Principles of Marketing

Part One

Marketing and the Marketing Process

Ch. 1: Marketing in a Changing World:

Ch. 2: Marketing and Society; Social Responsibility and Marketing Ethics:

Ch  3: Strategic Marketing Planning:

Strategic planning is also the first stage of marketing planning and defines marketing's role in the organization.

3 stages of strategic market planning:

first, the strategic plan and its implications for marketing;

secondly, the marketing process; and
thirdly, ways of putting the plan into action.

Planning encourages systematic thinking. It forces the company to sharpen its objectives and policies, leads to better co-ordination of company efforts, and provides clearer performance standards for control.

The strategic plan involves adapting the firm to take advantage of opportunities in its constantly changing environment. It is the process of developing and maintaining a strategic fit between the organization's goals and capabilities and its changing marketing opportunities.

Putting plans into action involves four stages: analysis, planning, implementation and control.

The strategic plan contains several components:

The mission,

The strategic objectives,

The strategic audit, SWOT analysis,

Portfolio analysis, ( BCG matrix and GE )

Objectives and ( market/product expantion gird )

Strategies.

Marketing Strategies for Competitive Advantage

To be successful, the company must do a better job than its competitors of satisfying target consumers. Chapter 11 shows how this increasingly depends upon establishing relationships with customers and other participants in the value chain by providing them with quality, value and service.

Providing excellent value and customer service is a necessary but not sufficient means of succeeding in the marketplace. Besides embracing the needs of consumers, marketing strategies must build an advantage over the competition. The company must consider its size and industry position, then decide how to position itself to gain the strongest possible competitive advantage. Chapter 12 explains how to do this.

The design of competitive marketing strategies begins with competitor analysis.

In this way it can discern areas of potential advantage and disadvantage. The company must formally or informally monitor the competitive environment to answer these and other important questions:

Who are our competitors?

What are their objectives and strategies?

What are their strengths and weaknesses?

How will they react to different competitive strategies we might use?

Which competitive marketing strategy a company adopts depends on its industry position. A firm that dominates a market can adopt one or more of several market leader strategies. Well-known leaders include Chanel (fragrances), Coca-Cola (soft drinks), McDonald's (fast food), Komatsu (large construction equipment), Kodak (photographic film), Lego (construction toys) and Boeing (civil aircraft). Market challengers are runner-up companies that aggressively attack competitors to get more market share. For example, Pepsi challenges Coke and Airbus challenges Boeing. The challenger might attack the market leader, other firms of its own sixe, or smaller local and regional competitors. Home runner-up firms will choose to follow rather than challenge the market leader. Firms using market follower strategies seek stable market shares and profit by following competitors' product offers, prices and marketing programmes.14 Smaller firms in a market, or even larger firms that lack established positions, often adopt market nicher strategies. They specialize in serving market niches that large competitors overlook or ignore. Market nichers avoid direct confrontations with the big companies by specializing along market, customer, product or marketing-mix lines. Through clever niching, low-share firms in an industry can be as profitable as their large competitors.

Developing the Marketing Mix

Winning companies are those that meet customer needs economically and conveniently and with effective communication.

The Marketing Plan

 

Executive summary

Current marketing situation
SWOT analysis
Objectives and issues
Marketing strategy
Action programmes
Budgets
Controls ( monitor progres )

Implementation:
Marketing implementation is the process that turns marketing strategies and plants into marketing actions to accomplish strategic marketing objectives.
1- Set goals
2- Measure performance
3- Evaluate performance
4- Take corrective actions
 
 
 
 
 

Part Two

The Marketing Setting

 
Ch 4: The Marketing Environment:
Ch 5: The Global Marketplace
Ch 6: Consumer Buyer Behaviour

 The central question for marketers is; how do consumers respond to various marketing stimuli that the company might use?
 Marketing stimuli consist of the four Ps: product, price, place and promotion.
Other stimuli include significant forces and events in the buyer's environment; economic, technological, political and cultural.
All these stimuli enter the buyer's black box, where they are turned into a set of observable buyer responses (shown on the right-hand side of Figure 6.1): product choice, brand choice, dealer choice, purchase timing and purchase amount.

First, the buyer's characteristics influence how he or she perceives and reacts to the stimuli.
Second, the buyer's decision process itself affects the buyer's behaviour.

Model of buyer behaviour:
Stimuli...................Characteristics /Decision Process............Pd, brand, deal, purchase timing and amount

Characteristics Affecting Consumer Behaviour

Extent of group influence on product and brand choice
Factors influencing behaviour





Psychological Factors

Motivation, Perception, Learning,
Maslow's hierarchy of needs






Types of Buying Decision Behaviour
Buyer decision process

Steps between evaluation of alternatives and a purchase derision

The Buyer Decision Process for New Products

Stages in the Adoption Process
Adopter categorization on (he basis of relative time of adoption of innovations)

Ch 7: Business Markets and Business Buyer Behaviour
Ch 8: Market Information and Marketing Research
 
 

Part Three

Core Strategy

 
Ch 9: Market Segmentation and Targeting
Ch 10: Positioning


Ch 11: Building Customer Relationships: Customer Satisfaction, Quality, Value and Service

Rubbermaid's success results from a simple but effective competitive marketing strategy: to offer consistently the best value to customers. First, the company carefully studies and listens to consumers. It uses demographic and lifestyle analysis to spot consumer trends and conducts focus groups, interviews and in-home product tests to learn about consumer problems and needs, likes and dislikes. Then it gives consumers what they want -  a continuous flow of useful, innovative and high-quality products.

Innovation and new-product development have become a kind of religion in the company.

This chapter tells in more detail how companies can win customers and outperform competitors. The answer lies in the marketing concept - in doing a better job of meeting and satisfying customer needs.
 
Customer delivered value

Customers are satisfied when their expectations are met and delighted when their expectations are exceeded. Satisfied customers remain loyal longer, buy more, are less price sensitive and talk favourably about the company.
 
For customer-centred companies, customer satisfaction is both a goal and an essential factor in company success. Companies that achieve high customer satisfaction ratings make sure that their target market knows it.
These and other companies realize that highly satisfied customers produce several benefits for the company. They are less price sensitive and they remain customers for a longer period.
Thus the purpose of marketing is to generate customer value profitably.
Delivering Customer Value and Satisfaction
To answer this, we will examine the concepts of a value chain and value delivery system.
The value chain breaks the firm into nine value-creating activities in an effort to understand the behaviour of costs in the specific business and the potential sources of competitive differentiation. The nine value-creating activities include five primary activities and four support activities.
 

