I AM A PRODUCT!

At the risk of sounding extremely materialistic yet I always tell budding entrepreneurs and future leaders that an education in management teaches one among other things to become an expert in marketing products. It teaches one to understand the needs of the consumers and position the brand in such a manner that the consumer feels he / she needs the brand and goes and buys it. Most of the students of management are quick to learn this and by the time they graduate they are ready to impress the corporate world with their newly learnt skill of ‘marketing’. As david ogilvy once said “a great marketer can even sell snow to an eskimo”. Many management graduates pride themselves upon the fact that they can ‘market almost anything to anyone’, and most of them are actually pretty good at it too. So then all these so-called expert marketers must also be greatly successful in their careers?

Surprisingly that is not true. This is because these marketers learnt to market everything and anything but forgot to learn to market the most important thing and that is ‘marketing themselves’!

FORGET THE RESUME FIND YOURSELF FIRST

Amitabh Bachchan

The traditional way of marketing oneself was with the help of a good resume. Today you need to go a step further than that. You need to ‘brand yourself ’. Just listing your achievements in a resume will not take you far. You need to be able to ‘sell and market’ your achievements effectively. Here are some points to keep in mind.

Be Distinct: Now I see you

This is a fact that we all are being judged all the time, and whether we like it or not, whether we realize it or not, we are constantly selling ourselves. In the business world it’s all about branding. The most ‘well branded’ product rules the market share and the hearts of the consumers. To be really successful in the corporate world you need to ‘brand’ yourself. You need to ‘position’ yourself correctly so that people see you as you want them to see you. Do not wait for people to discover for themselves your real qualities, your true potential and your strengths. You need to show it to them yourself through correct branding. You need to find out that one thing you are best at and use all possible resources to build upon it.

Look at it this way, who was the ‘angry young man’ of Bollywood? Yes, it was Amitabh Bachchan. Even though he gave stellar performances in other roles, he ‘branded’ himself as the angry young man. Who is the most generous Bollywood star? Salman Khan. In fact, his charitable organisation ‘Being Human’ has helped him make his branding as the ‘most charitable star’ even stronger.

Salman Khan

Social networking sites are an interesting platform for one to start their personal branding. In June Former Secretary of State (US) Hillary Clinton joined Twitter. However, the thing that got the maximum attention was her bio that she had posted more than her tweets. She branded herself as “wife, mom, lawyer, women and kids advocate, FLOAR, FLOTUS, US Senator, SecState, author, dog owner, hair icon, pantsuit aficionado, glass ceiling cracker, TBD…” Where TBD stood for ‘to be decided’, with many interpreting it as a sign that she might join the Presidential race in 2016. If she does join, then it’s her personal branding that will help her differentiate herself from the other candidates, just the way Obama did. He came out of nowhere, but his personal branding was so strong, so bang on target that he was noticed and remembered and voted for. He branded himself as the man who could do it. ‘Yes we can’, “Change you can believe in”, have become slogans that you associate with him only. No wonder when Narender Modi chanted ‘Yes we can...’ in Hyderabad as he flagged off the BJP’s election campaign he came under a lot of criticism with some even labeling him as ‘fake Obama’. That is the power of a strong branding – nobody can copy you. As in business – Coke is the ‘Real Thing’, and Pepsi can never be known as that or Nike is ‘Just do it’ and Adidas can only say ‘Impossible is Nothing’ but cannot ask its consumers to just do it! When you find a distinct way to brand yourself people start seeing you that way too. So don’t just be an expert in marketing for its too vague. Make it more specific. An expert in social marketing is probably a little more specific.

Hillary Clinton

Apart from people and products today cities are branding themselves too. One of the most well branded cities is Las Vegas. It promotes itself as the place where you can do what you want and nobody will bother you, for its tagline says “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”! Yash Raj Films branded Switzerland as the country for lovers and Switzerland can never thank him enough for the countless couples who started going there after seeing Switzerland in Yash Chopra’s films.

The more focused your branding the more easy it is for people to remember you and identify you, for now they see you more clearly and distinctly.

Be Honest

A successful brand is one that is built on a unique concept but more importantly one that is built on the foundation of honesty. The reason Oprah is one of the most passionately loved celebrity (read brand) is because of her total honesty. She was brutally honest about her poverty-stricken past, her failures, her struggles with her weight and just about everything. So on her talk show when she motivated people and told them they could overcome their problems, they believed her. It made her a success and her show the biggest talk show in the history of television. The reason ‘Comedy Nights with Kapil’ today has the highest TRP is not only because of the clean honest humor its host Kapil brings to the show but also because his total demeanor has sincerity and honesty around it, for he does not pretend to be someone else, and the audience love him for that. In just the same way the people loved Steve Jobs. It was not just his marvelous products but his honesty about his weaknesses his failures along with his successes that endeared him to his customers making the brand ‘Steve Jobs’ iconic and him a legend whose tales will be told and retold many times over.

