Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1427

Please Stop Ideating

Surely it makes sense that the more ideas we have, the better our innovation track record will be. Not true, it turns out.

Firms that hold ideation sessions − those in which a group guided by outside consultants generate ideas for new products and services − generate little additional revenue from new offerings compared to those that don’t. That was a finding of a study of consumer-package-goods companies that I led.

How could this be? Aren’t more ideas better?

Actually, coming up with an idea turns out to be relatively easy; refining a concept until it becomes an economic success is the hard part. Consider this example: The first known claim of inventing a hand-held mobile phone was made in 1906. Yet it took another 70 years of development before one that actually worked was produced.

In fact, most companies have an abundance of ideas. At one firm with a particularly dismal record of innovation, about 800 new product ideas sat frozen at the corporate level.

As a chief marketing officer of an iconic groundbreaking brand once told me, “The hard part of innovation isn’t coming up with an idea; rather it’s picking the right one to develop.”

When working with groups at organizations that face big challenges and enormous pressure to innovate, I tell them, “I’m very certain one of you in this room has the right answer. The problem is the 200 wrong answers also in the room.”

Let’s face it, ideation is fun. It’s a taste of freedom away from the constraints of an everyday job, and it can feel pretty exhilarating. And yet an ideation-fest invariably creates an illusion of generating new ideas that’s followed by disappointment when it becomes clear that none are actually being developed.

Someone will always claim they participated in an ideation session that produced an incredible new breakthrough. But even when true, a few examples of success from the multitude of ill-considered sessions conducted annually around the world hardly constitute an impressive track record justifying the time and money invested.

And it gets worse. Not only might an ideation session fail to improve innovation, it can actually impede the process. Many times I’ve witnessed leadership teams leaving these sessions confused by all the additional new product ideas they need to consider.

Does all this mean ideation sessions are worthless? Not when they have the right focus. Ideation sessions that shift the focus away from creating new ideas to capturing all existing ideas, clarifying, and then prioritizing them enables the organization to begin the critically important task of deciding upon the few powerful ideas they need to develop.

When there are many ideas on the table, how do you prioritize?

It’s time to apply what you’ve learned in the past to develop criteria for whether or not to invest in a given idea in the future. Research shows that learning from past mistakes and successes has, by far, the biggest impact on increasing revenue from new products. For instance, perhaps over the years you’ve discovered that for a new product to flourish, a highly influential customer must commit in advance to incorporate it into its own products. So that becomes a primary consideration in deciding which new products to pursue.

The key is implementing a formal and mandatory review of all successful and unsuccessful new products or services to capture everything learned. Then use this to develop and refine explicit criteria that are religiously followed when selecting the ones to develop and launch.

So think twice before holding that next ideation session. By digging a little deeper you’ll realize that the session will likely produce little of value if its focus is mostly on generating new ideas. Instead, focus your innovation efforts on what will pay off in the long run and relentlessly refine an idea until it becomes the equivalent of the next handheld mobile phone.

As You Start Your Career, Focus on People Skills

All across the country, this year’s soon-to-be graduates are revving up to start their careers. You may be one of them. You’re already thinking about what you’ll do when get into your new position. You’re smart and energetic, and you’re eager to commit both of those attributes to moving ahead. But is that enough to succeed? Unfortunately, no.

Brains only take you so far. Smarts get you through the gate, but everyone in your cohort of incoming hires has the hard skills required to qualify for the position. The fact is, the link between merit and success is forged through soft skills — ones you may not be able to attain on your own.

You need a helping hand, someone to show you the ropes, decipher the unwritten codes of conduct, and guide you through the corporate jungle. You need a sponsor, which is different from a mentor. A sponsor serves as your advocate. They open the door to career-changing opportunities, by making important introductions to senior leaders, expanding the perception of what you can offer the organization, and offering powerful backing to help you soar and protection when you stumble.

But most important, a sponsor helps you develop your executive presence, so that when those opportunities arise, you will be perceived as the undoubtedly right candidate. Executive presence is the “it factor,” a heady combination of confidence, poise, and authenticity that convinces the rest of us we’re in the presence of someone who’s going places. It’s an amalgam of qualities that telegraphs that you’re in charge — or deserve to be.

