Good Manners in Work place

Do manners matter at work? Should you really be expected to be polite all the time, or can you bend the rules in the name of efficiency or self-preservation?

When your boss calls and you’re in the middle of a meeting with a colleague, you answer it. It must be important – after all, it’s your boss! Never mind that your colleague and the meeting are important too, it’s your boss on the phone!

Or what about when you’re running behind? It’s 3:50pm and the report you’re preparing has to be out by 4:00pm sharp. You print it off and the paper jams in the middle of your job. There’s no time to fix it so you resend the print job to another printer, but you don’t go back and sort it out once your report’s delivered. Instead, you just leave the jam for someone else to discover and fix. Sure, it’s an inconvenience for them, but it wasn’t exactly your fault that the printer jammed, was it?

You know that behaviors like this are rude. You wouldn’t behave in this way outside of the office. So why do we then allow ourselves to behave inconsiderately at work?

There is a definite double standard when it comes to workplace manners. It’s common to see people doing things at work they wouldn’t dream of doing in a social setting. But you can’t allow these behaviors to persist if you want to create and maintain a healthy work environment.

Disrespectful and discourteous behavior makes members of your team unhappy, and damages the cohesion of your team. It works against all of the efforts you make to motivate team members, and thereby raise productivity. With this in mind, there is simply no excuse for bad manners. Whether you are interacting with a person higher or lower on the corporate hierarchy, giving feedback, issuing instructions or exerting power; good manners are an absolute necessity.

To make sure your workplace is free of rude behavior requires a two-pronged approach:

• Encouraging good manners.
• Stamping out poor manners.

Encouraging Good Manners

Most of the time when bad manners surface at work it is unintentional. It’s easy to get caught up in your own tasks and projects. People’s focus gets so narrow that they forget to consider the impact that their words or actions will have on other people.

In an attempt to be efficient and productive we take a few liberties with our manners at work. Perhaps, at one time, we apologetically said, “I’m sorry, we have to stop the discussion and move onto the next point.” But now we blurt out, “Next!” or “Let’s get on with it, people!”

While the intention may be the same, the degree of bluntness, or even rudeness, used nowadays is unacceptable – at work or anywhere.

If good people are bruised by someone else’s rudeness once too often, you risk losing them. How long is it going to take to find an equally good replacement, and bring them “up to speed”? How much is this going to cost? And what opportunities will you have lost in the meantime?

When disrespectful conduct starts surfacing throughout a company, or when it’s used by executives or other key people, it can become part of the organization’s culture. Poor manners can be quickly absorbed into cultural norms, especially when no one stands up and demands courteous and polite behavior.

So what can you do if rudeness is endemic within the culture of your organization?

• In conjunction with your colleagues, focus on the problem behaviors and create a list of the behaviors that are expected within your team. Be specific so that people really understand what constitutes good manners. Depending on where the problems lie, you may want to include these items:
  • Email and Internet expectations.
  • Where people eat.
  • What people wear.
  • Meeting routines and etiquette.
  • Physical state of individual workstations.
  • Working in close quarters.
  • Communication style – tone, manner, language.
  • Use of supplies and equipment – common and co-workers’ own.
  • Telephone manners.
• Demonstrate all the appropriate behaviors in your own actions, whatever your place in the corporate hierarchy. Acting as a role model is one of the most effective means of reinforcing what is acceptable and expected.
• Until things improve, consider adding a “Manners” heading to the agenda of your regular team meeting to emphasize and entrench the importance of change.
• Recognize people for demonstrating polite behavior. Make a point of thanking people for turning off their cell phones before entering a meeting, or making a new pot of coffee after taking the last cup.
• Until things improve, consider adding a manners category to your performance review process. This elevates manners to a core competency level in your organization and underpins how important it is to effective performance.

Stamping Out Bad Manners

Encouraging good manners is one side of the coin. The other requires developing mechanisms and strategies to eliminate poor manners from your workplace. When workplace manners begin to slip, it can be hard to stop the slide and regain control.

Open communication and empathy are perhaps your strongest weapons for controlling discourtesy in the office. When people stop talking or sharing their experiences and concerns, or when they stop considering how their actions make others feel, poor behavior can start to work its way into the fabric of the organization’s culture.

Consider this scenario. A few jokes get passed around the company’s intranet. Everyone has a good laugh. Then slowly, over time, the jokes get more and more explicit. No one says anything because nobody wants to be the one who stops all the fun. Then a harassment complaint is made, the fun comes to a screeching halt – and everyone wishes they had said something earlier to stop the inappropriate behavior.

Or you start noticing that your snacks and drinks are missing from the fridge. You don’t say anything because it’s just a pop or a snack-size yogurt. You don’t want people to think you’re cheap or a complainer so you bring a cooler to work and put it under your desk.

While the magnitudes of these issues are vastly different, what allows the situation to deteriorate is poor communication from one side and a lack of empathy from the other.

First, you have to have a workplace where there is open and honest communication. When you do, your co-workers feel comfortable voicing their concerns and there are mechanisms in place for resolving conflicts.

Along with these, people must also believe that something will done to address their concerns. They have to see that their issues are taken care of and that management is just as concerned about poor behavior as they are.

On the flip side, people must take responsibility for their actions. They must think about the impact of what they say or do has on other people and the workplace in general. Whenever you have people working together, there has to be a high level of respect and concern for others.

Some tips for creating this type of workplace include:

• Developing a staff feedback system.
• Clearly defining what is not acceptable in terms of appropriate workplace behavior. This should refer to the “good manners” document you create as part of the process of encouraging good manners.
• Applying a fair and consistent discipline procedure.
• Creating a conflict resolution process that begins with people speaking directly to one another, but where they then get progressively more outside support and assistance if a solution can’t be worked out.
• Depending on national culture, consider encouraging people to use the words “I’m sorry” or “I apologize” – and mean it.
• Encouraging people to ask themselves, “How would the other person like to be treated in this situation?” Perhaps even put these words and phrases in prominent areas of the office as reminders to be polite and courteous.

Ask yourself if you apply a double standard to workplace manners compared with social manners. What excuses have you used to justify your lapses in manners? Do these excuses stand up to rational inspection?

Apply This to Your Life

• Make a list of things you’ve done at work that have been less than polite. Reflect on these actions and set a goal for yourself to use your best manners at work and at home.
• If there is a recent incident where you felt you were treated poorly, or you treated someone else poorly, develop a plan to resolve the issue. Communicate openly and honestly with the person and share your experiences and feelings.

A new tool to improve your negotiation skills – Persuasion tool

Think about the last time you negotiated with someone. Perhaps you asked a colleague to support a new project, in return for helping them with a work task. Maybe you tried to persuade your partner to rearrange his or her schedule so you could have a night out with your friends?

Were you successful? Did you get the outcome you wanted? And do you think you used the correct approach in your negotiations?

There are many different techniques we can use in a negotiation. But we could be far more successful if we knew what approach to use, based on the skills and abilities that we already have.

