The Hindu Business Line : Six ‘life’ secretsTo know the unknown

Be there. Be real. These are the first two of the six secrets that Raymond A. Nadeau discusses in Living Brands ( www.tatamcgrawhill.com). “Becoming a legitimate part of people’s lives is the new minimum price of brand entry and is the only method for a brand’s sustained longevity.” Being there is critical; because it is no longer news that brands have evolved “from being products with purely functional benefits into highly emotionalised personalities that represent an entire intimate lifestyle to consumers.”

As a result, we marketers have to connect with more people in more languages, insists the author. We need to address needs and experiences we often don’t understand – all within the context of cultures and cultural values we may not fully grasp. “Still, we push forward, and we wonder why many of our strategic initiatives fail. It’s more of a surprise that some of them actually work.” Sobering. Be real, the next secret, is about collaborating with the consumer. “The difference between collaborative branding and traditional marketing is that it does not have an ‘us versus them’ mentality,” explains Nadeau. “A truly collaborative branding strategy does not target, which sounds more like a big-game-hunting term; rather, it provides satisfaction to human needs. Collaborative branding discovers, delights, and satisfies.” The war is over, declares the author. “The consumer won. It’s time to move on to reconstruction.” And the other secrets are…

Throbbing stuff.

Six ‘life’ secretsTo know the unknown

Selling Blue Elephants
Howard Moskowitz & Alex Gofman

Do you want to know how to make great products that people want before they even know they want them? Howard Moskowitz and Alex Gofman explore this question in Selling Blue Elephants ( www.pearsoned.co.in).

And RDE or Rule Developing Experimentation is their answer: “A systematised solution-oriented business process of experimentation that designs, tests, and modifies alternative ideas, packages, products, or services in a disciplined way so that the developer and marketer discover what appeals to the customer, even if the customer can’t articulate the need, much less the solution.” Take time to experimentally explore the factors that could drive consumer interest, advise the authors. “Show the customers (or let them try) several systematically designed prototypes, and they will tell what they like, what they do not, and what does not make any difference to them.”

In chapter after chapter, the book showcases RDE in action, be it in computers or coffee, banking or pickles, to prove that RDE is “more than an afternoon’s feel-good session in a business therapy office, where the participants unload their business-relevant shackles and constraints and adopt a new and creative attitude.”

Of interest to investors should be the chapter on how RDE defeats Murphy’s Law and ‘bares’ stock markets. It unravels a tool to detect likely changes in market sentiment towards specific stocks as a result of associated messaging. The authors suggest a vision for the future: ‘the well-prepared hedge fund.’ Something that hinges on “a system that vacuums the Web periodically, identifies the messaging for a specific product-oriented topic in the news, and then submits these messages for evaluation by shareholders or by fund managers… ”

Explosive!

D. Murali

http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

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Six ‘life’ secretsTo know the unknown