Marketing quote to remember

Companies constantly search for temporary monopoly

Joel Goldhar

I met Bruce Nussbaum

I completely forgot to mention that I had a chance to thank Bruce for his work, and for being part of the reason why I’m at ID. He was very gracious about it and we spoke for a little while before his talk. Cool stuff.

A little tip

I’m a feed addict, always checking google reader & Viigo on my phone, on my desktop and on my laptop when i get the chance. The problem has been that there are more articles than I have time to read and when I move between computers, I lose the articles I marked in one. I also try to limit myself to 30 minutes of feeds in the morning.

I tab click each of the interesting articles to create a new tab with the article I want to read in firefox

As I read each article, I close the tabs

When I run out of time, I create a single bookmark (Cntrl+Shift+D in windows) of all the remaining tabs in firefox calling it Today

Finally, I use Foxmarks to synchronize between multiple desktops so now, regardless of where I am, I can read the articles I’ve marked.

You could also do this by starring the articles but I find that I almost never go back to the starred articles and this method allows me to open the articles themselves, not just the feed.

What do you think?

Wrap up from the Institute of Design’s Strategy Conference

Well,

I have some time this morning to write a quick summary of the Institute of Design’s Strategy conference which happened last week at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. This was one of the best conferences I’ve attended. Most of the speakers were excellent, the crowds were packed and there was definitely a sense of optimism in the air, quite unlike the prevailing sentiments you can find gracing any of our newspapers today.

Having an amazing seat at the third row didn’t hurt either – changes it from watching to engaging.

Some quick summaries of the presentations I thought were most interesting with my key takeaways.

Bill Buxton – Bill is a principle researcher at Microsoft. One of his points was that the success of design rests on where it’s situated within a company. When design is hidden under layers of management, it rarely has a chance to shine. As a case in point, Bill highlighted the timeline of Apple’s success, noting that Jonathan Ive was employed by Apple several years before it’s first big product hit, the iMac. It took Steve Jobs taking over the company to bring design up to a level where it could affect change. Oh, one more point which Bill made – never call the people who buy your products a consumer. When companies look at people through the lens of “consumption”, they will rarely be able to partner with them to create the kind of innovations which drive company growth, even during recessions.

Scott Cook – Interesting story on the founding and continued success of Intuit. I liked his quote ” Seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else thought”. I had a chance to speak with Scott at the reception and there were a lot of details missing from the story, it was nevertheless interesting to speak to him. There was a point made by Scott that I never quite got an answer for – he mentioned that executives in companies are layers away from what customers are saying and thus can rarely spot the breakthrough innovations. He gave an anecdotal story that even at HP, Dave Packard turned away many of the ideas that later came to be successful. Not sure how to validate a comment like that but it that’s true, what can executives do to be closer to the needs of their customers. Does the modern day executive need to pull a Henry Vth, disguising themselves to be closer to their guest.

Matt Mason – Co-Founder of Wedia and author of the The Pirate’s Dilemma, gave one of the conference’s best presentations about youth culture, piracy and what companies can do to combat it. He had many points to make but the ones that I thought were particularly interesting were companies use openness to combat obscurity such as Nike selling tricked out versions of Air Force One after Bathing Ape released pirated copies of Air Force One with their own crazy artwork. The next point he made was to sell what can’t be be pirated, either convenience or experience. As an example, he cited the popularity of iTunes which has sold billions of dollars of music when the music is available for free on the net, albeit for a lot more work.

These were just some of the highlights from the conference and speakers who I thought were particularly interesting. On a side note, I ended up taking these notes on my trusty but aging Blackberry Pearl and emailing them to myself and buying more than 3 books while listening to the speakers (damn you Amazon 1-click purchasing).

A friend and I are working on a next-gen product for the wireless presentation space and I found this behavior striking whereby interactions with the audience happen not just through verbal feedback but through the blogging of speeches, visits to the speaker’s websites and purchases of books etc, all while still listening to them speak. We’ll need to see how we can incorporate some of these capabilities within our product.

