Here’s What I’m Up To

You found me, now find out what I’m up to.

Beehive is where I do marketing.  We are a virtual agency.  We do cool stuff with cool people.  Stuff like digital campaigns, social media, traditional media, guerilla marketing, creative production, websites, partner promotions, press & publicity and other things that require a mix of reason and eccentricity.  We do all of this in English & Spanish.  Check us out at beehive.me Whether you want to target Latinos via grassroots, with traditional marketing  or online with digital/social, we can help you big-time.  We’ve helped clients like Shasta, Pantelion Studios, Relativity Media and more bring their brands to the Latino consumer & audience.

ZUMGI is where I do brand & strategy consulting.  I’ve done projects for folks like Coca Cola, Lourd Capital Management, Rice Garden, and more.  Check us out at www.zumgi.com and on our page on Facebook.

You can also find me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter at @gingerzumaeta, @beehive_group, and @zumgi.

From Prada to Nada – Share the Player!

Start with Positioning!

What’s your position?  Seriously.  Where do you fit in?  What’s the pain-point you solve?  Would the market even notice if you disappeared?

A positioning statement solves these, but before you go off and throw together a good ‘sentence’, you’ll have to do your homework.  That’s where I come in.  I help companies dig deep to find out what their core values are, how that results in a brand personality (the internal reflection of who they are) and how that manifests itself in their brand image (the external reflection of who they are).

Once you’ve got all of this sorted, NOW it’s time to start thinking about what position your brand should focus on in the marketplace.  Even if you truly have the capability to do ‘all things’, that’s almost a 100% positive indicator that you don’t do most of them better than all of your competitors.  So, focus on your features and benefits to get the benefits that give you the biggest edge.  Now onward to building that positioning statement.

I harp on positioning all the time because once you’ve got it, it’s like having your brands true north.  It makes the ‘what’s in scope and out of scope’ question very easy to answer.  A project either fits with the position or it doesn’t.

While I spend a lot of my time actually building marketing campaigns, I don’t do it without having a great sense of  what the positioning statement for the brand  is, and formulating a story for the brand that brings it to life.  These two tools are absolutely essential to getting everything that follows right.

This is a required discipline if you’re serious about your brand.   Don’t cheat on this stuff.  If you don’t know how to do this correctly, get help from a professional.

If you’d like to assess your current positioning or need help formulating one, I can help.  Contact ginger [at] zumgi [dot] com.

Happiness Leads to Higher Income

Great news via HBR’s Daily Stat!

Greater happiness is associated with higher future income, research shows. A one-point increase in people’s assessment of their happiness on a five-point scale was linked to a 3% higher income five years later, according to a study cited by Saatchi & Saatchi.

Source: Small Actions Big Impact: Foundations of the Personal Sustainability Project (PDF)

The Truth about Marketing.

The Difference between Marketing & Promoting? It’s in the Analysis.

Quick: What’s your unique value proposition? If you weren’t able to ‘nail it’ immediately, you’re not alone.

If you were able to answer that question quickly, you’re ahead of the pack. Now answer this: Could any other company claim the same proposition? If you’re saying yes now, then your value proposition isn’t really unique. How the heck did that happen?

Why is it that so many companies – even mature companies; sometimes especially mature companies – can’t answer this basic question as naturally as they can say their names? The answer most of the time is that they stopped marketing, and started promoting. There’s nothing wrong with promoting, it just isn’t a suitable substitute for understanding your market. The problem is that too many companies don’t want to spend the time on the analysis required to explicitly define their position. However, if you’re not doing analysis, you’re not really marketing. You’re just promoting . . . and just promoting won’t help you win in the long-term.

So what is Marketing? To understand it, you have to understand that MARKET is at the core of what it’s all about. What market are you in? For Starbucks, it’s the coffee market. For Netflix, it’s home video. But it doesn’t stop there. It’s not the actual coffee that’s the basis of competition . . . it’s the coffee drinkers. It’s about the CUSTOMERS. Companies like Starbucks and Netflix have invested considerable time in understanding where they fit into their respective marketplaces and how their customers derive value from their products. This process of analyzing the marketplace is critical to not only selling the product, but to developing new products as well! If you don’t do the analysis, you don’t have a great probability of maximizing value . . . in other words, you won’t sell as much as you could if you had done your homework.

Before you start promoting, follow the process below. Start with fully analyzing your marketplace’s 5Cs – Customers, Company, Competitors, Collaborators and Context. Next, segment the market into distinct groups that are mutually exclusive but collectively exhaustive. Now that you have your segments, you can choose the appropriate target market and develop a positioning statement that clearly encompasses your value proposition to those customers. The beauty of doing the analysis is that once you’ve got that value proposition, everything else becomes easy.

Now you can promote your product or service knowing that you’re going to have the right message – and right meaning – for your customers. More than ever, this exercise is going to separate the winners from the losers. Customers are making tough choices about how they spend their money. If customers don’t instantly understand how your product or service benefits them, there will be another company’s products that will. That decision point could determine how long you’re in business.