Executive presence is not just a measure of performance: After all, it’s a given that every entry-level hire is ready to work hard and excel — that’s why you all were hired. Rather, executive presence is a measure of image: whether you signal to others that you “have what it takes,” that you’re leadership material.

Research from the Center for Talent Innovation found that executive presence rests on three pillars:

Gravitas. This is the core characteristic, with 67% of the 268 senior executives surveyed saying that gravitas is what really matters to move to a leadership position. More than intellectual horsepower, gravitas is about signaling that you have the confidence and credibility to get your point across and create buy-in when the going gets rough.
Communication. People know you have gravitas because you communicate the authority of a leader through your bearing, speaking skills, and ability to command a room. That’s why 28% of executives surveyed put this attribute at the top of the list of leadership materials.
Appearance. While only 5% of leaders consider appearance key in executive presences, all recognize its power as a critical filter — and its potential for derailing talented up-and-comers.

These three pillars are universal and interrelated. If your communication skills ensure you can command a room, your gravitas grows exponentially; conversely, if your presentation is rambling and your manner timid, your gravitas plummets. And while you may be the smartest guy or gal in the room, no one will pay much attention to what you say if they’re distracted by the coffee stains on your shirt or a neckline gaping down to your navel.

How do you know how people perceive you? Ask your sponsor for feedback. After all, they are in the perfect position to hear the whispered comments or spot the telltale clues that you either hit the mark or missed it.

Make your request for advice timely, specific, and prescriptive. The blanket, “How am I doing?” usually returns a blanket answer (“Fine!”). Better to laser in on a recent encounter that required considerable executive presence — a meeting with a leader in the firm or a presentation to a group of clients — and request an assessment on your body language, speech and delivery, attire, or command of the room.

Of course, not every sponsor is an ace at giving clear feedback. If you don’t understand, it’s up to you to clarify the confusion. Ask, “How is what I’m doing getting in the way of my job?” Continue to ask questions like these until you can identify specific steps to improve the way you’re presenting yourself.

Then, demonstrate that you will act on the feedback you’ve been given. Unless you show that you’re willing to course-correct, your sponsor might conclude that you’re not worth the time and energy it takes to impart feedback in the first place. That could mean something as obvious as ditching the graduate student wardrobe for a polished, mature look. A common communications improvement is learning to distill a rambling presentation style into three succinct bullet points. Because gravitas is an amalgam of knowledge and confidence in that knowledge, one way to enhance it is to immerse yourself in a particular subject so that you stand out for your expertise.

The good news is, nobody’s perfect — especially when you’re starting out. It’s within your power to do something about it. If you’re able to find the right support and crack the code of executive presence, you’ll be first in line for the next plum assignment and set your career off on the right foot.

This is the fourth post in a blog series on using mentorship to advance your career. Sylvia Ann Hewlett is a contributor to the HBR Guide to Getting the Mentoring You Need.

Read the other posts here:

Post #1: Three Questions to Advance Your Career

Post #2: Engage a Mentor with a Short-Term Project

Post #3: Find the Right Mentor During a Career Transition

If Customers Knew How You Use Their Data, Would They Call It Creepy?

There is so much promise in what data can do, opening up opportunities for optimization and uncovering insights from correlations. There is more data coming from more places everyday, and every sector of the economy is becoming increasingly data-driven. But while data is flowing in novel ways, for most consumers it’s all hidden in a big data black box.

As the public becomes more distrusting of data practices with each Snowden dispatch, how do you take advantage of the opportunities offered by data without alienating consumers? There are two keys for using data to gain a competitive advantage while minimizing the risk of consumer backlash: transparency and dialogue.

Individuals don’t have the access or tools to build a complete understanding of where our data goes, how it is used, and how it impacts our lives. Savvy consumers might try to reverse engineer behavioral patterns that could explain why an ad follows us around on the web. But these are guesses, at best. The causal relationships between our actions, our data, and its far-reaching effects remain obscure. So we don’t know who to trust, and we have no way of holding all the players in the data ecosystem accountable.

Firms looking to stay ahead of privacy concerns should be forthright about how consumer data is being used and what value is being created — for the firm, for the customer, and for third parties. Most companies already say that they are all about their customers, but inherent power asymmetries mean consumers need better assurances and convincing proof.

