Rebranding Best Buy

There was a day (I'm talking 20 years ago kids) when Best Buy was exactly that: the best place to get deals on electronics as well as music (technically, I heard that Fry's back in the day had better deals, but we didn't have Fry's in Chicago). That was it's brand. And it worked. The deals made the long lines worth it. You could save on music, computer games, memory, cables, TVs, you name it. I honestly don't remember when Best Buy lost the "get your electronics cheap here" goal, but I suspect it was around the time in the late 90s when they decided that there was money to be made in selling extended warranties. I do know that by the time 2000 rolled around, Best Buy was not the Best Buy I remember. That was also the time I had a camcorder and a digital camera in my hand, and a Best Buy salesperson would not sell them to me without me providing a valid explanation for why I didn't want an extended warranty. But I digress. And now I'm reading that Best Buy needs to go through a rebranding. Really? Your friggin company and store already have branding build in! I mean, seriously. McDonalds, Audi, Amazon, Xbox, Apple, etc. all have to work to get their branding across. No wonder they are heading for bankruptcy. I've always been intrigued by companies that mess with a successful recipe. Remember Boston Market? They grew like gangbusters, then decided to add sandwiches, meatloaf, turkey, etc to their menu (before they were just chicken and sides), and voila! Bankrupt. REI, please don't change.

How long to hold a grudge?

Not against people, but against brands and companies?

The oldest grudge I have right now is 17 years and counting. Unless you count the fact that I will never buy a Chrysler because my father had a bad experience with Plymouth back in the 60s.

In 1993 American Express wronged me. Won't go into the details, but suffice it to say I will never do business with them. Ever. Ford and GM both pissed me off in the 90s, even after giving GM multiple chances to make good (my fault for being naive).

I'm a rational person. My Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is INTJ - the NT being the "rational" quartet. I am rational in almost all aspects of my life: dealing with my kids, deciding who to fire and promote at work, which charities I donate to, etc. The one exception is when I'm a consumer. Why does the iPod succeed when there are mp3 players with better storage per dollar? Why do people still buy from iTunes when DRM-free options such as Amazon MP3 exist?

Consumers are fickle. They are a challenge to understand. They are unpredictable.

Which is why it's imperative that every aspect of the customer's interaction with your brand goes well! You just don't know what sets off customers. And every small problem a customer encounters erodes trust in your brand.

Seth Godin for quite some time has talked about the new era of marketing. Consumers are in control now. Traditional marketing is ineffective at best; damaging (yes, that's right damaging) at worst. And he talked of this in the era of email and Internet message boards. "Back then," information spread virally around the web at amazing speed. Today, with twitter and facebook dominating the scene, things move even faster.

Speaking of social networks, its interesting to see how companies have responded to these tools. Those companies that are consumer-focused and known for customer excellence tend to use them well, those that have horrible customer experiences tend to struggle.

Xbox does this right - they have a twitter account (XboxSupport) that users can fire questions to. And they staff and respond to it. And when they respond anyone following them can see what they've advised.

Comcast, on the other hand, likes to respond with "Can I help you?" Can you help me? Why the frick are you asking the question? Do you really think I would say "no, I like not having internet access that I pay $60 a month for." (Yeah I would dump Comcast in a minute... if I had an alternative).

It was 10 years ago when Amazon cut it's marketing department and put the budget into free shipping. You know, an actual benefit for the customer. Why haven't more companies learned this lesson?

Ignoring your customer touchpoints isn't a smart way to do business. Some customers hold grudges a long time. 17 years. Maybe longer.

Using the concept of Impact in your sprint planning

The most common problem I see with people chartered with execution plans (project managers, program managers, whatever) is their blind scheduling of tasks using only priority and resources as their criteria. Let's take an extreme example. Assume you have two deliverables: the first is considered "highest priority," will result in a 10x decrease in operational costs, and will take 12 months to implement. The second one is not considered as high of a priority. It will result in a 5% decrease in operational costs, and will take 5 days to implement.

In my experience (assuming there are ample resources for deliverable #1), most execution planners will blindly execute the first deliverable followed by the second deliverable based on priority rather than consider the impact of reducing 5% of operating costs over the coming year. This is because most people who are chartered with execution have been considition to look at priority first, and resources second when scheduling work to be done.