In this article, we’ll explore the Persuasion Tools Model. This model looks at your intuition and influencing ability, and matches this up with the approach that’s likely to work best for you in negotiations. We’ll also identify ways to further develop your overall negotiation skills.

Tip:
Don’t just think of negotiation as something you only use in sales, or in supplier relationship management. You can use the skills and techniques we discuss in this article to develop your overall leadership and influencing skills, regardless of the role you are in.

The Persuasion Tools Model

The Persuasion Tools Model (see Figure 1 below) is based on work by the psychologist Kenneth Berrien. In his studies of applied psychology in the 1940s, he linked negotiation and persuasion style to emotional intelligence (EI).

The model can help you find the best negotiation approach to use, based on your level of intuition and your influencing capabilities. You can use the model to develop your influencing and persuasion skills, and become a better negotiator.

In this diagram, the horizontal axis represents influencing, which is a measure of your overall persuasion capability. The vertical axis represents the level of intuitionrequired when using a certain negotiation style.

The quadrants highlight negotiation approaches that may work best for you, based on your levels of intuition and your influencing skills. These approaches areemotion, logic, bargaining, and compromise.

For example, if you have a low level of intuition but you’re good at influencing others, the best approach would be to use logic in a negotiation. However, if you have low intuition and are poor at influencing others, the best approach would be to use compromise.

Next, we’ll look at each quadrant, and identify examples of how you might use each particular negotiation style.

Emotion

Using emotion effectively in negotiation involves understanding the emotions and feelings of the people you are negotiating with to project your influence. So you need high levels of intuition, and good influencing skills.

For example, you and a strong competitor are pitching your services to the same client. You cannot offer a better service or lower price than your competitor. However, your organization invests some of its profits in charitable projects.

So, part of your negotiations include a presentation on how some of income from this deal with be used to help your chosen charity. You use a storytelling approach, including real life examples of how your organization has benefited charities in the past, and highlight the projects that the income from this particular deal will help towards.

Obviously, using emotion in negotiation can be risky, and you need to have a good understanding of the people you are negotiating with for it to be successful. For instance, the example above wouldn’t be effective for an organization that only cared about making the biggest profits. Therefore, emotion is typically used by highly skilled negotiators who have high emotional intelligence and empathy with other people.

Note:
Sometimes, the emotion quadrant in the Persuasion Tools Model is represented by “threat/emotion.”

Logic

With logic, you use facts and data to make your case. You can use logic confidently if you have low intuition, but high influencing capability.

For example, you need to convince your company’s executive board that it would be worth acquiring a small distribution company, instead of outsourcing that function to an external organization.

You’ve done a lot of research, and you rely heavily on the presentation of facts and data to make your case. You show the board exactly how long it will take to pay off the investment, and you use a computer-based model to demonstrate that faster distribution will help increase profits over the long term.

Bargaining

Bargaining is one of the easiest and most popular methods of negotiation. To bargain effectively, you don’t need to have strong influencing skills. However, you do need higher levels of intuition because it can be costly to use bargaining at the wrong time, such as too soon in a negotiation.

For example, you’re in negotiations with a large software firm, trying to get a lower price for a large number of software licenses for your company. Your manager has told you not to leave the negotiations until you get at least a 20 percent discount off the retail price. Once you sense that the sales representative really needs your business, you begin bargaining by asking for 30 percent off. You then go back and forth with the sales representative, bargaining for a lower price, until you both agree on a 22 percent discount.

Tip:
You can learn more about effective bargaining with our articles on Distributive Bargaining and Integrative Negotiation.

Compromise

Compromise is considered the least powerful of all the negotiating styles, and it may be all that’s available to less-skilled negotiators.

For example, you’ve been at your current job for six months. Since you started, you’ve worked nights and weekends to catch up on the workload. You believe that you deserve a raise for the extra work, so you’ve just sat down to renegotiate your salary and compensation package with your boss.

You feel that getting a 10% raise from her might be tough, and you’re prepared to settle for a lower increase if she’ll increase your other benefits. In the end, you accept a lower payrise than you wanted, in return for more vacation time.

Limitations of the Persuasion Tools Model

The Persuasion Tools Model can be useful for discovering your most effective natural negotiation approach.

However, there are some limitations to the model. For example, it can be hard to measure your levels of intuition and influencing skills effectively. So it can be difficult to know what particular negotiation approaches best apply to you.

There will also be times when you’ll need to use a mixture of emotion, logic, bargaining, and comprise in your negotiations. So to be an effective persuader and negotiator, you can’t rely on perfecting just one of these skills.

Make sure that you supplement this model with other approaches and techniques, and interpret your conclusions with common sense.

Improving Your Negotiation Skills

It’s useful for all of us, regardless of the industry we work in, to have good negotiation skills.

You can improve your levels of intuition and influencing skills by working on a wide variety of other skill areas. For example, emotional intelligence, communication skills, powers of persuasion, and information gathering.

You can also practice applying these techniques by taking our Bite-Sized Training session on Negotiation.

Key Points

The Persuasion Tools Model helps you think about which negotiation approach may work best for you. By matching your levels of intuition and influencing skills with the right approach, you’ll have a better chance of a positive outcome in your negotiations.

However, there are some limitations to the model. So also focus on improving your intuitiveness, influencing skills, and overall negotiation skills. The links in this article provide a good starting point to develop those skills.

Reverse brainstorming – a creative way of brainstorming

Reverse brainstorming helps you solve problems by combiningbrainstorming and reversaltechniques. By combining these, you can extend your use of brainstorming to draw out even more creative ideas.

To use this technique, you start with one of two “reverse” questions:

Instead of asking, “How do I solve or prevent this problem?” ask, “How could I possibly cause the problem?”

Instead of asking “How do I achieve these results?” ask, “How could I possibly achieve the opposite effect?”

How to Use the Tool:

1. Clearly identify the problem or challenge, and write it down.
2. Reverse the problem or challenge by asking:
   “How could I possibly cause the problem?”, or
   “How could I possibly achieve the opposite effect?”.
3. Brainstorm the reverse problem to generate reverse solution ideas. Allow the brainstorm ideas to flow freely. Do not reject anything at this stage.
4. Once you have brainstormed all the ideas to solve the reverse problem, now reverse these into solution ideas for the original problem or challenge.
5. Evaluate these solution ideas. Can you see a potential solution? Can you see attributes of a potential solution?

Tip:
Reverse brain-storming is a good technique to try when it is difficult to identify solutions to the problem directly.

Example:
Luciana is the manager of a health clinic and she has the task of improving patient satisfaction.

There have been various improvement initiatives in the past and the team members have become rather skeptical about another meeting on the subject. The team is overworked, team members are “trying their best” and there is no appetite to “waste time” talking about this.

So she decides to use some creative problem solving techniques she has learned. This, she hopes, will make the team meeting more interesting and engage people in a new way.