As the number of uses for data continues to grow, more and more of these uses have the potential to raise consumers’ ethical and normative hackles. For example, data brokers are reselling browser behaviors as proxies for race and socioeconomic status, serving as inputs for discriminatory and predatory loans.

Firms have a competitive interest in clarifying their role in what is a messy and poorly defined ecosystem. Even data brokers are starting to acknowledge the need to foster a discussion about the ethical uses of data. Consumers and firms are bound to have different ideas of what constitutes reasonable uses of data. One way to maintain customer trust is to be honest about those differences and then engage consumers in conversations about data tradeoffs. If you don’t get in front of these questions on your terms, you can be sure consumers will adjust their preferences or consumer protection regulation will force the issue.

So how do you get your data story straight so that your employees and your consumers know where you stand? Instead of talking about how you could use data, start talking about how you should use data, taking customers’ potential reaction to those uses into account. It’s not always possible to know how consumers will react, but here are four guidelines to consider:

Gut check your data uses. If consumers knew how you were using data, would they cringe? It is a deceptively simple exercise, but it’s a good start for testing norms.

Provide value to consumers. Data uses should not just affect the bottom line. As consumers, we’re making tradeoffs with our data; for example, we sometimes reveal our purchasing habits in exchange for loyalty rewards. Explicitly acknowledge this exchange of value and make it real for consumers.

Tell stories that make data uses concrete. When we talk at the scale of big data, we lose sight of the individuals affected by those data-driven decisions. There’s a reason the Target pregnancy story is so compelling—it exposes the data use practices of the company while illustrating the real effects felt by one family. But it’s better If you are able to tell stories about how individuals benefit from the positive impacts of your data practices.

Open a dialogue about norms. Your personal appetite for acceptable uses of data is probably different from your neighbor’s. Cultural norms don’t develop in a vacuum; they exist between people with varied interests. So talk to your customers about their expectations. This goes beyond privacy policies. Develop a human-readable values statement that reflects your company’s norms about how data should be used. “Don’t be evil” doesn’t cut it.

As a society, we’re in the middle of figuring out how data can and should be used. It’s an ongoing process, and one that is best done out in the open. Firms that get their data story straight, consider consumer reactions, and engage consumers to get buy-in will be best positioned to succeed in a data-driven future.

Decreased Congestion in Beijing Undermines Air-Pollution Efforts

Beijing’s recent attempt to reduce air pollution by requiring drivers to take their cars off the road one day a week has had the effect of reducing congestion and raising speeds, which has led to increases in emissions of particulates, according to a team led by Cong Sun of Tsinghua University in China. As a consequence, there has been little or even a negative impact on air quality, which may help explain why Beijing has faced increasingly serious air pollution since imposing the one-day-a-week driving restrictions, the researchers say.

How to Execute a 15-Word Strategy Statement

There is no shortage of stories and anecdotes to illustrate how the best strategies can nearly always be reduced down to a brief but powerful statement and even more ink has been spilled describing the dangers of strategy statements that read like detailed action plans.

But how do you go about actually crafting — and using — a 15-word strategy statement?

My approach is based on narrative techniques. I begin by working with clients to write a story based on this template:

Once upon a time there was (insert a name who exemplifies your target customer/consumer) …. . Every day he/she (insert here his/her frustration or job to be done) …. . One day we developed (insert here the product/solution and what are actually the 2-3 things we offer or not) … . Until finally (insert here the end result for the customer/consumer compared to competition) … .

A few years ago, I facilitated a strategic innovation workshop for a swimwear manufacturer. We were trying to put together a value proposition for very occasional swimmers who don’t like to practice the sport in a pool, and whose water experience is essentially little more than paddling in the sea or sitting in a small private pool.

We started by watching videos of these swimmers, from smartphone footage taken by sales people visiting public pools around the world that had then been posted on an internal collaboration platform, along with observations from the people taking the shots about what the swimmers seemed to find most difficult.

The workshop participants clustered the individual swimmers’ pain points into a number of categories, which they ranked along two metrics. The first metric was a product of the degree of the pain and how many swimmers experienced it and the second was a measure of actionability: could a new product or service feature resolve the problem?

With this information we designed a value proposition together, using the Blue Ocean Strategy canvas approach, on which value propositions can be compared in terms of their features. The canvas had two lines, one for the company’s proposition and one for the industry standard, so that we could see how we would differ from the competition.

