Posts Tagged ‘business’

Modern brand building

Sunday, March 15th, 2009

Like so many? I sometimes search slideshare or youtube for inspiring presentations. I step out of my social group, where we share the some stories, and try to find stories that gives new insides. Searching on ´building brands´ brought me the presentation Modern brand building. The content is about the evolution of transaction to relation, talking to somebody to talking with somebody or campaigning to committing.

One of the lessons ‘plan for content you don’t create’ is a nice one. You facilitate, like you used to do in a web2.0 world, the customer to make the content. But what happened when the creators have values that are not the values of the brand, think about what happened with Longsdale clothing in the Netherlands.

The brand needs to lead the conversation with the customer. Like you do in a verbal conversation: you can lead and follow. A brand can sometimes follow, but most of the time they have to lead the customer…

Lifecycle

Sunday, March 15th, 2009

I heard recently on BNR that the Netherlands has a lot of companies with a gross revenue until euro 20 million. Between euro 20 and euro 300 it is difficult for Dutch companies and the Netherlands has relatively a large amount of companies bigger then euro 300.

I immediately thought about the lifecycle theory of Adizes. He compares the lifecycle of humans with company lifecycles. In the Netherlands most companies are somewhere between the Go-Go and the Adolescence phase. Issues like Founders trap and unfulfilled entrepreneur come around the corner.

To achieve the optimum phase, the Prime phase, you have to overcome a few issues:
1. Decentralization of authority.
2. Change in leadership from entrepreneurship to professional management.
3. Goal displacement.

I think the most important reason is the high score on individualism as one of Hofstedes culture dimension.
When companies would like to grow bigger you have to create a more collective culture.