tapping into the very DNA of her audience. She steps off the stage fresh with the knowledge of what her audience most passionately responded to. Then, with the applause still ringing in her ears, she steps into the mobile studio and responds to their feedback. Which should resonate with today’s corporate world. I cannot count the number of times I’ve advised companies to move their research and development centers closer to their customers. Take, for example, a major coffee manufacturer I’ve worked with for years. They were puzzled as to why their newest coffee brand was performing poorly. When I visited their testing facility to sample the product, I was met by a team dressed in white, in a room painted white, and was served the
coffee in a white mug. They were anxiously waiting for my opinion. Sipping on that coffee in such an austere environment was a long way away from far the convivial atmosphere of drinking coffee at home. “So, what do you think?” they asked. My answer was considered as I explained that, despite the product testing well in the lab, it was necessary to take it into the home of the consumer. In that way, I’m sure they would see that the experience would be completely different. This was the broken link. So, we moved the innovation and testing process out of the laboratory and into private homes. They’re now testing coffee in consumers’ kitchens, living rooms, and front porches. Their accuracy of predicting a new coffee product’s success has increased by 60%.
3. Be vulnerable. In contrast to almost every other accomplished performer out there, a major ingredient in Lady Gaga’s success has been her ability to show an authentic
vulnerability. She often shares stories about her own life with her fans, or “Little Monsters,” as she calls them, and never shies away from revealing her insecurities and listing her many mistakes. The Little Monsters love it. Not only does she manage to mirror her fans’ personal problems, but she also manages to unite them in a tightknit tribe. Many years ago, PepsiCo established an innovation lab online. It asked Pepsi fans to sign up, develop new flavors and concepts, and share these with PepsiCo. In order to understand the idea, I was quick to sign up, and share my ideas. I got an instant response: “Thank you for your ideas. We will get back to you.” Six years later, I’m still waiting. Some companies do, in fact, understand this. They engage their fans in innovation, treat them as stars of the show and, most importantly, get back to them frequently. Take Lego, the Danish construction toy loved by kids for decades. Now, those kids can build the creature or vehicle or weapon of their dreams, photograph it, and upload it on the Lego website, where it will be voted and commented on by other young aficionados. The consumers love it. They feel so much a part of a brand that they are called upon to advise as well as share in the weaknesses and vulnerabilities. It makes everything more human. And that is perhaps the essence behind Lady Gaga’s popularity. She is human. This is a strength that I’d venture to say every great brand once had, but has lost sight of over time. If yours is a company that’s become disconnected from your humanity, perhaps it’s time to channel your inner Gaga.
34 | FALL 2013
ve@sunprovince.com. ive@sunprovince.com.
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We’re proud to publish Metro Vancouver’s most comprehensive and trusted news sources, bringing high quality, targeted audiences to our advertisers.
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theprovince.com Website:
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655,000 monthly unique visitors
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449,033 monthly unique visitors
**
AWARDS
read The Vancouver Sun and The Province content in print or digital every week*
WE’RE SOCIAL
2012 WEbSTER AWARDS
WE’RE LOCAL
3 > The Vancouver Sun 2 > The Province
2013 INMA AWARD The Vancouver Sun
2013 AWARDS NOMINATIONS 3 National Newspaper (The Vancouver Sun) 1 Michener (The Vancouver Sun)
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combined followers on social networks
2013 bC bOOk PRIzES
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Taiyangbao.ca Chinese language website page views
b.C.’s largest South Asian news website Vancouverdesi.com
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Source: NADbank 2012, past week, print/digital
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#
300,000
page views
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Omniture February 2013
**
comScore February 27 - March 28, 2013
+
200,000 Westcoast Homes & Design circulation
Largest homes magazine in Metro Vancouver
#Omniture February 27 - March 28, 2013
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The End Of
WORK-LIFE BALANCE Mitch Joel
We have a problem when it comes to work-life balance. There is no such thing. This past May, I attended a conference in New York City called, Mirren New Business. It’s about as niche of a conference as they come. This one is solely focused on the role of business development for marketing and communications agencies. Along with learning new skills to build and win the perfect pitch, the hallway chatter is second to none. You can sidle up against some of the sharpest ad agency people in the business (our modern day Mad Men) and ask them the questions that your agency has been struggling with. There is no shock in knowing that the marketing agency business has a terrible reputation when it comes to burnout. In leading up to a big pitch, it is not uncommon for certain agencies to break out the folding beds and have people bring their toothbrushes and towels to hunker down for a handful of days/nights that would make cramming for a high school exam seem like a trip to the movie theaters to catch Man Of Steel in IMAX 3D. At the conference, I approached the global chief creative officer from one of the world’s hottest advertising agencies and asked him what he does when asked for feedback from his team when the client presentation is the next day, and there is little time for changes to happen? This was his answer: “If they come to you at noon and the presentation is at 11 am the following day, they still have eleven hours to fix things... that’s plenty of time.” Mitch Joel is president of Twist Image - one of North America’s largest independent digital marketing agencies. His first book, Six Pixels of Separation, named after his highly successful blog and podcast of the same name is a business and marketing bestseller. His latest book, CTRL ALT Delete, is out now. 36 | FALL 2013
Technology makes this even more complicated. It started with the pervasiveness of cellphones then took on exponential growth with the popularity of the BlackBerry, and now smartphones and tablets have created a blurring between the work that we do and the lives that we’re leading. There are currently studies looking at people’s “time to device,” or how long it takes you from waking up to make a reach for your mobile. As you can imagine, we have shifted from touching our spouses last before bed and first thing in the morning to our devices (and this includes the people who are still married). The bemoan of many to unplug, shut it down and take a break is often squelched by our desire to respond to every ring, beep, chirp, buzz and ping on our devices. We reach for these devices with the same Pavlovian reaction as those conditioned dogs. What’s a Type A personality to do?
1
Leg Number One: Family and friends Without a focus on your family, extended family and friends, you will never have the support you truly need to be successful.
2
Leg Number Two: Profession Whether it is the job you’re doing to pay the rent or the work that you were meant to do, having a profession that makes you satisfied - in however you define your satisfaction - is critical.
3
Leg Number Three: Community Locally, nationally and internationally. You must be an active contributor to both your community and your industry. Without a strong community, there will be nothing to support the infrastructure of the company that you serve.