With a better understanding of the pain-points of the targeted occasional swimmers and the kind of value proposition that could tempt them into the water, the workshop participants were able to build a storyline. They came up with the following narrative:

“Once upon a time there was a woman called Rosemary, who had learned and practiced only the basic swimming techniques to float and make short moves in the water. Every single time she visited a pool, she felt unease due to a perception of breathing water risk, immediate physical fatigue due to incorrect stroke movements and inconvenience related to the pool check in and out process. One day, our company developed a set of products and services that offered Rosemary all she needed to enjoy her pool experience. Finally, someone had brought joy to Rosemary’s pool experience and she moved from the gym to the water for her winter exercise.

Once we reached agreement on the strategy story, we were then able to distill from it a 15-word statement that identified the job the company had to do and for whom: “We aim to bring joy to the pool experience cycle of every swimmer, nobody excluded.”

Guided by this statement the company designed and developed a number of add-on product features, including most notably a pair of plastic fins that could be fixed on to most goggles to facilitate breathing, a big problem for most beginners.  The plastic fins make it easier to breathe into the air pocket by the swimmer’s head by enhancing the bow wave from the head, thus protecting the swimmer’s mouth and nose from splashes and water drops. Because the swimmer struggles less to breathe, she can concentrate on her stroke and swim better, and generally have a more comfortable pool experience.

The narrative exercise of creating a clear strategy statement had helped the workshop understand what kind of value proposition the company needed to create in order to attract a new class of customers and resulted in a clear strategy statement that both coordinated people internally and positioned the company attractively in the market.

The Big Question for E-Cigarettes: Replacement for Tobacco, or New Market?

The supposed benefits of e-cigarettes are front and center today, with news that the FDA will propose new rules for regulating the devices. At stake is the future of an industry already generating $2 billion in revenue in the U.S., and expected to grow dramatically, perhaps even outstripping the market for traditional cigarettes. But is this new market a replacement for the existing cigarette market, or is it creating new demand? The former would likely mean a substantial improvement in public health; the latter would mean a steep increase in nicotine addiction.

“The regulators face a conundrum,” according to John Quelch, a professor at Harvard Business School and at the Harvard School of Public Health, and author of a recent HBS case study on e-cigarettes. “On the one hand, the e-cigarette does represent a waypoint for a smoker to be able to potentially quit. That’s the plus side. The minus side is that the e-cigarette may draw into nicotine usage an entire array of new users.”

So far, the growing popularity of e-cigarettes has mostly been among current and former smokers, as the case study documents. To date, e-cigarettes seem to be replacing an existing market more than creating a new one, although there is no guarantee that this will continue.

What worries public health experts is the third bar: by 2011, just under 2 million U.S. adults who never smoked tobacco had tried e-cigarettes. More worrying still, nearly 7% of U.S. high school students had tried e-cigarettes in 2011-2012, and 2% were current e-cigarette smokers. While the majority of current e-cigarette smokers in the group were also tobacco smokers, the vast majority of those students who tried e-cigarettes were not. It’s impossible to say for sure how many of these non-smokers who try e-cigarettes will end up taking up the habit. Worse still is the possibility that e-cigarettes might be a gateway into tobacco smoking.

While research into e-cigarette use is limited to date, the case authors attempted to estimate the net impact of e-cigarettes on tobacco smoking. As the chart below illustrates, they believe that an uptake in tobacco smoking by those who try e-cigarettes is mitigating the decline of the tobacco cigarette market.

Sales of tobacco cigarettes have been falling in the U.S. for some time, declining 27% between 2000 and 2011. But if some users who try e-cigarettes will end up switching to tobacco as the case suggests, e-cigarettes’ ability to accelerate that decline will be partially offset. Quelch, says that increased regulation of e-cigarettes could also have the perverse effect of slowing the decline of tobacco cigarette sales.

“If you have the e-cigarette industry regulated the same way as tobacco, then basically all marketing is shut down,” he told me. “New entrants in the e-cigarette industry can no longer easily establish their brands.” Tobacco companies’ control of the e-cigarette market — made possible by a series of acquisitions starting in 2012 — “enables them to control the price of the product,” said Quelch. “Through controlling the price and distribution of the product they can then control or influence heavily the migration speed of tobacco users to e-cigarette usage.” Without much competition they can keep e-cigarette prices high to discourage tobacco smokers from switching.

