text: April | 2012 | Mr. Lange
  19.04.2012 by misterlange	- 0 comments
  The answer to your question is no, but…(read on to find out why it would be incredibly devastating for Coke still)
  Advertising in the fast moving consumer goods area (FMCG), especially in the beverages market, is all about Mind Share and brand perception. To become and stay the dominant global brand, you have to be ubiquitously well-known. Of course, you also maneuver the consumer's perception of your brand with advertising, but I'll leave that aside for a second. The highest goal achievable when it comes to Mind Share is to achieve a state of conditioning (or preconditioning) of your potential customers. A level below that, you want to definitely be at least in their relevant set. Let me explain:
  Think candy bars. There's a relatively high chance that you have two to three or even up to five in mind immediately, and that none of them ranks miles above the others in your head. This is your relevant set. Everytime you feel the desire to have a candy bar, you will take these two to five into consideration. So, sometimes you might choose a Snickers bar, sometimes a Butterfinger might fit you more, but you will hardly leave your relevant set.
  For an FMCG company, achieving the goal of being in the relevant set of their potential customers is already a huge success. Because this process is highly driven by Mind Share created through awareness created through exposure created through advertising pressure, your advertising budget plays a major role in achieving this goal.
  If you one-up your advertising and influence carefully how your brand is perceived, you might be able to condition or precondition your customers. Think cola. Oops, I bet you didn't think cola. I bet you thought Coke. And when you think about the color you had in mind, certain shapes of text or a bottle, Coke just might have cought you there, too. Advertisers call this habitualization. Picking Coke has become less of a choice (which it would be if it were only part of your relevant set) but a reflex. Now, this goal cannot be achieved through your product just standing around in stores. That is a major advertisement undertaking. You have to apply constant advertising pressure to make sure that no other brand trumps you in Mind Share. Because if so, that other brand will be the first coming up when the desire for a can of cold cola pops up, or might at least shift the situation in the consumer's head from a habitualized one to one where the consumer has a relevant set. This is called de-habitualization, and for companies like Coca Cola it spells d-a-n-g-e-r.
  So, in short terms: No, people wouldn't stop drinking Coke if Coca Cola ceased advertising it. The Coke brand would face subtle extinction by becoming more and more irrelevant, though.
  1. Find out who the most influential blogger in your area of business is. Use the money to pay for dinner with that person. During dinner, convince him to write about you (I expect you to have something worth blogging about in your company's bag). Often, it's enough to get that one opinion leader to put the word out. Other bloggers will then mostly pick up on the topic.
  2. Find out where most of the influential people who you think would use your product are (for example the most important convention for people from the field that you do business in. Grab your marketing guys and girls and your graphics designers (and if you have none of them, grab yourself) and come up with a medium and a message that you would consider has the highest viral potential vs. the lowest cost, so you can produce many of these mediums. For example (this is just for explanatory reasons and I will not be able to take the time to think it through) you could print smart and funny business cards, designed like those flyer postcards which are used as an advertising medium, just as small as a business card, that have a blank space that people can fill in their name and occupation and use to introduce themselves to each other. These cheap, subtly branded and (in theory) viral cards could then be handed out guerilla style in front of the venue where the event is taking place and help spark interest among opinion leaders of your business field, resulting in some of them ending up as multiplicators by tweeting or blogging or just by talking about your thing.
  As suggested by some people who answered your question, there are a lot of free things you can do for your marketing, too, though…
  05.04.2012 by misterlange	- 0 comments
  I will give you the theroetical rundown.
  I think the answer to this question should be divided into two parts.
  First, the recent paradigm shift from long-term strategies to lean, constantly adjusting strategic bits.
  The Lean Startup and all that followed it has sure been a blessing not only for engineers but for strategists and entrepreneurs overall. For decades, as you may know, the terms 'strategy' and 'short term' were not even allowed in the same paragraph. Depending on how and how quickly your market alternates, crudely applying long term strategies can have you bite the dust by the end of the fiscal year. It was time for us to wake up. Young, agile startups outpacing the Goliaths in the game give you a good example for why this has worked quite well for some time now, even in the decades where the term wasn't coined yet. After all, even evolution dictates quick adaption for those who want to succeed and survive. Rafe Sagarin states correctly in his recent Wired article "When Catastrophe Strikes, Emulate The Octopus", that not only long term evolutionary adaptation to its habitat but strangely quick adjustments to its surroundings like using two coconut halves as a "powerful armor" pave the way for the octopus' incredible success. As most of us know by now, many of these priciples can easily be applied to the world of business strategy. So, should we make lean strategies our new totem? This leads me to the second part.
  What do we do with this new knowledge?
  Paradigm shifts have a strange thing to them: When they occur, they take most of us with us and blow away what was there before them. The ideas of the pre-paradigm-shift-era are no longer valid. This is for enthusiastic reasons. And it helps us adapt the new paradigms more quickly. We often tend to forget, though, to take this knew knowledge with a grain of salt.
  I think I have the guts to say that there is no lean business. There is no fat one either. There is always a mixture of both. Think about it: we always use a mixture of long and short term strategies. And that's the right way to do it. Like the octopus, we need to adjust to long term strategic challenges with long term strategies and big budgets. But short term shifts in our market surroundings demand short term strategic adjustments, quick teams and smaller budgets.
  We tend to quickly fall in love with the blow of new wind that paradigm shifts and all the new ideas that come with them bring. After the butterflies are gone, though, we mit realize that it makes sense to apply some rationality to it and see that the world of strategy is not as black and white as most paradigm shifts suggest.
  And, to not leave you alone with only the theoretical sauce: one startup that I advise at the moment has received a fat business strategy with a lean engineering strategy, a lean marketing strategy and a fat business development strategy and funds allocated accordingly.
  Btw: If anyone wants to read the short but inspiring essay by Rafe Sagarin, there it is: http://www.wired.com/magazine/20…