Perhaps it will reveal something more than the usual “good ideas” that no one has time to act on.

To prepare for the team meeting, Luciana thinks carefully about the problem and writes down the problem statement:

• “How do we improve patient satisfaction?”

Then she reverses problem statement:

• “How do we make patients more dissatisfied?”

Already she starts to see how the new angle could reveal some surprising results.

At the team meeting, everyone gets involved in an enjoyable and productive reverse brainstorming session. They draw on both their work experience with patients and also their personal experience of being patients and customers of other organizations. Luciana helps ideas flow freely, ensuring people to not pass judgment on even the most unlikely suggestions.

Here are just a few of the “reverse” ideas:

• Double book appointments.
• Remove the chairs from the waiting room.
• Put patients who phone on hold (and forget about them).
• Have patients wait outside in the car park.
• Discuss patient’s problems in public.

When the brainstorming session runs dry, the team has a long list of the “reverse” solutions. Now it’s time to look at each one in reverse into a potential solution. Well resulting discussions are quite revealing. For example:

“Well of course we don’t leave patients outside in the car park – we already don’t do that.”
“But what about in the morning, there are often patients waiting outside until opening time?
“Mmm, true. Pretty annoying for people on first appointments.”
“So why don’t we open the waiting room 10 minutes earlier so it doesn’t happen”
“Right, we’ll do that from tomorrow. There are several members of staff working already, so it’s no problem”.

And so it went on. The reverse brainstorming session revealed tens of improvement ideas that the team could implement swiftly and easily.

Luciana concluded: “It was enlightening and fun to looking at the problem in reverse. The amazing thing is, it’s helped us become more patient-friendly by stopping doing things rather than creating more work”.

Key Points:

Reverse brain-storming is a good technique for creative problem solving, and can lead to robust solutions. Be sure to follow the basic rules of brainstorming to explore possible solutions to the full.

How do you perform ‘GAP ANALYSIS’ ??

Imagine that you’ve just been asked to improve call-handling in your organization’s contact center.

You already have some possible solutions in mind. However, before you choose a best solution, you need to identify what needs to be done to meet this project’s objectives.

This is where Gap Analysis is useful. This simple tool helps you identify the gap between your current situationand the future state that you want to reach, along with the tasks that you need to complete to close this gap.

Gap Analysis is useful at the beginning of a project when developing a Business Case, and it’s essential when you’re identifying the tasks that you need to complete to deliver your project.

Note:
Gap Analysis is not specifically mentioned as a technique in PMBOK or inPRINCE2. However, it’s a useful tool that you can apply when working with both of these project management methodologies.

Using Gap Analysis

To conduct a Gap Analysis for your project, follow these three steps:

1. Identify Your Future State

First, identify the objectives that you need to achieve. This gives you your future state – the “place” where you want to be once you’ve completed your project.

Simple example:

Future State	Current Situation	Next Actions
Answer 90 per cent of calls within 2 minutes.

2. Analyze Your Current Situation

For each of your objectives, analyze your current situation. To do this, consider the following questions:

• Who has the knowledge that you need? Who will you need to speak with to get a good picture of your current situation?
• Is the information in people’s heads, or is it documented somewhere?
• What’s the best way to get this information? By using brainstorming workshops? Through one-to-one interviews? By reviewing documents? By observing project activities such as design workshops? Or in some other way?

Simple example:

Future State	Current Situation	Next Actions/Proposals
Answer 90 per cent of calls within 2 minutes.	Approximately 50 per cent of calls are answered within 2 minutes.

3. Identify How You’ll Bridge the Gap

Once you know your future state and your current situation, you can think about what you need to do to bridge the gap and reach your project’s objectives.

Simple example:

Future State	Current Situation	Next Actions/Proposals
Answer 90 per cent of calls within 2 minutes.	Approximately 50 per cent of calls are answered within 2 minutes.	Develop a call volume reporting/queue modeling system to ensure that there are enough staff during busy periods. Recruit any additional people needed. Develop a system that allows callers to book a call back during busy periods.

Tips:

Pitch your Gap Analysis to provide an appropriate amount of detail. If you present too much detail, people will be overwhelmed, but if you don’t give enough detail, you won’t tell them what they need to know to sign the project off.

When you analyze your future situation and current state, use metrics where information can be quantified (such as “Salary costs account for 50 percent of the cost of the product.”), and general statements when metrics aren’t available (such as “Creativity is valued within the organization.”)

Also remember that your assessment of the current situation and the desired future state can be both quantitative and qualitative.

For instance:

	Current Situation	Future State
Quantitative	Total costs are $100 per unit.	Total costs will be $80 per unit.
Qualitative	Team members work in isolation.	Team members will work collaboratively.

Note:
While this article illustrates a very simple use of Gap Analysis, this approach can be very extensive and complex, for example, when it is used to identify software modifications needed as part of IT projects. Don’t underestimate how much work your Gap Analysis may involve!

Key Points

Gap Analysis compares your current situation with the future state that you want to achieve once your project is complete. By conducting a Gap Analysis, you can identify what you need to do to “bridge the gap” and make your project a success. You can use Gap Analysis at any stage of a project to analyze your progress, but it’s most useful at the beginning.

To carry out a Gap Analysis, first identify your project’s objectives – this is your “future state.” Then analyze your current situation, making sure that you gather information from the right sources.

Finally, identify how you’ll bridge the gap between your current situation and the desired future state.

How do you perform ‘VALUE CHAIN ANALYSIS’ in reality?

Value Chain Analysis is a useful tool for working out how you can create the greatest possible value for your customers.

In business, we’re paid to take raw inputs, and to “add value” to them by turning them into something of worth to other people. This is easy to see in manufacturing, where the manufacturer “adds value” by taking a raw material of little use to the end-user (for example, wood pulp) and converting it into something that people are prepared to pay money for (e.g. paper). But this idea is just as important in service industries, where people use inputs of time, knowledge, equipment and systems to create services of real value to the person being served – the customer.

And remember that your customers aren’t necessarily outside your organization: they can be your bosses, your co-workers, or the people who depend on you for what you do. 

Now, this is really important: In most cases, the more value you create, the more people will be prepared to pay a good price for your product or service, and the more they will they keep on buying from you. On a personal level, if you add a lot of value to your team, you will excel in what you do. You should then expect to be rewarded in line with your contribution.

So how do you find out where you, your team or your company can create value?

This is where the “Value Chain Analysis” tool is useful. Value Chain Analysis helps you identify the ways in which you create value for your customers, and then helps you think through how you can maximize this value: whether through superb products, great services, or jobs well done.

How to Use the Tool:

Value Chain Analysis is a three-step process:

1. Activity Analysis: First, you identify the activities you undertake to deliver your product or service;
2. Value Analysis: Second, for each activity, you think through what you would do to add the greatest value for your customer; and
3. Evaluation and Planning: Thirdly, you evaluate whether it is worth making changes, and then plan for action.

