Last week I was dinning at an Italian restaurant with my family. Our waiter was very courteous, by pure observation I could tell he stood out from the rest of the waiters in that restaurant. Two days later I dined at a ‘similar’ Italian restaurant with a few friends, and to my surprise got served by the same waiter that served me days earlier at the other restaurant.
What gives?…
in Creativity, Innovation, Strategy
Not having to worry about ‘x’ sounds too good to be true. Yet what if your value proposition was really focused on doing exactly that for customers or clients?
There aren’t a lot of companies ‘doing’ it so I was surprised to see what Box.net founder Aaron Levie said about his company’s intent:
“We’re moving toward a future where storage isn’t an issue,” Levie said. “You should never have to worry about how much storage you use.”
Take this example and apply it to something else. What if you never had to worry about having bad customer service? Ever! Wouldn’t that proposition really intrigue you? Of course it does.
Now apply it to your own offering. Think about an extreme version of your offering and stretch it to the point you may go bankrupt because you’ll be so focused on ‘eliminating worries’ that your customers will thank you for it!
Next, scale it back a little to the point where it generates interest and you can come up with ways to make it work.
Radical doesn’t mean risky, it means impact!
Please follow the people who shared these tweets as you’ll learn a lot from them 
Act deliberately crazy and no one will want to compete against you.
If you’ve read The Thirty Six Chinese Stratagems, then you’re familiar with the statement above. Here’s the stratagem if you don’t know it:
Feign madness but keep your balance
Hide behind the mask of a fool, a drunk, or a madman to create confusion about your intentions and motivations. Lure your opponent into underestimating your ability until, overconfident, he drops his guard. Then you may attack.
Grant McCracken wrote a post a few days ago that shines a light how Skechers is using said stratagem to compete against Nike, it’s worth a read.…
in Creativity, Strategy
How do you stand out in the commoditizied world of candies?
If you’re Hotlix you make insect candy. Yup, that’s right. Hotlix is the creator of creations such as the Strawberry flavored Scorpion Sucker, which has a real scorpion in it’s center. I just recently found out about them from the video below which shows how they make their creations, but Hotlix has been around for 20 years! Check it out:
This post is not about Hotlix, it’s about how to stand out. Notice that Hotlix makes candy but with a twist. It mixes somethings that is deliciously edible with something that just doesn’t make sense to eat. Quite simply they make something that is common (candy), uncommon (candy + bugs). It makes for an interesting combination that’s also an instant conversation starter. And quite memorable indeed because the marketing is embedded into the product which also helps create word of mouth!
That’s the secret. A simple way to stand out is to look at your business and think about all the things that are common and see how you can make them uncommon. De-commodities yourself!
Imagine that you are a pilot and you have to fly through a 5 mile canyon upside down. It’s actually kind of hard to imagine because it’s not something you’re trained to do but it’s something that could happen in a real life situation. It’s a scenario that’s outside your direct experience, you find it hard to accept it as possible and even worse adapting to it.
Now think about it this way:
What if businesses were judged on their ability to create ‘happiness for customers’? What if all those like buttons had less to do with becoming a fan and more to do with specific actions an organization took to actually make a customer happy? What if you hired people based on how happy they’ll make your customers? What if there were a ‘customer happiness index’ dashboard (Tweetdeck) and we’d all have access to it just like the stock market? What if businesses were penalized for wasting people’s time?
Imagine how every business would behave.
Same thing right? How can this be possible?
These may seem like outrageous scenarios but it’s definitely something we should be thinking about. As I argued before, delivering happiness is not business as usual, all it takes for things to change is for someone somewhere to start acting differently. This someone is Zappos, and pretty soon others will join their crusade.
This is not a new idea, but it’s been so long since it was replaced by impersonal mass marketing that it seems like new and it has taken everyone by surprise.
Zappos ‘delivering happiness’ strategy didn’t come out of a week long brainstorming session, it came about by the desire to build a company that’s designed for both life and work happiness.
This is a dramatic change from the familiar and it does provide a useful lesson for both identifying and exploiting change:
The importance of recognizing when the system is stuck. In this case the idea that businesses exist purely to make a profit. If you flip that script upside down, other options reveal themselves. Options nobody else can anticipate, strategies nobody can think of, ideas waiting for an owner to call their own.
Just like scripts become obsolete, so to do ideas have an expiration date. Think about what would be the opposite of doing what you currently do, how would that look and what options reveal themselves.
Key takeaway: Prepare for the unexpected and learn to recognize when an idea has reached it’s expiration date because if you don’t, you’ll be caught in an unfamiliar situation.
in Innovation, Strategy
‘That’s not going to happen here’. This is one of the claims I hear a lot here in Mexico: whatever trends are happening elsewhere are not going to happen here anytime soon.…