Author: manu prasad

  • Master Class

    Last week, I read a profoundly insightful post at Gaping Void, titled ‘On Mastery‘. The post seeks to answer (in Hugh’s own words) ““Suc­cess”. What does it take to be suc­cess­ful, pros­perous, happy, have a sense of pur­pose etc? What does THAT actually look like?” The answer, according to his post, is mastery. (do read his post for examples) When I shared this post on Twitter, Asmita related it to Chandni Chowk food vendors. Bingo. Around my own city – Bangalore- I can see examples of that. I can also see examples of when some of them have tried to scale and have fallen apart.

    Fame, popularity and money are by-products, but the master is not really dependent on that. In fact, he might even see it as undesirable side effects. As someone commented on Hugh’s post, it’s not even about the product, it’s the process. In Hugh’s own words “It’s something that truly belongs to you” and perhaps that’s why it’s so much more better, because there’s no dependency, unlike the by-products.

    It’s more of a personal learning for me, and it struck a chord as soon as I read it, as though I had the thought in my subconscious but lacked the cognizance to express it, even it to myself. In fact, I’d go on now to slightly disagree with Hugh MacLeod and say that for many people, mastery is success.

    Meanwhile, how does all this apply to business and brands? If I look at it through the prism of how things work now, I might be inclined to say that mastery cannot really scale, and I’d go back to my ‘Institutional Realignment‘ post and say that we’ll eventually get back to making mastery, a smaller ‘audience’, and a lesser scale the norm.  But in some ways, I can see examples of brands having mastered a culture and found a way to scale it – the much abused example – Zappos.

    However, if I had to look at it another way, I’d say that the web has made discovery much easier. Not in the traditional media way of ‘push the message to a mass and the interested ones will find you’ kind of a way, but the exact opposite. To use the data that people are sharing and through that, to find the right audience. The kind of audience who will appreciate the brand’s mastery, and who will then create good old fashioned community and word of mouth. The web offers tremendous opportunities to focus, but unfortunately we’re still in the early days of organised marketing and CRM data and most brands are busy losing focus and spamming themselves into oblivion, courtesy the lure of scale and its trappings.

    Of course, a part of me believes that mastery should have nothing to do with business, but as with many other things, the web might just change my perspective.

    until next time,  Master of Business Administration 😉

  • Wisdom Toolz

    Understanding what you learn gives insight, which in-turn fuels a creative economy. That’s what WisdomToolz aims to do with simulation. In conversation with co-founder Jayachandran S

    [scribd id=96371741 key=key-dpyv6js7r1p05b69jh3 mode=list]

     

  • Building Brand Frameworks

    It was an interesting coincidence that a couple of weeks back, around the time I posted on brand building and the effects of instant gratification (largely in the context of social media), I also got into a minor debate with a colleague on brand communication – tonality, voice etc. This is a topic I constantly think about – brand building in the social era- and on this blog, that is manifested in the form of posts from ‘flawsome‘ to ‘consistency and cohesion‘ to larger canvasses like brand identity and the definition of ‘brand’.

    Thanks to an ever changing social landscape, the questions and the answers are extremely dynamic. Different brands face different challenges as per their category, (pricing, demographic, ‘conscious’ly purchased or not) how long they have been around, their internal processes, structures and culture, and so on. But the earlier eras also had challenges and yet, we managed to define certain basic frameworks of brand building, which could be adapted across product categories, geographic locations and so on.

    Social has indeed disrupted everything because unlike say, television, which probably took over from print, it fundamentally changed the linear narrative by making ‘media’ a two way street, with side lanes opened up by consumers. It is probably because of this, that (for example) a Leo Burnett’s Human Brands concept (this post, for context) goes beyond adapting current frameworks and into the purpose of the brand itself.

    Brands that have built themselves in the ‘traditional media’ era are trying to adapt themselves, and that brings its own set of challenges. But what about brands being built now? Ignore the tech brands for now please – Facebook, Google, Twitter etc, what would your framework be if you had to build a brand starting now, in this age of massively fragmented media and user presence? Would you design the brand identity and adapt it to different media platforms or would you go with a bare minimum checklist and allow it to evolve with consumers adding context across various touch points – real and virtual? I’d really love to hear some perspectives!

    until next time, frames per second…

  • ItsMyMeal

    ItsMyMeal is a FoodCommerce venture, where food & e-commerce are managed together to provide the basic daily meal. In conversation with co-founder Nikhil Gupta

    [scribd id=94863993 key=key-1c0u9tjycvkz084406ze mode=list]

     

  • Branded trends

    Last week, Karthik had a post titled “Twitter, Twitter on the wall.. Who’s the trendiest hashtag of them all” that resonated much with me. In fact, it was a sentiment I had expressed just a few days before –

    We live in an era of instant gratification – from a consumer perspective. I’m not sure about the origins here – whether technology (from pagers/mobiles to social networking) came first or the behaviour did – and that prompted technology to evolve rapidly, but delayed rewards seem to have little or no meaning for today’s users.

    It’s a difficult behaviour to ignore, though building and evolving a brand’s DNA is a story that requires a much larger timeframe, IMO. And that’s where I remember Godin’s post titled Twitch – “the social internet is emphasizing twitch more than ever before. All that smart phone checking and checking in and name checking and instant rejoindering is amplifying the work of those that are just a little quicker than everyone else.” Godin himself states later that “While twitch may pay off in any ten minute cycle, I’m not sure if it gets you very far in the long run, where the long run might be as short as two weeks.“

    While it is possible to argue that individuals, even the personal brands, could scale quite some way on this, I’m not sure whether brands can. And that’s why I, despite being a practitioner of ‘social’, find the rise of the twitch tendency in brands, disturbing. Twitch is probably the brand’s rendition of ‘instant gratification’. What’s worse is that it’s not even the idea of social that’s the twitch here, but individual platforms and devices, (such as hashtags) which seem to have become drivers, sometimes displacing a well thought through strategy.

    A brand (even before the social era) consists of many parts. There’s no taking away from the fact that social has probably been the biggest disruption that brand frameworks have seen, but it still is only a part of the larger story. It needs to be woven into the larger brand framework, and then a decision should be taken on its role – lead or otherwise. Until brand managers take cognizance of that, twitch, will unfortunately prevail.

    until next time, a twitch in time….