Of course in the real world things are not so cut-and-dry and not so drastic. But the point is still the same: you should set your execution plan to maximize your output as a function of time. And here's the kicker: that should be your only criteria. And it's simple, really: start plotting out impact over time on a chart and look at the "area under the curve." Compare your scheduling options and you'll see why scheduling by impact is the best way to deliver value.

Most people will ask me at this point "but doesn't priority cover impact?" And the answer is "yes but's that irrelevant." It's irrelevant because it covers the impact of the deliverable only. It doesn't take into account impact as a function of schedule - the idea that changing around the scheduling of tasks will have different total impact over time.

Give it try on your current project. And start delivering value, sooner.

Microsoft releases a Silverlight 4 Facebook Client

Download it here. I had to uninstall Silverlight 3 in order to get it to install 4, but the Facebook client is really sweet. Better way to organize information.

Five free tips to speed your execution

Being at Microsoft almost two years now I've gotten to see how people, processes, and attitude contribute to speed of execution. Peers often ask me how I got things done, even without "approval," and by (gasp) not following Microsoft's heavyweight processes.

Here's what I tell them.

1. Serialize your tasks. No matter what you're doing, what your roadblocks are, etc, this is a simple math problem. So long as your goal isn't "get a bunch of things done at exactly the same time (such as cooking a meal or a product launch) you will automatically increase your speed of execution simply by serializing your tasks instead of parallelizing them. Don't believe me? Try this out: pretend you have three tasks, each take 1 day to complete. Parallelizing them (spending an equal amount of time on each), you will finish all three at the end of day three. If you serialize them, you finish task 1 on day 1, task 2 on day 2, and task 3 on day three. Both approaches take three total days to complete all three. But serializing them gives you an average deilvery time of 2 days instead of 3 days (33% improvement). And you get the benefits from task 1 two days early and task 2 one day early. Always focus on one thing and get it done.



2. Identify the least amount of work to move the needle. Smart people like to solve for the perfect solution, the 100% solution. Smarter people move the needle along the way. This is a cororally to the above. You can deliver an 100% solution in a month. Or, you can deliver a 25% solution this week, a 50% solution next week, a 75% solution the following week, and finally an 100%. The key here is once you've identified that 25% solution that moves the needle, get moving on it! Don't wait until the next phases are defined before you move on phase 1.



3. Help others win. If you have a great idea, let others in on it. Let them win. Let them look good. Let them have some credit. Don't hoard it. You'll be shocked how fast things get done.



4. Fail Faster. Startups know this very well. You will get things wrong more than you will get them right. And meetings, documentation, and brainstorming will not avoid the need to learn (although applied properly they will help you move forward with execution if you are getting others to contribute to your cause). So get on with failing. Now.



5. Ask for forgiveness, not permission. A long time ago I heard "you will move as fast as you can make decisions." Amen. Every time you ask for buy-in, approval, etc you will slow yourself down. I work with a lot of Sr. PMs and I work with a lot of Jr. PMs. I never hear a Sr. PM say "I need to get my boss' sign-off" - they just do it and make it happen.

One caveat: know when care is required. The last bullet doesn't apply in all cases. You've got to know when moving forward does require input, approval, or buy-in. But the opposite is the important piece: know when you can aggressively move forward on your own and Make It Happen.

Oh yeah, one last thing: prioritize. I have probably 50 suggestions to help speed execution. But notice I kept the list to five. It's enough for you to get moving, without having to read a post 10 times as long.

So get moving :)

I just don't buy it re: Apple

Just got done reading this article on how Apple is going down the wrong path with their "closed" systems.

As I like to say, I'm a PC-and-a-Mac. I have nothing for-or-against Apple or Microsoft. I love iPods, hate iTunes Music Store (but love iTunes for managing my music library, love iPhone, hate Windows Mobile, love Xbox and Xbox Live, am indifferent to my iMac and indifferent to my Windows laptop. And I love Amazon MP3 :)

I heard this "open system" line five years ago as iPods really took off. Apple hasn't lost it's leadership position yet. Instead, they continue to innovate, deliver value to customers, and reap the profits. They have a solid business model (deliver a seamless end-user experience software to sell music as a loss-lead to sell devices at a huge profit).

