Three words of wisdom from a successful entrepreneur

CORT JOHNSON

Young Entrepreneur Council

Published Tuesday, Aug. 19 2014, 5:00 AM EDT

Last updated Monday, Aug. 18 2014, 1:14 PM EDT

I’m fortunate that I have the opportunity to build Terrible Labs with an incredible team of engineers and designers. In just a few years, we’ve grown from three people with a questionable brand name to one of the most respected design and development consultancies around.

Prior to starting Terrible Labs, I spent time working at several other startups, and as a result, I have been lucky enough to learn from many great mentors. Below are a few words of wisdom that have helped me in my career thus far.

For the longest time, I would gauge a job opportunity based on its description. I’d look for gigs that described requirements where I thought I’d be able to add significant value on day one. I believed that if I was doing a good job and the company was performing well, I’d be happy.1. Ask “What do I want to learn?” not “What do I want to do?”

After accepting a few jobs based on the role, I found that my passion for the company quickly faded. That’s when I was told to stop judging a job based on its description and judge it instead on what I would be able to learn and who I would be able to learn from. I took that advice to heart and began thinking about the skills I wanted to acquire. Once I knew what I wanted to learn, I began pinpointing people in the Boston area who were best suited to help me attain those skills.

When we started Terrible Labs, I wasn’t excited about the prospect of starting a company. I was excited that I’d get to learn from some of the most talented engineers around. I’m not an engineer by trade, but I am passionate about being the best at managing an engineering team, understanding how to build a web or mobile application, and being able to take an idea and turn it into a product. Needless to say, I have now been at Terrible Labs longer than any other company in my career.

2. Don’t be afraid to get a job.

I was guilty of wanting to work for myself and start my own company right out of college. I thought I had the chops to make it happen and the connections to get it done. Don’t get me wrong, some people can pull it off, but most of us end up spinning our wheels and end up with little to show for all of our hard work.

In the waning days of my first startup, a close mentor of mine told me that if it were not for the first few jobs he had, he would not have been able to build his current company. He went on to tell me that the business problems he encountered at his job and the people he solved them with became the foundation for his startup. I spent the next few years working at a couple of different companies. Sure enough, it was at those companies where I met my co-founders of Terrible Labs — and several of our future clients.

3. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Early on in my career, I believed the startup lore that successful startups are created by those who sacrifice salary, work around the clock, and only eat ramen. So while working on my first startup, I went along with the hype and lived the “successful” lifestyle. After coming up short and not having much to show from my effort, I was reminded that a career, even in a startup, is a marathon and not a sprint. Don’t feel like you have to start a company tomorrow. Take the time to build your skills, make money, eat a meal, and break away from work once in a while.

Cort Johnson is a co-founder of Terrible Labs, a boutique design and development shop, and TicketZen, the easiest way to pay parking tickets with your mobile phone. He also works with Flybridge Capital Partners and its general partners as an advisor to support and broaden the firm's investment activities.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world's most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.

BRANDING: Why marketers need to adapt to fading brand loyalty - Canadian statistics

PERSUASION

Why marketers need to adapt to fading brand loyalty

SUSAN KRASHINSKY - MARKETING REPORTER

The Globe and Mail

Published Thursday, Jun. 05 2014, 4:18 PM EDT

Last updated Thursday, Jun. 05 2014, 6:19 PM EDT

Those in Sales and Marketing should pay attention to branding programs and market share!

According to a new report from Veritas Communications and Northstar, brand loyalty in Canada is slipping fast. Roughly three-quarters of people they surveyed said they had switched away from a “preferred” brand in the past year. And nearly 7 in 10 plan to do so in the coming year.

“These are large numbers, and we’re not talking about any brand; we’re talking about favoured brands,” Tricia Benn, Northstar’s chief marketing and strategy officer said. “This is becoming more common.”

