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Accidental Guru - Malcolm Gladwell
Gladwell's new book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is the New Yorker writer's latest book, focusing on the phenomenon of how "our ability to read people's intentions is paralyzed in high-stress situations." His first book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference moved him from a staff writer to a marketing guru - or even god. "His New Yorker articles have become reading for B-school students." However, when asked about the influence he has had on America, he reminds them that even best sellers reach less than 1% of Americans.
Yet, it's who he is reaching that has made the difference. Starbucks' Howard Schultz says the tipping-point is what "made" his company. Gladwell created a system of classification that is divided into "connectors, mavens and salesmen", and companies have redesigned their entire Relationship Management strategies to fit the model. Companies started hiring and deploying into the field "key influencers", and making The Tipping Point required reading. Simmons Market Research then "created the Tipping Point Segmentation System - syndicated research clients can use in order to understand how to reach the 12.5% of the U.S. population that falls within Gladwell's classification of tipping-point segments."
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Solve Poverty ProfitablyC.K. Prahalad, a strategy guru from the University of Michigan believes that poverty can be solved while people make a profit from it at the same time. There is money to be made from the "lowest rungs of the economic food chain." In his new book, "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid", he says that businesses are missing a huge opportunity.
The poor represent "$14 trillion in purchasing power, more than Germany, the UK, Italy, France and Japan put together." More interestingly is what they need...everything..."
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Target's success may be overshadowed by the legendary Walmart dynasty, but in actuality, it is creating phenomenal achievements in its own right.
Annual sales are larger than those of Coke and Pepsi combined
Shareholders have made 603% in the past 10 years.
Target dares to be different through trendy, distinct products.
The CEO pushes everyone to go the extra mile to find awesome products and continually redesign the way the stores look.
Target has not expanded beyond the US, nor mimicked the Walmart Supercenters and gone into direct rivalry with Walmart.
Target is the same size that Walmart was 10 years ago.
Target's original idea was to take high-end department store high-quality merchandise and sell it in its own discount stores. Their prices were slightly above the lowest sellers, and they offered everything imaginable, including artificial Christmas trees that no one thought would sell.
Though they started the same year as Kmart, Walmart
and Kohl's,
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Do you really know how goods get to your local retailer for you to purchase for Christmas? There really is a “long boat to China”, or FROM China, and it brings the pretty packages that we buy during the holidays, as well as all year long.
But that boat from China has to dock somewhere, and someone has to unload those packages, and some trucker or train has to deliver them to distribution centers and retail outlets. What we don’t realize is that we are running out of time and space to complete import business as usual, especially for the holiday crunch.
“The Los Angeles-Long Beach ports handle 43% of America’s imports.” This holiday season, 137 ships came sailing in, and only 94 of them could fit into the harbor, and some who docked had to wait as many as eight days to unload, which is twice as long as normal. These ports are the only ones large enough to handle the big ships, some with more than 4,000 containers on board. Combined, they handle “62% of all shipments to West Coast ports from Asian exporters.”
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Publishers Make A Splash with Beach Reads
Click the title to hear the audio article.
“Five New York publishing houses are teaming up with an exclusive [nature] resort [Little Dix Bay in the British Virgin Islands] to get new books in the right readers’ hands early.” Visitors to the resort will get an opportunity to read upcoming books before they are publicly released. Guests can order books, like room service, and return them when they leave.
“Word of mouth is the best way to sell books, and it’s the hardest to create. But if you’re sitting by the pool and you see other people reading a book that’s free for the taking, you might just pick it up and discover a new author.” That’s especially true since there has not been a pool there until this year, and there is absolutely no television on site.
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Murdoch’s Air War (DirecTV has taken off like a rocket)
British Sky Broadcasting, or BSkyB, allows 7.4 million Brits to place an onscreen bet on a soccer game, and switch camera angles to better watch his favorite soccer team. Sky owns almost 70% of the pay-tv market in England.
Rupert Murdoch has taken over DirecTV (from Hughes Electronics, a unit of GM), and plans on upgrading it to the same level of interactivity of BSkyB. DirecTV has added 14 million viewers, 600,000 of which were cable viewers. Satellite is completely digital, whereas cable is still trying to upgrade its customers with digital systems. However, cable companies aren’t sacrificing profits today for possible customers tomorrow, as Murdoch is. He’s able to out spend them, and it’s paying off – right now.
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GM’s Saturn Problem
14 years and 15 billion dollars later, Saturn hasn’t made one cent. Saturn was originally created as a “different kind of company” so non-GM customers would purchase GM cars in disguise. Plastic dent free bodies, and very high customer satisfaction rankings kept it going, but there were no profits for GM, the parent company.