 
  Value Delivery System
 
 
Retaining Customers
 
• Basic. The company salesperson sells the product, hut does not follow up in any way.

• Reactive. The salesperson sells the product and encourages the customer to call whenever he or she has any questions or prohlems.

• Accountable. The salesperson phones the customer a short time after the sale to check whether the product is meeting the customers expectations. The salesperson also solicits from the customer any product improvement suggestions and any specific disappointments. This information helps the company continuously to improve its offering.

• Proactive. The salesperson or others in the company phone the customer from time to time with suggestions about improved product use or helpful new products.

• Partnership. The company works continuously with the customer and with other customers to discover ways to deliver better value.

Implementing Total Quality Marketing
The task of improving product and service quality should be a company's top priority. Much of the striking global successes of Japanese companies resulted from their building exceptional quality into their products
 
Quality is our best assurance of customer allegiance, our strongest defence against foreign competition and the only path to sustained growth and earnings
 
Performance quality refers to the level at which a product performs its functions.
Conformance quality refers to freedom from defects and the consistency with which a product delivers a specified level of performance.
 
Marketing's commitment to the whole process needs to be particularly strong because of the central role of customer satisfaction to both marketing and total quality management (TQM). Within a quality-centre company, marketing management has two types of responsibility.
First, marketing management participates in formulating the strategies and policies that direct resources and strive for quality excellence.
Secondly, marketing has to deliver marketing quality alongside product quality.
 
Within quality programmes, marketing has several distinct roles.
Firstly, marketing has responsibility for correctly identifying customers' needs and wants, and for communicating them correctly to aid product design and to schedule production.
Second, marketing has to ensure that customers' orders are filled correctly and on time, and must check to see that customers receive proper instruction, training and technical assistance in the use of their product. Thirdly, marketers must stay in touch with customers after the sale, to make sure that they remain satisfied. Finally, marketers must gather and convey customers' ideas for product and service improvement back to the company.
 
Ch 12: Creating Competitive Advantages
 
Three winning strategies and one losing one:
Overall cost leadership
Differentiation Here the company concentrates on creating a highly differentiated product line and marketing programme, so that it comes aeross as the class leader in the industry.
Focus. Here the company focuses its effort on serving a few marke segments well rather than going after the whole market.
Operational excellence. The company provides superior value by leading its industry in price and convenience
Customer intimacy. The company provides superior value by precisely segmenting its markets and then tailoring its products or services to match exactly the needs of targeted customers. It specializes in satisfying unique customer needs through a close relationship with and intimate knowledge of the customer. It builds detailed customer databases for segmenting and targeting, and empowers its marketing people to respond quickly to customer needs. It serves customers who are willing to pay a premium to get precisely what they want, and it will do almost anything to build long-term customer loyalty and to capture customer lifetime value
Product leadership. The company provides superior value by offering a continuous stream of leading-edge products or services that make their ownand competing products obsolete. It is open to new ideas, relentlessly pursues new solutions, and works to reduce cycle times so that it can get new products to market quickly. It serves customers who want state-of-theart products and services, regardless of the costs in terms of price or inconvenience. Examples include Nokia, Tefal and Nike.

Market-Leader Strategies
The leader has the largest market share and usually leads the other firms in price changes, new product introductions, distribution coverage and promotion spending.

Leading firms want to remain no. 1, This calls for action on four fronts.
First, the firm must find ways to expand total demand.

Second, the firm can try to expand its market share further, even if market size remains constant.
Sales promotions and price reductions can produce increased share quickly, but such gains are made at the expense of profitability and disappear once the promotion ends.More often market share gains are achieved by long-term investment in quality, innovation or brand building
.Third, a company can retain its strength by reducing its costs.

Fourthly, the firm must protect its current market share through good defensive and offensive actions.
Defending its Position
First, it must prevent or fix weaknesses that provide opportunities for competitors.
The best defence is a good offence and the best response is continuous innovation.

Part Four

Product

 
Ch 13: Brands, Products., Packaging and Services
Ch 14: Product Development and Life-Cycle Strategies
Ch 15: Marketing Services
 

Part Five

Price

 
Ch 16: Pricing Considerations and Approaches
Ch 17: Pricing Strategies
 

Part Six

Promotion

 
Ch 18: Integrated Marketing Coinmunication Strategy
Ch 19: Mass Communications: Advertising, SalesPromotion and Public Relations
Ch 20: Personal Selling and Sales Management
 

 

Part Seven

Place

 
Ch 21: Managing Marketing Channels
Ch 22: Direct and Online Marketing

Important Marketing Terms

Acquisition costs:
The incremental costs involved in obtaining a new customer.

Brand:
A name, term, sign, symbol, design, or a combination of all used to uniquely identify a producer’s goods and
services and differentiate them from competitors.

Deep brand:
A name, term, trademark, logo, symbol, or design that successfully communicates a broad range of meaning about a product and its attributes.
Brand equity:
The added value a brand name identity brings to a product or service beyond the functional benefits provided.

Brand identity:
Positions customer’s relative perceptions of one brand to other competitive alternatives.

Business mission:
A brief description of an organization’s purpose with reference to its customers, products or services, markets, philosophy, and technology.

Cannibalization:
The undesirable trade-off where sales of a new product or service decrease sales from existing products or services and detract from the increased potential revenue contribution of the organization.

Co-branding:
The pairing of two manufacturer’s brand names on a single product or service.

Competitive advantage:
The strategic development where customers will choose a firm’s product or service over its competitors based on significantly more favorable perceptions or offerings.

Competitive analysis:
Analyzing and assessing the comparative strengths and weaknesses of competitors; may include their current and potential product and service development and marketing strategies.

Cross elasticity of demand:
The change in the quantity demanded of one product or service impacting the change in demand for another product or service.
 
Differentiated target marketing:

A process that occurs when an organization simultaneously pursues several different market segments, usually with a different strategy for each.

Differentiation:
An approach to create a competitive advantage based on obtaining a significant value difference that customers will appreciate and be willing to pay for, and which, ideally, will increase their loyalty as a result.

Distinctive competency:
An organization’s strengths or qualities including skills, technologies, or resources that distinguish it from competitors to provide superior and unique customer value and, hopefully, is difficult to imitate.

Innovators:
A type of adopter in Everett Rogers’ diffusion of innovations framework describing the first group to purchase a new product or service.