Other research, such as Deloitte’s Pantry Study, has found that brand loyalty has been on a steady decline in recent years. Recently, Bond Brand Loyalty, an agency that focuses on loyalty marketing specifically, released a report that found 29 per cent of consumers said they would not be loyal to a brand without its loyalty program.

“Many brands rely overly heavily on points, discounts and rebates to influence customer behaviour. The risk for these brands is that customers are loyal to the discount, not to the brand,” Scott Robinson, a senior director with Bond, said.

The team at Veritas and Northstar attribute slipping brand loyalty partly to a growing cynicism toward advertising, as well as the way communications have changed.

One-third of survey respondents said they see themselves as influencers. Veritas’s research shows that the endorsements of friends and family have twice as much effect on decision making as any other source, including experts. As the media people use to converse with each other make it easier to solicit advice or influence others, it is complicating things for marketers. Businesses have always known that word of mouth is powerful, but now it has become amplified. That means the opportunities have grown for people to consider a different brand or to be influenced to try something new.

“The result of this is that brand loyalty is fleeting,” Veritas president Krista Webster said.

But it also complicates how brands speak to people. Because friends have such a big influence on consumer decisions, many brands try to speak in the voice of a friend, especially on social media. They are attempting “to mirror the most trusted sources,” Ms. Benn said.

That can work against marketers when consumers see through it. And since consumers are feeling more empowered than ever to communicate their like or dislike with brands and to influence others in their lives, they see through marketing more than ever.

The best strategy for marketers, then, is to quit pretending their brands have a special place in consumers’ hearts. Instead, they should provide experiences that are actually valuable to people.

“Too many brands are making themselves the hero of their story,” said Darren McColl, global chief brand strategy officer for marketing agency SapientNitro, and author of Storyscaping. “There’s an impatience with it.”

He points to an example that he worked on: the 2009 “best job in the world” campaign for Tourism Queensland in Australia. People competed to be hired as caretaker for Hamilton Island on the Great Barrier Reef.

The offer attracted more than 34,000 video applications from all over the world and was covered in more than 6,000 news stories. That’s the kind of promotion Queensland could not buy.

But it did something else as well: Rather than pushing tourism to Queensland, it encouraged people to think of themselves as the centre of the story. Contestants created their own video stories as part of their applications. But even those who did not enter but simply saw the campaign likely spent a few minutes daydreaming about living in an island paradise.

In other words, the job was a vehicle to make people put themselves in the story.

“My client at Coke once said it perfectly. I’ll never forget it: ‘How much of a relationship does a mum want to have with her orange juice? Not much. But we have to find a way to make it meaningful,’” Mr. McColl said.

Sometimes, that’s as simple as being useful. Mattel Inc. and its agency Ogilvy & Mather Paris came up with an ingenious way to promote the company’s classic Scrabble game to smartphone users. It provided free WiFi Internet connections in public places. In order to connect to the Scrabble Network, users had to spell a word from Scrabble tiles. Higher scoring words gave users longer access to the network.

People spelled more than 6,000 words in two weeks and the company gave away more than 110,000 minutes of WiFi. It was a campaign that rewarded people for their time by being useful and fun. (Those who shared their scores on Facebook got even more free time.)

Walt Disney Co. has been working on a way to make its experiences at its parks more tailored to individual visitors. Last year it introduced MagicBands, rubber wristbands embedded with RFID (radio frequency identification). The wristbands work as hotel keys, tickets, and authentication to charge meals and other purchases to a visitor’s room.

It also allows the company to personalize visitors’ experiences: Disney characters might wish your child a happy birthday by name, for example. And the company can use the data it collects about how people move around the parks to better tailor their services in future. Some have reasonably criticized this level of tracking as creepy. But the manufactured “magic” is a sign of how smart marketers are trying to create some of the brand love that is increasingly hard won.

“It’s critical not that they sound like your friend, using the same familiarity and language. It’s about understanding me,” Veritas’s Ms. Webster said. “You can’t have that authentic voice if you don’t understand the true context of your consumer.”

