Entrepreneurship and Marketing

Posted on May 23, 2011 by

In August the 25th annual Global Research Symposium on Marketing and Entrepreneurship will be held in Rio. There is a journal known as the Journal of Research in Marketing and Entrepreneurship that has been around for a couple of decades. And there is an active and well-run Entrepreneurship SIG in the American Marketing Association. Yet these are exceptions: generally in academia when entrepreneurship does not have its own domain it is included in Management, not Marketing. Why?

Why management, not marketing?

I have known and studied a number of entrepreneurs. I have yet to hear one say: “I wish I had studied more about strategy.” Or “I wish I had studied HR.” Or “I wish I knew more about transactional leadership!” What I have heard is “I wish I knew more about selling” or “I wish I knew more about marketing.” So why isn’t e-ship often included in marketing?

Some of it may come from the leadership of management scholar Drucker (who also wisely noted that ALL that matters for firms is marketing and innovation). And some of it is likely due to some of my Brethren in Marketing who see themselves as applied psychologists and are somewhat hostile to crude capitalists such as salespersons and entrepreneurs. However, in a world of lean startups and effectuation, it is clear that understanding markets and clients are key skills of entrepreneurship.

So I would like to tip my hat to Marketers such as Gerry Hills, David Carson, and Glenn Omura who are studying entrepreneurship and trying to keep it in its proper domain!

Journal of Research in Marketing and Entrepreneurship @J_RME  http://www.emeraldinsight.com/products/journals/journals.htm?id=jrme

2011 symposium:       http://2011rsme.com/author/2011rsme/

Posted in effectuation, entrepreneurship, experiential innovation, Slow Burn Entrepreneurship | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Just Do It!

Posted on May 17, 2011 by

Since I had been involved in new service development as well as in several startups before becoming an academic I was skeptical of formal product development models such as stage gate. But still there an attraction to research and planning, so much of the recent research on product innovation is disquieting.

Just Do It!

Agile development, lean startups, probe-and-learn, and effectuation all describe a rapid-prototyping-like process of simply (1) putting a “minimal” product into the market, (2) observing results, (3) learning, and (4) doing another iteration. In other words: Just Do It!

Nuances include keeping the “bet” small, so that you can afford failure and future iterations. And having a vision and discipline so that the iterations are more like controlled experiments than random evolution. 

Marketing’s role is thus to be agile, to collect and understand data, and to adjust product vision. Forget the formal market research and business plans.

Brave new world for marketing and product innovation!

An aside: Origin of Nike Slogan

As an aside, do you know the origin of Nike’s slogan Just Do it! ?

Hint: It was inspired by the phrase “Let’s Do It.”  Not the Cole Porter song made immortal by Ella Fitzgerald; that would hardly fit the edgy image of Nike! (This is the company that was still running commercials using the imagery of dog fighting after their spokesperson Michael Vick had been arrested.)

Let’s do it! were the final words of career criminal and serial killer Gary Gilmore before he was executed by firing squad in Utah.

Posted in Co-creation or User collaboration, Customer Research Methods, effectuation, experiential innovation, Experiment, Slow Burn Entrepreneurship | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Pioneers get arrows in their backs…

Posted on May 10, 2011 by

Apple’s great timing

Two recent articles have heralded Steven Jobs’ excellent timing of innovation:

  • David Aaker’s article on his blog asked ”Why wasn’t the iPod a Sony brand?”: As David relates, Sony had launched two digit players two years earlier, but the technology was not yet right. Apple waited then launched when affordable flash memory was available. Article: WhyNotSony
  • “How Apple Foot-Dragged to Victory” by HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR. (WSJ), notes that: “Mr. Jobs’s slowness is the key to Apple’s success. His focus on the device, his emphasis on perfecting the user experience, meant holding back, not overreaching. The iPod would only be a music player. The iPhone and iPad would be Web-browsing devices that wouldn’t play most of the video on the Web… And notice that each of these device categories had been around for five or 10 years by the time Apple entered (clobbered) them.”

First mover advantage?

Is Steven Jobs the exception to the well-known “first mover advantage?” We all know how pioneers such as Apple Computer (in PCs), Gillette (in safety razors), Hewlett-Packard (laser printers), and Microsoft (PC operating systems) commanded long term market dominance by being first…

However in reality none of those firms in the previous list was first…or second…or third to market! Most entered the market 3-5 years or more after the first entrants. Bill Gates bought DOS on the cheap after he sold IBM on the product! As Tellis and Golder point out in their book Will and Vision, most of the companies we assume were first to market have simply benefitted from “survival bias” or “the-winners-write-history” syndrome.

If it weren’t for the movie The Social Network within a decade or so we would all probably have come to believe that at least some key attribute of Facebook was introduced by Zuckerberg; and would have forgotten Geocities, Friendster, MySpace, and ConnectU (Winklevoss twins). [And of course even the W twins weren't the first to think of marrying MySpace features to elite college .edu addresses...]