The regulations announced this week are modest, prohibiting e-cigarette sales to minors and subjecting the product to FDA review. Advertising of e-cigarettes remain legal, as do flavors like grape and bubblegum that seem aimed beyond current smokers. For now, at least, it is perfectly legal to target e-cigarettes to an entirely new market.

Why Corporate Social Responsibility Doesn’t Work

Six Big ReasonsWhy Corporations Fail to Do the Right ThingThe Atlantic

Christine Bader, whose job at BP was to "assess and mitigate the social and human rights risks to communities living near major BP projects," was not able to help prevent the Deepwater Horizon disaster or the 2005 BP refinery explosion in Texas City. This despite doing important work for a company that seemed committed to social responsibility. In her quest to figure out why good corporate intentions don't prevent tragedies, Bader uncovered six themes that get in the way of making progress. Among them: People lie. No one gets rewarded for disasters averted. Customers won't pay more. And no one really knows what corporate responsibility actually is. Bader points out that we all have a role to play in making things better: The general public must "recognize the real costs of safety and sustainability," and companies have to "bear witness to their impacts, improve internal communication, reduce incentives to lie, and reward prevention.”

Hell Is a Start-UpNo ExitWired

Guess what? Running a start-up isn't the booze-soaked, foosball-fueled Silicon Valley dreamscape some would have you imagine. This measured, deeply reported piece by Gideon Lewis-Kraus tracks two entrepreneurs (disclosure: I went to high school with one of them) as they work feverishly to save their young company. Or, to put it more bluntly, "They had a month to raise $1 million or they would no longer be able to make payroll." Lewis-Kraus is with these founders as they attempt to make this happen. He also spends time in a hacker house with fresh SV recruits; he paid "$1,250 for a mattress on the floor, behind a panel of imbricated torn shower curtains, in an unheated rabbit warren of 20 bunk beds under a low converted-warehouse ceiling." It's an important look into what it's really like to try and "kill it" in a world that "is not a place where one is invited to show frailty or despondence."

The Mating DanceRisk and the Unmarried CEO Knowledge@Wharton

Why, exactly, is the CEO of your company embarking on that daring capital expenditure that's got analysts shaking their heads? Is it all about a unique vision of the company's potential? Or something more personal? If the chief executive is unmarried, maybe he (or she) is just trying to attract a mate. Nikolai Roussanov of Wharton and Pavel G. Savor of Temple found that firms led by single CEOs engage in much more aggressive investment behavior, in terms of capex, innovation activity, R&D, and acquisitions, than companies led by married chief executives. The potential for an increase in personal wealth may be a factor – "single individuals are clearly competing for potential mates with other single individuals," and socioeconomic status is a major attractor. It's also possible that single CEOs are generally less risk averse because they don’t have families to worry about. The same kinds of dynamics probably play out among lower-level managers too, Roussanov says in this Wharton video. –Andy O'Connell

The Productivity Police The Secret History of Life-Hacking Pacific Standard

Ever wonder why "life hacking" is such a thing, why people get so excited about little ideas for how to be happier and more productive at work? Ideas such as tracking your sleep habits with motion-sensing apps and calculating your perfect personal bedtime? Nikil Saval writes on Pacific Standard that life hacking's popularity says something about How We Live Today – it wouldn’t be popular if it didn’t "tap into something deeply corroded about the way work has, without much resistance, managed to invade every corner of our lives." What life hackers don’t realize, he says, is that there's something dehumanizing about life hacking itself. It turns every aspect of daily existence into a task to be managed: "Rather than putting people in greater control of their lives, it puts them into the service of a stratum of faceless managers, in the form of apps, self-administered charts tracking the minutiae of eating habits and sleep cycles, and the books and buzzwords of gurus." What we've really done is internalize Frederick Winslow Taylor's century-old concept of scientific management for factory workers. We have become our own productivity police. –Andy O'Connell

Buy Me Some Peanuts and Very Few SuperstarsJohn Henry and the Making of a Red Sox Baseball DynastyBusinessweek

