HBR has a interest blog post by Vineet Nayar that questions to blanket logic of celebrating failure. I am a big proponent of celebrating failure, but I think the distinction between Mistakes and Ristakes is important.
Definitions:

Mistakes: A mistake is as an error in action or calculation caused by poor reasoning, carelessness, or insufficient knowledge.

Ristakes: A risktake is an error — but not one caused by carelessness or insufficient knowledge. Its possibility has been foreseen, calculated, and accepted.

Building on my last post on the missed opportunities to build brand value, here is a photo of a letter to Andy Warhol from the Product Marketing Manager from Campbell Soup (I found the original article citing the letter here). I have no idea if it is real, but it is a great response. Makes me wonder if marketers need to ditch the 20 year old playbook for the 40 year old one?

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If Andy Warhol Painted His Campbell's Soup Paintings Today, How Soon Would The Cease & Desist Arrive?

Another day, another DCMA takedown notice issued by a company's attorney that takes an opportunity to build brand value and actually destroys it. The picture (you can find it on Flickr here) is a DCMA takedown notice sent to a MIT educational program about a student who built a replica Pac-Man game from the programming language Scratch - a simple programming language designed to teach people how to program. Again, the attorney probably acted by the book in issuing the takedown notice, but did NAMCO, its marketers, and the attorney miss a brand building opportunity?

It's been a few years since I got in the middle of some IP law, but from what I remember IP law does not require that you demand the takedown of every potentially infringing piece of content, you just need to demonstrate you are exercising control. Control can take many forms. They could just grant the student permission for the purpose of this educational exercise. If there was a real threat to their game built on more robust computing languages, then they could limit the permission for a specific period of time. Problem solved. Now think about the wasted brand value building opportunity?

How much free press would they have received if they congratulated the student for embracing their iconic game in their pursuit to learn how to program? What if they granted an open license for any student to build Pac-Man replica games in the pursuit of their learning? People may actually see Pac-Man everywhere. What a tragedy for the brand?

This new age of content manipulation should force any brand marketer/content owner to rethink their playbook on how they will build brand value. Those who don't and keep doing what they did for the past 20 years are negligent in their duties (IMO). If you are a marketer and these situations make you unsure of how to act, start asking questions. Get your key stakeholders (including legal) into a room and explore "what if" scenarios. Ask your attorney what is the "minimum" that you must do to protect the brand's legal rights - Minimum being the key word. Then discuss the potential upside of different responses. Takes some risks. Learn. You may surprise yourself with the results.

We need to stop using the 20 year old playbook in this new world!

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NAMCO Demands Take of Pacman Created by Kid...

Old Spice has stopped their 3-day, non-stop new media assault that hopefully wakes business up to the potential of new media. Kudos for recognizing the power of directly connecting to your market at an individual level. Bold steps - instead of relying major brand marketers security blanket strategy of TV advertising and tracking the Gross Rating Points, think about the rich data generated by this campaign. What do you think they used as success metrics? 

Target Market Connection

• Questions submitted (individual brand engagement)
• Responses Posted (direct connection by brand to members of target market - 185 posted)
• New members/subscribers to YouTube channel, Twitter account, and Facebook page
• Social Media ripple effects (retweets, etc.)

Traditional Brand Building

• Value of Media generated by news references
•  Establishing iconic brand identity

I wonder how much this cost compared to a traditional TV campaign.

Some key takeaways:

• Engage your market
• Communicate the tone and values of the brand, without pushing the brand itself
• Set your success metrics in advance and track in real-time
• Don't be afraid to adjust in mid-campaign to new opportunities or audience feedback
• Virality will be linked to tone, message that people are quick to share - think light and funny or shocking

Too much has been said already so no sense repeating it, but I will share a few thoughts

• In large, complex organizations like Microsoft, often the people who rise to leadership positions are the "politicians"
• Politicians are about comprises which rarely produces a compelling product
• Political environment are about power; not the product; and definitely not the consumer
• It's not that Microsoft failed - failure should be celebrated subject to the caveat that the organization learns from it - I doubt Microsoft learned anything from this experience

That's it. As a person who has spent the past two years thinking about how large companies grow this story saddens me. How many times have we seen this story before? When will they learn?