Will and Vision

It turns out that Pioneers often do end up with arrows in their backs and latecomers win the categories. What factors decide winners? Tellis and Golder explore key factors. Two of the biggest are persistence and continual innovation in response to market feedback. Tellis and Golder provide further support of principles underlying:

  • Probe-and-learn
  • Experimentation or rapid prototyping
  • Lean Startups
  • Effectuation
  • Agile development

Strongly recommended:

Book by Tellis and Golder: Will & Vision: How Latecomers Grow to Dominate Markets

Posted in effectuation, entrepreneurship, experiential innovation, Experiment, Ideation, Slow Burn Entrepreneurship | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Reflections on two years of tweeting

Posted on May 3, 2011 by

Actually it was two years in March, but I sometimes procrastinate a bit…

I had two purposes when I signed up for twitter: (1) to promote my year-old blog and (2) to try to understand the twitter phenomenon. My first tweets were classic newbie tweets – “trying to figure out what this is all about” and “read my blog at www.servicecocreation.com ”. I was slow to figure out what it was about, but benefitted from early connections to people like @waynemarr, @kenthuffman, and @markwschaefer who tried to explain it to me.

I connected to marketing professors and consultants. Kent’s list of “top marketing professors” inspired me to continue to connect with people so I could make his list which had a cutoff of 500 followers. The habit of seeking out interesting tweeters and then looking at who they followed and who twitter said was like them, caused my numbers to grow.

From Broadcasting to Social Engagement

But the most important discovery was from @markwschaefer and a new tweeter who I originally helped a bit, @ckburgess, who showed this “broadcaster” that twitter was actually a social media. Why not converse on twitter? Virtual friends can become real friends… I have made friends and linked to really interesting people as I began to interact not just broadcast.

My initial objectives were met: blog viewings went from 10/day to 50 or more with over 100 subscribers and many more comments and tweets from the site. One article was recently viewed by over 1000 persons in 3 days and tweeting almost 200 times. I think I now also have some idea of twitter’s potential.

Virtual world spills into the real world!

The coolest discoveries were benefits to my real world life: when I decided to enter a last minute grant proposal for a social media marketing course a couple tweets and a blog posting resulted in a lead user community to co-create the proposal.

Just a few weeks later I needed a proposal for a conference presentation and in 48 hours combined a couple blog articles into a conference paper!

My online efforts are now spilling over into my daily life! For a more thorough review of twitter see my earlier post on Mark’s excellent book, The Tao of Twitter.

Posted in Social Media Marketing | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Computers in the classroom: no surfin’

Posted on April 26, 2011 by

On the first day of class I announce that there are to be no computers open during class discussion or lectures. (Of course they are permitted or encouraged during group work or for some online exercises, but that is an entirely different issue.) My pronouncement generally elicits horrified looks from 20-25% of the class and a student or two may choose to drop my course at that point.

Some of the strongest reaction has come from colleagues or profs from other schools. “If I didn’t think I could compete with the internet, I would give up teaching” is a common refrain, often uttered by someone who has trouble communicating one-on-one. As if his fascinating talk on advanced auditing was more interesting than the beer pong pics just posted on FB! Never mind that current research on learning indicates that attention is the most important factor in learning and multitasking of any sort kills attention and learning. Multitasking

In the book, The Shallows, studies are cited showing that  hyperlinks to citations in the text of a paper impair learning: imagine having Facebook and YouTube in your control bar while you are trying to take lecture notes! As Aaron Herrington, founder of Modea, said in a recent lecture: “online you are always 1-click or 3 seconds away from cute kittens or porn.”

Even after a keynote speech on Brain research and learning that focused on attention and the risks of multitasking at a recent conference on pedagogy, I get the standard pushback from other faculty when I said that I banned open devices. “If I didn’t think…”

However two young women who had recently graduated from the well-known research university across the river from my school were there. They both said that they wished their professors had banned computers from their large lecture classes because of the third-party effects: even though they kept their own computers shut the noise from the student next to them playing WOW and the embarrassment at the guys in front of them viewing porn affected their concentration.

So profs be honest. Open computers, students communicating on FB and viewing YouTube movies and free porn, may help keep your class happier and more docile – especially in large lecture classes, but it does not aid learning by them or their neighbors!

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Is “Lean Startups” a misnomer?

Posted on April 19, 2011 by

In an article last week, I showed that the careful-experiment, iterative, innovation process called “Build-Measure-Learn” by Eric Ries had earlier emerged in a dissertation research by Gary Lynn as “Probe-(study)-Learn” twenty years earlier. Dr. Lynn studied goods-producing firms. There are good reasons to be aware of the earlier studies

  1. Thought pioneers should receive proper credit. But more importantly…
  2. The experimental iterative has been known in the product development literature for over 20 years, so it should be a robust theory.
  3. The process originally emerged in studies of discontinuous hardware, so the principles should apply universally, not just to web-based businesses or software.

Lean or Not?

One interesting contrast between the “Probe and Learn” article and the writing of Eric Ries on Lean Startups is that the former actually go to great lengths to contrast their procedure to the Lean Process. Lynn et al. cite The Machine that Changed the World several times and note that their Probe and Learn procedure is for discontinuous innovation not for the mundane innovation described in that book (which is one of the original works on Lean). Ries also stresses that Lean Startups are doing discontinuous innovation…

Interesting issue! The authors of “Probe and Learn” viewed it partially as an antidote to Lean Thinking while a promoter of the process for startups views it as a Lean process…

I have thought about it and conversed with a friend at the Lean Institute and I think Lean Startups is OK and that “Probe and Learn” could have been called lean innovation: What do you think???

For more information I recommend:

Posted in Co-creation or User collaboration, Customer Research Methods, effectuation, entrepreneurship, experiential innovation, Experiment, Slow Burn Entrepreneurship | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Crush It! A Review

Posted on April 14, 2011 by

My review of Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl8WazUWlks

YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl8WazUWlks

Amazon link: Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion

Feel free to buy, borrow or steal the book anywhere! Using the Amazon link above merely abets my Amazon addiction…

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