We follow these through one-by-one:-

Step 1 – Activity Analysis

The first step to take is to brainstorm the activities that you, your team or your company undertakes that in some way contribute towards your customer’s experience.

At an organizational level, this will include the step-by-step business processes that you use to serve the customer. These will include marketing of your products or services; sales and order-taking; operational processes; delivery; support; and so on (this may also involve many other steps or processes specific to your industry).

At a personal or team level, it will involve the step-by-step flow of work that you carry out.

But this will also involve other things as well. For example:

• How you recruit people with the skills to give the best service.
• How you motivate yourself or your team to perform well.
• How you keep up-to-date with the most efficient and effective techniques.
• How you select and develop the technologies that give you the edge.
• How you get feedback from your customer on how you’re doing, and how you can improve further.

Tip:
If you carry out the brainstorming behind the Activity Analysis and Value Analysis with your team, you’ll almost certainly get a richer answer than if you do it on your own. You may also find that your team is more likely to “buy into” any conclusions you draw from the exercise. After all, the conclusions will be as much theirs as yours.

Once you’ve brainstormed the activities which add value for your company, list them. A useful way of doing this is to lay them out as a simplified flow chart running down the page – this gives a good visual representation of your “value chain”. You can see an example of this in Figure 1 below.

Step 2 – Value Analysis

Now, for each activity you’ve identified, list the “Value Factors” – the things that your customers’ value in the way that each activity is conducted.

For example, if you’re thinking about a telephone order-taking process, your customer will value a quick answer to his or her call; a polite manner; efficient taking of order details; fast and knowledgeable answering of questions; and an efficient and quick resolution to any problems that arise.

If you’re thinking about delivery of a professional service, your customer will most likely value an accurate and correct solution; a solution based on completely up-to-date information; a solution that is clearly expressed and easily actionable; and so on.

Next to each activity you’ve identified, write down these Value Factors.

And next to these, write down what needs to be done or changed to provide great value for each Value Factor.

Step 3 – Evaluate Changes and Plan for Action

By the time you’ve completed your Value Analysis, you’ll probably be fired up for action: you’ll have generated plenty of ideas for increasing the value you deliver to customers. And if you could deliver all of these, your service could be fabulous!

Now be a bit careful at this stage: you could easily fritter your energy away on a hundred different jobs, and never really complete any of them.

So firstly, pick out the quick, easy, cheap wins – go for some of these, as this will improve your team’s spirits no end.

Then screen the more difficult changes. Some may be impractical. Others will deliver only marginal improvements, but at great cost. Drop these.

And then prioritize the remaining tasks and plan to tackle them in an achievable, step-by-step way that delivers steady improvement at the same time that it keeps your team’s enthusiasm going.

Tip:
If you have a strong enough relationship with one or more of your customers, it may be worth presenting your conclusions to them and getting their feedback – this is a good way of either confirming that you’re right or of getting a better understanding of what they really want.

Example:

Lakshmi is a software development manager for a software house. She and her team handle short software enhancements for many clients. As part of a team development day, she and her team use Value Chain Analysis to think about how they can deliver excellent service to their clients.

During the Activity Analysis part of the session, they identify the following activities that create value for clients:

• Order taking
• Enhancement specification
• Scheduling
• Software development
• Programmer testing
• Secondary testing
• Delivery
• Support

Lakshmi also identifies the following non-client-facing activities as being important:

• Recruitment: Choosing people who will work well with the team.
• Training: Helping new team members become effective as quickly as possible, and helping team members learn about new software, techniques and technologies as they are developed.

Lakshmi marks these out in a vertical value chain on her whiteboard (you can see the first three client-facing activities shown in the “Step 1: Activity Analysis” box in Figure 1 below):

Next, she and her team focus on the Order Taking process, and identify the factors that will give the greatest value to customers as part of this process. They identify the following Value Factors:

• Giving a quick answer to incoming phone calls.
• Having a good knowledge of the customer’s business, situation and system, so that they do not waste the customer’s time with unnecessary explanation.
• Asking all the right questions, and getting a full and accurate understanding of the customer’s needs.
• Explaining the development process to the customer and managing his or her expectations as to the likely timetable for delivery.

You can see these in the “Value Factors” column of figure 1.

They then look at what they need to do to deliver the maximum value to the customer. These things are shown in the Figure 1’s “Changes Needed” column.

They then look at what they need to do to deliver the maximum value to the customer. These things are shown in the Figure 1’s “Changes Needed” column.

They then do the same for all other processes.

Once all brainstorming is complete, Lakshmi and her team may be able to identify quick wins, reject low yield or high cost options, and agree their priorities for implementation.

Key Points:

Value Chain Analysis is a useful way of thinking through the ways in which you deliver value to your customers, and reviewing all of the things you can do to maximize that value.

It takes place as a three stage process:

• Activity Analysis, where you identify the activities that contribute to the delivery of your product or service.
• Value Analysis, where you identify the things that your customers value in the way you conduct each activity, and then work out the changes that are needed.
• Evaluation and Planning, where you decide what changes to make and plan how you will make them.

By using Value Chain Analysis and by following it through to action, you can achieve excellence in the things that really matter to your customers.

The Future of Technology and its effect on our lives

Business Week’s 2004 list of top 15 global brands included 6 technology brands – Microsoft, IBM, General Electric, Intel, Nokia, and Hewlett Packard. Cisco nudged the list at No. 16. These are all brands that have revised their notions of what makes people adopt technology. Microsoft has moved on to ‘Your Potential, Our Passion’; Nokia speaks of ‘Human Technology’; IBM’s ‘On Demand Business’ offers solutions to the small entrepreneur.

While the churn is on within the technology corporations, how has the consumer evolved, in the barrage of new technology? Just look at the possibilities before us today – something we would not have possibly imagined even at the turn of the millennium:

• We do not receive physical salary checks anymore; we can see on our computers if our salary has been credited to our bank account. Between several hundred employees, over a year, surely a tree must have been saved.
• For the first time this year, the sale of digital cameras will overtake that of film cameras in the US. An entire middleman – the film developer will be soon extinct.
• CD-ROMs for 18-month olds are now in the market. My 19-month old daughter loves to bang away on the keyboard, and hear the sounds, chase the objects on screen.
• Many of us have received, as a personalized mailer, a dummy cover of The Economist with our names on it. It gave us such a kick that we pinned it up on our softboards. • We are questioning our family physician or even specialist about the course of treatment on our second visit, having done some extensive research about the diagnosed ailment on the web.
• In many markets, including here in India, we don’t have to physically buy an air ticket. We can print the boarding pass, with a barcode, choose our seats, pay through our credit card, and simply check in. It saves us time, and the aggravation of a queue and traffic. We will be able to do the same for trains in India before this year is over.
• Our initial fears of giving away our credit card number on an e-commerce site have all but disappeared.

