Discovering business opportunities

 Interview with Dr. Dan Herman, CEO of Competitive Advantages, a strategy consulting and branding services firm, serving worldwide clients ranging from local mid-sized companies to “Fortune Global 500″ corporations. Together with his highly trained team, he creates Unique Success Formulas, Emotionally Significant Brands and Short-Term ‘Hit’ Brands for their clients. Among the many organizations and brands, he has worked with are multinationals such as Coca-Cola, IBM, Unilever, Motorola, Roche Pharmaceuticals, Holiday Inn, Apple computers, Suzuki, Chrysler, Warner Brothers, H. Stern as well as many others. The list also includes FC Spartak Moscow and many of Israel’s leading companies in the fields of banking and financial services, telecommunications, health services, food and beverages, toiletries and cosmetics, public transportation, hotels, retail chains, the national lottery and several non-profit organizations, government agencies and political parties.

Great thanks for this interview, Dan! 

What can be said about the return on investment of a STB, when it’s compared with a LTB?  One should think more money can be made with a LTB.

I never said we should stop thinking long-term altogether. We must think long-term in the management of our companies and organizations. Even in marketing and branding we need to think both long and short-term. I advise my clients to use combinations of long and short term brands. They have different marketing roles. The long term brand inspires trust. The short term brand raises excitement. Oftentimes marketers should use a long term background brand (e.g. Volkswagen) but create excitement with foreground short term hits (e.g. the New Beetle). Most innovations are not ground breaking. They are, in our terms, Minimally Effective Innovations (MEI). In order to maximize their revenue potential it is preferable to create and market them as a series of successive short-term meteoric successes. Contrary to the traditional point of view it seems that now, as consumers are more responsive to novelty, it makes more sense to launch new brands instead of “new and improved” product versions under a long term brand.An expertly created and marketed short-term brand reaches a higher sales volume and market share than an long term brand and it is far less expensive to launch. From a financial perspective, a succession of short term brands achieves a higher average market share over time. (Read the article)

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 Interview with Dr. Dan Herman, CEO of Competitive Advantages, a strategy consulting and branding services firm, serving worldwide clients ranging from local mid-sized companies to “Fortune Global 500″ corporations. Together with his highly trained team, he creates Unique Success Formulas, Emotionally Significant Brands and Short-Term ‘Hit’ Brands for their clients.

Among the many organizations and brands, he has worked with are multinationals such as Coca-Cola, IBM, Unilever, Motorola, Roche Pharmaceuticals, Holiday Inn, Apple computers, Suzuki, Chrysler, Warner Brothers, H. Stern as well as many others. The list also includes FC Spartak Moscow and many of Israel’s leading companies in the fields of banking and financial services, telecommunications, health services, food and beverages, toiletries and cosmetics, public transportation, hotels, retail chains, the national lottery and several non-profit organizations, government agencies and political parties.

Thank you, Dan, for your time!

You recently published a book in the United States titled “Outsmart the MBA Clones: The Alternative Guide to Competitive Strategy, Marketing and Branding” (www.outsmart-mba-clones.com)? What have you got against MBA programs and graduates? And – why do we need “an alternative guide”?

I have nothing against MBA programs or graduates. I am an MBA graduate myself. However, we should remember that management is very different from, say, engineering. When you take a strategy move in the market you do not only change the situation in the market – you potentially change the characteristics of the market. For examples, your innovative service strategy can change consumers’ expectations and the market norms. Therefore, management and marketing practices lose their effectiveness when everybody is using them and they should constantly change. Despite the apparent diversity among MBA programs, they produce executives who think and act in a similar and predictable manner. This undermines the competitiveness of their companies and provides a strategic advantage to those who recognize these biases and think differently. I do not, however, tell marketers to ‘think out of the box’ as so many do. I supply them with a new and comprehensive toolbox for success. My book, “Outsmart the MBA Clones” provides a set of new concepts and a toolkit unlike anything taught in MBA schools. The ambitious promise of this book is to help managers create business strategies that will succeed and yet amazingly will not be copied by the competition, resulting in private monopolies.

(Read the article)

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Marco Bevolo is Director at Philips Design. He joined Philips Design in 1999, assuming responsibility for the cultural trend research program. He was instrumental in the creation of CultureScan, an ongoing trend forecasting research project investigating cultures and aesthetics at regional and global level.