Early adopters:
A type of adopter in Everett Rogers’ diffusion of innovations framework that describes buyers that follow “innovators” rather than be the first to purchase.

Early majority:
A type of adopter in Everett Rogers’ diffusion of innovations framework that describes those interested in new technology who wait to purchase until these innovations are proven to perform to the expected standard.

Experience curve:
A visual representation, often based on a function of time, from the initial exposure to a process that offers greater information and results in enhanced efficiency and/or operations advantage.


Fighting brand strategy:
Adding a new brand to confront competitive brands in an established product category.

Experience curve:
A visual representation, often based on a function of time, from the initial exposure to a process that offers greater information and results in enhanced efficiency and/or operations advantage.

Frequency marketing:
Activities which encourage repeat purchasing through a formal program enrollment process to develop loyalty and commitment. Frequency marketing is also referred to as loyalty programs.

Integrated marketing communications:
The practice of blending different elements of the communication mix in mutually reinforcing ways.

Innovators:
Innovators are the first individuals to adopt an innovation. Innovators are willing to take risks, youngest in age, have the highest social class, have great financial lucidity, very social and have closest contact to scientific sources and interaction with other innovators.

Early Adopters:
This is second fastest category of individuals who adopt an innovation. These individuals have the highest degree of opinion leadership among the other adopter categories. Early adopters are typically younger in age, have a higher social status, have more financial lucidity, advanced education, and are more socially forward than late adopters (Rogers 1962, p. 185).
Early Majority

Individuals in this category adopt an innovation after a varying degree of time. This time of adoption is significantly longer than the innovators and early adopters. Early Majority tend to be slower in the adoption process, have above average social status, contact with early adopters, and show some opinion leadership
Late Majority:
Individuals in this category will adopt an innovation after the average member of the society. These individuals approach an innovation with a high degree of skepticism and after the majority of society has adopted the innovation. Late Majority are typically skeptical about an innovation, have below average social status, very little financial lucidity, in contact with others in late majority and early majority, very little opinion leadership.
Laggards:
Individuals in this category are the last to adopt an innovation. Unlike some of the previous categories, individuals in this category show little to no opinion leadership. These individuals typically have an aversion to change-agents and tend to be advanced in age. Laggards typically tend to be focused on “traditions”, have lowest social status, lowest financial fluidity, oldest of all other adopters, in contact with only family and close friends, very little to no opinion leadership.

Loyalty programs:
 Activities designed to encourage repeat purchasing through a formal program enrollment process and the distribution of benefits. Loyalty programs may also be referred to as frequency marketing.

Market evolution:
Incremental changes in primary demand for a product class and changes in technology.

Market segmentation:
The categorization of potential buyers into groups based on common characteristics such as age, gender, income, and geography or other attributes relating to purchase or consumption behavior.

Opportunity cost:
Resource-use options that are forfeited as a result of pursuing one activity among several possibilities. This can also be described as the potential benefits foregone as a result of choosing another course of action.

Positioning Orchestrating: an organization’s offering and image to occupy a unique and valued place in the customer’s mind relative to competitive offerings. A product or service can be positioned on the basis of an attribute or benefit, use or application, user, class, price or level of quality.

Price elasticity of demand:
The change in demand relative to a change in price for a product or service.

Product life cycle (PLC):
The phases of the sales projections or history of a product or service category over time used to assist with marketing mix decisions and strategic options available. The four stages of the product life cycle include introduction, growth, maturity, and decline, and typically follow a predictable pattern based on sales volume over time.

Repositioning:
The process of strategically changing consumer perceptions surrounding a product or service.

Situation analysis:
The assessment of operations to determine the reasons for the gap between what was or is expected, and what has happened or what will happen.

Slotting allowances:
Payments to retail stores for acquiring and maintaining shelf space.

Tactics:
A collection of tools, activities and business decisions required to implement a strategy.

Value:
The ratio of perceived benefits compared to price for a product or service.

The Starbucks Experience

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Everyone is familiar with the Starbucks story. The eponymous American coffee chain has been part of peoples’ lives for years now. Among other things, the company has been recognized as one of the world’s most admired companies by Fortune magazine. And this has been reflected in the value placed in the company by its shareholders: since 1992, its stock has risen by an astounding 5,000 percent.
The genius of the company’s success lies in its proven ability to create personalized customer experiences, secure customer loyalty, stimulate business growth, generate profits, and energize employees – all at the same time.

 WHY YOU NEED THIS BOOK
The Starbucks Experience discusses the unique blend of “home-brewed” ingenuity and people-driven philosophies that are behind Starbucks’ success. Author Dr Joseph Michelli gained access to Starbucks personnel and resources and discovered that the company’s success is driven by those who work there – the “partners” – and the special experience they create for each and every customer.
Dr Michelli makes use of real-life insider stories, eye-opening anecdotes, and step-by-step strategies to condense Starbucks’ working philosophies into five key principles in order to enable readers to learn from the best – and be the best.

PRINCIPLE 1: MAKE IT YOUR OWN

Business leaders want their employees to be fully engaged in the work they do instead of simply going through the motions. Senior management must find ways to get its partners to fully engage their passions and talents every day, while ensuring that individual partners’ differences are blended into a good uniform experience for its customers.
It can admittedly be very awkward to find a balance between these two vital – yet sometimes divergent – leadership responsibilities. Through its principle of Make It Your Own, however, Starbucks has managed to create a model that encourages partners at all levels to pour their creative energy and dedication into their jobs and inspire customers in legendary ways.

This structure is known as the “Five Ways of Being” and is encapsulated in a pamphlet known as the Green Apron Book:

Be welcoming

At Starbucks, “being welcoming” is an essential way to get the customer’s visit off to a positive start, and is also the foundation for producing a warm and comfortable environment. It lets partners forge bonds with customers.

“Being welcoming”, at its essence, is defined as “offering everyone a sense of belonging”. Partners should do all they can to create a place where people feel that they are a priority and where their day can be brightened, at least for a moment.

Welcoming people by name and remembering them from visit to visit is a small thing, but it counts very much. People fear just being another member of the herd; they want to have their uniqueness recognized.

Be genuine

At Starbucks, being genuine means to “connect, discover, and respond”. Focusing on these three elements in each customer interaction forms a quality relationship.

Connect. Legendary service comes from a desire and effort to exceed what the customer expects. Customers have repeatedly shared experiences of Starbucks partners making a connection well beyond some formulaic greeting. Individual staff uniqueness gives them a special way to connect with others.