The pace of change has been blinding. The nature of technology itself has undergone a transformation – it is no longer just a ‘device’, leaving us all as consumers with a sense of breathlessness and expectation – what next?

How have we chosen to embrace new products and services enabled by technology, while rejecting others? Have we been overwhelmed by choice and possibilities, or found ways to integrate technology into our lives, sometimes subverting corporate expectations? How has it affected notions of class and equity in society?

The Discovery group at Ogilvy & Mather embarked on an ambitious project that explored all these vital dimensions. It was also an exercise in anticipation – where will technology take us in the near future? We explored how children are using technology to arrive at some possibilities. How can technology brands ride on the wave of social and cultural transformation? We explored the web of interconnections between technology creators, users and forecasters, to uncover those possibilities which hold the key to making technology brands successful.

Methodology

Our exploration required a somewhat different method of investigation. While one can broadly categorize these methods into secondary / desk research and primary research, the subject lends itself to interesting, sometimes subversive investigation.

We used media ethnography to identify cutting-edge technologies that are likely to hit markets, and their creators through a study of a range of magazines – Time, Newsweek, Fortune, The Economist, Wired, Smart Inc, and Popular Mechanics. All these magazines review innovations in technology, and present their likely chances of success in the marketplace. They also have a creator’s point-of-view, which provides us some insights into the drivers for technology creation. We added a crucial layer of understanding to the creator’s perspective by having structured conversations with them. The conversations were based on a set of hypotheses that we had previously defined. These were people in charge of research and development, and in some ways closer to the product than the marketplace. The choice was deliberate, to assess how much of consumer awareness and sensitivity went into the process of technology innovation. Finally, we visited 250 homes in Mumbai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, New Delhi and Chennai. The sample was divided between SECs A,B and C, with a skew towards the upper SECs, because the number of devices they would be using was greater. This part of the study involved an in-depth exploration of the motivations for technology adoption, gender differences, the process of deciding, choosing, buying and using any gadget and influences on the process. The Internet gave us access to the philosophies and work of an increasing number of social scientists and futurologists who are studying the relationship between human beings, technology and society at large. We also spoke to teachers in primary schools to understand how children were using technology, and what technology use was doing to them.

The Key Findings One of the constant debates that rages among social scientists who observe the effects of technology has to do with whether humans desire greater simplicity or complexity as they progress. Many technology creators extol the value of convergence. While that might drastically reduce the number of ‘devices’ that we need and use, it also adds complexity to the task of using a device. Alternately, people like Al Ries have written about how we desire purity, and will therefore look for technologies that will do one thing, and do it extremely well.

Our first hypothesis takes off from this debate.

Broadly, all technology will eventually fall into two categories: network, and interface. One will connect devices, the other will connect a device with a human.

Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist at Intel, has quite accurately said people inhabit homes, technology powers houses. It is that sensitivity that creators of domestic technologies need to keep in mind. While most domestic technologies embody notions of efficiency, so-called labour saving devices have not actually had that effect. The change she advocates is to design not for efficiency, but for experience, affect and desire. Her manifesto is – think domestic, not digital. As an anthropologist, she believes that technology creators must draw and learn from the rich cultural heritage of the home and the hearth. Philips’s Home of the Near Future is based on the belief that ‘the Home of the Future will look more like the home of the past than the home of today’. Philips designed a wooden Breakfast Tray that provides a secure surface for a leisurely breakfast in bed. The soft base forms a stable, comfortable ‘interface’ with the body. Thanks to the magnetic metal contacts integrated into the tray, cups and plates do not slide about. Though cool to the touch themselves, the contacts also provide power to the crockery, keeping coffee and croissants warm, or orange juice and cereals cool. CounterActive, a prototype kitchen at MIT, exemplifies how the kitchen experience can be enhanced. Concealed beneath the one-inch-thick counter is a capacitive touch sensor: the recipe is projected down onto the counter, and the cook touches the countertop to move through the recipe or to glean greater details. Recipes contain side links and facts; a cherry tart recipe will tell you the number of cherries on an average tree, and a recipe for Chicken Provençal includes the sights and sounds of a typical French market. CounterActive blends in with the environment and architectural space of the kitchen. Its focus is not to make meal production more efficient, but to enhance the experience of cooking. It gives the cook the feeling of being able to consult others, share her own perspectives.

Much of what we can do with technology has, quite obviously, been enabled by networks. Online social networks are simply human activities that ride on technical communications infrastructures of wires and chips. And wireless communications is ramping up our ability to connect. Though it seems, at the beginning, that WiFi is largely for the business traveler who must always be in touch with his or her office, the applications are diverse and surprising. Its need is felt the most when people are otherwise disconnected. For example, on the top of Mt Everest. Or in Baghdad, described as the most wireless dependent city on the planet, with phone lines down. While WiFi is seen as a luxury in some places, in others it is a weapon, elsewhere the only way to communicate. MIT has installed WiFi base stations on intervillage buses in South India. In Tokyo, mothers can know where their fourth-graders are: as the kids can carry a wireless GPS based tracking device called Cocosecom.

The challenge before technology innovators, clearly, is to enable technologies to communicate with each other, and sort problems out, pretty much the way humans do (or at least try to !).

Technology will enable diverse cultures to collaborate more efficiently, in every sphere. It will bring people and organizations together, closer.

There is no mistaking the shift in society’s focus from thriving on competition to the need for collaboration. Communication and conversation are among the keys to learning. Today’s knowledge economy is driven purely by technology. In the field of English language instruction, the rise of the new technologies has ushered in the age of collaboration. The Internet and the World Wide Web have created a global English learning environment with new needs and new challenges. There is the challenge of a paradigm shift from faculty-centered instruction to learner-centered initiatives. A teacher’s role is shifted from a content provider to a learning facilitator. Collaboration is making a deep impact in corporate training environme nts. Technologies enable communication among learners, remote presentations from experts or instructors, online meetings and virtual classrooms. It is likely that live or synchronous training on the Web will become more cost-feasible and effective.

The promise is enticing: get workers together online to solve problems faster and become more responsive to customer needs. Collaborative tools such as Microsoft Live Meeting, Lotus SameTime, SharePoint, Groove, TeamThink and Team Direction make it easy to coordinate large groups by enabling members to post questions, work jointly on documents, schedule meetings and track progress towards goals.

Corporations are beginning to see the value of collaborations not just within, but outside. Kodak’s traditional strength lay in imaging. As image storage has moved from film to digital, it has been forced to look for alliances in image capture, which is the traditional domain of camera makers. In 2001, Kodak tied up with Olympus in a cross-licensing agreement that was aimed at growth in the digital photography market. By licensing the iPod and offering iTunes on their desktops, hp moved itself immediately to the front of the line (alongside Apple). hp was able to offer their customers (who probably know and trust the hp brand but never owned anything by Apple) a superior experience to the competition. Literally overnight hp becomes not just a player in the online music race, but a leader.