Find your blend. Patrick Pichette is the Chief Financial Officer of Google. While attending a private function, a few of his former colleagues from Bell asked Pichette what his worklife balance was like at Google. Without missing a beat or batting an eye, Pichette said: “you don’t take this job for work-life balance.” Later in the evening, I asked Pichette to elaborate on what he meant. He believes in “blend” and not in worklife balance. He went on to explain that while attending a meeting in London, he would tag on a few days to spend with his family, or he may duck out of the office to grab a workout and then play catch-up later in the evening. In short, work is no longer something you do during the day - especially if it’s something you’re passionate about. Work isn’t something that resides outside of life, it is an integral part of it. How many hours a day do you work? Is it simply predicated on the standard industrial complex of nine-to-five or do you find yourself more and more connected
to the work that you do (both physically and technologically)? How do you make this work?
How do you find your blend? There are many layers to blend. Along with running a digital marketing agency, I blog every day, podcast once a week, contribute a bi-weekly column at the Harvard Business Review, and for Huffington Post, remain fairly active in my industry and community and have a very young family. It’s not easy, but I have also spent a large chunk of my time prior to making any of these commitments to establishing my rules for blend in a world where the work that I do is a massive part of who I am. Blend can best be defined by using the visual of a three-legged stool. Each leg stands for something:
The secret to blend... If one of those legs on this three-legged
stool is unbalanced or out of check, the stool with topple over. Forget work-life balance and focus on your blend. Ensure that all three legs on this stool are balanced. Have the humility to know when things are falling out of place and react - as quickly as possible - to correct course. Understand that without you sitting on top of the stool (with a good posture), everything crumbles as well. This means that you have to ensure both a strong mental and physical state of mind. No, this isn’t some kind of motivation piece or the type of thinking or hyperbole you will usually find coming out of an Anthony Robbins book. All too often, we think of work-life balance as if our work should fall outside of our lives, when - in our new digital reality - it’s just about finding the right blend. And, always remember that workaholics have no balance... or blend. They just work and there’s a whole lot more to life than the work. Go find your blend.
FALL 2013 | 37
John Jantsch What Exactly Is
CONTENT MARKETING? The title of this article may seem a bit odd since everyone knows what content marketing is. I mean, it’s all we’ve been talking about for the last few years. It started with rallying cries like “content is king” and more recently it’s even evolved into its very own form of marketing known as “content marketing.”
But think about it for a minute – what is it really? Is content marketing a blog post, an eBook, an infographic? Is it a thing? Or is it, as I would like to suggest, a behavior? More frame of mind than set of tactics. More what it does than what it is. For this article I would like to suggest a somewhat different way of defining the expanding role of content in marketing in whatever shape and form it ultimately takes. If we begin to think about our use of content not so much for what it looks like but for what purpose it serves, perhaps the strategic aspect of content in marketing won’t seem so vague and unformed. The following six applications of content may help anyone doubting the fact that content marketing isn’t just a thing
– it’s THE thing – to realize how deeply content has moved into the DNA of every business and every buying decision.
Content marketing is an expectation Today’s prospect fully expects to be able
Content marketing creates awareness
realize how deeply content has moved into the DNA of every business and every buying decision.
38 | FALL 2013
gin to consider as the solution to these challenges. They’ve grown to expect the company itself as well as customers, networks, partners and the media to be the source of this content.
to turn to a search engine or social network and dig up the answers, or at least a data set, to every challenge, problem or need they encounter. In turn, they then fully expect to find a rich fountain of content specific to the organizations and products they be-
In many cases a prospect’s first exposure to an organization comes not from a slick :60 second ad but from an obscure blog post on a very specific topic of interest turned up in a series of search engine inquiries. Building a library of content that reaches into these very corners of search is the essence of inbound marketing. Content in this form starts the a prospect on their journey of discovery.
Content marketing builds trust In the inbound world, trust is pretty much everything. Obviously, the end game is that they ultimately trust the product, service, organization or solution they seek will address their needs, but the first line of trust is often formed based on the con-
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tent they find or don’t find. How an organization make the complex simple through content. How an organization demonstrates their expertise? How an organization maintains their reputation online? These are the questions that content from both marketing and sales can address on the way to either building or eroding trust.
Content marketing provides proof Ever since prospects learned that just about any claim an organization makes can be supported or contested with a simple search, the need to build content that offers proof of results blossomed. Getting at customer success stories in ways that describe the heart of what really matters is an all important form of necessary content.
how might you think about creating a content system that serves every fundamental use mentioned above?
Content marketing is a customer service tool Twitter has become a public facing customer service tool for good or bad and with it comes an entirely new level of service based content. Content that teaches customers how to get more, how you really care for your customers, how to fix problems and how to find the answers to common challenges and functions has become a utility that must be planned and executed with great care
Content marketing is a referral tool One of the greatest stumbling blocks to referrals is the lack of a tangible referral tool to point to other than a website or brochure. With the right mindset marketers can use a popular education based eBook or seminar as a way to get introduced to a strategic partner’s entire customer base. With this somewhat expanded view of content marketing in mind, how might you think about creating a content system that serves every fundamental use mentioned above?
So when the Art of... team needed to gear-up their web site & online automation tools, they trusted Simplicate Interactive to get the job done without adding complexity or sacrificing customization.
actual number of moving parts may be significantly fewer than millions, but you get the idea ... it’s hard and detail oriented, just like the products you work on every day.
Most of us fight the daily whack-a-mole war on email and try to split our time judiciously between multiple devices and infinite amounts of digital content. There is no shortage of it. The result? Scarcity of attention.
CONTENT MARKETING as the Remedy to TOO MUCH CONTENT Loni Stark
Content marketing as the way to stand out in a digital world swimming in content reminds me of the common advice to “fight fire with fire.” So how will “content” marketing be a salvation for marketers in a world bursting with too much content? Quality, my dear Watson. Content marketing is not a strategy and practice to pump out more content, but rather a way to be more thoughtful about the value of the content being created. Is it relevant, useful and delightful to people who are your customers or ones you want to recruit?
Rise of Both Medium and Message
As director of product & industry marketing for Adobe’s Digital Marketing Solutions, Loni Stark leads a team responsible for defining solutions and go-to-market strategies essential to CMOs and digital marketers worldwide. Stark has over 14 years experience helping businesses apply technology to optimize critical functions to meet business objectives including building brand awareness and driving consumer demand.
