Tedded - Business Book Review

“There’s another bubble hiding in our economy”

“The Brand Bubble” by John Gerzema and Ed Lebar is to remind and warn everyone that the current economy crisis might not be the last one in present days. Brands, around the world, have been inflated perceptually and financially. With the new era of technology, customers are surrounded with blogs, news, reviews, discussions, recommendations, and they are within an arm reach; this is the so-called ConsumerLand by the authors. Big brands are not invincible anymore. Brands that survive, thrive, and flourish need “energy”. This book tells you the meaning and importance of “energy” and how can you foster it.

Contents

Part 1: Introduction

Chapter 1: Tulipmania and Inflated Brands

The first chapter tells you the current state of brands and how they were inflated mainly by the hands of Wall Street. Brands are less trusted, less liked, less salient, and more often perceived as low quality but the value of the brands, or the intangible assets of the company measured by the stock market, is still on the way up.

Chapter 2: Can You Say “Irresistable”?

The authors state that the new dimension that drives the brand is “energy”, and the new four pillars of brand are Energized Differentiation, Relevance, Esteem, and Knowledge. There is an interesting grid of BrandAsset Valuator© or BAV which has Y-axis as Brand Strength and X-axis as Brand Stature. You can take a look at TheBrandBubble.com.

Chapter 3: Wall Street, Meet Main Street

The point of the chapter is that consumers are more sophisticated and act more like investors that they seek future benefits, want to maximise returns, accumulate information and knowledge, watch for movement, and demand transparency and accountability.

Chapter 4: The Postmodern Craving for Creativity

Creativity is a must, full stop.

Chapter 5: Welcome to ConsumerLand

The Internet and more specifically social media changes the way consumers behave

Part 2: Application

In this part, each chapter is the stage of brand development. In each chapter, the authors will explain the contents and end the chapters with 1.) Obstacle to beat back 2.) The law of energy, 3.) The new rule of brand management and 4.) Case study. I will write brief explanations without going into too much detail.

Chapter 6: Stage One-Exploration: Performing an Energy Audit

The chapter starts with and anatomy of BAV and, into details, “Energized Differentiation“. The author stressed the word “Energized” by defining it as Vision, Invention, and Dynamism (VID) and how sample brands are ranked on the sprectrum.

Chapter 7: Stage Two-Distillation: Identifying the Energy Core

Gerzema and Lebar’s “Energy Core” is equivalent to Jim Collins’ “Core Ideology” with a slight tweak. If you have not read Jim Collins, it is the heart of an organisation, it’s how to company is, have been, and will be built.

Chapter 8: Stage Three-Ignition: Creating an Energized Value Chain

“In ignition, the enterprise takes the fuel from its Energy Core and uses it to drive the brand forward.” And every function can contribute to the ignition of the brand.

Chapter 9: Stage Four-Fusion: Becoming an Energy-Driven Enterprise

Fusion is when the new practices are becoming the culture of an organisation or “brand as culture”. The examples of Energy-driven enterprises are Google, Whole Foods, and Nordstrom.

Chapter 10: Stage Five-Renewal: Active Listening and Constant Refreshing of Brand Meaning

The authors tell you that brands need to evolve and keep changing over the time. “Tactics are strategy, strategy is tactics”

…

In the next part, I’ll compare this book to the ideal book, a book that is easy to understand, distinct, practical, credible, insightful, and provides great reading experience.

Ease of Understanding: 5/10: This book is on an abstract subject, branding, and the authors did not make it clearer. The first part, introduction, is explained nicely; and that’s where the 5/10 are from. However, the author fails to elaborate the second part, application. The contents (of the second part) are not linked together beautifully. You might wonder why this “Obstacle to beat back”, “The law of energy”, “The new rule of management”, or case study is in this chapter. And what does it really mean? What it has to do with the chapter? Why isn’t it there, instead?

Distinction: 6/10: Like I mentioned earlier, the first part is written with interesting data and BAV is fascinating. There are analysis, valuation, speculation and it is a blend of marketing, management, economics, finance, etc (Ed Lebar is the former professor of economics). The second part is pretty much like other mainstream business books. The essence of the Energy Core is already defined numerous times under different names by different authors. However, the case studies are not bland; Lego, Virgin, Xerox, Mumbai Tiffin Box, and Uniqlo.

