Leadership

Leadership is so important to a just start-up company. Since a small company doesn't have many people, and those people always responsible for multi-tasks, leaders should know how to engage people with their responsibilities. How to motivate people, how to make them aware of the company's strategy, and how to communicate with them to get complex tasks done are all important to the leader. 

If I were the leader, I will affect people around me primarily by my professional knowledge. I can help my group members or subordinates with their questions and give them guidance with the problems they have met. With the knowledge I've got, I can bring the company to a higher stage and become more competitive against other players in the market. Therefore, I will gradually get authority and become credibility with my field. Eventually, I as a leader will gain respect and admiration from my team members, hopefully. 

Being charismatic is also important for a leader I think. Charisma to me is how a leader can easily affect people around him or her. Team members are happy to be influenced and easily agree to what the team leader suggest. For me, I would like to gain my charisma with  being one of my team members. I would like to position myself as one of them and influence them with my own action. Therefore, after seeing my action, such as working as long as others do, focusing on details and making sure they are aligned with company's strategy, people around me will also be influenced and as time goes by as well as more and more people are doing and thinking the same way, it can potentially become the culture of company.

Engaging Story of Toothpaste

Do you feel boring of doing a thing without any change? Especially when you have to do it TWO TIMES A DAY and EVERYDAY! That is, I bet you are right, brushing your teeth.

Start making it a joyful experience and have a better life a little bit every other day! Everyday start differently and have a mood flavor for yourself! Here is a story about how a customer makes her life brighter and with higher quality with our product.

Ellie is a girl that doesn't like her life to be on the same routine everyday. She is seeking for new things and wants to improve her quality of life, in which having fresh things is a critical measure to that.

However, while constantly enjoy changing styles and routines to remain fresh  for other daily behaviors in life, for example, the way of cooking and styles of dish, Ellie would like to look for new things to make the life in the morning better. She has changed the color of toothbrush, changed to power toothbrush, sonic toothbrush once or twice, and cup she uses, the facial cleanser she used in the morning and even the odor in her bathroom, but nothing gives her continuous incentive and she gets tired after awhile.

The most annoying thing to her is the flavor of the toothpaste. She has tried ever flavor she can find in grocery stores, supermarkets and drug stores, but all of them are in different types of mint. Everything is in mint. There is no way she doesn't love mint, but she hate unchangeable. What she hates most is, she can do nothing about it. There is no other flavor in the market, and there is no other way to brush her teeth. However, this time when she goes to drug store to shop again, she discovers a whole different toothpaste: anything but mint! There are 8 different flavors, she won't be worried about no other choose from mint for a long time in the future, and the way she brushes her teeth is different as well. She can customize her toothpaste with different flavors in cartridges by putting them in a toothbrush that can take 5 cartridges in total. Everyday with new flavors, and she can choose flavors by spin the wheel randomly and have a surprise of the flavor in her mouth.

A perfect day starts with brushing your teeth differently!

Market Size Research

I would like to address the market size of whole toothpaste market.

In the report of 2011 US toothpaste market, the total sales excluding Walmart is $1.38 Billion and 476.2 Million in unit volume. Of that, Colgate and Crest occupy 70%, which leaves 30% for rest of brands and products. Also, the sales of toothpaste has increased by 5.7% compared to last year. Therefore, I assume the growth rate will at least be the same in 2012 since the US is experiencing a economy recovery. In conclusion, there will be $.65 Billion for products other than Crest and Colgate. However, even among those minor brands, the market is still not divided evenly. Products and brands such as Sensodyne and Aquafresh are still own larger market share than unknown brands. Based on another resource, Aquafresh has a market share of 8% in the US market in 2010. Therefore, I would assume rest brands hold a left market share of 15%. According to an article in WSJ, there are 352 different types and sizes toothpaste in the market. Of that, 80 products come from Colgate and Crest, and according to my research, Aquafresh and Sensodyne have 8 and 10 different toothpaste, respectively. Thus, I would assume there are 250 products left for those 10% market.

In conclusion, I assume we will have 1.38*1.057*.15/250=.875 Million in the US.

Some Thoughts for Inbound Marketing

Can today's company survive on inbound marketing? Yes.
Can today's company survive only on inbound marketing? I would highly doubt about it.

Though it's a new term in marketing world, Inbound marketing has already been integrated and regarded as a necessary aspect in marketing strategy.