I would be remiss if I didn’t include this feature by Joshua Green on HBR's hometown heroes. Yet the things that made the Red Sox so memorable on their path to World Series victory – "their team chemistry, their beards, and the emotional bond they forged with the city in the wake of the marathon bombing" – were in fact the last things on owner John Henry's mind when orchestrating the team. "It was the ability to ignore sentiment that paved the way for their success," Green writes. He explores Henry's methodical and mathematical talent strategy, which relies on impermanence (few long-term contracts for team veterans); young, cheap talent ("it's not expensive players, but inexpensive ones, who are becoming baseball's prized commodity"); and players who can just plain get on base. If you're game for a read that combines all of this, plus commodities futures trading and the phrase "he looked like the Angel of Death," look no further.

BONUS BITSHappy Birthday?

Twenty Years of Spam (Cloudmark)
The First Unit Is Expensive: Wu-Tang Clan Edition (Digitopoly)
The Biggest Contributor to Brand Growth (Bain Insights)

A Tool That Maps Out Cultural Differences

Understanding cultural differences isn’t easy, even when you’ve lived in many different countries (disclosure: I’m a Brit, grew up in Southeast Asia, lived and worked in Switzerland and the US, and now live and work in France). Just when you think you’ve got a culture nailed, something happens that your mental model hasn’t predicted.

Americans, world-famous for candor and directness, struggle when it comes to giving tough feedback, even when it’s needed. The French, on the other hand, who are famous for their insistence on good manners (just feel the vibe when you forget to say bonjour to your boulanger), revel in their harsh critiques. Paradoxes like this crop up all the time, and obviously they’re a good source of anecdotes. But in a business world that increasingly relies on culturally mixed workforces and teams, they’re also recipes for failure.

Erin Meyer, an American (from Minnesota) in Paris who coaches executives in managing cross-cultural career moves and teaches at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, has a theory about these malentendus. The problem, she argues, is that most people tend to emphasize just one or two, at most three, dimensions of cultural difference when it comes to parsing and predicting foreigners’ behavior.

But cultures differ along many more than three dimensions, so the more dimensions you consider, the less likely you are to trip up on a cultural paradox — you’ll be able to tell that incoming French manager to tone down critiques of his American subordinates before he upsets them.

The trouble, of course, is that it’s cognitively difficult for us to keep more than three dimensions of comparison in our head at once. What’s more, we tend to lose sight of the fact that relative, not absolute differences, are what matters. Most cultures would find the Brazilians to be very relaxed about punctuality, for instance, but Brazilians themselves tend to struggle to adapt to Indians’ even more casual notions of time.

So Meyer developed a tool to help us better navigate the cultural minefield more systematically. She identified eight dimensions that, in her experience and from research, seem to capture most of the likely differences between cultures, and she rated a large sample of countries on these dimensions. You can see below how certain country pairs differ along these eight dimensions — and where the problems with each pair are most likely to occur and what you might do to mitigate them.

View a larger version of the interactive here. 

Marketers Need to Think More Like Publishers

In 2010, Pepsi pulled its Super Bowl ads and invested $20 million into its Refresh project, which employed crowdsourcing to support good causes. It was an astounding social media success, with more than 87 million votes cast.

Unfortunately, as this Harvard Business School case study points out, it was an abysmal business failure and Pepsi eventually fell to third place in the soda category, behind Diet Coke. For all of the hype and hoopla on social media, sales suffered dearly.

Pepsi’s ambitions were far from unusual. Research by the Content Marketing Institute estimates that 90% of consumer marketers are investing in content. Unfortunately, most of those efforts will fail. In order to succeed, marketers will have to learn to think like publishers. That will mean more than a change in tactics or even strategy, but a starkly different perspective. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Define the mission. All great publications have missions. Helen Gurley Brown sought to make every girl feel that she can be beautiful and confident. That’s Cosmopolitan’s mission. Henry Luce sought to create a better-informed public and Time magazine embodies his vision even today. Vogue is a fashion bible because Anna Wintour believes a stylish world is a better place.

Marketers need to take the same approach. Nobody is going to believe that the CEO of Pepsi wakes up in the morning thinking about how she can build better after-school programs and bike trails, which is why Pepsi Refresh didn’t resonate. Others, like American Express Open Forum succeed because they are in line with the brand’s mission.