Discover. Business success requires the discovery of each person’s needs and individual situation. Discovery is essential to developing a unique and genuine bond. The special qualities and needs of each customer must be determined.

Respond. A lot of businesses do manage to achieve the first two elements, but they don’t always act on what they learn. Starbucks employees not only listen to their customers, but also take action immediately based on what they hear and learn from these experiences for future customer interactions.

Be considerate

Starbucks partners look beyond their needs and consider the needs of others – customers, potential customers, critics, co-workers, other shareholders, and even the environment – in sum, the entire universe of people and things Starbucks affects.

At the corporate level, “being considerate” means exploring the long-term well-being of partners and those individuals whose lives the partners touch – while being mindful of the earth’s ability to sustain the demands placed on it.

Thoughtfulness should become a part of a company’s culture. Leaders should place a priority on consideration and encourage their staff to put their own twist on the concept.

Be knowledgeable

What does being knowledgeable mean in this context? Starbucks partners are always encouraged to love what they do and share it with others.

Partners are encouraged to enhance their expertise in coffee and customer service. Value is always added to partners’ efforts when they gain work-related knowledge. In addition, as they become more informed, their value to the business, self-confidence, and the impact they have on others all increase.

Starbucks upper management also offers formal training opportunities to develop their knowledge of coffee that can lead to personal insights for customers, and also give out incentives for partners to undertake such training.

Be involved

This means nothing less than active participation in the store, in the company, and in the community – a “yes, I will” attitude where breakthrough products and service are created. There must be a move away from a “bare minimum is OK” mentality.

Partners look around the store for clues on how to make the customer experiences and the business better and to improve the manner in which customer needs are served.

The management makes it a point to listen and respond to the ideas and suggestions of partners – as a result, partners frequently take responsibility for suggesting and championing new product ideas based on the inputs from their customers.

Lastly, there is community involvement, which can take many forms – from creating a community meeting place to staff volunteering in community-related activities, all of which are encouraged and supported by Starbucks leadership.

PRINCIPLE 2: EVERYTHING MATTERS


All business is detail. When details are overlooked or missed, even the most patient customers can be frustrated and costly errors can occur. What’s more, only a handful of unhappy customers bring their complaints to management – the rest simply bring their dollars elsewhere, and share their grievances with family members, friends, and acquaintances. (People are more likely to talk about unpleasant experiences than pleasant ones.)
Leaders have to understand that they must take care of both the “below-deck” (unseen aspects) and the “above-deck” (customer-facing) components of the customer experience. In the world of business, everything truly does matter.

 A small detail can sometimes make the difference between success and failure. Something as simple as a little 7-cent valve did more than its share towards making Starbucks a publicly traded company.

Important details live in both that which is seen and that which is unseen by the customer.

There is absolutely no way to hide poor quality in anything. Hide it though some may try, it always becomes evident in the end.

Store environment, product quality, training (doesn’t need to be boring, conventional or mundane), the development of a playful culture (a playful and positive work environment produces vital and engaged staff members), and a social conscience all matter a great deal.

The “Starbucks sensation” is driven not just by the quality of its products, but by the entire atmosphere surrounding the purchase of its coffee, the openness of its store space, interesting menu boards, the shape of its counter, and other things besides.

The art of retailing coffee – and indeed many other things as well – goes way beyond product. The details of the total experience matter, from napkins to coffee bags, store-fronts to window seats.

Details affect the emotional connection (the “felt sense”) that others have with you and your store or product.

People should go out and ask what details customers notice about their businesses, in order to know exactly what to focus on (this doesn’t mean however that whatever’s invisible to the customers can be neglected, of course).

Acknowledge the importance of everything, celebrate all the details, and play – have fun while working hard to make sure that everything is as good as you can make it!

Lastly, not only does everything matter; everyone matters as well.

PRINCIPLE 3: SURPRISE AND DELIGHT
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This idea behind the importance of this principle is hardly a new one. As early back as 1912, the Rueckheim brothers, who are behind the successful candy brand Cracker Jack, already knew that adding a surprise to each package would dramatically increase the appeal of their product.

 In that vein, delight is the caramelized popcorn – the basic product that your customers get – while surprise is the prize they get! Customers want the predictable and the consistent, while hoping for an occasional positive twist or added value thrown in.

Nowadays, people have a certain anticipation for something special with just about every purchasing experience, or hope they will get surprised, even in the most mundane experiences.

Today’s customers are far more discerning than ever before and far harder to please than any others who came before them.

To make matters worse, they have developed an insatiable appetite for what is unique and amazing in just about everything they buy. Most consumers have such a high threshold for the cutting-edge and the most up-to-date that they thumb their noses at almost everything that doesn’t qualify as such.

The most effective events are natural and spontaneous, not artificial or forced. Look first for a need, and then step in and fill it in the most genuine and spontaneous way possible.

Surprise can result from as simple a series of events as offering a little guidance, and then stepping in and getting out of the way and watching (and learning) as people search for the things that bring them joy.

Your efforts to surprise others are a contagious force. Look for genuine opportunities to do the positively unexpected. This creates a “ripple effect” that will have customers talking and not only will help bring people to the store, but will also serve to spread good word about your product quality and level of service. And, customers often end up surprising the store staff and/or one another as well!

Customer delight comes from surprise as well as predictability. You should ensure that your customers rely on you and your staff to provide both products and experiences at a consistently high level of quality. The occasional surprise will only serve to sweeten the pot and bring people back for more.

When breakdowns occur, businesses can still delight customers by making things right. You can and should view breakdowns as unexpected (and not entirely unwelcome) opportunities to improve your customer experience.

Delight is the result of an unwavering commitment to creating a comfortable and trusted relationship. If extra time and energy has been invested in delighting others and not simply satisfying them, you will be rewarded with nothing less than extraordinary results.

PRINCIPLE 4: EMBRACE RESISTANCE
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It was once noted that a person only profits from praise when he values criticism, and Starbucks management has taken this to heart. Valuing criticism is a major part of the Starbucks puzzle.
Embracing resistance involves a complex set of skills that can enable businesses and individuals to create business and relationship opportunities when confronted with irritation, skepticism, and/or wariness.
This principle requires leaders to distinguish between customers who want their concerns to be resolved and those individuals who just can’t seem to stop complaining or seem to find it impossible to be satisfied. Embracing resistance is more than simply placating these groups; it focuses on learning from those individuals who don’t always make it easy to listen.

