We’re in maintenance mode here, switching over entries from a previous WordPress app to the spanking new Daily Brand forum. So some of the archives from back to mid-2006 and particularly all of the most recent postings for 2007 (aside from one February post here on Tut) are not in the system yet, but will be over the next week or so. Please check back soon. Thanks!

Posted by: Colin Mangham

Today, with a concomitant decrease in consumer trust of marketing messages and an increase in social networking due to technologies including the Internet and mobile phones, word-of-mouth (WOM) communication has become a highly valuable conduit for influencing consumer behavior. If we pause to think about the topics of our day-to-day conversations, most of us quickly recognize that many are product-related, even if not brand specific. Examples include references to how good (or bad) we look in certain clothes, where we recommend as a great place to eat, or why we had a bad experience in the teller line at the bank, etc.

Fact is, for better or worse (depending on your level of love or disdain for marketing), WOM communications are, in many cases, the results of branding and marketing efforts to seed those dialogs. Marketers today are embracing more holistic strategies, utilizing WOM and other tactics as economical and, in many cases, more effective approaches than conventional tactics (e.g., advertising) for engaging consumers.

These communications are often lifestyle-oriented, including tie-ins to trends in social responsibility, as is evident with the many green/eco-friendly campaigns (and viral emails) of late from not just companies but also non-profits including charities and social/environmental activists. This is a reminder that marketing is not just a tool for profit, but for communicating needs, attributes and benefits in any exchange of value.

Posted by: Colin Mangham

No doubt about it the value system of my GenX significantly differs from that of the Baby Boomers before us. The GenX cohort tends to be more independent, self-sufficient and self-motivated, as opposed to the Boomers who display a more diligent work ethic and favor stability and loyalty to their employers.

GenXers have also broken from the sequential order of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that the Boomers followed so diligently, along the lines of education, career, marriage and promotion in sequence. In contrast, GenX has a need for self-achievement, yes, but endeavors not to let job responsibilities compromise general quality of life, whereas the Boomers would follow the path of work hard, play later (albeit after you get that Big Promotion).

That is not to say that GenX doesn’t have “Boomer Envy,” which Douglas Coupland defined as an envy of material wealth and long-range material security accrued by the older set of the boomer generation. But they also demonstrate an unwillingness to seriously ‘work’ for any of that. Mainly, my generational cohort focuses less on the ‘job’ itself and more on job satisfaction and life outside the job in terms of leisure activities, family, lifestyles and other interests.

Posted by: Colin Mangham

Though there isn’t one single way to divide people into age cohorts for the purpose of citing behavioral and attitudinal commonalities among consumers within a defined time period, the most commonly referenced are the major categories of Baby Boomers, Generation X and Generation Y.

I was born in 1967 – ah, yes, 40 years ago today – which puts me in the Generation X cohort of people born between 1965 and 1980. Many people point to author Douglas Coupland as having coined the moniker “GenX” in his book of the same title, but it was also the name of musician Billy Idol’s punk band in the early ‘80s. This is important to note because ours was a generation profoundly shaped by the launch of MTV and the proliferation of music videos.

Never before had there been such a powerful combination of sight and sound to tell us what to wear and do – even who to ‘be’ to be cool. The ‘beautiful people’ cluttered the screen on MTV, riding subways, dancing in the twilight, dressed in tuxedoes shooting (poison) arrows. It was all about fashion, and took our consumerism to the next level as, arguably for the first time, product placement took center stage.

Posted by: Colin Mangham

Another key to empowering people is clearly defining what they are meant to do, what they should hope and, perhaps, expect to achieve. This is especially important when the employee is working within a staff of other service providers, as it helps to gain synergies from goal congruency across the team. The resulting cohesiveness can help to empower them to “pull their own weight,” a powerful motivator for many people, as well as ride a wave of camaraderie moving toward the same or similar goals.

Furthermore, service providers can ensure positive results, as Randy Pennington presents it in “Results Rule,” when there is “a set of organizational beliefs, assumptions, and values supporting a commitment to results, relationships both externally and internally, and accountability … mutual respect, cooperation, and a high degree of trust between individuals and their managers, teams and departments … [and] alignment of individual, team and departmental performance with the organization’s strategic business objectives.”

Posted by: Colin Mangham

Flashback. Beginning June 16 last year, more than 130 treasures from the tomb of the famous boy King Tut and other Valley of the Kings tombs and additional ancient sites [were] on display at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) for five months. According to The Art Newspaper, by early September, 600,000 tickets had sold, and total attendance was projected to approach one million, placing the exhibition second in overall attendance only to the 1.2 million attracted by the 1979 show.

LACMA did an excellent job of addressing all five of the strategies above by managing reservations and crowds through the support of its partners: AEG finances the show, AEI manages production and some of the logistics of the tour, and National Geographic produces related books and films. LACMA members were able to be first in the queue to choose not only the date they would like to attend, but also the time. The latter is not typically an option and, in fact, it was a stringent requirement to address number 3 above. The museum took reservations several weeks in advance to fill the calendar dates as well as time slots each day. This way they were able to manage the demand by spreading out the attendance more evenly over the course of a day.

To further optimize queuing beyond the initial entry point, they disallowed back tracking within the venue and metered out optimally sized groups that could spend only a certain amount of time (e.g., 20 minutes) in each exhibit room. Most people I spoke with agreed that it helped enhance their experience as it regulated the number of people crowding each artifact. Which is important to note with respect to the museum staff given last week’s labor strike at the Louvre, where, as described by Digital Journal, “There can sometimes be 65,000 visitors on one day. No wonder they are stressed … they are constantly telling people, no flash photography, who don’t listen. The crowds get larger, but the staff does not.”