Be Relevant: Keep upgrading

Barack Obama

We are all pretty much like softwares. Just as they need constant upgrades so do we. Once you have identified your unique and distinct branding strategy and started branding yourself most honestly you will see success but if you stop now you may be lost once again. You need to keep moving and keep modifying yourself to suit the needs of the changing times. If I go back to my old example of Amitabh Bachchan, then from the ‘angry young man’ to ‘the most stylish superstar’ the man has constantly changed and upgraded himself to remain relevant to the new generation too. Coca Cola is still the ‘Real Thing’ and it has managed to remain relevant by constantly finding new ways to brand itself.

Branding is all about standing out so that the target market chooses you over competition. If you want to be successful start by branding yourself first. Be as distinct as the McDonald arches, as iconic as Apple, as loved as Nike, as admired as Facebook, as desirable as a Rolls Royce. Look at any success story and behind that you will find a well planned branding strategy. It’s time you started thinking like a brand and crafting your own branding strategy. In today’s fast moving world only the distinct and the distinguished make it to the top. Remember the golden rule that success starts by first selling yourself and never forgetting that you too are a product!

BOLLYWOOD, HOLLYWOOD AND BRANDS

Amitabh Bachchan made his debut in Hollywood with a small but well portrayed role in the film The Great Gatsby. If you have seen the film you too would have been mesmerized by the grandeur of it, but if you have seen it from a marketer’s point of view you would notice how intelligently the film has been made to include well-known brands. It’s actually overflowing with premium products. The top international designers Miu Miu and Prada for the movie designed more than 40 different cocktail gowns. Brooks Brothers designed the lead actor Leonardo Di- Caprio’s clothes. Moët & Chandon provided the champagne used in the film. The top-notch jewellery designer Tiffany & Co. created the jewellery.

However, this time it has been done differently. There may be no obvious close up shots that the brands need to depend on to be noticed in the film. This time the brands ‘invested’ in the movie too. Which implies that they have specially created products for the film and in their advertising and branding strategies would highlight this fact. Since these are all limited edition pieces the brands have a lot to benefit. Tiffany & Co., for example, has already got a list of clients who would want to buy these pieces as a ‘keepsakes’ since the designs are from an era long gone and a lot of people are there who would love to own something from that era.

Brooks Brothers have launched their own “The Gatsby Collection” which has suits inspired by the fashion of the 1920s. The brands in question will promote these new collections in their advertisements, which will benefit not just them but the movie too.

So in-film branding has now taken a different turn. Instead of a brand just putting its existing product in the movie now the trend is of brands customising their wares and even investing and creating products exclusively for the film. Brands are now co-investors in the films.

DOES IT WORK?

The latest James Bond film, Skyfall was produced at a cost of $200 million. Advertisers who wanted their brands to appear in the film along with Bond covered much of it. Traditionally Bond is supposed to drink a vodka martini ‘shaken not stirred’, but in Skyfall he drinks Heineken beer. $45 million is what it cost Heineken to replace the martini.

Bond is the ultimate brand ambassador. No wonder brands do not hesitate to spend millions to be a part of this exclusive club. Coke Zero, which features in the new Bond film, too, made an advertisement to drive home the fact that it was Bond’s favoured drink. The campaign was called “Unlock the 007 in you”. The campaign shows an interactive vending machine in a train station that challenges commuters to reach a particular spot in 70 seconds and win tickets for the Bond film. To make the task a little difficult and make the film a little more entertaining the customers who took up the challenge were stopped by carefully planted obstacles in the form of a beautiful woman in red calling out their name to a cart of oranges spilling in their path to falling suitcases etc. The campaign was a hit on YouTube and got more than 10 million views.

Back in Bollywood, product placement went a step further with the central character of the film being a brand. Yes you got it, the Yash Raj Films (YRF) produced Mere Dad Ki Maruti where Maruti Ertiga was the main character and the film revolved around it. Maruti in return bought 50,000 music CDs of the film to be given away to all its customers making the film’s music a platinum success! YRF in turn made 5 music videos featuring the car and ran it across 20 music channels. This just goes on to prove that in-film branding has taken a whole new form. Today, brands are almost equal stakeholders as the production house itself. It seems this arrangement seems to work for both and benefit both the parties.