*********

74 per cent: Canadians surveyed who reported switching away from one or more of their “preferred” brands in the past year

69 per cent: those who said they are planning to switch from a “preferred” brand in the coming year

39 per cent: people who looked to traditional media for information before trying a different brand

32 per cent: those who sought out information online before switching

31 per cent: those who looked for information on social media such as Facebook or Twitter

25 per cent: those who were influenced by online communities such as chat rooms or review sites

19 per cent: those who found information on a company’s app or blog

43 per cent: survey respondents who said they look for advice from others before trying out a new brand

*Source: Veritas Communications Influencer study, conducted by research firm Northstar. The company surveyed 500 adult Canadians across the country in English and French.

SOCIAL MEDIA: One year in, Twitter's Canadian arm strives to define itself

One year in, Twitter's Canadian arm strives to define itself Add to ...

JAMES BRADSHAW - MEDIA REPORTER

The Globe and Mail

Published Wednesday, Jun. 04 2014, 3:37 PM EDT

Last updated Thursday, Jun. 05 2014, 7:31 AM EDT

It has been a year of growth, hiring, and thousands upon thousands of tweets at Twitter Inc.’s Canadian outpost, but Kirstine Stewart still struggles to find the right yardstick to measure its progress.

As head of Twitter Canada, Ms. Stewart’s main job is convincing broadcasters and brands that her company’s network is a place where they can engage with more people, whether they’re on their sofa or on the move. Even after many milestones, there is much more to do to convince companies to pour their marketing budgets into 140-character promotions.

One year after it set up shop in Toronto, the company’s Canadian arm still holds to its startup ethos. There is no clear five-year plan, which makes it harder to explain what Twitter is, and will be. For now, Ms. Stewart has been extending a hand to nervous former colleagues in the broadcast world – her last job was heading up CBC’s English services – and promising to help them find “new life” and new audiences in a fast-changing digital landscape.

“We have a great opportunity to help transition traditional media into a newer space,” Ms. Stewart said in an interview. “Did video kill the radio star? No. Things move and change. That’s just the world of media.”

Among the success stories so far is the fact that all of Canada’s major broadcasters signed on to Twitter Amplify, a program that lets them embed videos and other content into tweets targeted at users with particular interests. Thanks to the power of algorithms, the corporate account for Hockey Night in Canada can now blast out clips of goals scored in the NHL playoffs within moments, reaching targeted hockey aficionados who are not yet among its 248,000 followers.

The key is Twitter’s ability to mine data on hundreds of millions of users – some of whom have come to view the network as an indispensable tool – that is more specific than the broad age and gender categories that have shaped decision-making in conventional television. “I’m a 40-something woman with a couple of kids at home. I don’t watch Oprah,” Ms. Stewart says, to illustrate that “no one is ever typical.”

Initiatives like Amplify have driven Twitter’s rapid growth. Its first-quarter revenue more than doubled to $250-million worldwide, and its global recruiting has nearly kept pace, rising from 1,500 employees when Ms. Stewart became the first Canadian-based hire in April, 2013, to nearly 3,000 today.

The Canadian office has swelled to more than 20 people and expects to surpass 30 by summer’s end, which will soon force a move from its King Street West location to make room for new arrivals. Here, seniority is measured in months, or even weeks. Revenue has also “multiplied,” Ms. Stewart said, though the company doesn’t release country-specific figures.

Yet investors are still wary. Growth in the number of users has been slowing, and the first quarter saw just a 5.8-per-cent increase in the number of users, to 255 million. Some have questioned whether Twitter can secure the mass appeal needed to make it profitable. The company publishes select metrics such as ad revenue per 1,000 timeline views, and has 360 ways to profile its users, from location to gender or the device they use.

Even so, it can be tricky making those numbers tell a simple story that shows how Twitter measures up to Facebook Inc. or Google Inc. “People try to fit you in a box,” Ms. Stewart says.