1967. Herbert Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher of communication theory whose views are seen as pivotal to the study of media theory, co-authors the best-selling book, “The Medium is the Massage.” In it McLuhan demonstrates how the medium chosen to communicate a message is as important, if not more, than the message itself. With the advent of new media through web, video, mobile and social, there have never been more ways for marketers to communicate and engage with audiences. However, the ease by which anyone can set up a Twitter account, Pinterest board or publish a mobile application means that in order to really connect with people
as marketers, we need to focus on both medium and message. The evolution of the video streaming industry is an example of this need to be strong in both medium and message. Netflix accounts for a third of all Internet traffic in North America on a typical weeknight. In order to stay competitive it needed to create original programming such as “House of Cards” and “Orange is the New Black.” Google’s recent investment in a YouTube studio in Los Angeles to create more compelling content for its popular video-sharing website is another indication of the importance of original, quality content. FALL 2013 | 41
Content Strategy Must Include Message, Medium and Membership Content marketing is a bold endeavor rooted in the belief that what a brand has to say is just as important as how it says it. Blasting Twitter messages and Facebook posts is not enough if there’s no substance behind it.
For content marketing to deliver on the end goals of attracting new customers, increasing brand loyalty and increasing engagement, it must be built on a strategy that incorporates each of these three elements:
Marshall McLuhan
MESSAGE The content must be valuable to your customers or the ones you want to attract. Every piece of content must help solve a problem and be important enough to induce action. Bonus points for delighting and entertaining. For example, MyMove.com is a resource that helps millions of Americans move each year by providing content on every step of a relocation from selecting the right neighborhood to planting daisies in the backyard. By focusing on the “moving” problem, it draws a large segment of folks who need services such as moving trucks, real estate agents and landscapers.
MEDIUM A content marketing strategy must tailor the message to be most conveniently consumed by the audience. Convenience factors in the effort to consume the content, as well as how easily accessible it is. It’s why mobile is such a powerful delivery medium, but even more powerful when judiciously interweaved with other channels. Mobile is an especially effective medium for the most personal aspects of our lives: friends and family, health and money. It’s why social networks, Fitbits and banking apps are so potent in the mobile form.
MEMBERSHIP Content marketing is most powerful when it incites engagement and dialogue. Do not seek to be the last word on any topic, but rather start the conversation with valuable content and let others join in. Social communities require brands to seed with relevant content, but the medium invites and empowers others to contribute. Brands such as Harley-Davidson have long understood the power of community engagement; Harley invites member participation in its Harley Owners Group. The brand identity is further reinforced by many independent forums created by Harley-Davidson enthusiasts. Message, medium and membership are the trifecta of a competitive content marketing strategy. The right digital marketing technologies can enable an organization to accelerate and scale a content marketing effort, but it won’t help bail you out of a poor strategy. 42 | FALL 2013
This article was originally published in CMSWire.
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BUSY:
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The 3 Things All Humans Crave
CHRISTINE COMAFORD
And How To Motivate Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere Maslow was right. As you probably know, once we have food and shelter, but before we can seek self-actualization—the Smart State—we must feel safety, belonging and mattering. Without these three essential keys a person cannot get in their Smart State—they cannot perform, innovate, feel emotionally engaged, agree, move forward.
What You Crave Safety, belonging, and mattering are essential to your brain and your ability to perform at work, at home, and in life overall. The greater the feeling of safety, both emotional and physical so we can take risks; the greater the feeling of connection with others, or the feeling that we’re in this together and we belong together; the greater the feeling that we personally matter and make a difference and are contributing to the greater good; then the greater the success of the company, the relationship, the family, the team, the individual. In every communication, in every conflict, we are subconsciously either reinforcing or begging for safety, belonging, mattering or a combination. It’s neurological… it’s primal… there is nothing you can do to override or change this subterranean subconscious programming as much as you may try. Safety means creating an environment where we can take risks and stretch and grow. Is it safe to take risks at your company? Belonging means creating an environment where we all feel like a tight-knit tribe, we’re all equal and we’re rowing in the same direction to reach our goals. Think about gangs—where people will literally
44 | FALL 2013
kill to stay in the tribe. That’s how powerful this stuff is. Mattering means each of us contributes individually in a unique way. We all make a difference. We’re appreciated and publicly acknowledged. Does your company culture work this way?
Where You Crave It Safety, belonging, mattering is already prevalent in your life and company—let’s see where. Let’s do a quick quiz. For each behavior below, what is the person craving? Fight/Flight/Freeze craves Talking about “us vs. them” craves Victim/complaining craves Perpetually seeking recognition craves What are the answers? 1. Safety, 2. Belonging, 3. Mattering, 4. Mattering. Sure, 1-4 could crave all three, but it’s helpful to look at what is most essential, and then to provide that. It gets results faster. So as a leader, and as a human, you must identify whether it is safety and or belonging and or mattering that is most important to the people in your life… and then do everything you can to satisfy that subterranean subconscious need. Safety + belonging + mattering = TRUST.
This means leaders must behave in ways that make employees feel that they are safe, that they belong, and that they matter. Doing so will help shift them out of their fear-driven Critter State (where all decisions are based on what they perceive will help them survive) and into their Smart State (where they can innovate, collaborate, feel emotionally engaged, and move the company forward). This isn’t just true of employees. It’s true of clients, associates, spouses, friends, children. At our emotional core, we all want safety, belonging and mattering. To influence anyone, we must influence emotionally. The art (and science) of influence is more complex than can be fully explained here. However, I can share a few insights that may help you better open people up to their Smart State.
How to Get It How do you boost the experience of safety, belonging, mattering within your company? Do what my super successful clients do–deliver safety, belonging, mattering through your behavior and communication. Here are behavior examples:
• Engaging Mission, Vision, Values – draws people together for a greater cause, helps us see where we’re headed together, sets our “code of conduct” as a tribe • Individual Development Plans – shows how we matter and belong here, how our company sees us as a long term investment (we’re safe) • Cultural Rituals: Rock Star, High Fives, Shout Outs, Public Appreciation – reinforces mattering and tribal customs (safety, belonging) • Transparency: Accountability Structures, Open Communication, Fairness – we’re safe, be long, matter since we know where the performance “bar” is and how to jump over it Here are communication examples. These are especially helpful when a person is in their Critter State and we want to help them feel safe enough to shift out of it. For this we use three influencing phrases:
1
“What if”: When you use this preface to an idea/suggestion, you remove ego and reduce emotion. You’re curious—not forcing a position, but scratching your head and pondering. This enables someone to brainstorm more easily with you.
2
“I need your help”: We call this a dom-sub swap, because when the dominant person uses it, they are enrolling the subordinate person and asking them to rise up and swap roles. This is an especially effective phrase when you want a person to change their behavior or take on more responsibility.
3
“Would it be helpful if”: When someone is stuck in their Critter State and spinning or unable to move forward, offering up a solution will help them see a possible course of action or positive outcome.