The appearance of internet really has changed every aspect of the world. From customer behavior to purchasing process, it's not only about another distribution channel any more. Everyone seems agree on the statement that customers nowadays tend to come to the company to look for information and products instead of receiving information and product recommendations from companies. Also, consumers are more skeptical than ever towards the message sent by companies, thus Google came up with the word ZMOT to describe the change of customers' buying behavior and to warn companies they should pay more attention to their PR and customer satisfaction now. They can not only affect existing customers' loyalty, but also have an effect on new customers' acquisition and its brand image among the market. What's more, potential shelf-space may also be affected by this ZMOT.

ZMOT is so closely related to today's inbound marketing. First of all, whether the source the customers hear of a specific brand or product is credible is primarily have a difference in consumers' decision making. What's more, whether a company has the authority to solve a problem or fulfill a need is also decided by customers themselves. Thus, companies should pay attention on PR and creating its authority through other newspaper and magazine articles. Mentioned by experts in a specific industry is another aspect to raise reputation and awareness through inbound marketing. Also, after customer using products or receiving service, they will also give feedback to company and telling others their feeling. Internet makes it much more easier than ever before. Bad news and unhappy feelings spread quickly with social media. Therefore, companies should take care and consistently focus on its customer reviews. It may even cause them not showing up in customers sight. Think about those products with lower than 4 stars customer reviews in Amazon.com. Customers skip those kind of products to narrow down their search results so that they don't have to read thousands of pieces product descriptions.

However, outbound still holds a critical position in a company's marketing strategy. We can see from every year's Super Bowl commercials. The ability of appearance on popular and related channels and programs is considered into a company's credibility and authority as well, especially for those brand that already famous to keep its brand image. Also for a new brand in some industry, let's say automobile, if a company only appears on internet without physical appearance, customers will still have a hard time to trust in the brand and product. In addition, customer experience is still one of the most important marketing effort companies are making, which can only be achieved perfectly by outbound marketing such as in-store shopping assistance.

Why can't big companies innovate?

From the case given in the article, we can see that the failure does not appear because of nothing. Though one of the seven sources of innovation is about process innovation, this one is not really the thing. When big companies are trying to innovate, they tend to be more conservative than those start-up companies. They don’t want to start from zero and prefer to use the resources they’ve already had. Therefore, when they try to innovate, they still can’t get rid of those bad things and their thoughts have been limited.

From my perspective, it is more like doing budget. Since large companies have such a long history and lots of data about their budget, they don’t want to start from zero and do zero-based budget, which needs them to put much more effort and resource in. They only like to do budget based on historical data, such as incremental budget, only change a few things and seems to be “more efficient” than zero-budget. However, it cannot make companies discover the inefficient things underlying the company, which will lead to hidden problems in the future. Though zero-based budget seems to be time-consuming and a waste of resources, it can help the company go through what they have and give them a better thought about how to make the operation better and more efficient.

In this case, what the company is trying to do is to avoid “waste of time and resource” and try to come up with what they have. They only focus on internal environment, instead of outside. The research of customer needs and market size they have missed are critical to its failure. It is not an innovation of new product; they just try to avoid the excess capacity they cannot take fully advantage of, and they don’t make it. If they want to do innovation for their products, they need to thoroughly analyze all the resources they have and the industry environment, the market, and even the economy and policy they have in the country they want to enter. And then they need to compare what they need and what they have got in hand to see the gap and to acquire other things.

I think innovate is not much more complex than take advantage of excess capacity and need to be treated well enough to really begin the innovation. Otherwise they can make extra revenue by undertake outsourcing orders from other companies. 

Persona Pain and Gain

Elevator Pitch for Herbal temporary hair dye:

For actors&actresses who need to change their hair style often and fashion youth who would like to try some "crazy" color on their head often, herbal temporary hair dye is a hair dye that is purely made by herbal and contains no harmful compositions. It also can be washed off by normal shampoo, which means you can try different color every day. You can simply dye hair by yourself in just 10 mins. Unlike some other hair dye, like O'real, this product is completely harmfulness for health and hair, and could easily dye on or wash off. Customers can try some "crazy" color that would never show up on other brands without worry about whether they would not like the color tomorrow or some health issues. 


The persona I choose is a young girl Nancy at her age of 25 loving party, has a full-time work to do and it's a serious work for classic dressing style. 

What does a bad day look like for her?
  After a crazy party night, the girl has no time to re-make her hair and shows up with her red-color hair, leaving a bad impression to her co-workers and boss. 

What is she afraid of?
  She feels badly and worries that would have negative effect to her career. She also was afraid when she put the color on her hair, worries it would last even longer time so she had to wear that in a long time to work. 

What keeps her awake at night?
  Hoping the color would fade a little bit or she has to do coloring twice in several days, that would hurt her hair badly. 