 It’s important to realize that nothing in nature grows without facing limiting forces, and businesses are no different. Therefore it’s best to learn to live with such challenges – and even use them to your advantage.

To work with resistance effectively, you must distinguish between those people who really do want their concerns resolved and those who simply want to complain.

For some concerns, listening is all that is required. It offers space for commentary and constructive discussion.

For other types of resistance, direct action is required; management should know when listening is simply not enough.

While it’s natural to want to avoid complicating the issue and avoid contact with one’s detractors altogether, quite a lot can be gained by welcoming these people to the early stages of problem-focused discussions. Their grievances can thus be voiced and their inputs incorporated early on – when doing so matters most.

If and when the concerns of critics are allayed, these people can and often do become your most ardent supporters.

It’s vital to correct misinformation as swiftly and rapidly as you can. Misinformation has a way of spreading and becoming even more complex and convoluted as it is spread, and the further this goes the harder and costlier it is to deal with.

If and when errors are made, it’s important to take direct, unequivocal responsibility and follow this up with corrective action.

PRINCIPLE 5: LEAVE YOUR MARK


We all end up leaving some mark on the world. What varies – and what is most important – is whether that mark is positive or negative. Do we give back more than we take, or do we take more than we give?
This is particularly significant in the world of business, where managers’ actions have profound effects on individuals and societies. Some leaders are content with hitting the firm’s product goals and cut corners on everything from employee benefits to capital expenses. Others believe that an important part of their business success is linked to the powerful and positive impact they have on their communities.
Successful leaders realize that a key component of their success is leaving a powerful and positive mark in the communities in which their businesses operate.

Many business executives initially decide to be good corporate citizens because they hope it will improve their business.

Almost all who sustain this type of commitment do so because it becomes patently obvious that this is the right way – indeed, the only way – to do business.

People want to do business with, work for, invest in, and patronize socially conscious companies.

The most talented and qualified applicants increasingly consider a company’s ethics and community support when selecting an employer.

Employee morale is three times higher in those companies where community development is an integral part of the business model than in their less-involved counterparts.

When employees’ work environments match their personal values, they become far more productive than employees whose work environments don’t match what they value or uphold.

By participating in community-based activities, employees are given the chance to build leadership skills and grow as teams.

The value of a business’s brand is 100 percent linked to the trust people place in the company to do what it says it will do.

Corporate social responsibility shouldn’t be seen as a passing fad or fancy. Instead, it should be valued as the way global business really gets done.

We can all be the change we want to see in the world!

The Art of The Start

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You have the idea of a lifetime and yet you do not know where and how to begin. It is a dilemma shared by entrepreneurs everywhere - what does it take to turn a great idea into action?

 Author Guy Kawasaki brings two decades of business experience to offer a definitive guide for anyone who dreams of starting anything. Whether you are thinking of starting a start-up Internet operation or a church group, The Art of the Start will provide you with everything you need to know from raising money to fostering a community.

Chapter 1: The Art of Starting

There are five important things an entrepreneur must accomplish:
1- Make Meaning.
The best reason to start an organization is to make meaning. Meaning is not about money, fame or power. Instead, meaning is about making the world a better place, increasing the quality of life, righting a wrong and preventing good from ending.
2- Make Mantra.
Instead of a mission statement, take your meaning and make your own mantra. A mantra is defined as a sacred verbal formula repeated in prayer, meditation, or incantations such as an invocation of god or a magic spell. Examples of mantras include Disney’s “Fun family entertainment”, and Nike’s “Authentic athletic performance.”
3- Get Going.
Start creating your product or service and commence delivering to your customers. Forget about writing long business plans or creating complicated financial projections. Instead build your prototype and launch your website.
4- Define Your Business Model.
Define your customers and their needs. Come up with a sales mechanism that will earn you more money than what you are spending.
5- Weave a Mat (Milestones, Assumptions, and Tasks) . Compile a list of the milestones you need to meet, assumptions that are built into your business model, and the tasks you need to accomplish to create your organization.

Chapter 2: The Art of Positioning


With the right positioning, you should be able to see clearly why the organization was started, why it should be patronized by customers, and why good people should choose to work for the organization.
Before you begin dwelling into the art of positioning, you must first answer the question, “What do you do?” You must be able to provide an answer that not only seizes the high ground but shows exactly how your organization differs from its competitors. It is only then that you can communicate this powerful message to your chosen market.
Seize the High Ground

Good positioning must have the following qualities:
1- Positive.

2- Customer-centric.

3- Empowering to your employees.

4- Self-explanatory.

5- Targets the intended customer.

6- Must show the core competencies of your organization.

7- Relevant to your core competencies and to the core needs of your customers.

8- Long-lasting.

9- Different from your competitors.

10- Other Positioning Tips:
Position your product or service in the most personal manner you can.

You must choose a remarkable name for your organization, product or service.

Use plain words that are easy to understand when describing what your company can do for your customers. Avoid technical or insider jargon.

Offer concrete points instead of mere overused adjectives when distinguishing your products to competitors. Instead of calling your system safe, say that your system has never been hacked.

ensure that each member of your organization understands your company’s positioning.

Chapter 3: The Art of Pitching

For an entrepreneur, pitching is almost as important as breathing. Not only is pitching a great tool for raising money, it is essential for reaching agreements. Needless to say, agreements are common to any entrepreneur’s daily life.
Here are some tips to help you make a perfect pitch:
1- Explain Yourself in the First Minute.
Every single time you make your pitch, take in mind that your audience is waiting for you to answer one question: “What does your organization do?” The next time you make a pitch, make sure that you answer that question in the very first minute.
2- Answer the Little Man.
Picture a little man sitting on your shoulder the next time you are giving a presentation. Imagine the little man whispering, “So what?” in your ear every time you make a point. Always answer the little man’s question. To make it even better, right after you answer the so-what question, move into “For instance…” and provide a real-world use or scenario.
3- Know Your Audience.
Do your research before any meeting starts. Find out who you would be pitching to and learn what’s important to your audience. You must also visit the organization’s website and gather core information about the people you would be speaking to.
4- Observe the 10/20/30 Rule.
Use the following the next time you are giving a presentation: ten slides, 20 minutes, 30-point font text. The 10 slides that are necessary for a pitch to investors are:
Title slide

Problem

Solution

Business model

Underlying magic

Marketing and sales

Competition

Management team

Financial projections and key metrics

Current status, accomplishments, timeline and use of funds
5- Set the Stage.
Remember that everything and anything that goes wrong would be your fault. Therefore, you must be prepared. Make sure you bring your own projector and your own written materials. It might even be advisable to bring two laptops (both with your loaded presentation) and a memory card with a copy of your presentation just in case.
6- Let One Person do the Talking.
In a pitch, it would be advisable for the CEO to do 80% of the talking. As for the rest of the team, one or two slides that pertain to their expertise are more than enough.
7- Pitch Constantly.
The best way to achieve familiarity is to keep doing your pitch over and over again. Try out your pitch in front of your employees, relatives and friends.