Do you see how all three reinforce safety, belonging, mattering? Every employee, every family member, can be happier and more effective if you simply identify which of these three needs are programmed into their subconscious so powerfully that they literally crave them.
Christine Comaford is a global thought leader on corporate culture and performance optimization. She uses the latest neuroscience techniques to help leaders and teams create reliable revenue, deep emotional engagement, and profitable growth. Download an excerpt of her upcoming book at www.SmartTribesBook.com. And follow Christine on Twitter: @comaford
FALL 2013 | 45
UNLOCK THE POTENTIAL IN YOUR PEOPLE From consumer goods to heavy machinery, CSX transports over 6 million carloads and containers every year. To ensure CSX can access integrated, real-time customer data from sales to marketing to operations, Director of CRM Vicki Burton chose proactive, easy-to-use Microsoft Dynamics business solutions. Now CSX can anticipate customer needs and make informed decisions from the ďƒžrst mile to the last. CSX is building stronger customer relationships today, and ready for what’s around the corner for shipping tomorrow. microsoft.ca/dynamics
The Startup World’s
BIG MISS Jonathan Fields
Over the last 5 years, we’ve seen the release of a stream of books like Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup that do a wonderful job of systematizing a near-maniacal focus on the customer. Especially assumptions about the customer. Doing so makes it more likely that you’ll end up building a product and company that serves a genuine need, not just the founder’s own ego or attachment to a particular solution. That, in turn, makes it more likely you’ll “succeed.”
Here’s the formula… Customer + pain = need. Need + solution = value. Value + effective delivery = revenue. Revenue + bank account = yay!
Yes, I know, I’ve massively over-simplified the process, but you get what I’m saying. Do this, and success will be yours. So, riddle me this… Why is there an increasing sea of “outwardly successful” entrepreneurs who feel beaten, battered and bound by the very beasts they’ve born? Turns out, something’s missing from the formula. And it’s BIG.
The whole approach to iterating around customer need that’s captured modern-day entrepreneurship is important. It’s something I spend a lot of time on myself. But, it’s all about what I call “downstream alignment,” or aligning your: • Product • Business model and • Mode of delivery…
FALL 2013 | 47
…with the needs of those most likely to pay you. So, you’ve got a better shot at building a company that will be cash flow positive. Awesome. But what about having a better shot at building a company you actually to want to run? I’ve known and worked with so many entrepreneurs who’ve built outwardly successful companies that have become customer-centric, revenue-generating cages of the founder’s own creation. Ones they hate working at. How’d that happen?
> Because they never dealt with the equally important, but rarely considered “Upstream Alignment Metrics.”
It’s just assumed that if you build it and people pay, everyone’s giddy”. Does the product, business and mode of delivery that customers are telling you they value enough to pay you to create align with the fiber of your being, your sense of meaning, fulfillment, your maker ’s modus operandi and ideal life? This is the step virtually everyone skips. Because: • The startup community either doesn’t realize or devalues how important it is, and • Almost nobody teaches upstream alignment on a forward-looking basis.
1 • • • • • • • •
Instead, we wait until things start blowing up or we’re downright miserable. We try all the usual fixes, wonder why they aren’t helping us feel better and then, and only then, say, “oh, there’s something bigger going on here.” Some other “soft-factors” that are either shutting down growth or making us miserable successes. It’s just assumed that if you build it and people pay, everyone’s giddy. It’s nice to create something that’s generating cash and serving a need. But, for a lot of people, without a deeper sense
of upstream alignment, that’s not enough to keep you engaged and happy over time. Because you’ve built something that serves everyone’s needs but yours. Question is, what do you do if that’s you? Here’s a 4-part Upstream Alignment Process that’s been adapted from the work and systems I’ve developed over the years. It’s necessarily shorthanded here and very general because, in this context, it has to be. But it’ll also give you a really good feel for what you might want to focus on beyond customer need and delight.
Create Your Upstream Alignment Inventory: Core values – What key beliefs do you hold about who and what matters most in life Strengths – What are your top 3 to 5 organic strengths? Creative orientation – Are you more intrinsically drawn to blank pages or spreadsheets? Risk orientation – How do you handle risk, uncertainty and ambiguity? Social orientation – How do you perfer to move into and engage in social interactions? Perfect day – What is your perfect work day and day off? Legacy – What do you want to leave behind? What do you want people to say about you when you’re gone? Contribution Preferences –For each of the below categories, what are the qualities that make you come alive/fill you up and what are the qualities that empty you out? ◦ ◦ ◦ ◦ ◦
People – What type of people fill you up (look at everything from sex, age, interests, social dynamics, etc). Culture – Look at pace, formality, openness, etc. Setting – Look at both the immediate work location and broader geographic preferences Tasks and processes – Look at the types of nitty-gritty things that fill or empty you Mission – explore the defining traits of missions/visions that fill and empty you
48 | FALL 2013
2
Hold Your Answers Up To Your Current Work Reality:
We spend a lot of time identifying customer avatars, needs, models and modes of delivery that are most likely to be a direct hit for those we seek to serve (downstream alignment). But, will those things be a direct hit for you as well (Upstream alignment)? If not, you’ll likely find yourself failing or building a venture that’s outwardly successful, but empties you out. Ask these additional questions to help explore your ventures Upstream Alignment. • • • •
3
Upstream customer alignment - Do feel a sense of deep connection and service toward the community of people you are building your venture around? Upstream product alignment - Does the product you created not only solve a real need, but do so in a way that makes you feel deeply-connected to what you’ve created? Upstream business model alignment - Does the business model that makes most sense for those you serve also align with the model that will give you the strongest sense of purpose and meaning? Upstream mode of delivery alignment - Does the way the people who need your solution want to receive it align with a mode of delivery that also fills you up?