She still hears from naysayers who think Twitter is filled mostly with people commenting on their lunch, but less often. More broadcasters, brands such as Visa Inc. and organizations such as the Canadian Olympic Committee have been experimenting with Twitter’s ever-expanding suite of promotional products.

But marketers often carve up their budgets between conventional and digital media, which can hamstring investments in Twitter. The solution, Ms. Stewart says, is education. She has brought on board new managers to work closely with particular industries, such as head of sports Christopher Doyle, who joined recently from CBC Sports. Their message is that businesses “have to think more in real time” about reaching users, and that Twitter can be the connector.

“It’s hard to define that success and explain it in a simple way,” she says. “But it’s pretty clear what it is when you’re on the platform.”

BRANDING: The art – and science – of creating a brand name

The art – and science – of creating a brand name

SUSAN KRASHINSKY - MARKETING REPORTER

The Globe and Mail

Published Thursday, May. 29 2014, 4:23 PM EDT

Last updated Friday, May. 30 2014, 8:06 AM EDT

Anyone who has spent time poring over a book of baby names or wrestling with the legacy of great-grandma Bertha knows that coming up with a name is no trivial matter. And when it comes to the multimillion-dollar baby that is a major brand, the pressure is on.

That is why nervous corporate parents come to David Placek’s door. Over the past 30 years, the founder of Sausalito, Calif.-based Lexicon Branding Inc. has focused solely on giving brands their names.

“Just how important is a name? My simple answer to this is, nothing will be used for a longer period of time or more often than a company’s name,” Mr. Placek said. “It’s not just a creative exercise. It’s a strategic one.”For Lexicon, those creations have included such household names as Swiffer, Dasani, and here in Canada, BlackBerry. More recently, Mr. Placek was on Canadian soil – and bearing fruit – once again: Lexicon helped with rebranding ING Direct to Tangerine.

Because brand identity is the core of any marketer’s plans, companies are willing to shell out to make sure they get it right. Lexicon’s services start at $45,000 (U.S.), but for bigger corporate projects that require multiple interviews with management – as Tangerine’s did – the cost is typically doubled, closer to roughly $90,000 depending on the project.

The average thinking person might well balk at the price tag, especially since coming up with a name does not seem, frankly, all that hard to do.

But companies such as Toyota Motor Corp., Coca-Cola Co. and Apple Inc. have decided that it’s worth every penny. So how does it actually work?

First, there’s the research. ING spoke to roughly 10,000 people, inside and outside the company, to figure out how people feel about the brand, what its strengths and weaknesses are, and to test the names it was working with, among other factors. (Lexicon contributed by surveying about 5,000 employees and more than 1,500 customers.)

For ING, that was important because it highlighted the fact that customers do not have the same skepticism toward banks in Canada as in the U.S. There was no need to rebuild lost trust. And secondly, customers tended to see ING as different.

“So we wanted to make sure we didn’t create a name that was more traditional, more stodgy, or more like other banks,” Mr. Placek said. “We had to keep our freshness.”

After research is done, two-person teams of linguists at Lexicon come up with a long list of names. Each team is given a different briefing: One team knows everything that management wants, the current name, and the research results. Other teams are given less information, to free them up to think more broadly.

The long list for Tangerine was about 3,000 names, which is astounding. (Try to think of 3,000 words.) But Mr. Placek explains that many of these are accounted for by different variations on a single idea: Adding a prefix for example, or listing different tree names if there is one idea based on a tree.

“To be successful here, you have to not worry about being very efficient,” he said.

That long list is quickly cut in half. Then a longer process cuts it down to a meaningful long list of 300 or 400 that management will consider. When the list got down to roughly 40, Lexicon’s legal team stepped in. They tossed out names that might violate other trademarks, but also those that are legally passable but too similar to others to be effective amid all the marketing clutter.

Finally, linguists comb through the names to ensure they are pronounceable and have positive connotations in a number of different languages. (For Tangerine, they looked at about 12.) Then they go back to market research to test their options.

“Then we argue,” Mr. Placek said.