Competition from Japan and Korea weren’t figured into the equation. All auto operations are running in the red. So what is GM going to do to get out of this financial quagmire? Unload Saturn? Of course not – they are going to sink 3 billion more dollars into Saturn – and make it just another GM car, sort of.
The name won’t change, so hopefully the customer loyalty won’t change (because 70% of Saturn buyers won’t even consider purchasing another GM car), but the designs and parts will be wholly GM. It will be another example of one car created with slightly different variations under different names – but all basically the same car by one manufacturer.
Why not just get rid of Saturn?
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The iPod people have invaded Apple’s stores!
By Andy Serwer, Fortune, December 2004
Hardware companies can’t do retail? Says who? Not Apple. Not with the iPod sales spiraling almost out of control. There was a line of people waiting to pay $300 to $400 for an iPod. That says a lot about their product – or is it their marketing?
Apple has sold 6 million iPods to date, with 2 million being sold just in the last quarter. Within 14 days, Apple increased their projected sales by 30%, gauging it by early customer responses and sales. And Apple’s stock has more than doubled this year.
Next move? A mini-mini-iPod which only holds 60 songs but costs $150. It’s a generational thing in many ways. Older generations think of Apple as something weird – the younger generation thinks of Apple as hot, which could affect Mac purchases eventually.
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Fabio Trades Book Jackets for Jackets
By Julia Boorstin, Fortune December 2004
Fabio has moved from modeling for romance novels to selling coats through Walmart’s Sam’s Club, which can’t keep them in stock. Fabio says he was always interested in the fashion industry, and learned from his mother that women had the buying power, “even if men have the illusion of running the world.”
The question was “Why coats?” His fans complained about the scarcity of fashionable clothing outside of big cities. When he approached Sam’s Club about it, they were very skeptical, saying that coats were the hardest thing to sell. They test marketed in 2 stores, to see if they could sell 400 in three weeks. They sold 6,000 almost immediately, and Sam’s Club ordered coats for all 600 of its U.S. stores.
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The Big Benioff - Software On Demand at Salesforce.com
By Daniel Roth, Fortune December 2004
Salesforce.com is changing the way you think about software – well, as long as you want to be connected to the internet. What he does is create software that you utilize online, instead of resident on your computer. Why would you ever want to pay someone a monthly fee for a program you could keep resident on your computer? That is the question Benioff is waiting for you to ask.
Step back and look at the bigger picture. Don’t just think of it as a program you pay for as long as you live, think of it as a program that you pay to use, but don’t ever have to worry about updating or upgrading. Think of it as a program that has an increasing number of software add-ons that work seamlessly with this program, and you don’t have to worry about compatibility. This is called Software On Demand.
Benioff’s method of attention-getting has included hiring protesters “to demonstrate outside of archrival Siebel Systems’ events – and even hired fake news crews to “cover” them. The B-52’s performed at Salesforce.com’s launch party (at that time the company had no customers). David Bowie sang at a fundraiser sponsored by the company, and Arnold Schwarzenegger helped kick off an update of the service.
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LISTENER BRAIN STORMS!
If you would like to add your brainstorming ideas, either from a previous issue, or regarding another newsworthy event, you can do so by submitting it as a comment to one of the online articles and/or calling our Brain Storm! recording line at
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 (click here to listen to the audio)Introduction: Scott Allen is the leading expert on building quality business relationships online, offering training programs in conjunction with social networking sites LinkedIn, Ryze, and others, plus courses on creating a powerful personal presence and growing your social network on the internet. He has been quoted in ABCNews.com, CFO, Christian Science Monitor, Sales and Marketing Management, and other major publications. A 20-year veteran entrepreneur and IT executive, he has implemented solutions for clients such as IBM, Computer Services Corporation, and Amazon.com. He was formerly VP of Professional Services and VP of Product Management for Mongoose Technology, an enterprise portal and community infrastructure vendor. As the Entrepreneurs Guide on About.com, he provides over 10,000 weekly readers with guidance and resources to help them start and develop their new businesses.
In an online article I read yesterday, I was pleased to see that my ideas aren't so off the wall after all. HarperCollins is recognizing the need to do direct marketing with potential and present clients, as opposed to going the traditional route through other vendors. They are also moving into the digital download MP3 venue, as they realize that eventually, cassettes and even CDs will go the way of the LP. Digital download is the way audio books will be delivered, and eventually, straight from the publisher, just like at Encouraging Audiobooks.
They are also moving away from an author-centric brand to a publisher-centric brand, with the hope that people will eventually see that there is a
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nTag: Name Tags that Take Notes, by Ian Mount, Fast Company, January 2005
Imagine going to a conference where everyone is wearing an electronic tag that keeps track of what seminars you attend, your agenda, interests, job, etc., and then allows you to exchange that information with someone else via infrared and radio frequencies?
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