Read Steve Jobs’ full “Thoughts On Flash” here.
Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.
The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.
New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.
I had a conversation with someone this morning that made me painfully aware of a breach in the strategic hull of the “Diet” business. They mentioned to me they had just quit smoking and wanted to shed a few pounds they’d picked up in the process. I mentioned a book that outlines a process I have had success with written by Ian K. Smith, the nutritionist responsible for the food programs the competitors in the show “Celebrity Fit Club” follow (or fail following).
But her understanding of what she needed to do was to go on some sort of “military diet” thing where she could lose 11 pounds in 3 days of suffering and then be done with it. I decided not to press the subject or tell her the human body is only capable of losing 3 pounds of fat a week, really no matter what you do, since I’d be crashing her dream of a quick fix. This is a commonly known fact among nutritionists and trainers but not among the average person.
The problem is that even the best sources of information are branded like the ones that peddle false hopes of and easy fix to a complex problem. Ironically, the ones that sell are telling people a version of the story they want to hear and therefore illicit a behavior, they buy it, but upon certain failure many give up and never come close to their goals. But no one is checking statistics to measure the success rates of those readers before they buy, they instead buy based on the $15.00 hope that the manufactured fantasy of rapid effortless weight loss that the book promises is true. It isn’t!
So what’s wrong with this picture and where’s an opportunity to redesign the strategy?
1. The publishers marketing these books are all crowding together under the same umbrella afraid to get wet. They’ve decided there’s one way to market a diet book that will work. Design it like an airport bookstore business title and make sure there’s a picture of the celebrity (or soon to be celebrity) author on the cover. Budget for author photo shoot? $500.
2. With a huge health and organic food craze going on right now, how come nobody is designing a weight loss system based on wholistic, sustainable food choices? This could be huge if positioned properly. Farm partnerships and tours?
3. The real change that most people need to make to succeed at weight loss is by eating more fruits and vegetables, especially raw. Why not piggy back on the raw craze and create a designer diet?
4. The reality behind the successful training programs is that they retrain your mind and body to crave foods that are good for you. This is a paradigm shift for anyone used to eating take out and restaurant food. By changing the position from promises of “rapid weight loss” to helping people get re-acquainted with the vegetarian in them there’s a huge amount of different opportunities for sustainable and culinarily interesting “diets”.
This occurred to me while doing the “Fat Smash Diet”. Really the gist of it is you drop all the wheat and fried foods and empty dry carbs, even meat for the first couple weeks in place of fruits and vegetables. At first it was hard, but once underway I realized it was less about weight loss and more about retraining my brain to crave and be satisfied by foods that make my body happy. This is what they’re all afraid to say! But why?
My question is, why is this not an attractive story to tell markets? Dropping meat and expensive packaged foods for sustainable fruits and veggies, grown locally and organically, this is the real secret behind the best diets, and ironically it’s huge now in the media. So when are these two going to marry?
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the important of ones personal brand. With a tight job market, it makes sense that people be able to understand where they fit and to work towards a unique differentiation strategy for themselves.
With this understanding I thought I’d take some of the strategic thinking typically reserved for businesses and map a quick process for people to use for their professional selves. I’ll keep this extremely simple since I’d like this to be something people can run with and not a long dragged out analysis/paralysis process. I’ve translated the following concepts from the business to the individual, and seeing it this way makes me see the process a little differently. It’s actually eerie how people-brands and business-brands can be so similar.
The 4 Human Experiences Your Brand Should Affect:
1. Perception: What do you want people to think of you? Be this person.
2. Reason: Are you who you say/act like? Authenticity is critical, look for your deeper truth, what’s beneath the surface you may be afraid to expose?
3. Emotion: Are you connecting with people on a deeper level? What do you believe deeply in that you can advocate/evangelize?
4. Resonance: Do you connect with people in a way that’s meaningful to them? Are you reading other’s needs or are you acting on your own?
The Building Blocks of Your Experience:
1. Where do you have the most credibility?
2. Where do you have the most experience?
3. What are you passionate about?
4. What causes are you aligned with personally?
5. How do you define success for yourself? Money, achievement, freedom?
6. What do you stand for?
7. Who are you competing with?
8. How are you different from them?
9. Who would you be excited to collaborate with?
10. Is there a social context to your desires?
11. Choosing only adjectives, how would you describe your best qualities?
I’m really just winging this but in looking back at this post this is some powerful stuff for any person to do for themselves. If you’re like me and you’ve had a difficulty in the past describing what you do to strangers, this would be a fantastic immersive process to take on, even if it were just for 30 minutes.
It’s critical for every business to spend some time between developing a business strategy and executing a marketing plan. Many people, myself included, call this “Brand Strategy”, but there’s other names for it. The important issue is to find out what makes you truly unique and irreplaceable to your customers, and the only way to really find this out is by having conversations and asking tough questions, both of yourself and your customers.
Here’s why it’s important to have a brand strategy before kicking off your marketing strategy:
1. Without a brand strategy you will have no aligned single “deeper truth” driving your marketing efforts beyond profitability or increasing shareholder value. This encourages short term thinking that diminishes the individuality of your business and makes you generic. The marketing strategy will be based more on the “now” and therefore the brand strategy should be rooted in the “always”.
2. You need a sounding board to validate constantly changing marketing efforts. When developing creative ideas and concepts, how do you validate these? By having a solid brand strategy you can weigh everything you do against that. Is this idea really us? See if it speaks to your brand. It will help you know whether your agency “gets you” and whether your sales teams are all saying the same thing. Put a stake in the ground and live by it.
2. Without a stake in the ground on your brand you are at constant risk of saying the wrong thing and therefore being the wrong thing to your customers, then you’ll need to triage, which is expensive. Do this enough no one will believe you. Choose your story and stick with it for the long run.
3. You need to find your “True North” for your business/brand. Once you understand how to articulate this, it will inspire fantastic creative execution, because everyone on your team will be working towards the same clear goal or destination. It will also make it easier and less costly to engage new team members/agencies, etc. By being able to articulate your unique value and position over and over, it becomes easier and easier to onboard team members and takes less time to get them onboard. Many companies stay with bad agencies simply because the time to onboard a new team is too costly and there never seems to be a good time for it.
What’s your true north?