DOES IT ALWAYS WORK?

In the film Delhi Belly Imran Khan is gifted a red car which looks like the Santro. One of his friends comments “When a donkey f***s a rickshaw this is what you get”. Even though the car had no branding yet the company Hyundai did not take it well and demanded that the derogatory reference be removed.

Reebok paid $1.5 million for product placement in the film Jerry Maguire. However, all through the film Rod Tidwell (played by Cuba Gooding Jr.) kept rebuking Reebok for ignoring him and not sponsoring him. The company was promised a totally different deal. They were told that in the end the player would get a sponsorship deal from Reebok, but it never happened.

In the movie Transformers, one of the characters transforms into a Mountain Dew vending machine, a rather evil one, which kills people by shooting out soda, cans. It could make a few people think twice before going too near one! Product placement is fine, but you need to be very careful that the brand is shown in the right situations doing the right stuff. Something that Budweiser did not find itself in, in the film Flight starring Denzel Washington. There is a scene in the film where the alcoholic Whip Whitaker (played by Denzel Washington) opens a can of Budweiser while sitting behind the wheel of a passenger jet as he attempts to land it safely. The company asked the Paramount Pictures to remove their logo and make it obscure. This is not what they would want people to associate their brand with.

In the film Hangover 2 one of the characters is seen sporting a fake Louis Vuitton bag and in one of the scenes he remarks “Careful that is a Louis Vuitton”. Even though he misprounces the name the company has not taken it very sportingly and has sued the makers Warner Bros on grounds of trademark dilution, unfair competition etc. A company called Diophy, which specializes in fakes, creates the fakes used in the film!

IT WORKS !

All this just goes on to prove that in-film branding works, or else brands would not invest so much in both making sure that they are seen in the right films as well as making sure they are not seen in the wrong films.

Nokia paid a staggering 30 million pounds to make Superman use its phone in the film Man of Steel. An astounding 94 product placement deals were made for the film raking in 100 million pounds for the producer Warner Bros.

It is so powerful that China is using this to change its country’s image. Last year a new agreement was signed between China and US concerning product placement. The agreement is between Dreamworks Animation Studio and China for setting up a joint venture in- Shanghai. This deal would give China access to films produced in America . The movie Transformers: Dark of the Moon premiered in Shanghai and became a huge hit. However, the more important part is that the movie featured some of the Chinese homegrown brands like Lenovo, Yili Milk, TCL etc. Add to this the fact that after the US the most profitable market for the film was China. It seems to be the perfect case of ‘winwin’ for both the players. China has long been known as the manufacturing hub of the world but it now wants more. It wants to be known as the nation of great brands, for this will give it the image it so desperately desires. China is turning to films to change the image of its brands and give them that ‘worldclass’ touch. In-film branding gives brands a unique aura. Add to that the thrills of having a captive audience for 2 to 3 hours (at a time when technology has reduced attention span of customers like crazy). All of these factors go on to make in-film product placements a huge opportunity for marketers. So even though cinema goers may not really take it well that Superman – the man of steel – uses Gilette to shave, drinks Budweiser, throws around only Chrysler cars, or wears spectacles by Warby Parker, the fact is you and I are talking about it and that is what the brands want!

So while some may criticize it but the fact remains that in-film branding works, always. Right from the time when the first brand Hershey’s chocolate was featured in the silent film Wings in1927 till date it does create an impact. Be it the Hyundai Santro in Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani, or in Delhi Belly or Bournvita in Koi Mil Gaya, or Coke in Taal, or Thums Up in Hum Aapke Hai Kaun, or Switzerland in Silsila or South Africa in Cocktail, everybody has benefitted from the association. Be rest assured that this is one branding technique that will never fade. Brands and Bollywood, Hollywood and all other woods will always be best friends forever!

Head Games: Ego and Entrepreneurial Failure

This post was originally published at O'Reilly Programming

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

—Samuel Beckett

Entrepreneurial success hinges in large part on a founder’s mastery of psychology. This requires the ability to manage one’s responses to what Ben Horowitz calls “The Struggle,” that is, the emotional roller coaster of startup life. Paul DeJoe captures the ups and downs of being a startup CEO in a postreprinted in a book that I edited, Managing Startups: Best Blog Posts.