Identify Alignment Conflicts and Alignment Drift:
Alignment Conflicts are areas where what you’ve built or want to build conflict with your answers to the above questions. Similarly, Alignment Drift is when there was great alignment in the early days, but not any more. This can be deliberate, as in when you evolve the business model, product or mode of delivery to accommodate changes in market. Or it can be inadvertent, the result of small changes that add up to big net shifts away from what matters to you over time. Either way, it’s important to identify areas of conflict between upstream and downstream alignment, assign a level of conflict (1=minor, 10=oh hell no!). Then…
4
Resolve Alignment Conflicts:
A serious part of what I end up doing with folks who come to me wanting to launch or build companies is what feels like backtracking, but it’s really “backFILLING.” Guiding them through a much more interactive version of the above process, then developing a “conflict resolution” plan. The outcomes and plans of action will vary wildly, depending on the person and the venture stage. Some will see ways to “tune” themselves, their ventures or both to create the blended upstream and downstream alignment needed to unlock
growth and fulfillment. Others will end up realizing what they’ve created is outwardly successful, but in accommodating the market, it’s become so stripped of what drew them to it in the first place, they no longer find or are capable of finding joy taking it forward. At that point, exit or transition plans may need to be put on the table. And, still others who’ve been struggling mightily, but not yet found success, either outwardly or inwardly will face the decision about how best to invest their time, energy and lives from
that moment forward. Regardless of the outcome, you end up with a far deeper understanding of what matters, not just to the world, but to you, and how best to contribute your energy to the world moving forward. The really big take-away is this. Alignment with the needs of the customer matters. A lot. But so does alignment up the chain with the founder. Do the work BEFORE you launch your next venture and you’ll find yourself in a much happier and more genuinely successful place.
FALL 2013 | 49
Tile www.thetileapp.com | MSRP: $18.95
Tile is a recent crowdfunded device that offers the the ability to find your possessions through bluetooth-like sonar ping. The actual size is about 3/4 of a credit card and 2-3mm thick. It has an adhesive which allows you to place it on just about anything. Currently, Tile will work with the iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPad Mini, iPad 3rd and 4th generation, and the 5th generation iPod Touch. With the app and device on hand it will hone in to your device through a series of chirps.
G
DGETS
Mac Pro www.apple.com | MSRP: TBD
Apple’s new Mac Pro (Fall release) boasts Intel’s XEON E5 chipset, 1,866GHz RAM and new SSD storage that is 2.5 times faster than current SSD Drives. It has dual GPU’s for editing video and can run up to 3 high resolution 4K displays simultaneously. The list of specifications also include PCI Express-based flash
Karma Wi-Fi
storage and high-performance Thunderbolt 2. The best part of
www.yourkarma.com | MSRP: $99 - $279
course is Mac Pro’s innovative design, its black cylindrical shape and at almost a third of the size of its predecessor.
Karma is a device that creates a wireless hotspot around you. It moves with you and keeps your Wi-Fi devices connected to the internet. Its uses Clearwire’s cellular network and is available across 50+ counting cities across the US. This devices is small, simple, and has easy to understand pricing ($14/1Gig, no expiry). What makes Karma different is its notion of “social bandwidth”. Karma provides an open Wi-Fi Hotspot that anyone close to you can connect to. When a new person connects to your Karma device it will ask for their information and automatically rewards both the new user and the device owner 100MB of data. This works well for those heading to the US that don’t want to be left with outrageous data roaming charges.
50 | FALL 2013
Michael E. Gerber
What is The
DREAMING ROOM ? ™
What is Art, and what indeed is Small Business, and who am I in the midst of it, at the heart of it, at the beginning and the end of it”? There is so much talk about technology, about the expansion of our reach, about smart phones and smart tools. And yet, all the while that more billions of us are able through tools we’ve now got available to us to do so many things we never had the ability or the inclination to do, there is still the human problem, that as human beings we are not growing in capacity, to learn, to grow, to understand, to know, those most human skills which make us who
we are and who we were meant to be. Which drives the question for everyone who has come to The Art of Small Business: What is Art, and What indeed is Small Business, and How, as a small business owner, can you rise above the conversation of tools and reach, to drive down to the most important questions of all, which are: What is Art, and what indeed is Small Business, and who am I in the midst of it, at the heart of it, at the beginning and the end of it?
Who and what indeed? I have a thought for you. FALL 2013 | 51
Who and what indeed? I have a thought for you. I wrote it several days ago to my Dreaming Room Master Licensees. I might have just as easily sent it to you. It went on to say: This morning, I came to a revelation which spoke to me so eloquently, that The Dreaming Room’s mystery is significantly more understandable than I had thought. That it is the incubator for inspiring participants to go beyond their ordinary mechanical life, to go beyond making a living, to go beyond the ordinary waking, eating, entertaining, sleeping, tv-induced dross we all commit ourselves to do in the creative-less way we go about doing it. See the actors working at menial jobs, going to auditions, hoping upon hope for something more, something greater, something better than hum drum. See the applicants at American Idol, living with
the fantasy, in most cases hopeless fantasy, that they will be on stage and famous one day, that it could indeed happen, one day, even as they live their hopelessly meaningless lives. See the world of people over the ages, feel this within yourself, living, struggling, dying, just because they were given a life, and have no clue what to do about it. Look at the mystery of life as we’ve been given it, with absolutely no preparation for how to live it, what it means to live it, what the outcome of living it will be, and even, more important, what the meaning of living it is, and means. And therefore, as we ask and then struggle with those seemingly at times banal questions, seemingly sophomoric questions – but the questions which drive us mad at times, the darkest times, the hardest times, the most anguished times, the most hopeless times — we come to see the meaning of
That’s what The Dreaming Room was and is – a place for huzzah!
The Dreaming Room. That it is the sole place in which the spiritual questions and the economic questions are put to work within us at the very same time. In the Dreaming Room we are forced to see how our spiritual life and our economic life are one life, not two distinctly different lives. That ‘church and state’ are one thing not two. That the life we create, if to have meaning beyond the insufferably ordinary – washing dishes, selling cars, doing chiropractic, waiting tables – we must put it into question in the very way Rick Warren, Steve Jobs, Mother Theresa, Dr. Martin Luther King, Ray Kroc and so many, many more did and do. And that’s why I created The Dreaming Room. For that very reason. Because, it has always been intensely true to me that being in business, running a business, creating a business, growing a business is as meaningless as every other compulsion, obsession which drives our lives. It’s just something some of us choose to do because we can’t think of something else to choose to do. Mainly that’s what business is. Mainly that’s what work of any kind is. Mainly it’s what we do with our time until our time runs out. There has got to be more to life than that has always been the mantra which possesses me – there’s got to be more to life, to business, to work, than that. There’s got to be poetry, music, a story, a vibration within it which speaks to the mystery, which speaks to the meaning of why I bother to work so hard, to struggle with the meaning, to struggle with the outcome, and to marvel at the insights which come my way every day, only to leave me still in question, still with this urgency to say that it’s just around the corner, it is, just waiting for me to see it, finally, and then, the creation will come, and with it, the light of realization, all at once, huzzah! That’s what The Dreaming Room was and is – a place for huzzah! Shouldn’t every human being on earth be put into the process in which their lives rise above the ordinary, by forcing, yes demanding, yes passionately pursuing their own, their very own, huzzah!