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Raj Singh has a guest post on MobileBeat on how can mobile manufacturers differentiate in this new mobile world. Raj poses a number of strategic choices or options for the manufacturers. My impression is that many of these take a look at the major technology opportunities for the mobile industry as a whole. When I set out to write this article I expected to dispute some of Raj's ideas, but as I developed my own I found myself building on them.

Mobile phone manufacturers are in a difficult place. As Rich Wong noted their industry has shifted from one where the operators had the power to one where a new industry participants, the operating system developers, have captured the power (although the operators still exert a lot of power). As Raj highlights in his post much of the revenue potential of this industry will be controlled by the one who owns the customer billing relationship suggesting maintaining brand by finding a unique OS or developing an effective customer billing model.

I wouldn't suggest building their own OS, but leveraging what is out there. While they may have developed OS's in the past, they were never good at it. I doubt they have the capabilities to compete in this arena. While this will be the most lucrative part of the ecosystem pie, it would be a tough win. Apple and Google have huge leads. Microsoft is in the background willing to spend obscene amounts of money to become relevant in mobile. I recommend staying within their competencies and trying to win their piece of the pie (and possibly some of that control).

That means building the best hardware (like many of Raj's points) and thinking about process innovation on the supply and customer sides. The model to follow may be Dell and how they dominated the computer hardware market through supply chain innovation and direct to consumer sales. I am not a technology expert, nor do I have a detailed understanding of their supply chain, but I can add some pie in the sky ideas to the conversation. Some questions to ask:

• How can we build a direct to consumer relationship that the operators will respect?
• How can we build quality phones that can work on a CDMA and/or GSM network for a reasonable price?
• How can we get some revenue share from the carriers like Best Buy for every subscriber we provide?
• How can we go MVNO and control the full relationship?
• How can we set up manufacturing to allow customers to order custom-build phones?
• How can we develop direct sales relationships with corporate IT departments as more and more of their employees are using mobile technology?

Mobile manufacturers are quickly becoming the commodity in this ecosystem. They need to make some move capture some of the industry power. This will not be accomplished by iteration. It will take innovation - I suspect it will be more process or business model innovation and less product innovation (leave that in the hands of the OS makers for now). How do you think the manufacturers become relevant again? 

Nice comment in the Harvard Business Review blog section about the Innovator's Paradox by Scott Anthony. He defines the Innovator's Paradox as this:

"When you don't need the growth, you act in ways that lead to you not getting the growth you will need. And when you do need the growth, you can't act in ways that deliver it."

I encourage you to read the article but the gist is this:

• When companies are in a period of high growth and resources are ample they should be looking for the next growth opportunities but they don't do it effectively. Their activities lack discipline; wasteful spending and overpriced acquisitions occur.
• When a companies business matures and growth slows done, there are little resources available for growth initiatives. The acute need for growth pulls them to large established markets that rarely pay off how they thought they would. They often ignore disruptive technologies because their current markets are small; if they view the disruption as a threat they will respond, but the response will be rigid. If they view the disruption as an opportunity, they will be more flexible in the response, but starve it of funding (because they don't see it threatening their business).

I love one of Anthony's recommendations - That for every growth business, companies must recognize that the business size has a limit. Thus, they should plan accordingly in the early stages.

Article: The Innovator's Paradox by Scott Anthony

Processes are not enough to drive growth. There needs to a number of support mechanisms that ensure the processes flow properly. These are what I refer to as the platforms for growth. There are three main platforms: Strategic, Organization, and Networks. The Network platform ensures the necessary flow of subject matter information into and across the company to accelerate expertise in key strategic growth areas.

Networks should be thought of in two ways: Internal and External. Internal networks consist of internal, cross-functional subject matter experts. Internal networks are best organized by growth opportunities. For example if your company has identified the mobile space as a strategic opportunity for growth, experts should be identified to discuss the opportunities and challenges for your company in this space. Experts may already have the knowledge or be asked to become experts in the area. There should be cross-functional representation, so while you may not have a finance expert knowledgeable about the mobile industry, they should be asked to become the mobile finance expert for the company. A company could have many growth networks - as many as identified strategic opportunities.

The innovation team should be charged with ensuring the internal networks are engage. There should be virtual environments set up to drive knowledge sharing and discussion and in-person events to learn more about the area (possibly with speakers identified by the external networks).