Practicality: 4/10: I had high hope in the second part, application but it did not turn out to be very practical. There is no solid step, those five stages are mere guidelines and example of successful organisations.

I’ll give an example of Stage Three-Ignition, the authors tell us that Energy Core can be from any part of the organisation; Leadership, Finance, R&D, Business Model, Sales, Manufacturing, Operations, Distribution, IT and CRM, and HR. Each of these has different examples which is great. Now, the obstacle to beat back is “Management’s focus is primarily on today’s profitability” and the author suggested that we must look for the long-term because most of marketing (in typical companies) is just selling. Then, the chapter moves on to The Third Law of Energy: “A brand is not a place, it’s a direction”; they state that brands must be verbs and positioning can no longer be static. And the new rule of brand management is “Drive the brand back through the organization”; there came Xerox case study.

The application is more like “that’s the way it is”.

Credibility: 7/10: The book has lots of solid and sound examples and case studies. They look very sensible and credible. However, the only drawback is BrandAsset Valuator© (BAV) because the book relies significantly on this model. Although we know the concept and basic anatomy of BAV such as VID (Vision, Invention, and Dynamism), we do not know how they are ranked and the math behind it.

Insight: 9/10: I will state again that the book has lots of examples, data, researches. Most issues are explained sufficiently (albiet not always clearly). And the greatest value of this book is cases, examples, and how they are analysed.

Reading Experience: 5/10: In the very first chapters, the book looks extremely promising but the excitement fades away due to the abstractness of the latter chapters. I do not like to compare with other books but at times, you will feel that this book is much like Jim Collins’ “Good to Great” and “Built to Last”. The good point of this book is that it is newer and sounds more fun (branding vs corporate management) but the drawback is that chapters are not tied together like those two books mentioned.

Overall: 6.0/10: I desperately want to like this book because it has what it takes to be great; great examples and case studies, very insightful researches, and interesting analysis. However, this book fails to synchronise the contents and stories. And it does not offer good-enough practical guidelines to readers. I will be looking forward to the next book by Gerzema and Lebar. I would say buy this book but do not have your expectation too high.

“Q: How many bosses does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: One. He holds up the lightbulb and expects the universe to revolve around him.”

Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition by Guy Kawasaki is arguably one of the most humourous business books around. Despite the fact that most contents in the book are from his blog, How To Change The World, “Reality Check” is full of great business “checklists” (hence, Reality Check). And those checklists cover lots of aspect in business (be warned, this book is huge, 461 pages before an index).

Contents:

- The Reality of Starting

Guy starts with the checklist you need in starting a business or intrapreneurship (entrepreneurship inside a company) and how to construct a mantra (forget three paragraphs mission statement)

- The Reality of Raising Money

As a venture capitalist, Guy Kawasaki wrote on how to raise fund from annoying and moody venture capitalists.

- The Reality of Planning and Executing

Business plans, financial projections, etc; you’ve been there and done that but Guy told you how to hit a homerun from them.

- The Reality of Innovating

Before jumping into innovating-everything bandwagon, this chapter tells you the myths, sins, and art of innovation.

- The Reality of Marketing

A brief revision of branding and identity.

- The Reality of Selling and Evangelizing

From the world’s top evangelist, he wrote about the art of selling, distribution, evangelism and PR.

- The Reality of Communicating

This main chapter covers lots of ground from e-mailing, presentation, demo, blogging, and moderating a panel.

- The Reality of Beguiling

There are lots of art (checklists and steps) of customer service, schmoozing, sucking up, sucking down (?!), and partnering.

- The Reality of Competing

A short chapter saying about your company’s defensibility and patents.

- The Reality of Hiring and Firing

Guy wrote about Silicon Valley hiring, how to hire, how to fire, craiglist, and linkedin, among other things.

- The Reality of Working

How to prevent Bozo explosion? What are mavericks in the workplace? What’s your EQ (Entrepreneurial Quotient)? This main chapter portrays the reality you face at work.

- The Reality of Doing Good

It is nice to end the book with philanthropy and how nonprofit organisations are changing the world

…

I’ll humbly compare “Reality Check” to my ideal business book; the book that is “easy to understand, distinct, practical, reliable, insightful, and provides great reading experience.”