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CM
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Possible events at a marketing conference 5,75% chance that you will fall asleep.
6,5% chance that a ringing phone will wake you up.
80,1% chance that the phone that wakes you up is yours.
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CHANCE THAT YOU’LL DISCOVER MEDIATIVE’S EXPERTISE IN THE DIGITAL MARKETING INDUSTRY.
chance that you’ll succeed in calming things down by making a joke about geolocation.
Mediative is one of North America's largest integrated advertising and digital marketing companies, specialized in maximizing the online presence of some of the world's most respected brands. Mediative covers all print, search, advertising, and social networks to drive marketing performance for clients throughout the buying cycle, integrating data, networks and technology to help advertisers, publishers and retailers connect with their target audiences.
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THE NEW
DIGITAL CONSUMER
By Jennifer Dunn
Jennifer Dunn is Mediative’s Senior Product Manager of Display Advertising. With a close eye on the ever-evolving digital landscape, Jennifer is constantly researching and testing innovative technologies to enable large and local advertisers to best reach and engage Canadian desktop and mobile audiences. Canadians love their smartphones. 33% of us have one and we don’t leave home without it. With 79% of Canadian smartphone users unable to leave their homes without their devices and 60% having used their smartphone to access a webpage everyday over the past 7 days, smartphones and tablets can officially be considered to be Canadian consumers’ constant companion. We use it all day, everyday. However, despite consumers’ shift towards mobile platforms, advertisers have yet to shift their thinking of how to effectively target mobile users. Much like TV advertisers struggled to adapt to digital channels with the onset of the Internet, many of today’s advertisers continue to use old web paradigms for mobile platforms even though the devices and the way they are used to browse couldn’t be more different. At home on a computer consumers research a purchase, checking several sites, blogs and consumer reports before looking for a vendor nearby. It makes sense to profile these habits. However, behaviour doesn’t necessarily reflect intent on mobile platforms. While smartphone and tablet users frequently kill time playing games and/or looking up 54 | FALL 2013
trivia, they are more often than not, looking at the updated scores or the current weather, checking when the next train arrives, reading breaking news or even comparing two products in the store right now. When it comes to mobile it’s all about the here and now. Even if we could track the consumer’s mobile behaviour, there’s no time to target and retarget them with display messages given the immediate nature of mobile activity.
When it comes to mobile it’s all about the here and now”. Given mobile’s users immediate intentions, the key to successful mobile marketing is pinpointing and capitalizing on this platform’s unique strength – movement. Smartphones move in time and in space. We use our phones at work, at home and at play. They are with us in wind, rain and snow. We even bring them on holiday and business trips. And all along the way we use them to help us navigate
the world and make decisions. Imagine you’re at a football game, your team is winning, you’re excited and you decide to check in on your office pool using your smartphone. Are you thinking about gardening? Probably not. Do you want halfprice chicken wings? Yes, more likely than not. Think about how powerful a chicken promo might be if sent to the location of the game during the hours of play. Certainly the results would out-perform an ad for tulip bulbs in the same setting. This message, at this time and in this place, will probably better reach the target audience than any other large unfocused campaign. Because your consumer is hungry for chicken wings, right now and he can get them nearby. Now imagine it’s raining, the game continues, but the consumer’s needs have changed. He’s more concerned with his warmth and dryness than his hunger. A display ad for ponchos or team caps would be more likely to grab his attention in this particular moment and environment. But how do we as advertisers make the most of this opportunity? It’s simple: by targeting the times, places and situations when and where consumers are open to seeing and responding to your advertising message.
This means getting inside the consumers’ head and mapping out the times and places when his/her purchasing decisions are made”.
REDISCOVERING LOCAL INFLUENCE ON CONSUMER PURCHASE INTENTIONS “Location, location, location!” Once upon a time these words of wisdom were the golden rule of business real estate. Where you placed your storefront in the physical world determined the number of paying customers you could expect to buy your product or service. It was all about street traffic and visibility. Grocery stores and pharmacies thrived in residential neighborhoods. Banks and trendy coffee shops fared better in a business district. It seemed like common sense to be where your clients were. And advertisers followed this logic. Glossy catalogues were delivered to upscale neighborhoods and university campuses were covered in concert posters. With the dawn of a new digital age, location was lost and replaced by a worldwide audience of “placeless” consumers. Overwhelmed by the sheer number of virtually anonymous viewers, advertisers turned to mass marketing and plastered the Internet with their messages, hoping something would stick. But relevance is the key to performance and advertising works best when directed to the people most interested and able to buy. Networks of “website channels” became the new model for online marketing, using men or women’s lifestyle content, real estate listings or entertainment sites to target a narrower consumer bracket. Yes, this strategy works. It reaches the desktop and laptop browser who is leisurely researching his or her next minivan or pricing a fantasy
weekend in Vegas - purchases that may or may not ever happen, and probably won’t happen today. Even when web ads are matched with demographic content, they can miss the mark. A banner for designer bikinis and sunglasses might resonate with affluent women in a heat wave but it risks irritating those stranded in a snow storm with no Caribbean vacation in sight. Granted, the use of cookies to follow online audiences and track their interests means consumers can be further targeted using their browsing history and subsequently their intent to purchase. That is, people looking at low calorie recipes online are subsequently sent ads for yoga gear or nutritional supplements, working on the assumption that they’re in the market for more health products. But mobile technology doesn’t work the same way, patterns can’t be tracked. And besides, phones aren’t used for the same kind of browsing as laptops. A smart phone or tablet is for answering immediate questions and solving imminent problems on the go. Mobile is about finding out what I, as an individual – as a consumer, need to know now. So how do we make the mobile message matter? When it comes to mobile marketing, the advertising industry needs to shift its old “mass-market” mind-set and forget about gathering consumer interest by placing banner ads on sites our target might visit. Instead let’s think about where
that interest begins and identify the situations and places in which the organic interest in your product is born. This means getting inside the consumers’ head and mapping out the times and places when his/her purchasing decisions are made. Drilling down to consumer questions is the key to using advertising to generate needs and wants for your offering. If you are selling home security services, ask yourself, when, where and why would a consumer think about the safety of his house and belongings. At home over breakfast? In the office near quitting time? How about at an airport, while waiting for a flight? Travellers, having just left their homes empty and unsupervised might be more willing to consider an alarm service at this particular moment, than at any other, especially since they have some time to kill before boarding. Narrowing the time frame to March-break, Christmas Holiday period, or any other family travel peak times, might further optimize your message and increase the number of consumers exploring your offering. It’s about solving the consumers’ problems when they are in different environments.