Sometimes, Lexicon will create new words for a name. This can be useful to communicate that a company is innovative – as was the case for Pentium – or in a category where competitors are using very descriptive words. When Procter & Gamble Co. created Swiffer, for example, its biggest competitor was Clorox Co.’s ReadyMop. P&G considered names such as EasyMop and MegaMop before coming to Lexicon.

The team helped P&G figure out that consumers’ associations with the word “mop” – a floppy, messy tool pushing water and dirt around the floor – were not good. Since pretty much everyone hates mopping, Lexicon also proposed that the product sound just a bit more fun, almost like a toy.

Lexicon played with the sounds from words for cleaning – wiping, brushing, sweeping, swiping. Their first idea was to take the word “swipe” and transform it into Swif, with one F. Then they added another F, but the word just came to a stop. It was not active enough. They finally landed on Swiffer, which has been a huge success.

“I’ve been told ReadyMop is about a $200-million brand. Swiffer is almost a $4-billion brand,” Mr. Placek said. It’s also expanded to other products such as the Duster and the WetJet.

For Sonos, a brand of high-end audio equipment, Lexicon took the Latin root for sound, “son.” It then structured the name as a palindrome to communicate the idea that it is seamless. It was also a plus that the word ends in OS, since the company wants people to think of its equipment as more than just speakers. They are an operating system.

Lexicon is not the only player in this space. Many ad agencies will come up with brand names for clients. (In the case of Tangerine, its Toronto agency John St. was deeply involved in the process with Lexicon.) And there are other competitors who specialize in naming, such as San Francisco-based Landor Associates and the Omnicom Group Inc.-owned firm Interbrand.

For all the projects he has done, there are plenty of brand names Mr. Placek wishes he’d created. DreamWorks, for example, perfectly sums up a team of people whose work is all about imagination – they dream by day. He admires Lexus for coining a name at a time when most cars were named after people, such as Ford, or after animals like Mustang. The name sounds like luxury. And it is perfectly constructed to be pleasing to say, he explains, rhapsodizing about the order of vowels and consonants in a way only a person obsessed with words can.

“It’s very crisp,” he says. “I love the X in the middle. It’s just an extraordinary name.”

ING’S SHORTLIST

When ING Direct rebranded itself as Tangerine this year, it was the result of a process that started with a list of roughly 3,000 possible names. That was eventually whittled down to the following shortlist:

Forward Bank

Thrive Bank

Veva Bank

Orange Bank

Tangerine Bank

LEXICON’S GREATEST HITS

In the 30 years since Lexicon was founded in a San Francisco apartment, David Placek has worked on more than 3,500 brand naming projects. Here are some of the most recognizable brands he and his team have helped to create:

Swiffer

Febreze

BlackBerry

Forester and Outback for Subaru

Scion for Toyota

PowerBook for Apple

OnStar

Pentium

Dasani

BRANDING: Seven habits of highly successful brands

 
• Management

MANAGING BOOKS

Seven habits of highly successful brands

HARVEY SCHACHTER

Special to The Globe and Mail

Published Tuesday, Apr. 01 2014, 7:00 PM EDT

Last updated Tuesday, Apr. 01 2014, 2:50 PM EDT

What Great Brands Do

By Denise Lee Yohn

(Jossey-Bass, 262 pages, $33.95)

Most companies chase customers to buy the fabulous products they believe they are offering. When they see potential new opportunities, they swoop in and add to their array of goodies. Often, those opportunities come by being carefully attuned to trends. They devote endless hours to sending marketing messages in support of their brand. If they’re doing well, they may also contemplate giving back to the community through some charitable cause or marketing effort.

It starts with the notion of what she calls “brand as business.” A company should base all its operations around its brand, the values expressed by the brand permeating the firm’s culture. But she notes that a survey of chief marketing officers found that 64 per cent feel their brands do not influence decisions made by the company. The brand is for communications activities, but not something around which company operations orbit.But marketing consultant Denise Lee Yohn says great brands don’t do that. In fact, they often do the opposite of what we expect. And it pays off.