Now the good news. It’s not too late. Take the time now to walk through these steps. If you don’t have a trained marketer on staff, bring someone in to help. Don’t skimp on the analysis. You’ve got to do the analysis if you’re going to understand your customers . . . and after all, that’s why you’re in business . . . to sell products and services to people who see value in those products and services and are willing to pay for them.

At ZUMGI, we make sure you’re targeting the right customers with the right value proposition to maximize profit. How? With proper scoping, you can get more by doing less when you get in tune with the simple truth about what customers desire. If you want all the benefits of a CMO, but none of the overhead, we can help.

Create an Incubator INSIDE to drive Growth

Create a Special Unit to Drive Growth

Rita McGrath – Harvard Business Review

As the economy shows some signs of shrugging off its doldrums, growth is back on the agenda. After cutting costs for a year or more while repeating the mantra “do more with less,” should companies be looking to special groups to jump-start growth?

Corporate venture groups, incubator “greenhouses,” and other units dedicated to identifying and incubating growth opportunities have a checkered corporate history. Often begun with flashes of significant enthusiasm, they are often first on the chopping block when executive sponsors change, costs need to be cut, or the fashion of the day swings away from growth and back to basics. Nonetheless, there are great reasons why companies should be giving some serious thought to setting up an incubation unit, and also some great lessons learned on how to avoid some of the more serious mistakes.

Why devote resources to a unit specifically to focus on growth? The simplest answer is that nobody else has the time to devote to looking for insights, developing new business plans, creating alliances, building networks and doing all the other work that is essential to promoting a robust pipeline of growth opportunities. When all around you are working 24/7, who has the time to think, reflect, and do any more than just get through the day? So a growth-oriented group is a good idea if your organization wants to do more than just extend today’s business or make acquisitions.

There are, however, some things to watch out for as you set the group up. First, the person in charge of it should be incredibly well networked, respected, and taken seriously in your company. Second, make sure that the people in the growth group understand that this is neither a fiefdom, nor a career destination. It’s generally not a good idea to make the growth group the place from which ventures are launched — indeed, that is often a recipe for the corporate equivalent of organ rejection, which defeats the purpose of developing the idea to start out with. It should be relatively small; around 6-8 people is about right, depending on the size of your company. And it should be seen as a place that helps divisions or lines of business, not one that puts additional burdens on them.

One of the most important jobs a growth group can do is create an opportunity inventory — both of ideas that are floating around in the organization but don’t have critical mass, and of ideas that are currently being resourced but perhaps not managed explicitly. Without an organizational home, these critical jobs tend not to get done, hampering the organization’s ability to grow.

Companies that have done a good job leveraging their incubators or growth groups include IBM with its Emerging Business Opportunity program, Swiss Reinsurance and its new product development group, Air Products and Chemicals and its new business programs, and DuPont, which developed a concept they called the “knowledge intensive university” to get growth on the agenda and keep it there. Companies such as Microsoft, too, are beginning to embrace the idea of groups dedicated to learning, discovery, and experimentation that have the time, the resources, and the respect to launch new ideas.

What are your experiences with growth groups?

A Big-Picture Look at Google, Microsoft, Apple and Yahoo – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com

A Big-Picture Look at Google, Microsoft, Apple and Yahoo

Bits Blog – NYTimes.com.

On Wednesday, I wrote about a battle looming between Apple and Google as discussions take place over the possibility of Apple making Microsoft’s Bing the default search engine on the iPhone.

Stepping back further than a single search engine fight, it’s evident that Google, Microsoft, Apple, and even Yahoo are now competing in numerous different business arenas.

The chart above illustrates many of the services these companies provide. Some of their products have been cornerstone revenue streams, and others are just at the beginning of development. But putting them up against each other really helps illustrate each company’s focus and their possible future directions of exploration.

Google
Although the company started in search and made billions of dollars in search-related advertising, it recently made the move into mobile software and hardware. Google is also moving to the desktop as hardware companies consider using Google’s Android operating system for tablet PCs and netbooks and Google continues developing its own Chrome OS. Google’s recent foray into mobile phones, with the Nexus One, signals a big shift for the company, but the lack of customer service might hinder customer adoption of its mobile products.

Microsoft
Microsoft really competes with everyone. It is on the desktop, in the cloud, on mobile devices, in your living room, answering search queries and navigating you to your favorite restaurant. So what’s next? Although the company invested in Facebook, and it offers some social features on its Xbox platform, it still needs to make a major leap into social networking. Another major gap is mobile phone hardware.

Apple
Apple’s success with Mac personal computers, the iPod, the iPhone and iTunes has allowed it to step back from the fray and avoid competing in search, news, maps and social networks. But the recent competition with Google over mobile phone software might change its attitude. Apple has close to $34 billion in cash and securities, which means that it can afford to make some big purchases in the search market — or any other market for that matter.

A side note: While looking at the comparisons of these four companies, it’s especially interesting to see that Apple is the only one of the four that charges for its online services, including calendar, contact sync and Web mail. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all provide these cloud-based products free of charge.

Yahoo
Yahoo has not really added any new products or services over the last year, but it seems to do best with content-related products. Yahoo News is still the No. 1 news site, and Flickr continues to grow and remain a highly successful photo Web site. As the race really pushes toward mobile over the next few years, it’s going to be interesting to see how Yahoo decides to play in that space.