controlpopulation-blog

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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Being in the moment … the story of a Marketing Director

This is a personal story of my startup. One of the first evolutions in human resources in our 4 people tech-heavy industrial engineering startup was doing we all need to be doing engineering jobs now. I decided to move closer to customers and sales. None of us knew what titles we should all be getting, and since we could pick one like a zoo animal cracker jar, I picked the title of Marketing Director. I came across a Marketing Director that week in an Industry vertical and I thought that probably summarizes the role that my company needed. Least did I know the anchoring and stereotyping the word ‘Marketing’ brought along with it.

With my newly minted business cards, and dressed sharply I started making calls and setting up meetings with distributors, channels across the region. It did not help that I was dealing with seven different regional countries with varying degrees of economic progress. For some, ‘Marketing’ meant meaningless chatter, people with little know-how who created pretty brochures and ran ad-campaigns. To others, it was a surprise that I was making the calls and not my secretary. Before long everyone associated me with the gateway to the company before someone more technical came to the table to discuss business.

So what is being in the moment got to do with it? A lot of times our judgments are clouded with an overreaching goal on how we see the world panning out around us or how we want to shape it. But this creates a conflict and lack of empathy for the listener in near term. So I learned to operate in two modes, much like a John LeCarre Spy I read as a teenager. Every interaction has the desired outcome, if I could commit to the outcome more often than not I knew what the narrative should be. I just had to pick the right cracker for a meeting.

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The new landscape

Launching a greenfield product can be both challenging and exciting. Not because of the unbounded freedom of choices it offers but instead shaping the change in customer behavior and the way to affect it. Having done it before launching products in various markets, I often felt value in resisting taking an avant-garde approach and instead meld into the existing customer journey. At the same time, it is critical not to trade off the value proposition that is being brought to the consumer in doing the same old same old. It helps to document the process of value creation and delivery by listing down the launch strategy into three categories.  Value Creation, Value Capture, and Delivery or borrowing Duncan Siemester’s famous paradigm, Create, Capture and Deliver.

In the case of American Well, the value creation was just simplifying the delivery of healthcare in the majority of the cases. I had the pleasure of talking to Roy Schoenberg at Sloan as a part of a Healthcare project. He said the value that American Well created is predominantly navigating the bureaucracy and making something elegant and simple possible. He was aware that the second mover advantage is significant in this case once American Well demonstrated the possibility of Online Primary Care.

 To understand the UX and the touchpoints it is important to look at the stakeholders of the American well system.

This is one of the idiosyncratic problems in Healthcare that the stakeholder paying for the value is different than the one receiving it. It creates twisted incentives. American Well is bringing it closer to the consumer by giving consumers choice and the options for the second opinion.

UX Touchpoints for nudges

For Patients

One of the touch points that would make sense is the sense of urgency in patients to see a doctor. Especially for parents with young children access to medical advice is very helpful. The other nudge is the choice of a doctor in selecting the physician or a care provider.

For Physicians

For Physicians the touch point would be the acceptance by payers and the regulators in accepting the form of delivery. American Well addressed this problem by presenting the solution at the major health conference and getting accredited by the BCBS and Medicare.

Future Growth

One of the big drivers today is in Telemedicine. American Well has been looking into this area and would benefit a great deal by partnering with the giants like CVS Minute Clinic or Quest in providing their IT infrastructure to the Telehealth services.

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Sustainability - A spoonful of branding

I read the Burberry case study with some interest to understand the utility and more precisely understand what the people inside Burberry think that they bring to the table. I have passed by several of the Airport duty-free stores, boutique shopping malls and often asked myself who and what they are signaling. The only thought that crossed my mind often was ‘Huh, another company leaving the tap open until it dries up’. It was not until my wife started talking about brands like LV, or Hermes that I could see them in any utilitarian concept. These products made excellent gifts. They signaled value of a relationship rather effortlessly to the recipient. The airport duty channel made more sense since it also signaled exclusivity.  ‘I was transiting in Tokyo,  and you won't believe they had Yamazaki 18 on sale ...’ as against the anecdote about someone picking u wine at a gas station. But when you look at the underlying value and try to evaluate what it takes to make a bag or where it is made it begs the question, what am I paying for? 

Now a large part of developing economies or places like Singapore started using that lens for evaluating value. How much went into it that I can use. And that created its own fads. What you see below is a restaurant in Singapore called ‘No Signboard seafood’. You can infer the signaling here but it ended up being one of the pricier restaurants over time. 

What Burberry did remarkably well, as it moved away from the Tommy Hilfiger brand towards something that was easier to associate with. They found a nice spot between the luxury goods and the sports fashion. What is also interesting was they found significant gains by focussing more on the wholesale distribution than the retail. Their cost of sales dropped by 9% over the years. But the challenge they face is what they associate themselves with ‘The British way’ does not belong to them. They did not create the aristocratic way of living and have no say on how that association evolves. For instance, there is a huge negative perception in Asia against the Victorian elitism due to their colonial past. It is everything that the millennials don’t want to be. It would be more appropriate if Burberry focussed on what they stand for, e.g. sustainable materials, bags for a cause or something to that effect. Otherwise, I guess people will just watch their ad campaigns like movies.

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Brand Spectrum and Architecture

Token Association

One of the examples of smart branding decisions that I took close to heart was the example of Intel. The way it created an association with the consumer with the token branding approach is phenomenal. 

I always viewed branding as a way for consumers to recognize aspects of value that are harder to perceive without the right communication. In this case, Intel produced better microprocessors and was innovating and providing the differentiation that the PC assemblers were leveraging on. The campaign basically destroyed the differentiation that IBM carried. And AMD still is trying to catch up the lost ground. 

The Automotive Industry, the new Brand houses

The other area where there is a change today is the Automobile Industry. The acquisition of Lotus by Proton then Geely is a clear strategy by brands in developing economies to move up the value chain with the new consumer demographic emerging in developing economies.

Even Tata (The company that got slammed with their poorly designed $3000 car nano) currently owns Jaguar. 

The people who might be interested in owning a Nano are very different from people who drive say the F-type. And it's beyond the functional utility. 

However, Ferrari takes this functional utility too lightly and started their own Perfume brand totally undermining the message they want to communicate. 

It is insulting to many of us who like cars to associate Scuderia with a perfume.

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Diffusion

Being at Sloan, we really needed something like that to describe Diffusion. But that only talks about the people part. Not so much the product.  Unlike what the article says, 0 to 1 changes happen in technology too, provided the gains to be had are significantly high. 

A case in point is BitCoin. It fails many of the factors that Rogers talks about. But observability caused the rapid adoption.