Brand Autopsy

Would You Miss BusinessWeek?

Continuing my “Would you Miss” series ...

Does BusinessWeek provide such a unique publication and reader experience that we would be saddened if it didn’t exist? Does BusinessWeek treat its employees so astonishingly well that those workers would not be able to find another employer to treat them as well? Does BusinessWeek forge such unfailing emotional connections with its readers that they would fail to find another magazine that could forge just as strong an emotional bond?

What say you?

Post inspiration | Mavericks at Work

Today's Time Waster

Weirdo Toys
The Home for Odd, Ugly, and Neglected Toys...

*** Click me said the jpeg ***

Zappos $1,000 Offer

Ever heard of a “Quit-Now” bonus for new employees? We’ve all heard of severance packages where long-standing employees are essentially paid a bonus to quit now. But a “Quit-Now” bonus for new employees to voluntarily leave after a week on the job … that’s novel.

Bill Taylor, of Mavericks at Work fame, writes how Zappos , a fast-growing online shoe retailer, will offer one-week old employees a “Quit-Now” bonus of $1,000. Zappos will ask new employees this question … “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.”

Why does Zappos do this? The reasoning, as Bill Taylor put it, is …

“Because if you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for. It’s hard to describe the level of energy in the Zappos culture—which means, by definition, it’s not for everybody. Zappos wants to learn if there’s a bad fit between what makes the organization tick and what makes individual employees tick—and it’s willing to pay to learn sooner rather than later. (About ten percent of new call-center employees take the money and run.)” READ MORE

Brilliant! Bloody brilliant!!

Thanks to someone’s blog for the hook-up. (Sorry, I forget who clued me in.)

Presentations, Comedians, and Point-of-View

Later this week I'm giving a presentation on giving presentations. (This'll be a tough gig 'cause one has to be truly on their presentation game if they are to share advice on how to give presentations. Yikes.)

Anyway, the basis of this presentation is sharing lessons I've learned from being an outsider looking into the world of stand-up comedians. There's a lot of great advice presenters can learn from how comics approach their craft.

For example, here are a few slides focusing on the importance of developing a strong Point-of-View when crafting and delivering a presentation.

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WOM Knowledge Nugget

From Hugh MacLeod's twitter missives, I read something that the marketer in you should also read. Word of Mouth isn't created by marketers, it is co-created with consumers. Right on Hugh, right on.

Advice from Eddie Lampert

Fortune’s latest issue shares “The Best Advice I Ever Got” from a cadre of business muckety-mucks. Lots of good advice from the likes of Michael Bloomberg, Nelson Peltz. Craig Newmark, Tina Fey, and Indra Nooyi. I especially liked the advice from Eddie Lampert, hedge fund head man and Sears chairman ...

"Almost every weekend when I was 7, 8, 9, 10 years old, my father and I would toss a football in the yard or play basketball in the driveway. When we played football, he'd say, "Go out ten steps. Turn to your right." The ball would reach me just before I turned, and it would hit me right in the chest. Why would my dad do this? He told me, "If I waited for you to turn, you and the defensive player would have an equal chance to get the ball. Your opportunity is gone."

This idea of anticipation is key to investing and to business generally. You can't wait for an opportunity to become obvious. You have to think, "Here's what other people and companies have done under certain circumstances. Now, under these new circumstances, how is this management likely to behave?" The plays my father designed for me helped me learn to think ahead." -- Eddie Lampert [source]

Steve Yastrow on the WE Relationship

I love the premise from Steve Yastrow’s recently-published book, WE: The Ideal Customer Relationship. In the opening chapter, Yastrow writes …

Relationships have become powerful differentiators. Customers can’t tell if your product is better than your competitor’s product, but they can tell if they have a better relationship with you than with your competitor.

If relationships are such powerful differentiators, what is the most productive, profitable, and sustainable relationship?

The We relationship.

In a We relationship, you think less about what separates you and more about what intertwines you.

In contrast, if your customer’s view of your relationship is not “We” but “Us & Them,” he will focus more on what he can get from you—and on what he believes you get from him—and less on how you can collaborate to reach your goals together. [Steve Yastrow, SOURCE]

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For those needing to see this premise in a chart, peep the following from pg. 13 of WE: The Ideal Customer Relationship ...

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Learn more about Steve Yastrow and get yourself a copy of WE.

New Guru Review

Four years ago I linked to an article titled, GURU NATION. The article shed light on the Business Guru Scene from the egos to the economics of it all. Interesting read.

The Wall Street Journal has revisited the Guru Scene for 2008. This updated look reflects a change where more non-traditional business experts are in greater demand. Journalists like Thomas Friedman (#2) and Malcolm Gladwell (#4) rank high as does education professor, Howard Gardner (#5). According to the article, the most popular topics for these business gurus include: globalization, motivation ,and innovation. Here's the list...

This list was compiled by two Babson College professors and is based upon the number of online mentions, academic citations, and LexisNexis media mentions. It’s not a truly scientific list, but it is an interesting list.

Adding to the interest is the absence of women in the top 20 rankings. Wendy Bounds, from the Wall Street Journal, asked readers for their take on why women are absent from the list … the conversation is worth reading.

Today's Time Waster

From AdFreak, by way of Nerve.com ... a collection of 50 top-notch commercial parodies from Saturday Night Live, SCTV, In Living Color, Chappelle's Show, and MADtv. Good stuff. Click below:

** "Click me," said the jpeg. **

Wii WOM

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an interview with Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo EVP of Sales & Marketing. The interview focused on the marketing strategies behind the U.S. introduction of Wii Fit, a gaming system designed to get people in game shape.

Cammie Dunaway explains there will be TV, Radio, and OOH advertising to support the launch but ... Nintendo is focusing much of its marketing attention on “public relations” efforts to get regular people to do the marketing for Wii Fit.

Cammie is a firm believer in the power of Word-of-Mouth (WOM) as a credible and effective marketing strategy. In the interview she doesn’t say anything earth-shattering new about WOM. Nevertheless, her sound-bites might give you some ammo in championing (or defending) Word-of-Mouth within your company.

WSJ: Videogame advertising has long been dominated by glitzy TV ads, yet the largest part of this advertising and marketing campaign will be the public-relations effort. Why?

Ms. Dunaway: "What we see is consumers are increasingly turning to friends, family and news articles as credible sources of information about products, more so than in the past."

WSJ: Why?

Ms. Dunaway: "It is because consumers are getting much smarter, because they have better access to information and they are able to share information online. They are bombarded with advertising messages -- so they have more tools to avoid that advertising today."