It’s all in a founder’s head: the drive to build something great; the resilience to dust yourself off when you repeatedly get knocked down; the passion powering a Reality Distortion Field that mesmerizes potential teammates, investors, and partners. But inside a founder’s head may also be delusional arrogance; an overly impulsive “ready-fire-aim” bias for action; a preoccupation with control; fear of failure; and self-doubt fueling the impostor syndrome. That’s why VC-turned-founder-coach Jerry Colonna named his blog The Monster in Your Head. In a recent interviewwith Jason Calacanis, Colonna does a nice job of summarizing some of the psychological challenges confronting entrepreneurs. So does a classic article by the psychoanalyst Manfred Kets de Vries: “The Dark Side of Entrepreneurship.”

Causes of Entrepreneurial Failure

If entrepreneurial success hinges on a founder’s mastery of psychology, it stands to reason that a founder’s flawed ego is often the root cause of startup failure.

Categorizing causes of entrepreneurial failure is tricky. Asking entrepreneurs why their venture failed doesn’t always yield reliable answers. To bolster our fragile egos, we credit our successes to our own brilliance and skill, and we attribute our failures to the shortcomings of others or to events outside our control. This pattern is so deeply ingrained that psychologists have labeled it the Fundamental Attribution Error.

Furthermore, just as a living organism might die for many reasons—for example, hunger, predation, or illness—startup failure has diverse causes. Paul Graham cites 18 reasons why startups fail; in her post, What Goes Wrong, reprinted in Managing Startups, Graham’s partner at Y Combinator, Jessica Livingston, warns founders that they must navigate a “tunnel full of monsters that kill.”

Finally, explanations for startup failure are often linked in a complex chain of causality. Running out of capital is often the proximate cause of death. But this implies that an entrepreneur couldn’t raise more funds. Why? Because the venture had little traction. Why? Because the team was slow to market with an inferior product, relative to rivals. Why?

In the spirit of “Five Whys” analysis, one should continue probing until the root cause for failure is revealed. Digging deeper often reveals that startup failures have ego problems at their core.

Ego-Driven Failure

At the risk of oversimplifying, the ego issues that can derail an early-stage startup come in two broad groupings. Some founders are ambivalent about their vision or their level of commitment to their venture. Others are headstrong—too confident about their vision and their ability to lead. In fact, Peter Thiel hypothesizesthat plotting founders along such a spectrum would yield an inverted normal distribution—one that is fat at both tails, rather than in the middle.

Ambivalence. Steve Blank tells a tragic story of a founder failing from a lack of nerve. Entrepreneurs who are irresolute, weak-willed, and wavering can cause problems like these:

• They fail to recruit a great teambecause strong candidates can sense the founder’s ambivalence and know that resolve is required to lead a startup through its ups and downs.
• They pivot too quickly, never devoting enough effort to any one opportunity to refine their offering and gain traction. Some founders get bored easily and rapidly cycle through new ideas. Others are overly compliant: they lack the strength to say “no” to team members, investors, or customers who suggest different course corrections. Another postfrom Blank republished in Managing Startups describes Yuri, an indecisive entrepreneur who shifted strategy constantly because he was unable to distinguish between vision and hallucination and was thus “buffeted by the realities of his burn rate, declining bank account, and depressing comments from customers.” His team “was afraid to make a decision, because they couldn’t guess what Yuri wanted to do that week.”
• They scale prematurely, burning through their capital before they have achieved product-market fit, because they are unwilling to resist pressure from investors who urge them to “swing for the fences.” The anonymous author of the new blog My Startup Has 30 Days to Live, a moving real-time account of the pressures, doubts and personal costs confronting a struggling startup’s founder, acknowledges making this mistake: “I had the power to reject these suggestions, at the risk of being labeled as un-coachable… These men never put a gun to my head, never threatened me into making the decisions I did. I just didn’t challenge them.”
• They stay in stealth mode too long,missing a window of opportunity or launch a flawed product due to a lack of early customer feedback. As Paul Graham points out, such procrastination sometimes stems from a fear of being judged.
• They provoke cofounders disputes—especially when, in Livingston’s words, a cofounder’s irresolute behavior raises questions about whether he is “trustworthy or works hard enough or is competent.”
• They throw in the towel without putting up much of a fight, because they lack, in Livingston’s view, the drive and determination “to overcome the sheer variety of problems you face in a startup” or they are “immobilized by sadness when things go wrong.” As Jason Cohen says, “It’s so easy to stop. There are so many reasons to stop. And that—stopping—is how most little startups actually fail.” Andrew Montalenti adds, in a postrepublished in Managing Startups, that founders are likely to get “antsy” when they pursue a startup mostly to advance their career but lack personal passion for its mission.
•  They follow the herd, perhaps because they are insecure about their ability to set direction. Such founders often pursue derivative ideas or copy rivals’ features, as in Cap Watkins’ post-mortem of Formspring’s failure.
•  They take their eye off the ball. Mark Suster bemoansentrepreneurs who crave the limelight and lack the discipline to say “no” to offers to speak at conferences. Livingston warns founders to avoid distractions—in particular, conversations with corporate development executives who want to learn about a startup but have no real intention of pursuing a deal.

