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Articles by Niraj Dawar
How Soft Capital Powers Startups
Money—it’s top-of-mind for any aspiring entrepreneur. No matter how much you’ve put aside or how confident you are about reaching your sales goals, you’ll never feel you have enough money. Without a doubt, it’s scary to step out into the unknown, leaving the security and comfort of a job and career and putting your standard of living at risk. Regrettably, too many aspiring entrepreneurs get caught up worrying about their lack of hard financial capital which never seems enough.
Brand Strategy For Startups
Launching a startup comes with numerous challenges that need to be overcome. For early-stage CEOs, their main concerns typically revolve around product development and securing seed funding for growth. However, many fail to recognize the importance of brand building, often considering it a lesser priority. In reality, brand building is as crucial to early success as product development and fundraising.
Startup Strategy: Making People Care
There is a lot of positive energy, excitement and passion that surrounds startups and fresh entrepreneurs who have a vision of how they can impact the planet according to their own slant on the world. Truth is, nobody cares. Not really. Sure, your mentor may care. Your spouse may care. Your startup investors may even care — a little (but remember they have other startup investments to protect them in case you run aground).
Approaching Start-Ups As Experiments
As anyone managing or advising startups knows, it’s not easy to step back from the daily fires that need to be put out to focus on the longer-term goals of building the business and going to market. Yet stepping back is often exactly what the doctor orders. So let’s step way back and see what we see. I have advised startups for more than twenty years, and simultaneously have designed and run behavioral experiments for my academic research for over thirty-five.
Why Every Brand Portfolio Needs A Strong Corporate Brand
From Marriott to Amazon to Nestlé to Google to Apple to Unilever to LG to Neutrogena Source-Branded Portfolios are increasing in importance. With a shared common, source of credibility, individual brands can focus on developing and strengthening their specialness. In a highly competitive, highly fractionated, fast-paced environment, resources are better often better spent behind Source-Branded Portfolios than behind a disparate portfolio of unaffiliated brands.
Leveraging Consumer Identity For Brand Advantage
We buy a huge range of products because of a drive to enhance the extended self. Athletic wear merchandisers get this, but companies in other verticals may not. Brands that link the consumer to key elements of the self, whether these are schools, favorite musical artists, old neighborhoods, or coveted identities like “successful executive” or “glam girl” have a competitive advantage over others that don’t connect to the extended self-concept.
Aligning Brands With Consumer Identity
Products and services link to our feelings and behaviors. But just how tight are these linkages, and how important are they to marketers? The answers are 1. Really tight and 2. Really important. Surprisingly, much of marketing theory and practice doesn’t fully acknowledge these connections. Sure, modern advertising tactics routinely paint an aspirational picture of what you could be like if you just bought Brand X.
Building Brands On Fantasy Based Reality
A big question in this early part of the 21st century seems to be “what is reality?“ On the one hand, reality is that which is verifiable by evidence. On the other, reality is that about which there is consensus. It’s simple when the two are the same: when there is consensus about things for which there is evidence. But in many spheres and in many groups, evidence and consensus are increasingly diverging.
Key Measures Of Marketing Outcomes
Marketing activities may not produce an immediate effect on sales, revenue, or cash flow. However, this does not mean there are no effects or that the effects of a marketing activity cannot be measured. An advertisement may persuade a consumer that a particular brand is superior to its competitors, but the consumer may not purchase that brand until they have a need for it.
Brand Architecture's Critical Role In B2B
Millad NX8000 is not exactly the kind of brand name that rolls off the tongue, nor does it have the easy brand recognition of a Nike Air, Apple iPad, or Diet Coke. Yet Millad NX8000, a chemical additive from Milliken Chemical, a division of privately held Milliken & Company, refers to a product that is present in more households than any of these better known consumer brands: it is the clarifier that gives polypropylene plastics such as Tupperware products their transparency.
Meaning Is The Bridge Every Brand Must Build
Consider for a moment how a Scrabble box full of single letters, lacks the quality of poetry, but if those letters are arranged in a certain way, they can then produce a poetic effect. It is the ordered relationships between the letters that create the identity of poetry. There is a profound parallel between the process of how our consciousness creates and shapes reality and how dreams manifest. The dynamics of how humans create material things has a deep similarity to the dynamics of dreaming.
The Mistake Of Asking Consumers What They Want
Asking consumers what they want is so passé. There was a time when brand and marketing managers would not think of making a decision about the product, its features, packaging, and even pricing without asking the consumer first – mostly through surveys. Lengthy questionnaires were always being designed, tested, administered, analyzed, and interpreted. Management meetings were called to discuss survey results, and make decisions.
Finding The Source Of Your Best Brand Ideas
Where do you get your best ideas? Are they all from within your industry? Many of the executives I know and speak with are constantly curious — they seek out ideas, incessantly ask questions, read the business press, attend conferences, network, seek out consultants, or even sign up for training and management development courses. Their goal is to find new ideas, the best ideas, and take them back to their jobs, their companies, their markets, and their customers.
Finding The Source Of Your Best Brand Ideas
Where do you get your best ideas? Are they all from within your industry? Many of the executives I know and speak with are constantly curious — they seek out ideas, incessantly ask questions, read the business press, attend conferences, network, seek out consultants, or even sign up for training and management development courses. Their goal is to find new ideas, the best ideas, and take them back to their jobs, their companies, their markets, and their customers.
