Brand – Creating & Establishing

Having a brand is a grand thing in a business. Actually, it signifies and implies a lot to the clients. It makes them consider you as part of the ‘above the fold’ group. But brands cannot be created and established following herd mentality. It needs a out of the box thinking. Once the brand is created, it has to be accepted across the board for its avant garde stuff and usefulness. Only then, there is a chance that it can be considered as aspirational brand.

Brand creation is a difficult process. The mojo to create a brand has to be too powerful. It has to sustain the effect of carpet bombing of products by your competitors in the market. The best thing is to select a niche area where the competition is less but there is a huge demand for your product. Once identified the market, you have to push your product after making it look attractive. This way, you get the first mover advantage along with the anchor tenant status in the niche market. Hire a few blatherskites to talk about your product and to attract the customers. Once clients start drizzling in, create a brand of your own around the product and start advertising the brand. At this juncture, the whole focus should be on the brand. It serves as an umbrella for all of your existing and future products.

In summary, brand creation is a tough task and has to be done carefully because it helps your clients to create impression about your product. As you know, first impression is the best impression. Only leaders sustain the race not the brown-nosers; similarly, only original brands can weather the market, not copied brands!

Success, Victory, Suffering, Defeat, & Popularity

Success, victory, suffering, defeat; all these 4 have one thing in common. They are infectious. Once a person is infected by any of these, he will go out of balance. The biggest problem is that while going out of balance, he drags his neighbors also in to the same conundrum.

This world is full of sufferings. Even success and victory are one kind of mental diseases. Keep on getting success, one’s ego boosts like anything and at that moment, one defeat, will take him off the map. A person might have done so many good things to be there in the public eye and become more popular. If an allegation comes on him and his popularity goes for a toss, from that point onwards, one can see lot of changes in his personality. Used to get praises and honors from every corner of the world and when suddenly pushed to a corner, he starts doing all sorts of things to regain his position; including unpopular stuff!

Politicians, movie stars, popular social workers, etc, are examples. Follow them closely and you see the reality. Popularity can be compared with Ebola virus, which is contagious. May be Ebola can be controlled by antibiotics but not popularity. People die to become popular; such is the craze of its effect.

Your Life – Your Take

What you want to do in your life? Everyone asks this question to others but they themselves don’t know what they are going to do. Most of the times, for the sake of some face time or time pass, they ask this kind of questions.

Teenagers are known for their adrenaline rush. Their hot blood is restless. They want to do something that makes them and shows them great. They want to astonish this world with their doings. They want to beat the system as frequently as they can whenever they get a chance; sometimes, they try to grab a chance. And, most important point, they don’t want to join the bandwagon. So many things boggle their mind; from girl friends to classroom stuff, from physical appearance to intellectual competitions. However, to endeavor all these things, they need guidance and there are so many matured people out there to give them clutter-free, to the point, guidance. But, the problem is that these people are not ready to take that. Their mind wavers a lot. We cannot blame anyone for this but the human tendency at that age. That something whatever they are looking for is an enigma to them also. But they don’t accept this fact!

Life is short and teenage is such a state of human body where the whole system vibrates with loads and tons of energy. Mind works fast. Body system is flexible and strong enough to take any unprecedented physical challenge. This the time that one has to use and channelize all his energies toward what he wants in his life. However, in most of the teenager’s case, it won’t happen. They don’t realize. They simply sit on the mind boggling potential dreaming something what they want to achieve in life without realizing that the energy base on what they are sitting is the one which helps them realize their dreams.

In summary, time and tide waits for no one; similarly, age and energy. Whoever realizes this truth gets what they want in life; rest, just dream!

Osmosis Marketing

Nowadays, marketing has been changed. Earlier, word of mouth marketing literally means, people intimating each other about a good product whenever the occasion demands it. But, now, life has changed and people connect each other through Twitter, Facebook, etc, social networking sites; irrespective wherever they stay on this planet. To cater to the needs of the people in this changed scenario, the way companies do marketing also changed. Now, they started promoting and building brands around their products using ‘Osmosis Marketing’ concept; means they are using blogs, tweets, etc, instead of traditional marketing stuff.

SO, what are the take-aways here? The combine effect of cost-effective strategies with ‘word of mouth’ channels! BY creating, enabling, and providing channels like blogs, tweets, etc, companies are encouraging people to talk to each other. The low-hanging fruits for the people in this concept is that they are getting some face time to talk to their friends and relatives using these channels. At the same time, when companies display their products through banner and pop-up advertisements, automatically, people mention about them also in their conversations resulting in more sales. Sometimes, there is a chance that the discussions go at a granular level and companies may get a few innovative actionable points from these discussions.

This ‘peel the onion’ strategy has more advantages than the earlier ‘boil the ocean’ strategy that the marketers used to follow to sell their products. The former provides lot of value-addition than the latter. If there are any pain points regarding the product, this kind of marketing allows the company to deal with the customer directly offline and fix it on the spot.

In summary, happy customers provide more business.