What is she responsible for?
  She has full-time work to do, so she should dress professionally, and the appearance may have potential influence to her work. 

What obstacles stand in her way?
  She is crazy about party, but she cannot express herself at the parties because of the work requirements.

What does this person want and aspire to?
  She wants something can let her change her hair color at night temporarily but has her original hair color for work, also wont have damage even she colors every night. 

How does this person measure success?
  She can both deal work and night life well. Having fun at the same time not affect her professional future. 

What can we offer this person?
  We can offer her a product that let her make colors for the parties or night life whenever she likes and won't have an influence to the next day's work. Also it won't hurt her hair even she wants to change her color hair everyday. 

Thoughts from Toyota's Secret: The A3 Report

The article talks about a very special innovation process used in Toyota to let employees describe problems they meet at work and solve them.

I think this A3 report is a perfect way to be practical in daily work for employees. According to the examples given in the article, people can write whatever they feel comfortable and even draw pictures on the paper. By doing that, they don't need to write a very detailed and time-consuming report to demonstrate the problem, it's easy to read and easy to be presented by the "author".

Though it takes shorter time than to write a several pages report, it contains everything that should be found in a innovation report. It starts from a problem, and not only gives a solution, also giving a business result to the manager, which is more important to the managerial people since they should take both the loss from problems and the cost to solve them into consideration.

However, it still has some limitation. Since it is simpler and has a limit to two page, "authors" can not explain in detail to the readers about how it would be. With less vision of great picture about the problem, management sometimes may underestimate the effect of the problem.

Also, it in most cases can only be applied in manufacturing companies, where people are doing more craft things and is easier for them to come up with a problem and find a solution. Otherwise, employees can hardly find problems and company cannot make this kind of report into part of its culture, thus leading to less of innovation. Meanwhile, some staff even meet the problem, but were not to report or describe it because they can't measure those problems with numbers or financial problems. They can't describe it with word and can only by showing to the manager. What's more, many problem are found by non-experts, therefore they cannot come up with a solution when they try to report. Sometimes a report needs cooperation between different function of departments, however, A3 report were limited to do so.

7 Sources of Innovation

The master of management, Peter Drucker named 7 opportunities of source of innovation, which are:

The unexpected, incongruities, process needs, industry and market structure, demographics, changes in perception and new knowledge. 

I can't think of many examples of the unexpected innovations. However, one unexpected example is a really successful innovation of product and a legacy to the world, Coca-cola. It was supposed to be a medicine while Dr. Pemberton eventually made a Soda Drink. However, I don't think this fantastic unexpected result would often happen, most of them turn out to be not-so-good ones. 

Incongruity or conflict makes some special needs able to be solved. Many architects use different fully designed furniture to enlarge using space in a limited sized room.

Process needs may discovered more by workers or supervisors who actually participate into a process. They are always the ones who first come up with problems. Also, this may come with the appearance of emerging technology. The cutting edge technology will have the opportunity to change process work, and may be foundation of new innovations. 

Changing of industry and market structure can also lead to innovation, so can changes perception. In the mobile phone industry, OS provider start to come up, instead of OEMs have their own decision of how to use and fit the OSs. Also, customers in this industry now change their taste from the design of phone to the design of systems. Therefore, no matter what the innovation is, almost all innovations of smartphone products are made by OS markers.

Demographic is another source of innovation, which can be seen from a huge migration from one city to another, stimulate the innovation for the new prospering city. 

New knowledge, I think is the most important source of innovation, and is the most case of where innovation comes from.

Google SWOT Analysis

Google is a so successful company that has many products and services in hand. It's SWOT Analysis has been conducted by enormous people from business students to famous consulting companies. Today I am trying to make a SWOT from my perspective about Google as a whole company, not only its search engine.

Starting from internal analysis:

Strength:
High reputation accumulated from its search engine business.
Large customer base of AdWord, advertising, and service making Google easier to introduce new product.
Various product lines can be each others complementary even creating a whole ecosystem and bring extra customer loyalty, leading technology innovation and large scale of partners.

Weakness:
Freemium model makes relatively fewer customers would like to pay for Google's service.
Since simplicity represented Google, it's hard to follow fashion or create fashion trend. In other words, it's too much a high-tech company
Profit resource allocation is too unbalanced. Ad income takes too much portion of Google's profit.

Opportunity:
Number of Internet user is still increasing these days.
App ad and searching become another profit point of Google AdScence.

Threat:
Social media take more and more time of customer spending on the Net.
In smartphone OS market, Apple becomes more and more competitive and begin to create its own ecosystem as well, after establishing its own map and other services, starting getting Google's market share in  Internet service.