Get all the insights by downloading the full study at http://artof.co/12mrCl7
FALL 2013 | 55
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How to Work
ONE HOUR A DAY While Maintaining a THRIVING BUSINESS
Stephen Shapiro
Do you run a small business? Or does your small business run you? As an entrepreneur, there are an unlimited number of things we could do in order to grow or improve our businesses. It is easy to keep 100 hours a week. I know I have done so countless times throughout my career. Unfortunately, we often convince ourselves that we MUST work those kinds of hours in order to be successful. The reality is that there is a point of diminishing returns. Although more work might produce greater results, the return on the additional effort decreases significantly.
We Work Too Hard Why do we work so hard? Sometimes it is because we do indeed have a lot on our plates. Or maybe we have too many plates. But more often than not, we work around the clock for other reasons. Some entrepreneurs have been “programmed” to work all of the time. They feel like slackers if they’re not on their computer writing, on the phone making calls, or meeting with people. Others worry that if they don’t complete every task, their business may tank. Or, their goal is to make as much money as possible and therefore they want to squeeze out every last drop of possible revenue. Then there are those individuals who wouldn’t know what to do with their free time if their business didn’t keep them occupied; they don’t have a life outside of work. And finally there are others who are workaholics because it allows them to avoid dealing with difficult issues in their life. As a result, too many business owners and entrepreneurs work too much. But what if you were only allowed to
work one hour a day? What would you do? I have been experimenting with this concept for nearly a year and have been relatively successful at keeping my time invested in my current business to about 20 hours a month (yes, you read that right, a month). Why am I doing this? There are two main reasons:
#1: It Forces Focus Each morning I ask myself, what is the one thing I need to do today? What is the one thing that will create the most value? What is the one thing that only I can do? And that is the activity that I engage in for the day. I delete, defer, or delegate everything else. Instead of keeping myself busy and climbing to the top of the “S” curve, I stop at the inflection point; the point of diminishing returns (the star). Pareto would say that 20% of the effort provides 80% of the results. Whether it is 20% or 40% is not important. The key is to find the point where more effort starts producing fewer results, and only you can decide that. Will you extract 100% of the potential
value? Probably not. But is squeezing out an extra 20% of value really worth 4 or 5 times the effort? That’s your choice. The key is to focus on activities that will create leverage and will maximize results.
#2: Create a New S Curve What will you do with your free time? You could of course take a vacation or spend more time with family. You could engage in work that you believe is more meaningful. You could volunteer and give back to society. Or you could create a new S-curve. Instead of squeezing out those few extra drops from your current business model where there are diminishing returns, start building a new business or business model that leverages your past success and creates entirely new revenue opportunities. With the extra time created, I’ve been working on a new book that targets a completely different market for me. I’m working on a television show concept. And I am creating new products that leverage my intellectual property. These items take upfront effort. But FALL 2013 | 57
when they are done and have built up momentum, I will spend less time on those businesses, freeing me to create new revenue streams. I am also developing new relationships that leverage my existing content. For example, my content has been licensed to a training company that is now delivering my material to their clients. It doesn’t take
any of my time, yet I get residual income. And these relationships free me up even more, allowing me to focus again. Clearly this strategy requires extraordinary partnerships. And as they do more, I can do less. To be clear, I am not suggesting you do a half-assed job. This will kill your business in the long run.
And, this strategy admittedly works best for a business that has momentum; where you are already successful. Once you are successful, you can then reap the rewards. You can implement processes that others can execute. You then you delegate, defer, license, automate, or eliminate the things that are not critical.
It is easier for me to say, “I’m going to tie my shoes,” than it is to actually tie them. But I still do it. The 20/80/80 Rule I call this “The 20/80/80 Rule.” If you spent only 20% of your time extracting 80% of the revenue from your existing business model, this gives you 80% of your time to do something different – something more fulfilling, something more enjoyable. Or, you can then invest your freed up 80% on new business models that have greater long-term potential.
Don’t Put the “NO” in InNOvation When I first wrote about this concept, many people (as expected) pushed back. Their response, “That’s easier said than done.” Well of course! Everything is easier said than done! It is easier for me to say, “I’m going to tie my shoes,” than it is to actually tie them. But I still do it. We look for excuses as to why we can’t do something. We blame our parents. We blame our circumstances. We blame the government. We blame our family. We blame our employer or boss. Instead of finding reasons why something won’t work, get creative about how to make it work. Ask yourself, “How can I apply the underlying principles to my specific situation?” Even if you can’t 58 | FALL 2013
apply the concept in its entirety, look for the nuggets that you can use.
Avoid the 100% Mentality Think about your business and where you invest your time, money, and energy. I love this statistic from Jeff Olson, author of The Agile Manager’s Guide to Getting Organized: “Perfectionism costs 50% or more of the total effort to squeeze out the last 10% or so of quality.” Never strive for perfection. Avoid the 100% mentality. If you are going to work less, you need to become masterful at knowing what to stop doing.
• Ditch your worst customers Look at your customers. Instead of trying to get more customers, ask, “Which customers should I get rid of?” Admit it, there are customers that generate less income than others, yet take up most of your time. I find that the customers who are most price-sensitive are also the most difficult. I spend more time with them than I do with my best customers. The solution? Ditch the 20% that are sucking up your time. This not only frees up some hours in your day, it frees up your mental
energy. Stress is created by your worst customers, not your best. Ok, I realize that when money is tight, this can seem like a risky proposition. Well, it is! But admit it, you intuitively know that attempting to keep 100% of your customers 100% happy will keep you working 100 hours a week and ultimately limit your true growth potential. Or as the comedian Bill Cosby reputedly said, “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”
• Ditch your lowest return activities Look at the work you do. Look at your to do list. You will never get 100% of the work done, even if you had 200 hours in a week. Regardless, we still strive to get 100% done. Again, this mentality limits your growth potential. Instead of asking, “How can I get as much done as possible?” ask, “What should I stop doing?” or “What are the things I must do?” Or better yet, ask, “What is the one thing that will unlock the greatest growth potential for my business? What gives me leverage?” Be honest. What would happen if you got
one less thing done off your to do list? Two less things? Find the sweet spot of where you can get the optimal return. Only do what you need to do, and get the rest off of your plate. And no, you are not the only one who can do most of your activities. It might feel that way, but it is not true. And believing it will kill you.