Did the Wintel decoupling of hardware and software enable Wintel to beat Apple in the 80s? Maybe. Maybe not. I think they delivered something cheaper and easier-to-use. Was that because of the decoupling? I think so, but Apple could have played the price war with them (especially when Apple had the market share). Apple chose not to, they lost.

Here's the key point: open platform is not an end-user requirement.

Google or Microsoft will take market share from Apple when they build a better product or innovate a better model (something that beats the device-software integration currently done very well by Apple).

When will marketers catch up?

This chart is mind-blowing. How, in the year 2008 (when this analysis was done) can marketers still be so far behind on where their audience is? It's not 1998 anymore.

Here's what else is interesting: Google (and a number of online advertisers) has made a killing despite the low investment from marketing in this area. Imagine what happens when marketers do get with the times. Or, what happens when companies realize they can reach more of their audience with less dollars and that their ROI is higher online than TV (have they not realized that yet)?

Or maybe they never learn. Sigh.

Five web UX guidelines

In the year 2009, I am dumbfounded at the number of rookie mistakes companies make on the web. I'll keep this short and simple, you should absolutely abide by these when building ways for your users to interact with you.

Understand that every little delay you introduce to your customers creates abandonments. Studies have been done on page load times, additional fields, text entry errors, etc, and they all lead to the same conclusion - every bump in the road creates abandonment.

1. Make your text fields forgiving. Google is a master at this. Doesn't matter whether I enter Mar 20, 3/20, 20 Mar, etc. Google figures it out. I don't get an error message saying "please enter in the form mm/dd/yyyy". Same goes for phone numbers. This is trivial to do in code, absolutely no reason it shouldn't be done.
   
2. Make it clear why required fields are required. Some are obvious to the user, most are not. A simple "why?" link giving the user the ability to learn more about why you required their birthday, SSN, and underwear size is easy to do.
   
   
3. Your user is not going read everything you show them. You have three seconds (used to be five) to give them a reason to read for another three seconds. And so on. You screw up those three seconds? Good bye.
   
   
4. Your competitors are a click away. Take a look at their sites. What do they do to make things easier. Amazon allows me to return items doing no more than sitting at a computer and dropping the item on the front porch. Why do Best Buy and Walmart make me go to their store? Yes, this has everything to do with UX - your processes are exposed through UX.
   
   

Yes, there are only four there. That's the point - do more with less. Always look to what can be removed from your site to add clarity, not what can be added.

Google makes LIFE's images available

Now this is a great application of the web, combining Google's image search with what is arguably the finest image archive out there, LIFE's image archive.

I wonder what the usage rights on for LIFE images?

Hell hath no fury...

... like a mother insulted. Or something like that. At least that's the way the weekend appeared after Motrin released a viral marketing video aimed at, well, not sure what. Google on "Motrin Moms", and you'll be up to speed in no time.

I watched the first shot across the bow from JessicaKnows, one of the twitterers I follow, and I watched the fury grow from there. Soon I checked out the hub-bub, and while I didn't see why the video was that bad, I certainly understood the reaction. Duh.

Yes, I'm late blogging on this, I figured I would wait for the dust to settle a little and see if I have any insights combing through the rubble. Whenever I see good or bad marketing attempts, I like to try and dig into the deep, root cause on why marketing is successful or fails.

I've read a lot of the reaction on this, and much of it centers on the "baby carrier" and "official mom" specifics. But there's a deeper learning here, one that I haven't seen made mention of yet:

Don't trivialize mom or the job she does

It's not just baby-carrying moms that were upset (and no, not all moms were upset), it was a broad section of moms that felt trivialized and talked down to. This is where Motrin failed. And it is such a fundamental principle. I've been at social gatherings with moms in the room, and believe me, we husbands of moms know when to start slowly backing out of the room with our beer and take cover.

The ad looked like something a few 20-somethings put together, with a voiceover from a 20-something that didn't sound old enough to be a mom, with an attitude that came off as condescending. Ouch, a no-no for the most important customer segment out there.

When I was at Whirlpool, we had a saying that guided our innovation: Mom is a tough customer. Amen to that. It kept us focused that we would never be able to pull the wool over our customer's eyes, and forced us to maintain a high bar on our innovation projects.