Mr. Bevolo’s work has been published in ‘The Art of Advertising’ and ‘Nuova Enciclopedia della Comunicazione’, the Design Management Review of Boston. His opinions on cultural futures, trends and branding have also appeared in Axis, Repubblica, ViewPoint, Der Spiegel, AdMap, Contagious and WGSN. He has lectured at the Domus Academy of Milan, Temasek Polytechnic of Singapore, the Pasadena Art Center College of Design, and was module coordinator of the Master of Arts in Design Management at INHOLLAND in Rotterdam.

As part of representing Philips Design he is regularly invited as speaker and chairman by various event and conference organizations worldwide.

In 2006 he was nominated for ‘Best Conference Paper’  of ESOMAR, New York.

He is Advisory board member of:  Authentic Luxury Foundation (London);  Eventica Global Luxury Forum (2008); Caramundo (Amsterdam / Rio de Janeiro); Platform 21, the international center for design, fashion and creation (Amsterdam, The Netherlands); Design Management Institute (USA); Association of Professional Futurists – APF (USA); ESOMAR (The Netherlands).

Dear Marco, thank you very much for sharing your point of view! 

1. The consumers (their habits, buying behavior, aspirations, preferences and attitude) have changed nowadays. Upon you how the luxury consumers’ profile is evolving? What are the major trends for the future?

For the purpose of our editorial research in the context of the Wharton School Publishing book “Premium by Design”, Howard Moskowitz, Alex Gofman and myself created a quali-quantitative framework to capture the future dynamics of this market, from thought leaders vision to actual common people’s statistic response. The outcome of this comprehensive study is multifaceted: after all, luxury is part of culture, and we are facing times of macro-cultural change both at regional and global level. These could be some among the key trends we identified:

- sustainability: as the work of Prof. Jem Bendell for WWF’s “Deeper Luxury” shows, there is a deep need for a sustainable “revolution” in the ways luxury brands operate. This is not purely a corporate strategy agenda item: this is a rising demand from worldwide audiences;

- design leadership: we expect a transfer of multidisciplinary processes and insights from mature design operations, those working at strategic level on brands and in companies, to the craftsmanship-driven galaxy of luxury design masters: the relatively recent appointment of innovation directors at classic luxury brands like Hermes or Moet Hennessy is a clear step in such direction;

- residual value: in the age of discount outlet retail, the ability of a luxury artifact to retain value over time, possibly becoming a vintage item or even a collector’s object, will make the difference between who’s in luxury, and who’s not. This is a dynamic that companies should definitely study and eventually stimulate in their own design and marketing strategies – difficult as alchemy, however feasible and definitely more and more crucial.

(Read the article)

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  Mr. Joffrey Chartier is a top professional with more than seven years of experience in the strategic management of premium and luxury brands. He set-up successfully new business directions and he managed to maximize the results on highly mature market of the premium cosmetics on the North America.

Thank you, Joffrey, for sharing your knowledge!

1. What will be the future of the luxury brands upon you? How they are evolving with the years?
 
I foresee certainly very bright future for the luxury brands for several reasons:
 
There are lots of developing countries that are aspiring to luxury. In countries such as Russia and China there is already a well-defined elite segment. In Russia and China the luxury consumption is a way higher than in the Western European countries or even in the USA. These consumers of premium brands inspire the rest of the population (lower segments),  whose purchasing power is getting gradually stronger with the years. As a consequence- the market segment of potential luxury consumers is growing bigger everyday in these countries and thus, worldwide.
  (Read the article)

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 Gianfranco Chicco, Marketing Director at HSM Italy, (World Business Forum, the Annual meeting for the business community), specialized in strategic planning, alliances with media partners and associations, online strategy, partnership agreements and development of new events. You can find his blog here

Thank you, Gianfranco, for sharing.

 1) What is the importance of the brand today? Have it lost from his power?

Brands (as a concept) haven’t lost their power, how could they? What happens is that in the last 5 years or so, in most mature market-driven economies, there’s been a strong power-shift back to consumers. Some brands have resisted, others have disappeared or lost its fancy, and a bunch of new ones have jumped to stardom. Even a “no-logo” is a brand. I like Kevin Roberts (www.saatchikevin.com) classification of brands according to two axes: Love and Respect. This representation of brands creates 4 basic groups:
+ Love and – Respect: fashion brands with a short but intense life
 - Love and + Respect: most brands lay here, especially some classic ones
 - Love and – Respect: commodities
+ Love and + Respect: a lovemark! (www.lovemarks.com)

(Read the article)

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