Brand Strategy: Differentiation Versus Centrality
Brands in a category are typically more similar than they are different. They have to be. They’re both trying to appeal to the large middle of the market. Classical marketing suggests differentiation is key: find a point of difference, or a unique selling proposition, and differentiate your brand on that basis in the customers’ mind.
"Tu producto es similar a otros, lo que te diferencia es cómo lo vendes"
NIRAJ DAWAR Este profesor e investigador indio de nacimiento es un especialista en estrategias de marketing reputado en medio mundo. Su idea central es que ahora la mayoría de los productos cumplen unos estándares de calidad que hacen muy difícil que unas marcas se diferencien de otras. Así que defiende que la clave está en «el cómo, y no en el qué» fabricas u ofreces.
How Brands Compete And Win
Competitive brand battles can be drawn out affairs, outlasting the tenures of several management teams. They can also be very expensive, often requiring outlays in the hundreds of millions of dollars. In some cases, billions of dollars are involved. It’s not just Coke versus Pepsi. These battles occur in every industry and practically every product category. Visa versus Mastercard. Nike versus Adidas. Colgate versus Crest. Airbus versus Boeing. Caterpillar versus Komatsu.
Marketing in the Age of Alexa
The autonomous car dropped Lori at her home and then left for its scheduled service at the dealership. It would be back in time to take her to the airport the next morning. On the way into her house, Lori gathered the drone deliveries from the drop box on her stoop. The familiar voice of Eve, a next-generation smart assistant like Alexa, greeted her in the foyer and gently reminded her of the travel plans for her upcoming conference in LA.
Facebook’s Unbundling Strategy Makes Perfect Sense
Can a company built on the ideas of scale and network effects unbundle its offering into multiple brands and still thrive? Facebook is about to find out. Unbundling has a compelling strategic and competitive rationale for Facebook. It has implications that extend far beyond the company’s stated goal to design single-purpose apps that fit mobile usage and the bottleneck of screen mobile device real estate.
Has Google Finally Proven That Online Ads Cause Offline Purchases?
Last week, Google announced that, in an effort to bridge the “online ad–offline purchase” gap, it will begin to connect online ad exposure to brick-and-mortar sales. The company claims it will be able to track about 70% of all credit and debit card transactions and link them to online consumer behavior. These moves are big leaps forward for advertisers.
Labels Like “Millennial” and “Boomer” Are Obsolete
Scarcely a presentation on marketing trends is complete without reference to the Boomer, Gen X, Gen Y, and Gen Z segments and allusions to each generation’s unique expectations, behaviors, attitudes, and values. The grand conclusion is always that these distinct demographic segments define generation-specific consumption patterns that marketers ignore at their peril.
How Marketing Changes When Shopping Is Automated
Much of marketing is premised on companies delivering messages to customers to influence their purchases and consumption. Indeed, the largest advertisers in the world are companies such as Procter & Gamble, Nestlé, and Unilever, which sell branded low-involvement products that are routinely purchased and consumed at a regular pace.
Why Localizing Marketing Doesn’t Always Work
Whether to localize global-brand marketing programs remains one of the most contentious debates in multinational organizations. On the one hand, local brand managers typically argue that consumer habits in their market are different, their consumers’ purchase behavior is different, preferences and tastes are different, the media and the retail trade are different, and, therefore, their customers require unique, tailored, and delicate handling.
Use Big Data to Create Value for Customers, Not Just Target Them
Big data holds out big promises for marketing. Notably, it pledges to answer two of the most vexing questions that have stymied marketers since they started selling: 1) who buys what when and at what price? and 2) can we link what consumers hear, read, and view to what they buy and consume? Answering these makes marketing more efficient by improving targeting and by identifying and eliminating the famed half of the marketing budget that is wasted.
What Intel Needs to Remember About Marketing
Intel’s restructuring announcement last week describes its plans to reduce headcount by 12,000, or 11% of its workforce, and to seek growth in markets such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and Data Center Processing. The personal computer (PC) chip market that the company dominated for over three decades, and which accounted for the bulk of its sales during that period, is now in decline, and accounts for only 50% of revenues, down from 65% in 2012.
A Better Way to Map Brand Strategy
Idea in Brief The Problem Companies have long used perceptual maps to understand how consumers feel about their brands relative to competitors’ and to develop brand positions. But their business value is limited because they fail to link a brand’s position to market performance metrics. Other marketing tools measure brands on yardsticks such as market share, growth rate, and profitability but fail to take consumer perceptions into consideration.
When Marketing Is Strategy
It’s no secret that in many industries today, upstream activities—such as sourcing, production, and logistics—are being commoditized or outsourced, while downstream activities aimed at reducing customers’ costs and risks are emerging as the drivers of value creation and sources of competitive advantage. Consider a consumer’s purchase of a can of Coca-Cola. In a supermarket or warehouse club the consumer buys the drink as part of a 24-pack. The price is about 25 cents a can.
Brand Strategy Workshop For Startups
A startup business faces many difficult challenges getting off the ground. For many early stage CEO’s assessing their priorities, product development and the seed money to grow are their primary concerns. Few if any are thinking much about the critical importance of brand building. For startup CEOs, brand building needs to be as important to early business success as product development and raising money.
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