Ease of Understanding: 9/10: The book is simple, straightforward, jargon-free, and very informal (even slightly rude sometimes). Forget theories and models, you will only find simple checklists, steps, and occasional interviews which are put in the main chapters (The Reality of…). One point taken because they are blog-like which make stringing nearly impossible. Guy must have tried very hard to group them together but it is not perfect.

Distinct: 6/10: From the contents, you will find nothing particularly new and we have seen and read all of them already. However, the distinct and unique characteristic of the book is its informality and straight-forwardness. It’s honest and it’s amusing. You won’t find many authors who could make fun of those business ideas naturally like Guy.

Practicality: 7/10: Despite the short chapters (96 chapters including intro and conclusion, 3-5 pages each), they are not just a bunch of pointless blog posts. The conclusion and call to action are in each chapter. There are three key themes within the book, 1) positive chapters (chapters starting with “The Art of..”, and “How To”; there are 51 of them), 2) negative chapters (”Lies of”, and chapters on a-holes; there are 14 of them), 3) interview chapters (with interesting authors like Chip and Dan Heath of “Made to Stick” or Garr Reynold of “The Presentation Zen”; there are 18 of them), and there are other 13 miscellaneous chapters.

Reliability: 5/10: There is very little (if at all) supporting data. The book is from Guy’s experience and rule of thumb. Complex statistics and formula might help but they will ruin the book. It is a worthy trade-off.

Insight: 6/10: The chapters are extremely short but they are compensated simply by having lots of them which are directed to the similar key points of the book. The credit is also to the interview (Q&A) chapters that Guy interviewed other authors for the different aspects of the stories.

Reading Experience: 10/10: This is, by far, the funniest (yet meaningful) business book I’ve read. The book make you feel like listening to Guy’s rant on the business as usual. You won’t get bored. Extra credit to the outrageous use of vocabularies; “bozosity”, “bull shiitake” (shiitake is a japanese mushroom), “assholedom”, “mediocracy” (mediocre + bureaucracy), and things like “karmic scoreboard”.

Overall: 7.2/10: Those who want to read something that “sounds” serious might not like the book. But beyond the casual and informal nature of Guy’s writing, what we’ve learnt from the book is valuable. I highly recommend the book if you want to be “clueful” (as opposed to clueless) in business. And you will have fun reading it and also a good laugh; you can’t say that to most business books.

“If it’s so easy to understand and it makes so much sense, why don’t more companies get tuned it?”

“Tuned In” by Craif Stull, Phil Myers & David Meerman Scott is a book on how to create the “resonator”, the product that sells itself. Or (quoted from the book);

“The perfect solution to a specific problem”

“A product or service that people want to buy without being coerced”

“An offering that establishes a real and direct connection to what your market values most”

“An idea that people immediately understand has value to them, even if they have never heard of your company or its products and services”

The book describes the six steps of creating the resonator

Contents

Chapter 1: Why Didn’t We Think of That?

Chapter 2: Tuned Out… and Just Guessing

Chapter 3: Get Tuned In

Chapter 4: Step 1: Find Unresolved Problems

Chapter 5: Step 2: Understand Buyer Personas

Chapter 6: Step 3: Quantify the Impact

Chapter 7: Step 4: Create Breakthrough Experiences

Chapter 8: Step 5: Articulate Powerful Ideas

Chapter 9: Step 6: Establish Authentic Connections

Chapter 10: Cultivate a Tuned In Culture

Chapter 11: Unleash Your Resonator

…

Let’s compare “Tuned In” to the ideal business book that is easy to understand, distinct, practical, credible, insightful, and provides great reading experience.

Ease of Understanding: 9/10: This book is very structured and it’s very hard to NOT understand. The concepts are not complicated. They are straight to the point with great examples all over the book.

Distinction: 5/10: The concept of this book is another “customer-centric innovation”. There are hundreds of this kind of book on the shelf already. However, the way the authors present the concept with clear and concise examples is refreshing. This concept of the book is identical to others: just better.

Practicality: 8/10: The six steps (plus what should be done before and after the steps) are simple enough to follow no matter what industry you are in. The authors showed examples ranging from the ice-cream shop to the comedian to Apple to the presidential election! The various examples with simple yet solid steps will make you think that you can do it.