Don't guess what your target segment's needs and attitudes are, engage them and find out.

My Innoview with Robbie Cape

In a previous life I spent three years running Whirlpool's Connected Home Technology group, where we researched a myriad of home-based solutions that leveraged information technology. I still have a lot of passion in this area and keep a watchful eye on it, so I was intrigued when I first caught a glimpse of Cozi, based here in Seattle. I thought it would be a perfect match for the Whirlpool brand, so I reached out to Robbie Cape at Cozi and put him in touch with some former Innovation contacts at Whirlpool. Sure enough, Cozi and Whirlpool have partnered up to help busy families.

I wanted to undersand Robbie and Cozi a little deeper, and Robbie has graciously agreed to talk about Cozi.

JR: What gave you the inspiration for Cozi?

RC: The needs of the family inspired Jan and I to build Cozi. We saw an incredible gap between the needs of the family and the degree to which technology and software were addressing those needs. That represented a wonderful opportunity for a couple of guys who love to (1) build simple technology experiences, and (2) address the needs of the typical "consumer." The Cozi vision was the perfect problem for us.

JR: Where have you found the greatest adoption for Cozi?

RC: Cozi has been adopted right across the United States; there is no one area where we have more adoption than others. Cozi tends to appeal most to families with kids between the ages of five and fifteen. Cozi families tend to have multiple PCs in their home and are comfortable with the internet, and they are far from "techy". In fact, most Cozi families talk about themselves as "no tech - no time".

JR: What was the biggest challenge getting Cozi to market?

RC: I'd say it's the same thing that challenges every startup: staying focused. It happens to be one of the things that this team is really good at, so it came naturally to us. Jan is exceptional on this front and he constantly reminded us that we needed to stay true to our original vision for v1, deliver on it, and then begin to iterate. That's what we're doing.

JR: What has been the biggest challenge growing the business?

RC: The biggest challenge has been acquiring customers. It's almost always a tough nut for a company starting with little marketing money. For us, it was especially hard since we didn't build in viral from day one. Why not? Because we needed to stay focused on what families were asking for. While sharing matters to them, it wasn't their #1, #2, or #3 requirement. And while it might have helped us get the word out on Cozi faster, we decided to optimize for the needs of Cozi families rather than for the growth of our user base. What's much harder to find is GREAT people who have the drive, experience, and ability to execute. I urge entrepreneurs to find the best partner (you need a partner to get through the challenges of a startup) and ensure their first few employees are all about execution. If you can execute, there is no stopping you.


JR: What other ventures have you been involved in?

RC: Cozi is my first startup. Before Cozi, I was at Microsoft for 12 years; I had a bunch of different jobs there, the most interesting one was the six years I spent on the Microsoft Money business. My last "job" at Microsoft was to build a startup team (we started with 2 people!) to help Microsoft figure out how to deliver annuity value to our best enterprise customers. It was fun to do a startup at Microsoft before I did one in the "real world."

JR: Can you talk about what's next in Cozi's future?
RC: Family Life - Simplified. That's what's next. We will continue to work with laser-like focus on delivering on this promise, simply. It turns out to be really hard to design, build, and deploy simple software; it's much hard than it looks. We are also focused on building the revenue side of the business so we can continue to build value for families for years to come. Thankfully, things are going very well on that front.

JR:Thanks Robbie for taking the time to post your thoughts, and best of luck to you and Cozi!

About Useless Meetings

So I'm reading more and more about people complaining about useless meetings. Nothing new, Dilbert (ok, Scott Adams) has made a fortune on this topic. But for some reason I feel people are feeling more and more helpless about it.

You control how useful meetings are. Yes, you. Even as an attendee.