External networks are inflows of subject matter expertise into the company. The identified growth opportunities dictate the external experts needed. The innovation team and member of the internal network should reach out to respective external experts. Efforts should be made to ensure to most current information on the growth opportunity is shared with the internal network including asking for regular presentations on current events and disseminating research. 

Networks are simple in concept, but they take a lot of work to ensure that they are actively engage. All too often networks are set up only to remain stagnant as members become distracted by the primary jobs. All participants should be granted time by their managers to participate, their participation should be part of their annual goals, and the virtual environment should make it easy for the members to stay up to date with the activity on the environment.

Processes are not enough to drive growth. There needs to a number of support mechanisms that ensure the processes flow properly. These are what I refer to as the platforms for growth. There are three main platforms: Strategic, Organization, and Networks. The Organization platform ensures that the required structure is in place to ensure the growth model operates efficiently.

First, all roles need to be defined and in place. An executive team must be ultimately accountable for the strategic direction of the program. A Innovation leadership team, comprised of senior executives, are responsible for executing the strategy. An Innovation team are the administrators of the program. They ensure communications and reporting go out as planned, projects have all the needed support, and oversee all model processes. If desired, the Innovation team can help with early opportunity research.

Second, governance of the program needs to be clearly defined. The executive team must create a program charter that set targets, defines boundaries of focus, and clarifies how program investments will be overseen. For example, Whirlpool has two governing bodies for their innovation program. One manages the program strategy and the other plans the innovation road map based on the strategy.

Third, available funding for the program needs to be defined. While it is great to define growth targets, it is meaningless if funds are not committed to achieving the them. Clear targets and investments help set expectations for return on investment. Some companies distinguish between sustaining and growth investments. Whirlpool sets a fixed % of revenue (or assets) for sustaining investments and funds growth based on the zero-based investment methodology.

Roles, governance, and funding provide the structure for the growth strategy model. Without them, I don't think any program will get very far. If you get into a situation where some executive asks you to lead a growth program, make sure you get that person to agree to the organizational platform. They should be the one defining the charter and serving on the executive team.

Processes are not enough to drive growth. There needs to a number of support mechanisms that ensure the processes flow properly. These are what I refer to as the platforms for growth. There are three main platforms: Strategic, Organization, and Networks. The Strategic platform ensures the necessary flow of information into, out, and across the company to ensure the best possible growth decisions are made.

First, there needs to be mechanisms to ensure organizational alignment of the growth strategy. A communication plan should define how critical information will be disseminated to the right people. This includes communicating the high level strategy to all employees, a clear strategy roadmap that will help the growth leaders understand the company's growth strategy over the next 3-5 years, and regular reports to growth leaders to help them understand recent decisions and their results. The top mission of alignment is to ensure the right information gets into the hands of the right people at the right time.

One good way to communicate alignment is a strategic planning session. For example, every 5 years Royal DSM conducts a strategic planning session that defines how much revenue will new product launches generate in 5 years, what new areas they plan to go into, and how their capabilities will change. Li & Fung do a similar exercise every 3 years. In between exercises, the companies review how they are performing against plan and make course corrections as necessary.

Second, a metric plan should be devised to translate the growth strategy into metric-trackable objectives and build a reporting plan around it. Starting with the defined growth strategy, identify the top level metrics that relate to each objective. For example, any strategy should have a clear new product revenue target - that is how much annual revenue in 3-5 years time will come from new products launched since today. From the top level metric, break it down into sub-metrics. For example to hit $200 million in revenue in 3 years time, a company would need 5 successful launches which implies 10 total launches which implies 20 projects started which implies 100 opportunities evaluated. All these represent targets to track. Now, you need to map how you will report on these metrics. Everyone does not need to see all metrics in a report. The CEO may only need to see the current annual revenue number and the forecast number expected by the target date, while pipeline statistic may only be of interest to innovation leaders.

Third, any strategic platform needs an inflow of competitor intelligence data. Competitive Intelligence programs should strive to know what competitors are doing and how they might respond to your strategies and tactics. Competitive Intelligence programs should know competitor's RPV - resources (assets and capabilities), processes (business models and competitive advantages), and values (vision and strategies). Understanding your competitors will help your people make the best decisions.