As opposed to the ‘first wave’ of technology adoption when men were the early adopters, the ‘second wave’ will see women adopting and using technology earlier. The gap between the two genders in technology adoption will reduce; however their motivations for adoption will be quite different.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, technology was about machines. Heavy machines that needed muscles to maneuver, and it seemed only logical that the more physically powerful masculine gender would be the master of technology. Today, robots do the physically challenging jobs. The new opportunities are in technology-mediated communications, in services, and it is here that the female sex comes into its own.

Various researches suggest that when women’s representation is no longer biologically based, as it sometimes happens on cyberspace, the Internet can be empowering to women. It allows women to be active and constructive. It allows their voices to be heard, and serves as a mechanism for the consideration of their ideas and insights. A study by N. Kaplan & E. Farrell – Cyberfeminism as New Theory (1994) – stresses that as more and more women grow up with new information technologies forming part of their everyday reality, the stereotyping of technology as a masculine domain and practice will necessarily fall apart.

While men are interested in the mastery of the technology, it is the wider social context that interests women, she asserts. Donna Milgram, Founder and Executive Director of the Institution for Women in Trades, Technology and Science found that where there is a computer lab, boys rush to the machines and girls hold back. If a girl is in the middle of a project, there are moments when she needs a computer to do something, and there are other times when she doesn’t need the computer. Boys, on the other hand, will gravitate to the computer even when they don’t need it because they just like the object, sitting with it and playing with it. For boys, the goal is important because it allowed boys to work with hardware and make things happen; For girls, the process of exploration was significant because it gave them a sense of camaraderie with a partner. Praveen Cherian of IBM in India puts it rather well when he says, “Women tend to bring technology into their sphere, while men reach out to technology.”

Advertising for mobile handsets exhibits a sensitivity towards gender differences. Models targeted at women focus on the end-use (using words such as clique and gossip – in the Motorola ads below), whereas those targete d at men carry greater technical information, and are indicative of their symbolic value (as the Motorola ‘Jetsetmoto’ does).

The creators of future technology products and brands will no longer be engineers / scientists but people and teams with multidisciplinary skills. An engineer-doctor; or a psychologist-engineer; an artist-engineer and so on.

Squishy, leftbrain science is slowly gaining its place alongside hardcore technology, as competitive tech firms try to get an edge on what their users are thinking … and buying. So are artists, as companies grapple with how technology appearance and interfaces become as critical to the acceptability of new products as the circuitry inside. “Today’s dynamic nature of business needs a dynamic worker. That is why we are hiring social scientists like anthropologists and economists to study what is happening and to aid it,” says Jim Spohrer of IBM.

Lingaraju Sawkar, General Manager, IT Services, at IBM India has interesting role definitions: the purist and the practicalist. The purist’s role is to develop ‘better’ technology – revolutionary. They are mostly the scientist-engineers. The practicalist’s role is to find a market value for the technology. It is an incremental role, one of adding value. Many marketing people perform it. But he feels that, “The industry needs an interface between the two, someone who can take technology and the user need and create a bridge” This the key gap that the ‘soft skill’ people fill. Artists provide engineers and scientists stimulation. “They provide us stimulation, asking What If?” says Allen Saur of Kodak.

People will increasingly look for and find ways to ‘get inside’ technology. It will no longer be that ‘black box’, and technology brands will be built not on ‘features’ but on the basis of how ‘human’ and ‘soft’ they appear to be. In that sense they will assume dimensions that have emotional underpinnings.

To have lasting impact – and to win enduring customer loyalty – innovative products must make an emotional connection to users, changing the way they think about wearing a parka or using a laptop. In other words, businesspeople should think about how they want their products to make their customers feel. Apple owners seem to enjoy a much stronger ‘emotional connection’ with their computers. The warmer colours, the softer curves of an iMac or an iBook, in no small way, contribute to the emotional bond.

In Japan, robots are deemed considerate and friendly. They fulfill a role of companionship that draws from social reality – a shortage of space that prohibits ownership of real pets, and the need for companionship for an aging population. (Besides keeping company, they can also alert others if something goes wrong – like the owner does not move for a long time). Though these robots do not attempt to understand their owner’s emotional state, they do have the ability to create emotions in their owners.

Marc Smith, a sociologist at Micosoft, believes that people love computers because “there are people inside them”, not just a bunch of semiconductors. As more and more people tinker with technology, they get concerned about the results that the tinkering has. As technology becomes more transparent and open to tinkering, its users’ interest evolves from ‘What it does?’ to ‘How it does what it does?’ to ‘How to make it work better?’.

By enabling unparalleled access to information, technology is already changing consumer expectations. The power that marketing departments typically had, in terms of being able to manage consumer expectations, will disappear.

No longer are the goals of the economy output and productivity. Customer satisfaction is. We cannot dismiss variety as a trivial extravagance. We are seeking more products and services that are based on our individual needs and preferences. The free market is responding by bringing what we buy closer to what we want. By making it cheaper to personalize during production, technology removes barriers to providing goods and services for individual customers. How does this pan out for marketing departments? For intermediaries? “Salespersons are faced with customers who already have the information; doctors face patients who have researched the illness and the remedy options”, says Lingaraju Sawkar of IBM.

The online ticket booking facility of the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) has emerged as the largest in the country in terms of online cash transactions, leaving behind several high-profile e-commerce sites. For a market that has thrived on touts and booking agents, this technology threatens to drive them out of business.

Technology will be a potent tool in the hands of the powerless, as they will find surprising uses for it; it will bridge the rich-poor gap in surprising ways.

Shyam Telecom operates in the Indian state of Rajasthan. It has opted to take its phones to the people rather than wait for them to come to it. The company has equipped a fleet of cycle rickshaws with a mobile phone. Drivers pedal these mobile payphones throughout the state capital, Jaipur, and the surrounding countryside. The rickshaw drivers, numbering around 200, are largely drawn from those at the margins of society – the disabled and women. The drivers take a 20% on every call, earning between 6,000 (US$131) to 9,000 ($197) rupees per month. Praveen Cherian of IBM emphasizes the benefits of appropriate technology. “Technology will probably eliminate the middleman, as producers (farmers) would be able to deal directly with the end consumers. Today even milkmen use mobile phones. Fishermen call up markets from their boats, using mobile phones, to identify which markets’ rates are higher in Kerala. If technology does not reach the common man, it will not survive,” he says.

Technology is set to revolutionize healthcare in the deeper reaches of India. “Telemedicine and electronic patient records will allow for better healthcare in remote locations; Primary Health Centres in the villages will be soon linked to district hospitals” says Sunil Kapoor, Chief Technology Officer, Fortis. Hewlett Packard is at it with its modified iPaq. To reduce paperwork, save time and improve the flow of information, PDAs were designed with suitable icons to cater to semi-literate Auxiliary Nurse-Midwives (ANMs). The user interface was developed in Hindi (and can be developed in any local language), so that semi-literate ANMs can use PDAs with ease. The PDAs capture information about the health conditions in a village, which can then be accessed by the computer at the Primary Health Centre, for developing a health status database.