There are four types of meetings:

1. All-hands. Ok, I admit I don't have any secret recipe to make this one more effective. Which is why I usually skip them. Worked for Amazon for three years, Whirlpool for three years, and I attended exactly one at Whirlpool. Once I found out how useless they were, I used my time more wisely.
2. Your meetings you call. Clearly this is up to you how useful they area.
3. Meetings that request your presense, and you're integral to the meeting. Meaning you are providing input. Here, you can keep this on track by asking up front for the goal and agenda of the meeting. And making sure the meeting organizer keeps on track. Or you punt for those organizers that have a track record of wasting your time.
4. Meetings that request your presense, and you're not integral to the meeting, at least on the surface. These tend to be the meetings that fill up your calendar, at least in larger companies. Whether they be reviews, status meetings, whatever. These can be easily solved by talking to the organizer. Why are you there? In a previous life I went to my boss basically asking to have an hour of my week back by skipping out on one of his weekly metrics meetings. He told me why he wanted me there, that I provided value by helping his techie managers think through business problems and offer a customer perspective to issues. This was a perspective I didn't realize, and it made me realize why my boss valued me on his team. All of a sudden those meetings weren't a waste of time after all - they were opportunities for me to reinforce my value prop to the team and strengthen my performance.

In short, you control whether meetings are useful. Take control of your calendar - you own it, your time is a precious resource, use it wisely.

And I recommend anything by Tom Peters to shake yourself from the "I'm a trapped employee" mentality to "I'm a free agent" mentality.

The new era of advertising

Google gets it.

I wondered when this would happen, and great to see Google make inroads here.

Can you imagine the disruption this is going to cause in marketing departments?

Now, there are a lot of problems with measuring advertising, but imagine what you can collect with advertising campaigns in a much more fine-grained, accurate manner.

• People who watch this channel also watch this channel. Not from anecdotes or surveys, but from user behavior (so have different campaigns on those channels).
  
• People saw x seconds of your commercial before they switched the channel.
  
• x eyeballs actually saw your commerical.
  

and so on.

This is a baby step that will eventually change how we think of advertising. And not just TV advertising. Satellite radio can do the same thing.

Marketing as a Customer

This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately, primarily because my wife is a manager at a local restaurant.

She does a great job. She only works a few nights a week, and usually she tends bar. She has a loyal following, people ask for her by name, and customers come in when she knows she's working. The policy is that the restaurant closes at 9pm, but she will keep the place open until it makes sense to close. As long as there are customers coming in, leaving good tips, she keeps it open, and creates customer loyalty. She's been doing this a couple of years, and the results for her have been impressive.

There is a flip side to all of this - you have to be a good customer for her to do this.

This gets me to thinking - how do I market myself as a customer? Yes, indeed, noodle on that for a bit. As a customer you are marketing yourself on why you should get a better deal, better service, better treatment, etc than other customers. Being a customer might be good enough. Then again, maybe not. Do you have a value proposition

I recently put this to test when Washington Mutual hit me for two overdraft fee recently. I have a sizeable amount in a savings account at WaMu, enough that WaMu makes more money on my savings in one month than they do on fees. I asked for a refund, and I did not get one. Clearly, I did not market myself correctly, as my value proposition was clear and beneficial to WaMu.

My recent Fathead experience, I must have marketed myself correctly. They sent a replacement Fathead despite it being out of warranty.

Pay attention to how you market yourself as a customer. It will have an impact on your customer experiences.

Bittersweet news on Clearwire / WiMax

Great to hear that $3.2B is going be to invested in Clearwire, but not so great that Comcast is one of the investors.

I'm waiting for Clearwire to be available in Snoqualmie so I can dump my Comcast broadband connection. Can't stand Comcast (hence we have Directv, despite their faults). Maybe I need to go back to dialup.

Interesting that Google is investing so much. I truly hope there is choice in software apps/services when WiMax is ready for primetime.

Painful to watch WiMax emerge so slowly. So much promise five years ago that has largely been untapped.

Shocked at the number of companies you CAN'T contact

I just tried to contact JellyFish's online tech support. They provided an email address to contact. I sent an email.

It bounced.

No support? I can't contact you? Won't be buying anything from you, that's for sure.

Are you chasing potential customers away?

About Brand Value

Brands can add value to products or they can destroy value. Take a high-performance sedan. Put a BMW or Audi label on it, and you can charge more. Put a Ford or Chevrolet badge on it, and you will have to charge less to sell it.

That much is obvious, and the reason companies have brand managers (my recent experience with Fathead is a great example of companies aggressively managing their brand).