Chapter 4: The Art of Writing a Business Plan

An entrepreneur will soon discover that a business plan is not really as important as most people deem it should be. However, the fact remains that most investors, recruits, potential board makers and decision makers expect a business plan and will not rest until they are given one.

1- Focus on the Executive Summary

When writing a business plan, use the ten slides that are necessary for a pitch to investors (previous chapter) and use them as your framework. Instead of a title slide, provide an executive summary. Remember that this executive summary is the most important part of your business plan.
An executive summary is a concise and clear description of the problem you wish to solve. It also states how you wish to solve the problem, your business model and the underlying magic of your product or service. Remember, your executive summary will determine whether or not people will read the rest of your business plan.
Keep It Clean

Here are other tips you should use when creating your business plan:
Do not exceed twenty pages. The shorter your plan is, the more likely it is to be read.

Only one person should write the entire business plan.

Use staples to bind the plan. Forget about leather, embossed portfolios.

Simplify financial projections to two pages. After all, it is simply impossible to know how much you’ll spend on office items in your fourth year of operations.

Include key metrics. Remember, the number of customers you have, locations and resellers are important to your investors.

Provide the right numbers. Your cash flow statement for the first five years is very important.

Chapter 5: The Art of Bootstrapping

Most people are surprised to learn that industry giants Microsoft and eBay are two companies that started with a bootstrap model. A bootstrappable business model has:
Low up-front capital requirements.

Short (under a month) sales cycles.

Short (under a month) payment terms.

Recurring revenue.

Word of mouth advertising.

Bootstrapping might mean passing up profitable sales that may take a long time to collect or stretching your payments for everything you buy. This might mean a decline in “paper” profits but for a bootstrapper, paper profits are not as important as cash flow management.

Ship, Then Test
If you are bootstrapping, you obviously are not sitting on a pile of money. Therefore, it is imperative that you get your product or service to the market immediately. When using this philosophy, you are opting to fix the problems of your product later rather than now.
The good news is, with this method, you will receive immediate cash flow and feedback from the real world. Unfortunately, this method might also tarnish your image if there are quality problems.
It is not easy to make this decision. If you feel that you would allow the people you love to use the product or service as it is right now, then it might be correct to ship it. If you are running out of money, it might also be advisable to ship the product and deal with the consequences later.
Bootstrapping Tips

Here are other things to consider when you are on a bootstrapper’s model:
Forget the “Proven” Team. When you’re bootstrapping you must almost always go for what’s affordable. Keep this in mind when you are choosing your team. Forget about hiring well-known industry veterans who would cost you an arm and a leg on wages alone. Instead, choose young inexperienced people with moldable talent and endless energy.

Focus on Function, Not Form. Do not focus on form when it comes to spending money. If you need proper accounting, you don’t need to hire a big name firm. You also don’t need to buy $700 office chairs when cheaper ones would do.

Go Direct. Take the opportunity to sell directly to your customers. Only use resellers once you have ensured that your product and service is bug-free. Remember, you have to establish your product on your own.

Position against the Leader. As a bootstrapper, positioning against the market leader or going against accepted ways of doing things might be the smartest thing to do.

Understaff and Outsource. Overstaffing can cause you a multitude of problems. It is better to understaff and outsource. Do not outsource research and development, marketing and sales. Instead, outsource your payroll management.

Build a Board. A board of directors is always a source of good guidance and superb direction. You don’t need to worry about your lack of capital to attract high-quality board members. If your products are innovative enough, the board members will come.

Sweat the Big stuff. Save on office space, furniture, computers, and office equipment. However, make sure you spend enough on product development, sales, billing and collection.

Execute. The failure to execute can be disastrous to a bootstrapper. To be able to execute, you must be able to:

Set and communicate goals.

Measure progress.

Establish a single point of accountability.

Reward the achievers.

Follow through until an issue is done or irrelevant.

Heed reality.

Establish a culture of execution.

Chapter 6: The Art of Recruiting

Recruiting good people is one of the most enjoyable and yet most critical tasks that you must face as an entrepreneur.
When recruiting, you must look beyond race, color, education and work experience. Instead you should focus on three factors:
Can the candidate do what you need?

Does the candidate believe in your meaning?

Does that candidate have the strengths you need?

Recruitment Tips:
Hire people better than you.

Remember that there are very few A players out there. Don’t make the mistake of disqualifying A prospects because of gender, race, sexual orientation or age.

Ignore the following factors: experience in a big, successful organization, experience in a failed organization, educational background, experience in the same industry, experience in the same function, and functional weakness. They are unimportant.

It is best to hire candidates who possess major strengths even if they have major weaknesses.

Chapter 7: The Art of Raising Capital

A start-up business is usually on a constant look-out for capital from outside investors. Investors include venture capitalists, foundations, friends and family members.
Although pitching plays a major role when you are trying to raise capital, the realities of your organization are so much more important. You must offer a product or service that is meaningful and long-lasting.
Here are some tips you can use when raising capital:
Build a Business. The best way to get investors is to build a business immediately. How do you build a business without money? Have a bootstrapper model.

Get an Intro. Have current investors, lawyers, accountants, other entrepreneurs and professors introduce you to investors. This way, they will learn about you from sources they respect.

Clean Up Your Act. Get rid of obvious flaws in your system. Flaws often occur in your intellectual property, capital structure, management team, stock offerings and regulatory compliance.

Disclose Everything. Don’t attempt to hide problems that can not be cleaned up immediately. Do not allow anything to damage your credibility.

Acknowledge, or Create, an Enemy. Believe it or not, investors do not want to hear that your organization has no existing competitors. This only tells them that there is no existing market out there for your service, or that you are too stupid to use Google.

Don’t Use Old Lies. Here are some examples of lies start-ups tell investors. Refrain from using them and be prepared to come up with new ones:

“Our projection is conservative.”

“All we have to do is get 1 percent of the market.”