“This means that nearly two-thirds of companies are pouring millions of dollars into marketing and advertising without aligning their business strategies with the values and attributes they’re communicating!” she writes in What Great Brands Do. “As a result, the full business value of the brand itself goes unrealized.”

She cites san Francisco-based Gap Inc., which at the turn of the century hit troubles, responding with expensive ad campaigns that didn’t lead to much – indeed, same store sales dropped 7 per cent. Gene Pressman, former chief executive officer of upscale clothing retailer Barneys New York, said the Gap’s product offerings failed to live up to its ad hype. “Marketing may get people through the door, but they’ll walk out the door when there’s nothing to buy,” he noted.

Ms. Yohn points out that Spanish clothes retailer Zara has done minimal advertising, yet it has grown. Google, the Body Shop and Lululemon Athletica grew enormously with little advertising (although Lululemon has experienced difficulties recently). “Advertising isn’t good or bad per se, but advertising that is divorced from the realities of the company’s actual offering can be counterproductive,” she warns.

In building your business around your brand, she recommends the following seven principles, some of which may seem counter-intuitive:

1. Great brands start inside

Your brand can’t simply be a promise – it must be a promise delivered. So branding starts with cultivating a strong internal culture that aligns with your brand, and will carry it to the outside world. “For your employees to understand, embrace and deliver your brand, they need to know its values in their heads, feel inspired by them in their hearts, and then put them into action with their hands and feet,” she says.

2. Great brands avoid selling products

While most companies obsess about their products, brands are about emotional connections. “Just do it!” was Nike’s call that connected strongly with athletes, spelling out nothing about the products the company sold. While competitors tried to provide more innovative products, Oregon-based Nike brilliantly embraced the values and aspirations of athletes.

3. Great brands avoid trends

While many companies leap on trends, the best brands know what they are about, even if they sometimes challenge trends. They lead change, anticipating and advancing cultural movements, as Starbucks and Lady Gaga have done.

4. Great brands don’t chase customers

Brands with integrity and self-confidence can use magnetic appeal to attract customers. Vancouver-based Lululemon, Ms. Yohn notes, doesn’t chase customers with sales or discounts. It attracts customers by staying true to its identity.

5. Great brands sweat the small stuff

Smart brands concern themselves with packaging, since that reflects what Procter & Gamble calls one of the first moments of truth with consumers. They also obsess about every point where the company connects with customers – touch points, as they are known – to ensure the brand is what they mean it to be.

6. Great brands commit and stay committed

Top companies know what they are about and remain ruthlessly focused, not pursuing every possibility that might lead them astray.

7. Great brands never have to ‘give back’

Companies such as outdoor apparel company Patagonia carry out their operations with a sense of social responsibility, so they don’t need to develop “giving back” programs. “Giving back suggests that you’ve taken something that needs to be paid back to balance out your karma,” she says. Great brands are in balance with the world around them.

In the end, the premises she presents aren’t all that startling. But they do run counter to practice in many companies. By telling stories of successful organizations that apply the rules she offers, Ms. Yohn challenges readers to recalibrate their brand marketing.

POSTSCRIPT

In The Science of Leadership (Oxford University Press, 328 pages, $54.95) Julian Barling, a professor of management and research chair at Queen’s School of Business, mixes a trip for readers through leadership research with his personal reflections on leadership development.

Consultant Kathryn D. Cramer shares what highly effective leaders see, say and do in Lead Positive (Jossey-Bass, 268 pages, $33.99).

Public speaking adviser Bill Hoogterp shares his methodology for talks by business professionals in Your Perfect Presentation (McGraw-Hill, 269 pages, $23.95).

Harvey Schachter is a Battersea, Ont.-based writer specializing in management issues. He writes Monday Morning Manager and management book reviews for the print edition of Report on Business and an online work-life column Balance. E-mail Harvey Schachter