Obstinacy.Startups run by founders who are control freaks, headstrong, or arrogant often precipitate the same problems listed above, but in very different ways: 

• They fail to recruit a great team because they don’t recognize their own shortcomings or they are unwilling to delegate. According to Kets de Vries, they also may be prone to driving away talented colleagues by scapegoating or by viewing employees in extreme terms, putting some on a pedestal while vilifying others.
• They fail to pivot because, in some cases, an overconfident entrepreneur simply cannot comprehend that customers might be rejecting their product. Or, they may be cocksure that the path that led to success in their last venture will prove true again. In still other instances, founders who Steve Duplessie describes as zealotsmay be loath to pivot away from a vision to which they are fervently committed—even if sticking with the startup’s original plan puts the venture in peril. This risk is compounded when an entrepreneur relies on a Steve Jobs-style “reality distortion field”—using personal charisma and riveting rhetoric to inspire people to go to extremes to achieve a startup’s vision. When a vision is sold this way, it is especially difficult to subsequently admit that it might have been flawed.
• They scale prematurely due to overconfidence or an impatient drive to see their vision become a reality. Kets de Vries says such founders often defend against anxiety by “turning to action as an antidote.”
• They stay in stealth mode too long.In some cases their founder, with a vision burning so brightly, feels no need to secure early market feedback. In other instances a founder’s perfectionism prevents a team from “launching early and often.”
• They provoke cofounder disputes by battling ceaselessly for dominance and control of their venture’s direction. 

There’s no science behind my characterization of founders’ egos as lying somewhere on a spectrum that ranges from ambivalent to obstinate. I’m sure this one-dimensional view makes trained psychologists cringe, because it ignores a mountain of research pointing to a “Big Five” set of stable personality traits: openness, agreeableness, extraversion, conscientiousness and neuroticism. Adeo Ressi’s Founder Institutedraws on such research in the admissions test for its training program. Based on analysis of responses from over 15,000 aspiring entrepreneurs, the test sheds light both on the traits of successful founders and the attributes of Bad Founder DNA: excuse-making, predatory aggressiveness, deceit, emotional instability, and narcissism. Founder Institute’s research confirms: it’s all in the head!

Failing Better

So, what should a founder to do to master the monsters in her head?

Self-reflection is the starting point. What motivates you? How do you respond to pressure and uncertainty? For some, therapy with a professional psychologist will put this in focus. For others, a startup coach like Colonna can provide helpful guidance, as can a good mentor. Regardless of where you seek such counsel: ask for help, tell the truth, and listen.

If you are thrashing around and pivoting too quickly, follow Steve Blank’s advice to Yuri: sit on any new insights for 72 hours, and brainstorm them with someone you trust.

Build the discipline of debriefing to learn from your startup’s failures. Discerning the causes of small setbacks may help you stave off big ones. The U.S. Army’s After-Action Reviewprocess provides a template. With an AAR, a team asks four simple questions: What was our objective? What happened? Why did it happen? What do we do next?

In conducting post-mortems, however, be on guard for the Fundamental Attribution Error, that is, a tendency to blame failure on events outside your control. Also, as Blank points out, you’ll be in a better position to learn from a big failure if you recognize that your emotional response to it may follow Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and gradual, grudging acceptance.

Follow the advice of Spencer Fry and find healthy ways to relieve stress. Recognize that such stress puts entrepreneurs at increased risk for depression. If you believe that you or someone you work with may be depressed, seek treatment NOW. And read Brad Feld’s posts to learn more about depression and how to manage it.

Finally, follow the advice of David Tisch, and never lose sight of the ‘why.’ Tisch advises founders to constantly ask whether they are still on the path that originally motivated them to launch a startup, for example, the desire to disrupt an industry, to build a great company, or simply to be independent. If not, Tisch says, it’s time to wind things up. As Brad Feld points out, sometimes failure is your best option.