Heading to the Institute of Design’s Strategy Conference

I’m finishing my breakfast as I write, heading over to catch my school, the Institute of Design’s annual Strategy Conference. We have a great line up this year and I’m especially interested to hear what Bill Buxton has to say about Sketching User Experience. There’s a short interview with him which you can read here.

Other speakers who seem promising are Claudia Kotchka, EX-VP of Design and Innovation at P&G who has attended our conference in prior years as well. I say ex vp of design since Bruce Nussbaum reported this morning that Claudia is leaving P&G. I’m as surprised as Bruce is but more curious as to where she’s headed next. Talent like that usually can spot trends and opportunities ahead of others.
Speaking of Bruce Nussbaum, he doesn’t know it but he’s one of the reasons why I’m at the Institute of Design. It was his articles on Innovation and the Institute of Design that led me to explore further after which I decided to leave my job in Boston and move to Chicago for school. Thanks Bruce and if I get to see you in person at this conference, I’ll thank you in person.

Well, it’s about that time so I must head off. Thankfully, the MCA is 4 blocks away and I’ll keep you all posted on the conference.

A quote to remember

Ross Lovegrove, in his Ted Talk had another beautiful quote, “Industrial Design is the art form of the 21st century”. Wow.
You can listen to Ross talk about Organic Design here

Howard Kunstler on the tragedy of suburbia

I can’t stop writing today..

If you are like me, and are an urbanite and believe in the superiority of urban living for the quality of life, but also in the emerging consensus that urban living is a better allocation of our global resources, not to mention that american suburbs are just plain ugly, you need to see this Ted Talk by Howard Kunstler.

BTW, I realized Ted Talks is like crack/cocaine for me – I can’t get enough.

In case you are curious

In case you are curious as to why I wrote three posts (4 counting this one) when I haven’t written anything for the past month, it’s because I’m officially on my summer vacation.

I’m going to be in Chicago this summer, working on a passion project of mine, trying to develop a better wireless presentation remote with my friend Ash, working on some interesting strategy and research work for the Michigan school district with Jeremy Alexis, a professor at the Institute of Design and taking three business school classes on International Marketing, Strategic Marketing and Operations Management. Oh, and of course, having a great time in Chicago which is amazing city, especially in the summer. I missed out last summer since I spent it at Minneapolis interning at the Innovation group at Target but not this time.

Information contained in matter

I heard a beautiful quote that I wanted to share. “Adding Information to Matter” that Janine Benyus, author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature mentioned during her Ted Talk. It’s something that was repeated during another Ted presentation by Robert Full on Animal Motion.

She was referring to the idea that nature finds ways to accomplish tasks with very little energy and that for nature, matter contains the information needed to accomplish the task. The examples she showed was an algae whose very shape allows it to catch the air and travel great distances, expending very little energy. Robert talked about a similar concept when he demonstrated that the very shape of the feet on geckos allow for dry adhesion and one of his three recommendations in the development of robots was to distribute the thinking and let the forms and shapes of the feet allow better movement (as opposed to having a computer plan and predict and react to every single stimulus).

The lies we are told at school

I wanted to address a pet peeve of mine that recently came to a head after a couple of business classes. This pet peeve is being given false stories of business successes or failures. I explored this earlier with the article titled Maxims are true until till they are not. Recently, I started my summer business courses and had the frustrating experience of listening colleagues engage in what they thought was a serious discussion about two business examples which were completely untrue.

In this class, the students mentioned Wal-Mart’s failure in Germany and Chevy Nova’s failure in Mexico as two anecdotal examples of failures in International Marketing. What incensed me was the trivial nature of discussions about these two stories. One member of the class explained that the reason WalMart’s failed in Germany was because of cultural missteps where greeters at the door offended German sensibilities. Not only is this patently untrue, the professor did not correct this persons mistake. The class then went on to discuss this absurdity for 20 minutes.