• Ditch unnecessary clutter and belongings – If you are going to use this mindset of freeing your time, you may want to free yourself from current lifestyle burdens. When I moved from a
3-bedroom house in New Jersey to a small one-bedroom furnished flat in London, I got rid of nearly all of my belonging; fitting everything into two boxes. From this process I learned that there is a liberation that comes from not having a lot of things and from living the simplest life possible. There’s less clutter around you, therefore, there are less things to worry about. And because you’re spending less money, you don’t have to worry about making as much about money. It gives you freedom. Therefore, instead of accumulating, start appreciating.
From this process I learned that there is a liberation that comes from not having a lot of things and from living the simplest life possible”. Encourage Creativity and Freedom The purpose of working one hour a day is not to encourage laziness. It is actually to encourage creativity. This philosophy creates space for you to create – to create new opportunities, to create new revenue streams, and to create a better life. We often hear the expression, “necessity is the mother of invention.” The reality is though, that when you work out of necessity, your invention is limited. When you come from a place of freedom - where you are able to start living life as you want it - you tap into true creativity. This opens new doors. Freedom is the name of the game. Don’t let busyness and perfection be the enemy of a successful business and an extraordinary life. FALL 2013 | 59
THE
RTISTS Fearlessness is not the absence of fear. It’s the mastery of fear. It’s about getting up one more time than we fall down.”
Arianna
Huffington
Never despise small beginnings, and don’t belittle your own accomplishments. Remember them and use them as inspiration as you go on to the next thing. When you venture outside your comfort zone, wherever the starting point may be, it’s kind of a big deal.”
Chris
Guillebeau
Chair, President, & Editor-in-Chief of The Huffington Post Media Group
Contagious products and ideas are like forest fires. They can’t happen without hundreds, if not thousands, of regular Joes and Janes passing the product or message along.”
Jonah
Berger Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania & New York Times Bestselling Author of Contagious
60 | FALL 2013
New York Times Bestselling Author of The $100 Startup & The Art of Non-Conformity
A thrilled customer is the most potent marketing asset your organization can leverage.”
John
Jantsch Small Business Expert & Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author of Duct Tape Marketing, The Referral Engine & The Commitment Engine
The Canadian Professional Sales Association (CPSA) can help you select, retain, and develop a successful sales team. With over 30, 000 members, the Canadian Professional Sales Association is committed to helping sales professionals improve their effectiveness, efficiencies, and professionalism through professional sales training and development, as well as exclusive membership savings programs. Read about our 4 Steps to Sales Success below to see how we can help you reach your sales goals and increase your revenue. 2. Train and coach your team to increase sales productivity. 2. T RA IN
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FROMDONUTS TODYNAMICS: MAKING MARKETING EASIER By Rob Adams How did homemade donuts lead to a passion for innovative marketing and customer engagement technology? Well, that’s a tasty little tale. In 2000, I was fresh out of the University of Las Vegas, and much to my parents’ chagrin I dropped my original plan to go to law school in favour of taking the plunge as an entrepreneur. Armed with a couple of credit cards and an audacious dream, I opened LaMar ’s Donuts in Las Vegas, a popular donut franchise from my hometown, Kansas City, to go head-to-head with the established leader, a little operation called Krispy Kreme. It was an uphill battle in the early days. My first week in business, I had an incredible number of customers: 50, to be precise. Now, keep in mind, when you’re selling a dozen donuts to each one of those 50 customers and you translate that to revenue, well, let’s just say that it didn’t even come close to covering my operating expenses. But despite the meagre cash flow, I knew that I had a superior product and realized that I needed to market my business, so I hired a communications firm. They were able to get my message out on radio and television, and my business grew literally overnight by 3,000 per cent. I went from making $100 a week to having customers lined up around the
I went from making $100 a week to having customers lined up around the block, all because they helped me find a way to tell my story and amplify my brand” block, all because they helped me find a way to tell my story and amplify my brand. People would come into the store, and because they were familiar with my story, they wanted to meet me and understand this concept of homemade donuts and how I did it – but as a business owner, I wouldn’t have been able to build that story and promote it myself. Back then, you couldn’t amplify your message like you can today using the marketing technology available. A year later, I had built LaMar ’s Donuts to a point where I was able to sell it to a famous tennis player, who was a fan of both the donuts and the successful business opportunity. Flash forward to today, I’m now the General Manager for Microsoft Dynamics in Canada. I’ve gone from selling donuts to selling business applications to companies of all sizes. Thinking back on my entrepreneurial experience gives me a chance to reflect on how I might approach things today, if I was still running my own business. Since my days with LaMar’s Donuts, new marketing channels and technologies have emerged – and they’re critical in the competitive business of capturing customer awareness and mindshare. One of the biggest challenges marketers face
is striking the right balance or marketing mix between traditional and digital approaches to achieve the best ROI. That’s where Microsoft Dynamics fits in. Whether you’re a corporate marketing team or an advertising agency, Dynamics CRM (customer relationship management) and Microsoft MarketingPilot deliver powerful, integrated marketing management solutions that can help you better understand your customers, get exceptional insight and control over budgets and resources, and create automated, measurable multi-channel campaigns across both offline and online channels. Whether you are looking to use social media, pay per click on the web, or use email, radio, TV, or billboards, Dynamics CRM and MarketingPilot can deliver improved execution and an understanding of the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. More importantly, our solutions are integrated, providing visibility into marketing investments across all channels which helps marketing leaders, like CMOs, quickly calculate ROI and illustrate their contributions to the business. I genuinely enjoy helping businesses use technology to help resolve these common issues. I really wanted to go into business applications in the first place because I
had run a company. I understood not only the existing challenges around implementing technology and solutions like that, but more importantly, I really did see the value in it. So I wanted to take some of the key lessons learned from having my own business and bring them to my customers, as I’m doing today. One of the other important lessons I learned? The secret to a truly great donut! Fresh ingredients are a must, every donut must be homemade, and it wouldn’t be a great donut shop without a great variety – we had more than 52 different varieties on any given day. My top two favourites: a cake donut with fresh fudge on top, sprinkled with M&Ms; and what we dubbed the “LaMar’s Bar:” a twist of a vanilla glazed donut and a chocolate glazed donut. I’m getting hungry just thinking about them!
Rob Adams is the General Manager of Microsoft Dynamics (Canada), responsible for Sales, Partner and Marketing strategy. In his previous role, Rob acted as Sales Director for Dynamics in the United States; he has been with the business group for eight years. Rob has a passion for making a difference in everything he does, which he extends through his business relationships by working to create true value for his customers. Outside of work, Rob loves to travel. He has also been a Big Brothers mentor for the past six years.
FALL 2013 | 63
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