Measuring Performance

Calibrating expectations or creating benchmarks for any task is a critical job for senior management in any company. Employees perform a single task in different ways which in turn gives different outputs. To standardize the output, management wants to benchmark the job. Every employee brings to the table some sort of skill set. However, it is the job of the management to check and verify how much bandwidth does an employee has and what sort of measures to be taken in order to get expected output from all employees of the same level. By setting expectations and publishing them using strategic communication methods, management can show employees that it is following transparency at all levels in all cases.

Transparency creates trust between the employees and management. Added to this, if management provides some face time to discuss and know the employee issues, every now and then, a strong bond would be created. Moving forward, whenever management needs more efforts from employees, simply it can push the envelope and employees also accept that because they know the reasons why management has taken such kind of decision.

Nowadays, where disruptive innovations are hitting the market like tornadoes, management and employees should make sure that they both are on the same page and understand each other’s stand when it comes to pursuing agreed benchmarks. This syncing with each other enforces sustainability of the spirit of the company and maintains its productivity during down times.

Communicate, But Diligently

A slurred speech, a blurred foresight, and a wrongly written word; all these three show same impact on a person in this world. They down the image of the person, who goes by them. Intentionally or not, whoever uses or follows them, reduces his good image tenure drastically and allures his enemies to surround him.

Communication is an art; be it through verbal or written. Blogging is the new trend. Either to impress a certain section of the people or to attract more eyeballs, writers sometimes use mocking language. The underlying intention is to clock more visitor count in a short period of time.  

Using bad language is a mark of disrespect for the society you are living in; both verbal and written. If you have grievances, sort them out in a professional way by meeting the concerned persons and airing your views. Pack your communication with sweetie and meaty words to convey what you have on your mind. These words just act as manure to a plant and grow your fan-base.

In summary, use communication channels diligently. Don’t fog your mind with the small picture; always look at the big picture and communicate.

As they say…A knife can kill a person at a time but a loosely left bad word can kill millions in one stroke! Mind it!

The Negative Effect of Trying To Become Too Professional

Everyone cannot become a professional. Someone just studies a subject for the sake of studying it, a few others tinkers with the subject in an amateurish way, and the rest understands, imbibes, digests, and implements what they learnt and makes sure they get the output as per their expectations; all this in a post-haste manner. The last category wings their way to success. They masticate what they dig-in until they get a handle on it. If necessary, they change their personal behavior to understand the subject. These people have lot of patience and they never become touchy. They never give importance to their own ego and are ready to say touché if someone else makes a valuable point at these people’s expense. Since they don’t give importance to emotions and there won’t harbor any hard feelings. Because of this, they don’t exhibit vindicative nature. The only problem with professionals is that they are more oriented to perfectionism and in this process they become wayward.

In summary, professionals are so tight and do not exhibit most of the loose ends what ordinary people show. However, the only loose end is becoming wayward (that also to become more professional), which kills their whole professional behavior and makes them look like ordinary person who doesn’t have common sense.

New Ways of Marketing

Marketing has its own style of doing things. What is there in this world that is not eligible or fit for marketing? Following is a paradigm example that helps you understand the bandwidth of marketing potential: from selling lifestyles to curated content, arranging manpower needs to selected positions on totem poles, everything is eligible for marketing.

However, nowadays, the style of marketing has been changed. It is not just putting efforts for outright selling but to inform and educate the customer. The idea is that once the customer understands and digests this new found knowledge, he himself goes looking for the product. There is no pressure-selling.

This strategy is a giant leap from the old ones where pressure-selling, pursuing, and chasing the customer, are part of the game.  As per the new trend, once the customer syncs with the company’s content cadence, the rest of the marketing cycle, i.e., converting himself from a prospect in to a lead is done by the customer himself without any further assistance.

In summary, the days of grappling and forcing the customer to buy have been replaced with educating and suggesting ways to focus and improve his bigger picture. This way, both the customer and company feel happy.

Happy marketing!

Skill Set – Key for YOUR Survival

Talent rules and is appreciated everywhere. It has been there like this since life on this planet evolved.  Even our human brains have the capability to learn until we die. However, most people don’t realize this and stick to their dogmatic views (based on what they have learned in their childhood) throughout their life. One can enumerate people who literally use their brains at the age of 60 in this world; the count would be very less.

Politics and research are such fields where the participants are subjected to think, think, and think for results. 

These professions put the participants on the edge of survival and on their toes for results. Naturally, for getting survived, the participants think a lot and come up with new ideas irrespective of their age.

Apart from these professions, whenever we face a danger in terms of ensnared by our competitor in business/ whenever management foist a narcissistic boss on our heads/ when we get an inkling of that something is happening in our backyard against us/ when we think that our sworn enemy is infallible/ etc,  we think a lot to get rid of the danger as soon as possible.

In summary, in this world, people survive by their respective skill set. If you are gnomic, it means you are not gnostic. Even a professional marksman do lot of rehearsals before he goes for his kill. If you see in little bit in-depth, all skill sets in this world teaches you to look at others for one or other thing; but not completely at yourself. If you are filled with narcissism, then irrespective of whatever skills you have, you are bound to be a failure both in life and profession.

Take care!