Posted by: Colin Mangham

Looking back at this week’s posts, I should mention that I have no regrets. It was a time and a place. Plus, I like a steep learning curve and this was at a point in my career when I was particularly keen on strengthening my skills and expanding my network, so this was all very interesting to me and great frontline experience to help me better collaborate with a lot of my fellow entrepreneur clients today.

I also think a lot of our team felt the same way. We were all relatively young, motivated for all the reasons stated in my last post. We were also a very cohesive group — I suppose partly due to the fireworks going off all around us. We enjoyed each other’s company, and usually did not mind working long and late hours. So the social interaction did support job satisfaction. That level of cohesiveness is what many companies are striving to achieve under the umbrella of employer brands and internal branding. But it’s certainly a steeper and slipperier slope today when the external lift of a veritable Gold Rush isn’t fueling the engine.

Posted by: Colin Mangham

It’s funny to look back in a Monday morning armchair quarterback sort of way. If you were to sit in on any of our meetings or take a stroll through our offices in that dotcom you would have thought we were maxing on productivity, all pistons firing. Everyone was fully engaged, working hard and all hours. However, much of this was only transitioning.

Lewin’s View of the Change Process cites three Phases. Phase 1 is “Unfreezing” (recognizing the need for change), Phase 2 is “Changing” (the actual transformation) and Phase 3 is “Refreezing” (results assessment and needed modifications). This all happened so fast that Phase 1 was a week or two start-to-finish, and we never really got out of Phase 2 before ultimately the Chairman opted to shut down the company only a couple of months into the transition.

Change is difficult, costly and, no doubt about, most of us are naturally change resistant. On top of that, organizational change is not always considered by constituents as “for the better” and personally satisfying. This is the case in a majority of the M&A deals we consult on at Daily. Still, somehow, most of us who still had our jobs believed the change was necessary, “for the better,” and we were motivated, at least as far as I can figure in hindsight, by three key factors:

1. Job Security – we had just seen half of the staff fired. The fact that those of us who remained still had jobs was a relief, especially as jobs were also drying up. Many of us had also left more conservative jobs for the New Frontier, and those former employers who did not “make the leap” were not all keen on hiring us back.
2. Trailblazing – what got us into the dotcom madness was also what kept us excited at this point … we really were finding new ways to use technology, especially with the promise of this new business model, and that was exciting.
3. Upside – the other thing that prompted many of us to leave our comfortable desk jobs was the potential to make a lot of money off our stock options in the fabled IPO. I still have a document with 40,000 shares of stock that are worth less than the paper it’s printed on. I know I’m not far form alone in this particular Purple Heart. Anyone want to form a support group?

Posted by: Colin Mangham

Most organizational changes are designed not to so much to transform the organization but to modify it in hopes of fixing its problems. After the company-wide strategic change was implemented, we had too many people whose skills and experience were no longer applicable to the business model. And even then we saw the writing on the wall and recognized that it faced a high improbability that it would actually get funded.

Remember all the new acronyms the dotcom vernacular spawned, including B2B and B2C? Well, we switched from a consumer-centric model to a business-to-business model focused on the development and implementation of tech-based channel distribution solutions for the apparel industry. Basically, we would shift from a B2C e-commerce engine and website to a supply chain support technologies provider for the same industry, but with support all the way through to the bricks-and-mortar retailers. In acronyms, it was now B2B2C.

In his master’s text exploring organizational behavior, Robert Vecchio states that “norms are the expectations for the behavior of the organization’s members, while values are preferences among activities and outcomes.” One of our leaders was the founder and Chairman, the other was the CEO he hired. They seemed to be aligned in views of the opportunity and what needed to be done, and I believe they communicated their values well.

I still hold respect for their positions and approach, although back then I wished I had known more about the company’s fate to be able to prepare my parachute (albeit decidedly not “golden”). The Chairman communicated his values through his actions, with nearly a million bucks of his own money into the venture. The CEO’s approach was more paternal, in a been-there-done-that sort of way, and he was a consummate storyteller, keeping us calm (if not wholly distracted) with his abilities to conjure up cheers and bear hugs in the locker room when we’re losing 65-0 at halftime.

However, what “norms” we had established were mostly no longer applicable — we were too young a company, only about seven months old, when the major shift occurred. You can imagine the underlying tension.

To be continued….

Posted by: Colin Mangham

*i.e., the pressure to change

In the spring of 2000, iWear Corporation, the short-lived but well staffed dotcom company I was working with (and that ultimately gave rise to my current company, The Daily Brand Group), dramatically changed its business model from e-commerce to supply chain management technologies. In basic terms, organizations tend to change primarily in response to external pressure rather than an actual internal desire or need to change. Ours was very much a case of external pressure. Everyone reading this remembers where they were and what they were doing when the dotcom boom spiraled downward to bust. When grossly over-inflated company valuations finally caught up to the stock market, the bottom fell out, and unfortunately the venture firms we were counting on to capitalize our dream scurried from sight.

We actually did well for a while, raising approximately $3.5 million and signing deals with 35 of the top 40 men’s apparel retailers before management began laying off people in all three offices. But we had what Keith Yamashita and Sandra Spataro (authors of “Unstuck”, a current favorite) identified as an “off-kilter” company with respect to organizational systems that are “stuck” and “out of balance”. We were a company that was high performing at the time but caught in a seismic shift in our industry. Our system was “aligned but aimed at the wrong task.”

For a Daily Story on this “Cradle to Grave” click here.

To be continued….

Posted by: Colin Mangham