Coke has taken an interesting approach with its sustainability initiative. Water quality and energy efficiency are important to Coke’s business and it has built up considerable expertise in that area. People who have an interest in the issue appreciate the company sharing it and if they can get an occasional coupon in the process, so much the better.

Most content marketers start with implementation ideas, such as social media or a video. That would be like John F. Kennedy proposing his man-to-the-moon idea by focusing on rocket technology, rather than America’s aspirations for the space age.

Start by figuring out what you have to offer the world. Most companies usually actually do have quite a bit to offer, but get bogged down because they haven’t identified their mission.

2. Identify analogues. Marketers like to cut through the clutter and get noticed. They focus on “unique selling propositions” and want their marketing messages to be distinctive. By looking, sounding, and feeling different, they hope to grab the consumer’s attention.

But marketing in the digital age is less about grabbing attention and more about holding attention. That goes double for publishing. You need to create an easy-to-navigate experience that will make consumers want to come back. The best way to do that is by adopting familiar conventions.

That’s why content development should always start with between three and five analogue products. You need to ask key questions like: Who’s done this before? How did they do it? What can we add? What can we subtract? For example, if a cosmetics brand wanted to publish content, would their reference be Cosmo, a Sephora store, or Sex and the City?  

Starting with analogues is the best way to get everybody on the same page and define what you want to achieve. From there, you can find your own voice.

3. Identify your structures. Possibly the most important — and certainly the most overlooked aspect of content creation — is structure. Every content discipline has its own rules and every content product is defined by the rules it chooses to break.

Magazines have clearly defined “brand bibles” that designate flatplan, voice, and pacing. Radio stations run on clocks. TV shows have clearly defined story structures and character arcs. The rules not only set audience expectations and make content easier to take in and enjoy, but form the crucial constraints in which creativity can thrive.

So when marketers approach publishing, they must go beyond the usual advertising conventions of target and message.  Instead, they must think seriously about the format in which information will be presented.  You may not need the detailed brand bible of an established publication — which can run up to 100 pages — but you have to start somewhere.

Every great publishing product combines consistency and surprise, so it’s okay to break some rules now and again, but you have to first establish what the rules are.

4. Create a true value exchange. It used to be that awareness could drive sales. If you spent lots of money on TV, you could be sure that consumers would know your brand and be more likely to buy your product. But today, brand awareness is less likely to result in a trip to the store and more likely to lead to searching behavior online, where your competitors can retarget your consumers.

That’s why it has become so important to build a relationship with consumers. Publishing can be a great way to build unique bonds, but there has to be a true value exchange rather than just a promotion. Gimmicks won’t work. You need to build trust and credibility through content that makes an impact because it informs, excites, and inspires. The Michelin Guides, which started out as basic handbooks for road-weary travelers (presumably traveling on their Michelin tires) are the classic example. A more modern example is Mailchimp, the email marketing service, which sends tutorials on how to get the most out of its product after you sign up. 

Most of all, great publishers lead. People like Helen Gurley Brown, Henry Luce, and Anna Wintour created legendary brands by driving trends, not following them. They do not seek to merely join the conversation, but to lead it. If you expect people to listen to you, it’s best to have something meaningful to say.

If marketers are ever going to be successful at content, the first step is to start thinking more like publishers.

Midsized Companies Can’t Afford Operational Glitches

Many midsized companies dream of joining the Fortune 500 someday or of becoming the next General Electric, Microsoft, or Amazon. But they don’t think nearly enough about operational meltdowns – technological glitches and other problems that can put them out of business. As a result, most are singularly unprepared to deal with them.

This lack of adaptability is not a problem in most small companies. They are usually quick to recognize operational problems and deal with them before they become disasters. If they don’t, they could go out of business overnight. Take Instagram, the San Francisco-based social media company. In October 2010, when its founders launched their website to the world, 25,000 web viewers overwhelmed the site. Instagram’s founders called their Stanford University friends, and the entire group worked 24 hours around the clock to keep the servers from crashing, transferring their traffic to Amazon’s servers. A month later, the site could handle a million simultaneous users. Instagram dodged an operational meltdown that could have rendered the start-up dead on arrival.