Credibility: 8/10: The vivid examples, again, “resonate” well with the concepts and steps. You can’t really deny the proven concept, customer-centric innovation. It’s so simple that make you think “There’s no reason I shouldn’t believe this.”

Insight: 6/10: The real substance of the book is how it connects the concepts to examples. You will not find deep analysis or research in a particular subject. Moreover, this book tries hard not to bore you. Once the excitement in the topic fades, the authors move onto another topic.

Reading Experience: 7/10: Reading “Tuned In” is enjoyable. You’ll read the contents of the books about how to create a “resonator” and you’ll think “Now….. How are you trying to convince me?” Craig Stull, Phil Myers, and David Meerman Scott will then give you simple explanations and excellent examples.

Overall: 7.2/10: As I mentioned far too many times already that the examples of this book are excellent. The six steps to create the “resonator” are very easy to apply. If you are swimming in the ocean of books on innovation and could not find a good book that you can get your team or yourself rolling right away. This example-driven practical book on customer-centric innovation is tuned in for you.

Obviously, lately I’m obsessed with Seth Godin. His blog is influential and inspirational and often triggers my business curiosity with his examples and new ideas.

His latest post in the blog, The same cigarrette as me, talks about “badge”. Basically, when a badge represents a tribe, you sell a lot of your product to that tribe (an insider).

I thought this idea rings a bell in my head and I thought of “personality”.

We’ve always understood that customers are likely to choose a product or service that has similar personality to the customer.

Is it true? Is it not?

If we give examples of personalities of the product and their main customers, there will be hundreds of examples, iPod, BMW, Seth’s blog (I’m a bit over-obsessed already), Barack Obama, Gucci, Sony Vaio.

These examples can represent the personality of the product and the personality of the users.

Are they badges?

.

.

Maybe, maybe not.

I recall when I read Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, a great book indeed.

In part I, the first chapter, “The personality and character ethics”

Speaking of personality, Covey wrote

“Success became more a function of personality, of public image, of attitudes and behaviors, skills and techniques, that lubricate the processes of human interaction. This personality Ethic essentially took two paths: one was human and public relation techniques, and the other was positive mental attitude.”

“Other parts of the personality approach were clearly manipulative, even deceptive, encouraging people to use techniques to get other people to like them, or to fake interest in the hobbies of others to get out of them what they wanted, or to use the “power look,” or to intimidate their way of life.” [emphasis mine]

Strong words

On the other hand,

“…Character Ethic as the foundation of success - things like integrity, huility, fidelity, temperance, courage, justice, patience, industry, simplicity, modesty, and the Golden Rule. Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography is representative of that literature. It is, basically, the story of one man’s effort to integrate certain principles and habits deep within his nature.”

“The Character Ethic taught that there are basic principles of effective living, and that people can only experience true success and enduring happiness as they learn and integrate these principles into their basic character.“ [emphasis mine]

So, what I do believe is that the difference between a badge and a wannabe is the “character”.

A company needs to develop its character, breath it, and live it in order to be a badge especially in the times that Google makes everything transparent, you can’t fake here.

Personality, in this era, is irrelevant. No matter how hard you try to make yourself look good, everyone can see it through.

No more “Brand Personality”, embrace “Your Character”

You know what - I haven’t finished Seth Godin’s Meatball Sundae! It should take like 5 hours for normal people. I have to admit, I’m a slow reader and sometimes I read the same thing more than once. Anyway

There’s a phase by Godin that has been ringing in my head since this morning

The shift from “How Many” to “Who”

Advertising is not gauge by how many people do you reach (old marketing), it is “who” do you reach (New marketing).

It’s like a turbocharged market targeting.

In the past, market targeting needs to be done by listing out market segmentation and evaluate which segment(s) is(are) the most profitable and probable for your product(s) or service(s).

And you target them.

Now, with Adwords, the bloody technology does not care about the segments of customers (as long as they are interested in the product or service or something related) and it targets the customers automatically.

To think that I’ve spent many classes and modules in both my Bachelor’s and Master’s degree studying STP (segmentation, targeting, positioning)……………

Is it the right time to throw away those textbooks?