Technology, particularly information technology, will bring in more transparency & accountability in society.

At the village of Ramanagaram in Andhra Pradesh, farmers walk into a “Bhoo Dhakilegala Milige” (Land Record Shop), and buy certified printouts of land records, which help them verify or prove land ownership or tenancy. In the process, they are free from the whims, inefficiency and corruption associated with village accountants who create, modify and supervise handwritten manual records. The project is a step toward bringing transparency and the abolition of corruption in the registration of land records.

In Delhi, citizens can get various certificates issued over the government’s site. These would normally involve several trips and the greasing of palms. As records are automated and computerized, as the public begins to access them, fraud will get limited.

The digital revolution is shredding, forever, the curtain that once hid all sorts of information about corporate behavior, operations and performance from public view. Yet few companies are ready to handle the new scrutiny—and this transparency is proving to be increasingly costly and upsetting for companies struggling with new levels of exposure. In a world of instant communications, whistle-blowers, inquisitive media and Googling, citizens and communities are routinely putting firms under the microscope as never before. Visibility and transparency mean that validation of a claim is rarely more than a click away; blind trust is disappearing.

Technology will allow people to live multiple lives, assume and live out multiple identities.

Every day, as millions of people interact over the internet, they navigate worlds that are simulated, they create virtual personalities, and forge online relationships. Fantasy and role-play, both natural and important functions of child development, are fostered by adult chatrooms and virtual reality. In a distributed, yet isolated world, people desire connections. In doing so, they think not of identity but identity crises. MUDs (multi user domains), better known as chatrooms, offer a parallel life – “you are what you pretend to be.” The idea of ‘windows’ makes it possible – the machine places you in several contexts at the same time. Hence, your identity on the computer is the sum of your distributed presence.

In a world enabled by technology, we are not limited by our history; we can recreate ourselves. Psychoanalysts feel that when people adopt online personae, they cross over into highly-charged territory. Some people see it as a process of self-discovery, even self-transformation. Some feel an uncomfortable sense of fragmentation, others a sense of relief.

The assumption of alternate persona can serve as an outlet for feelings that the person can possibly not express with real people around him or her. Society urges us to repress ourselves, it does not allow individual to access the ‘illegitimate parts of the self’. In many ways, technology, especially cyberspace, allows human beings to sense their inner diversity and thus know their limitations.

Technology will strengthen the institution of family and help it survive the onslaught of modernity and individualism by creating newer and richer touch points.

Ten years ago, we were drifting away from our extended families – our cousins, our uncles and aunts. Nuclear families got more inward looking, caught in their urge for greater prosperity; the pressure on time meant that immediate family got top priority.

But see what the mobile phone suddenly did! As the same set of members of the extended family began sharing their phone numbers, news and events became common currency. Every birth in the family, every visit provided an opportunity to share with the extended family. Multimedia messaging, email, digital cameras and camcorders suddenly provided the means for a shared visual experience, whose value seems to lie in the rediscovery of the traditional family get-togethers and celebrations.

Technology is bringing families together through the process of learning. No longer do the young learn from the old. Four-year olds know more about the functions and features of a mobile phone than their parents, and are teaching them how to use those beyond-basic features. It gives parents a sense of pride at the child’s technological fluency, it gives the child a sense of accomplishment. More and more grandparents are learning to use the computer and send email from their grandchildren.

Festivals like Christmas and Diwali are the traditional time for gifting. Jewellery and clothes are fast being replaced by technological gadgetry. Young couples are buying their parents washing machines, mobile phones and music systems. Parents are buying their children computers, gaming consoles and personal stereos. Families are indeed converging around technology.

The evidence seems to be convincing. In spite of changes in society that may encourage individualism, we will continue to seek modes of keeping our strongest relationships alive. We will find ways of enriching and sharing those experiences, in creating touch points that are mediated by technology.

The Future of Technology Brands

It is clear that technology and what we do with it is transforming our experience with the world. The technology experience is one that envelopes and enhances our emotions and our senses. What must technology brands strive to do?

Brands have to move beyond features into the experiential world. They will need to offer transformations; they must look beyond enhancing ability to maximizing human potential. Pine and Gilmore’s dimensions of the Experience Economy – entertainment, esthetics, escapism and education – provide significant pointers towards what it will take.

We are used to getting our personalized experiences from other human beings. These experiences enrich us as human beings; sometimes they even transform us. Our experience with technology should replicate or augment our experience with other people, and thereby provide us enrichment. Personalization will have a key role to play in delivering to us the kind of experience we long for.

Technology brands, traditionally promising and embodying notions of efficiency, can shift their focus to entertainment. It will, however have to be active entertainment, one that potentially engulfs the technology user. We will no longer be couch potatoes; we would like to be part of the entertainment. Sony Playstation does that already. The 2004 Cannes Grand Prix winning commercial symbolizes the power of technology enabled play, by throwing up new winners ‘at the top of the heap’ all the time. So does Movieoke, where movie lovers perform scenes from their favourite movies, which are projected behind them. Active entertainment comes alive during the World Cyber Games, wherein are born a new breed of heroes like Matt Leto, who win not through physical prowess but skill and speed of response.

Differentiation between technology brands will be through esthetics, not engineering. Already, Fortune magazine asks, “Is an MFA the new MBA?” Art school grads now work at BMW and Nokia. We are choosing to match the colours of our laptops with our mobile phones; the flatscreen mirror-vision TV from Philips becomes a mirror when not in use. Technology brands have much to learn from the fashion industry. They need to offer a sense of style, a sense of identity. They need to promise transformations. Consumer-led design will be critical to the technology industry. Consumers are beginning to seek experiences that are tactile, not the distance of the television set. Even software designers (such as the ones who created our knowledge management portal) now speak of offering ‘elegant solutions’.

Yet another possibility for technology brands lies in the experience of the escape. Technology allows us to escape our real selves, and be someone else – especially in cyberspace. It will soon free us from the office cubicle, from the city and the tyranny of bad traffic, and quite possibly take us back to nature. Brands that show us how to achieve this state of nirvana will strike a chord with us in the future.

Technology will change our experience of education. It will ensure that learning is distributed and freed of the confines of a classroom and an age. No longer will education be the privilege of those who can afford it. We will learn more things from more people and sources; learning curves will be shortened and deepened. Our new learning experience will transform us as human beings. Through the sharing of our experiences, we will be simultaneously teachers and students at every stage of our lives. And simply because different people have different needs for knowledge, technology brands should be able to offer unique learning environments, that are personalized to the individual.

Technology brands would increasingly cater to the spirit of enterprise in people. As time and distance become irrelevant, as knowledge becomes currency that can be valued and traded, people would seek ways of doing new things, the ‘markets’ f or which could exist anywhere in the globe. At the peak of the dotcom boom, we witnessed a huge upsurge in this spirit. The entrepreneurial instinct has been awakened, and it is the youth and female gender who will benefit the most from it in the future. Tech brands will be their enabler. These, in sum, are the possible points for technology brands to engage with their consumers. The more roles a brand is able to fulfill, the greater will be the chance for it to succeed in the marketplace.