Operational meltdowns at midsized companies can take much longer to notice and resolve. Firms in this segment have many more “moving parts” than start-up companies – systems connected to other systems, more layers of management through which bad news in the field must travel, etc. Unlike much larger companies, midsized firms usually lack deep operational and technological talent who can quickly recognize, understand, and resolve huge systems glitches. All these factors underline the point: Midsized companies are often the most likely to be brought down by operational meltdowns.

From my research, consulting experience, and more than 20 years as CEO of a midsized firm (in the decorative art publishing industry), I have found four signs that signal when an operational meltdown is probable in a midsized company:

An overbearing sales culture. In midsized companies, no order is ever too unreasonable to fulfill. But this creates havoc for their production and distribution functions. They don’t have the budgets of Fortune 500 companies, which can customize products and delivery for each customer who requests special treatment. Here’s what happened at a midsized company that was founded and led by a salesman. As his firm grew, he undervalued and underpaid the executives who ran the supply chain and finance departments. That, of course, meant he did not have highly competent executives running these functions. That led to a high number of errant shipments and to customers not paying their invoices according to the terms of payment, often because they weren’t getting the correct shipments on time. Meanwhile, his cherished salespeople said yes to just about every customer demand (following the CEO’s credo), which exacerbated the erroneous shipments problem. Customers delayed payment for months, which eventually helped force the firm into bankruptcy. To counterbalance an overbearing sales culture, midsized firms need an executive who loves operations, heart and soul, and hates risk and sloppiness. The CEO must shift the culture toward one that prizes execution just as much as sales.

An outdated IT or physical infrastructure. Midsized companies are often starved for capital to renew their infrastructure. Capital investments typically focus on items that move the top line: R&D funding, sales force automation systems, and the like. Certainly, operational and IT infrastructure spending does drain the bottom line, but if a midsized firm doesn’t make the right investments when they are necessary, the top line eventually erodes. The best midsized companies avoid this by shifting their annual budgeting cycle to quarterly or semiannually. The shorter time frame forces functional heads to predict their short-term needs and gives them a better chance of filling them. Equally important, such companies gently deny customer requests to which their operations can’t respond. Dave’s Killer Bread is a case in point. As a $3 million baker in Milwaukie, OR, the firm had already outgrown the capacity of its 15,000-square-foot bakery by 2006. Then Costco came knocking on Dave’s doors to supply its warehouse clubs, but Dave’s had to turn the giant retailer down. It couldn’t handle Costco’s demand without a huge investment in a new bakery. Later that year, Dave’s got $2.1 million in financing for a new 50,000-square-foot bakery, which opened in 2008. After waiting patiently, Costco became a customer, and by 2011, Dave’s sales rocketed to $50 million.

A shortage of key skills. The inability to find, develop, and keep key people during periods of rapid growth triggers many an operational breakdown. The skills that midsized companies need today – which weren’t necessary when they began life – expand rapidly, requiring subject matter experts in niches that small firms don’t need and big firms already have in place. Imagine a firm with 120 people at the beginning of the year that needs to design positions, hire, and onboard 80 new people in one year. Most firms with 120 people don’t have much of an HR function in place. Bringing in many people with critical new skills is too difficult to manage for the average functional head in a midsized company. The best midsized companies delegate recruitment and training to the HR function (which may need to be built up), which allows functional heads to focus on their daily activities.

An overreliance on a few big customers. The CEOs of midsized firms are often reluctant to commit major funding to any operational or IT infrastructure item that isn’t immediately necessary to keep their key customers’ business. But if accounting, manufacturing, and distribution systems are woefully inadequate, the shortcomings catch up to the company at some point – particularly if it lands one more big customer. Although it feels risky (and it is), building operations infrastructure can be a key differentiator. Midsized firms often lack up-to-date infrastructure and small firms usually don’t have it. It increases the likelihood of keeping big customers and qualifying for many more of them. Ultimately, the best way to reduce customer concentration is to get several other large customers.

Midsized companies which successfully avoid operational meltdowns make it their practice to divert money and attention away from activities focused on the top line (especially sales and marketing) and toward operations that deliver on the promises made to existing customers: production, distribution, customer service, and IT. Such companies as Dave’s Killer Bread resist the urge to say “yes” to new business that will severely tax the existing infrastructure, no matter how big the top-line potential.