“P&G is too old to be a threat.”

“Several investors are already in due diligence.”

“Key employees will join as soon as we get funded.”

Chapter 8: The Art of Partnering

Partnerships - a word that is actually more complicated than it sounds. Although good partnering can increase cash flow, accelerate revenue and reduce costs, a bad partnership can very well mean the other way around.
Here are some tips that can help you master the art of partnering:
Partner for “Spreadsheet” Reasons. Partnering can accelerate your entry into a new area, open up new distribution channels, speed up product development and reduce your costs.

Define Deliverables and Objectives. These include additional revenues, reduced costs, new products and services, new customers, new markets, etc.

Ensure that the Middles and Bottoms Like the Deal. It is not enough that upper management believe that the partnership is a good idea. Make sure that the partnership is understood by all the members of the organization. Everyone must contribute to make a partnership work.

Find Internal Champions. Choose one person from each organization to become an internal champion. Ensure that the main goal of the chosen champions is to achieve success. Nothing but the partnership counts.

Cut Win-Win Deals. Both partners have to win. Do not enter into win-lose partnerships.

Wait to Legislate. Don’t ask for legal advice too early. Legal experts will always give you more reasons not to go through the deal. Agree on business terms on your own before you bring in your lawyers.

Put an “Out” Clause in the Deal. The assurance that both parties won’t be trapped into a partnership that is not working actually promotes longevity.

Chapter 9: The Art of Branding

The classic Ps of marketing (product, place, price and promotion) pretty much sums up the art of branding. Some people add prayer to the list, but the author prefers proselytization which is the art of converting others to your belief or doctrine.
For today’s start-ups, proselytization is the core of branding. You must be able to create something contagious that would make people enthusiastic and eager to try your product or service. You must be able to make other people spread the word around.
Create a Contagion

The secret to branding is aligning with a product or service that is already gold or enhancing your product and service until it becomes gold. You must be able to create or find products and services that are contagious. Contagious products and services are:
Cool.

Effective.

Distinctive.

Disruptive.

Emotive.

Deep.

Indulgent.

Supported.

Branding Tips



Lower the Barriers to Adoption. You have to make your product or service simple and yet effective. You must flatten the learning curve. Your customers must be able to get basic functionality right almost immediately.

Recruit Evangelists. Evangelists are people who believe in your company and what you do. Take advantage of the customers who wish to help you and your business. Assign them tasks and expect them to get done. Provide them the tools they need to evangelize.

Foster a Community. Identify and recruit customers who are enthusiastic about what you do. Hire someone whose sole task is to foster a community. Integrate the presence of your community in all your sales and marketing tools. Allow members to use your building for their events and conferences.

Achieve Humanness. Target the young and don’t be afraid to make fun of yourself. Feature your customers and help the underprivileged.

Focus on Publicity. To attract publicity, create something grand and get them into the hands of people. Make friends even with reporters from publications you have never heard of. Additionally, make sure you maintain good relations with the press all year round.

Chapter 10: The Art of Rainmaking

A rainmaker is a person who generates large quantities of business. The first step of rainmaking in a start-up business is to get the very first version of the product or service out to the market. After you do this, you must observe where your product or service will sell the most.
The second step of rainmaking is to be able to sell the product or service well. Remember, as a start-up, people are not aware of your products and services. You must overcome resistance.
Here are some tips you can use to master the art of rainmaking:

Pick the right lead generation method.


Find the key influencer. Ignore titles. They really don’t mean much.


Be nice to secretaries and administrative aids.


Make your prospect talks. This way, they’ll be able to tell you what you need to do to close the deal.


Ask customers to test drive your products and services.


Give your customers a slow and easy adoption curve.


Do not be fazed when you are rejected.

Chapter 11: The Art of Being a Mensch

Mensch is a Yiddish term for an ethical and admirable person. In some cultures, it is considered the highest form of praise. To be a mensh, you must help people, do what’s right and contribute to society.
Here are some tips on becoming a mensch:
Help people who can not help you back.

Observe the spirit of agreements, pay for what you get and focus on what is important.

Help society by giving money, time, expertise and emotional support.

Made to Stick

.


What sticks?

Whether you’re a CEO or a full-time mom, you’ve got ideas that you need to communicate: a new product coming to market, a strategy you want to sell your boss, values you are trying to instil in your children. But it’s hard – fiendishly so – to transform the way people think and act.
Mark Twain once observed, “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.” His observation rings true: Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas – businesspeople, teachers, politicians, journalists, and others – struggle to make their ideas “stick.”
Why You Need This Book
Made to Stick is a book that will transform the way you communicate ideas. It’s a fast-paced tour of success stories (and failures): the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who drank a glass of bacteria to prove a point about stomach ulcers; the charities who make use of the “Mother Teresa Effect”; the elementary-school teacher whose simulation actually prevented racial prejudice. Provocative, eye-opening, and often surprisingly funny, Made to Stick shows us how we can apply these rules to making our own messages stick.


In this book, you’ll learn the six key qualities of an idea that is made to stick: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotional, and Stories – the SUCCESs framework.


Principle 1: Simplicity


How do we find the essential core of our ideas? A successful defense lawyer says, “If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won’t remember any.”
To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize. Saying something short is not the mission – sound bites are not the ideal. Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound. The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.
“Finding the core” means stripping an idea down to its most critical essence. To get to the core, we’ve got to weed out superfluous and tangential elements. But that’s the easy part. The hard part is weeding out ideas that may be really important but just aren’t the most important idea.
The Army Commander’s Intent forces its officers to highlight the most important goal of an operation. The value of the Intent comes from its singularity. You can’t have five North Stars, you can’t have five “most important goals,” and you can’t have five Commander’s Intents.
Finding the core is analogous to writing the Commander’s Intent – it’s about discarding a lot of great insights in order to let the most important insight shine. The French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupery once offered a definition of engineering elegance: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
A designer of simple ideas should aspire to the same goal: knowing how much can be wrung out of an idea before it begins to lose its essence.
 
Principle 2: Unexpectedness

How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We can use surprise – an emotion whose function is to increase alertness and cause focus – to grab people’s attention. And for our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity.