It is the ultimate experience of transformation that has excited us the most, as a human race. In the last decade, we have only witnessed a small part of what is possible. It was so because technology was the preserve of the few who could afford it. As the technological possibility envelops all in society, it will imbue us with a sense of belief, a sense of faith that has traditionally been only associated with religion.

World’s First Cloud Computing Phone & Huawei statistics

China`s Huawei Technologies Co Ltd , unveil cloud-computing mobile phones on Wednesday in an attempt to replicate its telecom gear success in the smartphone market.

The company, known for its low costs, is betting its cloud-computing smartphones will help the firm grab market share from the likes of Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics, analysts say. Huawei will launch its “Vision” smartphones at a media event in Beijing.

Cloud computing refers to data and software stored on computer servers rather than individual PCs and accessed over the Internet. Cloud computing smartphones will allow users to download applications without needing much storage space on their devices.

Last month, China`s Alibaba Group launched its first self-developed mobile operating system and smartphone running on its cloud computing-based operating system.

Founded in 1987, Huawei has grown rapidly. The Shenzhen-based company reported revenue of $28 billion last year. It aims to boost revenue to $100 billio! n in the next 10 years.

Huawei`s devices division, which focuses on consumer products such as smartphones, tablets and wireless cards, contributed about 17 percent to total revenue.

However, the company plans to boost its revenue in the consumer electronics space and aims to become the world`s third largest cellphone maker within five years.

In July, Huawei Device executives said the firm aimed to ship 20 million smartphones this year, higher than a previous target of 12 million-15 million units.

In June, Huawei unveiled its MediaPad, a 7-inch Android-based tablet computer in Singapore, and is also developing a 10-inch device to be launched this year.

The privately-held company employs more than 110,000 people, about half of whom are based outside China.

Huawei`s U.S. expansion plans in the network equipment sector have hit roadblocks on suspicions the company maintains links with China`s military.

Ren Zhengfei, Huawei`s ! low-profile founder who started the company with just 21,000 yuan ($3,200), served in the People`s Liberation Army until 1983.

Source: Economic Times

Marketing mistakes ‘START UPs’ generally make

Marketing for a startup is different than anything you may have done before. It’s different from the big-company and/or traditional marketing many executives may be used to, and a whole new challenge for entrepreneurs who don’t have a background in marketing to begin with.

The way startups need to market themselves is as unique as their product, service, market and target customer. But there are several mistakes many new startups consistently make.

Whether you’re managing a startup, managing marketing for a startup, or even consulting for a startup, here are seven common mistakes to avoid.

1. Hiring a PR firm too early

PR is sexy. It’s exciting to see your name in print, to have others talking about you, to have articles framed on the wall and shared with investors. And PR can be an important component of early marketing strategy for some startups. But hiring a full PR firm might not be the right answer, at least not yet.

Your initial PR efforts should be organic. They should stem from self-published channels and social networks, spread via employees, investors and customers directly. Executing on this opportunity requires a smart strategy and well-understood messages & objectives, and may very well require some outside help to coordinate. But early-stage startups can typically achieve these objectives and save money in the process by working with an independent socially-adept PR consultant who can help coordinate the internal and organic efforts that will drive early PR momentum.

2. Overthinking brand

Matt Heinz

I’ve seen countless startups obsess about their brand at the expense of the business. They build thick brand guidelines before they even have something to monetize or sell, and fuss over the logo instead of empowering the sales team.

Early startup marketing strategies need be executed with a bias for action, sales and revenue. If the color palette is slightly different for the email campaign vs. the trade show banner, nobody except a handful of insiders and others with too much time on their hands are going to notice and care.

Brand is important, brand consistency is important. But shipping, testing, moving fast and driving customer behavior and monetization is more important. If you can’t drive revenue and grow the business, that brand binder isn’t going to mean a thing.

3. Starting with a marketing budget

Startups should have to earn their marketing budget. They should operate with the assumption that there’s no money for marketing, and instead focus initially on the scrappy, organically-generated ways to drive customer awareness, demand and closed business.

We live in a world where our customers can be a powerful marketing channel, where countless free tools exist for us to be effective publishers with good content, where a good product and great value can create inbound demand that supersedes the need to pay the expensive, traditional marketing “tax”.

You may eventually start spending money to accelerate your opportunity. But if you start by spending money, there’s little incentive or motivation to first figure out what can drive the same performance and results with far less investment.

4. Taking strategy or tactical cues from competitors

If you’re doing it right, you’re obsessed with your competitors. You’re watching everything they do – from product updates to Web site changes to what their low-level employees are tweeting. And when you get a link from an investor to something that a competitor did that you’re not doing, your first reaction may be to scramble to catch up.

Resist that temptation. Use your competitors as a source of ideas, but filter them through your own objectives, priorities and needs. What’s good for your competitor may not work for your business. And what competitors are doing, launching or trying today may fantastically fail. If you’re doing it just because they did it, you’re distracted from the work that will more directly drive your unique business forward.

5. Letting interns drive the social media plan

Would you let a college student run your customer service department? Would you put them on a panel at an important customer event? Would you trust them to serve as the voice of your business directly to current customers, prospects, future investors and more?

Interns may be more socially-savvy than you, they may have more time to execute, they may have great ideas. But they by definition aren’t going to be around for long, they aren’t as invested in the business as you are, and anything they start that you can’t sustain when they leave is wasted work, or worse. Countless blogs, Twitter accounts and Facebook fan pages sit dormant since the intern left, making the company look like it stopped doing business. Don’t be that company.

6. Allowing adversarial relationships with sales and biz dev

It’s ridiculous that businesses big and small allow an adversarial relationship between marketing and sales to persist. It’s more ridiculous for marketers in today’s environment to fail to hold themselves accountable for measurable performance and revenue traction.

Sales and biz dev may close the deal, but marketing can set the table. Marketing can have a direct impact on driving larger sales pipelines, more business development opportunities, and faster revenue ramp. If sales, marketing and business development have the same goals, and are measured based on their individual and collective performance against measurable revenue-based outputs, it’s far more likely that they’ll work together.

There’s no reason that marketing can’t drive this process. And if you run the business, put common metrics & expectations in place and expect this level of collaboration to take place.

7. Impressing board members & investors instead of customers

Your board and investors are important constituents, no question. They’ll have lots of opinions and ideas. But it’s your job to filter those ideas through the eyes of your customer and your target market. Not every idea is going to work, not every idea is even worth testing.

And if you explain your rationale back to the originator with a thoughtful, customer-driven response, I guarantee your board and investors will greatly appreciate that you didn’t waste your time (and their money) on something that was less likely to work.

Courtesy: Matt Heinz

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