Problem is, brands in general do not resurrect, and never do so without doing something radically different. Nintendo thought outside the box and targeted a new customer segment with its Wii. Result? Resurrection of a dead brand. Sega is still dead, because they haven't done anything different. Apple resurrected its brand with the iPod. But even with these examples, we have examples of TiVo (dying), Sears, Cadillac, Sony, etc. as brands that once they started dying, they have been unable to resurrect themselves.

Reason is: brand value is a trailing indicator. The data in sales, revenue, and margin, which you are using to measure brand value, occurs after people have devalued your brand. Your reduced brand value is out there and having and impact, and you must now overcome it... which is really, really hard.

You must course correct and take action (again my Fathead example is a good one) before your brand is devalued. Audi fixes problems on my car before they are problems. Coach fixes their products even if I am the one that broke it (yes that is true).

The good news is that Web 2.0 makes this possible. People complain about their problems and experiences on blogs, instant messages, domain forums, etc. That information is out there and available to mine. Fathead found me through a blog post. They were looking. Smart of them.

Back to declining brand value. What is Yahoo going to do that is different from what it currently does? In three years they will kick themselves for not taking Microsoft's offer. And I think Microsoft will be thankful for not paying a premium for a dying brand.

So-called E-commerce Experts and self-awareness

Credibility is important. I just dropped my RSS feed to E-commerce Times, as I just read a horrible article by a "so-called expert" complaining about the way Amazon and other retailers their shopping experience. I didn't see any justification for his complaints, just that "it's not like what brick-and-mortars do." If this is their definition of an expert (and this is the level of advice they give), then I can't justify taking time out of a busy day to read their articles.

About the article, I find it amazing that a "Creative Director", apparently in the e-commerce space, doesn't understand customer intent and context in their shopping experience, and the difference between brick-and-mortars (where this is a customer cost component to get to a brick-and-mortar that must be overcome) and online shopping (where the cost of participation is very low which drives lots of one-off sales... hence the success of woot.com). Do Creative Directors really not perform contextual studies to understand customer behavior? I assumed that was a prerequisite to expert advice on design.

By this person's logic, woot.com cannot possibly be successful because no brick-and-mortar store sells only one product and a different product every day at that.

Instead, this Creative Director would do good to study these success stories and learn from them. It is not the e-tailers that don't get it, it is he that doesn't get it. Self-awareness is important, and a reason it is key to good Emotional Intelligence.

I feel bad for his clients, who are getting bad advice from a so-called expert.

By the way, this is my favorite interview question when I interview designers: why do successful online entities to apparently "stupid" things according to design theory? The answer, of course, is that they have data to justify their decisions.

Turning singles into doubles

I vividly remember a saying from my youth from Detroit Tigers' Hall of Famer Al Kaline: you make doubles between home and 1st base, not 1st and 2nd base. His point was clear: you can't ever make up ground on a slow start.

I see project teams try the equivalent all the time. They do not build the discipline, the know-how, the process into their project up front. Instead, they take a lacadaisical approach, thinking they have a lot of time, and thus not fully utilizing their time to develop the right processes. Suddenly, scope creeps in, things change, they get behind on their project, and all of a sudden they are in a crisis - there is no way they are going to hit their date. The next action is usually to "sprint real fast to second base" hoping to beat the throw - working long hours, scrutinizing the plan, cutting scope, etc. I have yet to see that work.

You need to develop the right culture, the right discipline, and the right process as the first phase of your project. There are going to be problems, there are going to be corrections. That's ok. Pay your dues early. When it's time to sprint to second, you'll be way ahead of the throw.

My definition of a stupid question

Stupid questions should not be confused with simple questions.

If a question has only one logical (or possible) answer, that can be deduced by the asker, then it is a stupid question.

I get these types of questions a lot as a Product Manager. I view my job as making things less ambigious. If there are multiple ways to do something, my job is to pick that way. Beyond that, the team should be able to find their own way. This creates engagement, makes their jobs more interesting and meaningful, and can help drive innovation (input from many instead of input from one).

One way I accomplish this is by a) clearly defining the customer segment and their behaviors/values, and b) setting up prioritized design guidelines. Both give program managers, developers, designers, etc the tools they need to make decisions for themselves. I've watched some very impressive decisions made by the team, simply based on their understand of our customers and how they behave.

My job is not to document the obvious. That's inefficent.

Then again, maybe that is why I am changing jobs.