The research article “Why did Wal-Mart fail in Germany?” written by Andreas Knorr and Andreas Arndt clearly point out the reasons for the failure of Wal-Mart which I’ve quoted below:

• A fundamentally flawed entry-by-acquisition strategy,
• a management by “hubris and clash of cultures”-approach to labor relations,
• a blatant failure to deliver on its legendary “we sell for less – always“, “everyday
low prices” and “excellent service” value proposition, and
• bad publicity due to its repeated infringement of some important German laws
and regulations.

As the article points out, cultural missteps were only one part of the problem but that had more to do with Wal-Mart’s relations with its German employees and its relationships with its labor unions more than affecting German consumer sensibilities.

The second story was about the Chevy Nova. The story told was that the car failed in the Mexican market due to the word Nova which means “No Go” in Spanish. I’d had heard this story before but not in a marketing class and something rang patently untrue about it and I did some research and apparently, I’m not the only one who felt the same way.

This article from Snopes which is a site dedicated to revealing urban legends, presents compelling reasons for why the ‘Nova’ story might be untrue.

* First of all, the phrase “no va” (literally “doesn’t go”) and the word “nova” are distinct entities with different pronunciations in Spanish: the former is two words and is pronounced with the accent on the second word; the latter is one word with the accent on the first syllable. Assuming that Spanish speakers would naturally see the word “nova” as equivalent to the phrase “no va” and think “Hey, this car doesn’t go!” is akin to assuming that English speakers woud spurn a dinette set sold under the name Notable because nobody wants a dinette set that doesn’t include a table.

* Although “no va” can be literally translated as “no go,” it would be a curious locution for a speaker of Spanish to use in reference to a car. Just as an English speaker would describe a broken-down car by saying that it “doesn’t run” rather than it “doesn’t go,” so a Spanish speaker would refer to a malfunctioning automobile by saying “no marcha” or “no funciona” or “no camina” rather than “no va.”

* Pemex (the Mexican government-owned oil monopoly) sold (and still sells) gasoline in Mexico under the name “Nova.” If Mexicans were going to associate anything with the Chevrolet Nova based on its name, it would probably be this gasoline. In any case, if Mexicans had no compunctions about filling the tanks of their cars with a type of gasoline whose name advertised that it “didn’t go,” why would they reject a similarly-named automobile?

* This legend assumes that a handful of General Motors executives launched a car into a foreign market and remained in blissful ignorance about a possible adverse translation of its name. Even if nobody in Detroit knew enough rudimentary Spanish to notice the coincidence, the Nova could not have been brought to market in Mexico and/or South America without the involvement of numerous Spanish speakers engaged to translate user manuals, prepare advertising and promotional materials, communicate with the network of Chevrolet dealers in the target countries, etc. In fact, GM was aware of the translation and opted to retain the model name “Nova” in Spanish-speaking markets anyway, because they (correctly) felt the matter to be unimportant.

While not definitive, (which would require sales numbers for the Chevy Nova in Mexico which are not available), they do a credible job of casting doubt on the story. With this sort of doubt on the credibility of this story, it’s inexcusable that this example gets cited as a failure in International Marketing at a business school.

Last point, a couple of weeks ago Don Norman held a talk at our school and made the claim that Disney Executives prefer to have long lines for their rides (but show you videos to make you feel like you are not waiting for a long time). Of course, as a complete counterpoint to his claim, I watched a video in my Operations Management class where Disney Executives were on record as wanting to reduce customer wait times (and would rather have them buying items and consuming food at their restaurants) and therefore implemented a FASTPASS system.

It’s contradictory stories like this which should make all of us a lot more vigilant and unwilling to accept these stories that are told to us. And it’s not just about business. Paul Graham had a very interesting essay about the lies we tell children which was a great read.