Nordstrom is a department store known for outstanding customer service. That extra service comes at a price: Nordstrom can be an expensive place to shop. Yet many people are willing to pay higher prices precisely because Nordstrom makes shopping so much more pleasant.
Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, in their book Built to Last, describe stories told at Nordstrom about unexpected service by employees, who are known within the firm as “Nordies”:
The Nordie who ironed a new shirt for a customer who needed it for a meeting that afternoon;
The Nordie who cheerfully gift wrapped products a customer bought at Macy’s;
The Nordie who warmed customers’ cars in winter while they finished shopping;
The Nordie who made a last-minute delivery of party clothes to a frantic hostess;
And even the Nordie who refunded money for a set of tire chains – although Nordstrom doesn’t sell tire chains.
  
Principle 3: Concreteness

Jane Elliot, an elementary-school teacher in Iowa, found herself trying to explain Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death to her classroom of third-graders. She aimed to make prejudice tangible to her students. At the start of class, she divided the students into two groups: brown-eyed kids and blue-eyed kids. The groups were separated. She made a shocking announcement that the brown-eyed kids were superior to blue-eyed kids.

 Elliot was shocked at how quickly the class was transformed. She watched those kids turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating third-graders. Even their performance on academic tasks changed.
Elliot’s simulation made prejudice concrete – brutally concrete. It also had an enduring impact on the students’ lives. She turned prejudice into an experience.
How do we make our ideas clear? We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. This is where so much business communication goes awry. Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions – they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images, because our brains are wired to remember concrete data.

Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.
  
Principle 4: Credibility

How do we get people to believe our ideas? We’ve got to find a source of credibility to draw on. Sometimes the wellsprings are dry, Barry Marshall discovered in his quest to cure the ulcer. Drawing on external credibility didn’t work. The endorsement of his supervisors and his institution in Perth didn’t seem to be enough.
Drawing on internal credibility didn’t work either – his careful marshalling of data and detail still didn’t help him clear the bar. In the end, what he did was draw on the audience’s credibility – he essentially “modelled” a testable credential by gulping a glass of bacteria. The implicit challenge was: See for yourself – if you drink this gunk, you’ll get an ulcer, just like I did.
It’s not always obvious which wellspring of credibility we should draw from. What Marshall showed so brilliantly was perseverance – knowing when it was time to draw on a different well.
 
It’s inspirational to know that a medical genius like Marshall had to climb over the same hurdles with his idea as we’ll have to climb with ours – and to see that he eventually prevailed, to the benefit of us all.
    
Principle 5: Emotional

Dan Syrek is the nation’s leading researcher on litter. In the 1980s, Syrek and his Sacramento-based organization were hired by the state of Texas. Syrek knew that what Texas needed to do was reach people who weren’t inclined to shed tears over roadside trash. Designing an antilitter campaign based on self-interest wasn’t likely to work with this group. They called their target market Bubba.
Syrek knew that the best way to change Bubba’s behaviour was to convince him that people like him did not litter. Based on his research, the Texas Department of Transportation approved a campaign built around the slogan “Don’t Mess with Texas.”

The campaign was an instant success. Within a few months of the launch, an astonishing 73 percent of Texans polled could recall the message and identify it as an antilitter message. Within one year, litter had declined 29 percent.
How can we make people care about our ideas? We get them to take off their Analytical Hats. We create empathy for specific individuals. We show how our ideas are associated with things that people already care about. We appeal to their self-interest, but we also appeal to their identities – not only to the people they are right now, but also to the people they would like to be.
           
Principle 6: Stories

In the late 1990s, the fast-food giant Subway launched a campaign to tout the healthiness of a new line of sandwiches. It was focused on the remarkable story of a college student named Jared Fogle.
Jared had a serious weight problem. By his junior year in college, he had ballooned to 425 pounds. After three months of the “Subway diet,” as he called it, he stepped on the scale. It read 330 pounds. He had dropped almost 100 pounds in three months by eating at Subway.
Despite the hurdles - an initial refusal of Subway’s marketing director to unveil the tale of Jared since in his experience, “fast foods can’t do healthy”; the director’s initial decision to focus on the taste of Subway’s sandwiches; and problems regarding who would pay for the Jared commercials - the campaign was a stunning success.
The Jared story has a morsel of simulation value. Even skinny people who aren’t interested in dieting will be inspired by Jared’s tale. He fought big odds and prevailed through perseverance. And this is the second major payoff that stories provide: inspiration. Inspiration drives action, as does simulation.
Note how well the Jared story does on the Success checklist:
It’s simple: Eat subs and lose weight. (It may be oversimplified, frankly, since the meatball sub with extra mayo won’t help you lose weight.)

It’s unexpected: A guy lost a ton of weight by eating fast food! This story violates our schema of fast food, a schema that’s more consistent with the picture of a fat Jared than a skinny Jared.

It’s concrete: Think of the oversized pants, the massive loss of girth, the diet composed of particular sandwiches. It’s much more like an Aesop fable than an abstraction.

It’s credible: It has the same kind of antiauthority truthfulness that we saw with the Pam Laffin antismoking campaign. The guy who wore 60-inch pants is giving us diet advice!

It’s emotional: We care about an individual, Jared, than about a mass. And it taps into profound areas of Maslow’s hierarchy – it’s about a guy who reached his potential with the help of a sub shop.

It’s a story: Our protagonist overcomes big odds to triumph. It inspires the rest of us to do the same.

Stories naturally embody most of the SUCCESs framework. Stories are almost always Concrete. Most of them have Emotional and Unexpected elements. The hardest part of using stories effectively is making sure that they’re Simple – that they reflect your core message. It’s not enough to tell a great story; the story has to reflect your agenda. You don’t want a general lining up his troops before battle to tell a Connection plot story.
Stories have the amazing dual power to simulate and to inspire. And most of the time we don’t even have to use much creativity to harness these powers – we just need to be ready to spot the good ones that life generates every day.

Making Strategies Stick: Three Principles

The trick to talking strategy is making strategic ideas sticky. Here are a few tips for making your strategy stick with people:
Be concrete. The beauty of concrete language – language that is specific and sensory – is that everyone understands your message in a similar way.

Say something unexpected. If a strategy is common sense, don’t waste your time communicating it. (If it’s common sense, why bother?) It’s critical, though, for leaders to identify the uncommon sense in their strategies. What’s new about the strategy? What’s different?

Tell stories. A good story is better than an abstract strategy statement. Remember, you can reconstruct the moral from the story, but you can’t reconstruct the story from the moral.

Final Words

Regardless of your level of “natural creativity,” this book will show you how a little focused effort can make almost any idea stickier, and a sticky idea is an idea that is more likely to make a difference.

All you need to do is understand the six principles of powerful ideas!