The Landmark Blog

Corporate Strategy - What Do You Do When You Lose...BIG?

I have a passion for soccer that I inherited from my dad.  I tell my sons that soccer runs in their blood, that it’s part of their heritage.  My sons play soccer, I play(ed) soccer, my brothers played, my dad and his brothers played, and my grandfather played soccer.  My grandfather actually played for his local professional team, the Garth Rangers (Wales, UK). 

My dad is a Welshman who moved to the U.S. when he was about seventeen years old.  Growing up, I was very interested in U.S. sports, especially baseball and football.  My dad didn't understand.  Football...wasn't really football, didn't use feet much, was covered in pads, seemed over-complicated, unorganized, and just wasn't rugby.  Baseball...was...just...boring (to him).  Nevertheless, I loved to play and watch both. 

In fifth grade, I was a pretty small kid.  On my football team, I was a linebacker.  One day, a much larger (probably slower) kid knocked me out of the circle used to test who started the game (the test was to hit each other until someone fell down or was knocked out of the circle).  I lost my starting spot and couldn't regain it for most of the season.  At that point, football became particularly boring for my dad and as a player, I was frustrated.  One day, my dad came to me and told me a story of magic, of glamour, of heritage and family, a story of the beautiful game, the world’s game, of George Best and European football...real football.  I was hooked.  At ten years old, I knew that as a half Welshman I could be the greatest American soccer player EVER (oh…if it were that simple…boy did I suck to begin with).

I began playing soccer in fifth grade and haven't stopped playing since.  If you know me you understand that soccer has become a part of who I am.  I'm passionate about it...bordering on nerdy.  In my "spare time," I coach competitive youth soccer.  I've been coaching youth soccer for about fifteen years.  I coach two teams and they are good (in the top-10 at each age group for the state of Utah, U.S.)  Last night, one of the teams had an experience that I hope to never repeat.  We lost...BIG...REALLY BIG.  When you hit the top levels of competitive soccer, most games are 1-0, 2-1, 3-2, 3-1, etc.  A BIG loss would be something like 4-0 or 5-1.  We lost 10-0.  It was UGLY...REALLY UGLY...EMBARRASINGLY UGLY.  The biggest joke around soccer communities is how bad the referees suck.  This referee was terrible (they all are), he didn't call a thing (there were four different fights that I was aware of during the game...one that even turned into a shoving/kicking/swinging match...the referee had no control...and didn't call fouls on any of it).  The referee, in spite of his poor performance, was not the reason for the 10-0 loss.  We just took a drubbing to a team that we played 3-2 the last time we competed against each other.  It was frustrating...and sad. 

If you've ever coached through a situation like this, you go through some moments that are similar to the stages of grief…though significantly sped up (yeah…I told you I was a little nerdy…maybe the word is CRAZY is more in line).

1 – Denial and Isolation: “Really, are we going to get beat like this”…I walk up and down the sideline muttering…eventually I sit down and shut up completely.

2 – Anger: Bark at the players from the sideline, through half time, on the field, off the field, eventually no barking at all (which is even worse).

3 – Bargaining: “Please boys, just get your heads up, shake it off, and go out and play the way you know how.  Show some heart…if you work hard, good things will happen."  As I’m thinking (at 7-0)…"Just don't let it go in to double digits...I'll be a good person for the rest of my life if it just doesn't go into double digits."  I guess I'm off the hook.

4 – Depression: I was so shaken by the loss last night that all I could do was stutter…I was ready to stop coaching…didn’t sleep well…couldn't think of anything else.

5 – Acceptance: Today I realize that there’s nothing I can do to change last night.  I’m not going to quit on those boys.  I feel a little idiotic (ok - a lot idiotic...it is JUST A GAME...right?  Have you heard the saying "Soccer is Life"?).  We really are a good team.

So here’s the inevitable point.  As companies, or as employees, managers and professionals, we all take our losses from time to time.  Sometimes we even get our butts kicked.  Occasionally, we get our butts kicked badly.  Social media has done some wonderful things for “getting the word out”.  When you’re doing well, it quickly becomes apparent.  Social media has also expedited the speed at which everyone else finds out that you just got your butt kicked (the 10-0 drubbing hit Facebook before I even returned home for the night).  Most losses aren’t always public knowledge.  Maybe you lost a big proposal, a big job you’ve always had on hand, a key staff member, a client, or had some negative press, and maybe it’s impactful…very impactful.  We’ve all been there.  In business, when you lose…BIG…what do you do?  Here are some suggestions, along with some great quotes by the late great UCLA head coach John Wooden:

• “If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” Flawless execution is one key way of succeeding consistently and minimizing the losses.  If you’ve just experienced a loss, meet with your staff…reset…then teach your staff (or yourself if appropriate) to execute cleanly from the start.  The first goal scored in my soccer game was within two minutes of the starting whistle.  It started a very bad precedence and was the start of a very long night.  Start with clean execution in mind.
• “Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.”  Do you know why you lost…or are losing?  If not, figure out the cause of the loss, do some market research, especially if your losses are consistent.  A good market research organization will help you figure out how to fix it.  If you aren’t prone in that direction, figure out how to fix it yourself.  Some things are difficult to change.  Make the changes that make sense to change.  Then ask yourself, is that enough?  If it’s not, do something about it.  Be a player rather than a spectator.
• “Don't measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you should have accomplished with your ability.”  Evaluate your losses.  Did you just experience one loss, or have you experienced many losses in a row?  These are two different issues.  Is there a trend?  What are you capable of?  Are you competing at that level of your ability?  If not, why?  Evaluate whether you need to make tweaks in your product or service offerings that align more cleanly with your ability.  Do some product research.  Or, make tweaks in your ability to align more cleanly with your product or service offerings.
• “A coach is someone who can give correction without causing resentment.”  After our loss, a close friend gave me this sage advice.  “The best time to teach is right after a loss.” At the time of the loss, I was so worked up I couldn’t see this simple principle.  It’s worth remembering that a good coach (or manager or mentor) is one who can identify areas of improvement, help you see what needs to improve, and show you the path to improvement or how to accomplish it.  Improvement means more wins.
• “Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.” It’s important to remember that once things are done, when the final whistle blows, there’s nothing else you can do about the situation.  If you’ve worked your hardest, made the appropriate corrections, followed these steps for the next opportunity, improved yourself as a result of the loss, the final step is to let the loss go.  Walk away, don’t repeat the mistake(s), and move on.  This just might be the toughest step.

Any suggestions on what to do when you lose...BIG?  How do you turn losses into wins down the road?

Social Media Market Research Methods are REALLY Unevolved

Sometimes you just run out of things to say.  We've all experienced it.  When you're engaged in conversation with a group of people, it's the lull in conversation between the end of one topic and the beginning of another.  The quieting of the chatter.  Then something happens, it's a little bit difficult to define what it is, but a stimulus occurs that shoots the conversation down a whole new track, a micro conversation that invigorates the macro conversation.  I believe that this happens in social media, and I experienced it recently with this blog. 

For the first time since starting this blog, for the past couple of weeks, I've frankly had very little to say.  It was a very interesting experience for me.  I'm not a rabid talker to begin with, but I typically have some thought...some idea...some topic for this blog...gestating in my head.  I had nothing.  A lapse in the conversation...

Until last night...

Last night I was given a very simple illustration of the impact social media can have on the conversation.  I've mentioned this before, but I have teens in my household.  Two of them began to argue last night about whether cheerleading is actually a sport.  One of them is a cheerleader, the other a soccer player.  The soccer player posted this simple question to his 300 friends on Facebook..."Who agrees that cheerleading isn't a sport? Sorry Sis."  Incidentally, the cheerleader had just returned from a two-hour tumbling session, was tired, sore, and feisty.  Chaos ensued.  The simple question resulted in 42 Facebook comments (not to mention the internal "conversation" going on in my household).  Both sides of the controversy chimed in with blistering frequency (over an hour and a half) and then the conversation stopped very abruptly when the parents of these teens sent them all to bed around 10:30pm.  

In the process of the conversation, I Googled whether cheerleading was a sport and didn't really come to a definitive answer.  When I didn't get a resolution to the question from Google, I consulted the mother of all immediate answers...ChaCha.

If you've never heard or used this service, it's very unique (and for the most part free).  The teens I know use this service A LOT.  You text ChaCha a question (242242 - spells "ChaCha")...any question...and ChaCha will text you the answer.  You can send some N number of questions per month (data & txt messages apply) without being charged (I don't text them often enough to know what the limit is).  The slogan on their website is "Real people answering your questions!  Crazy Huh?"

I texted this simple question to ChaCha.  "Is cheerleading a sport".  As always, ChaCha came back with a reply in less than 30 seconds.  "ESPN Court rules cheerleading is contact sport, yet many states for high school sports are not ruling it a sport, it depends who you ask.  I would say Cheerleading is a sport."  An ESPN Court ruled that cheerleading is not only a sport but a contact sport.  If you've seen many cheerleading competitions, you'll understand.  In the past several years that I've attended these competitions with my daughter, I've seen more people fall out of "stunts", more girls kicked or inadvertently punched in the face, fallen or dropped from 15-20 feet in the air, and/or hurt than I've seen in most other "sport" activities.  At one point I actually tried to start videoing when these athletes "took a whipper."  I agree with ChaCha.  Cheerleading, at least competitive cheerleading, is a sport.

In connecting the dots from this experience to the market research that many of us provide, something occurred to me.  Social media market research methods are REALLY UNDERDEVELOPED and VERY UNSTANDARDIZED.  As I've followed the #MarketResearch hash tag on Twitter, I realized something.  The way that most of us operating in the market research industry define market research, and the way that a lot of "other" businesses often define market research are very different.

You'll often see this post pop up on Twitter "Conducting #MarketResearch on...".  The interesting point here is that this person is typically not doing any kind of Qualitative or Quantitative research as the market research industry has defined it.  No focus group, no ethnography, no MROC, no survey, no statistical analysis, but is simply "looking stuff up".  They're "looking stuff up" using Google, and Facebook, and Twitter, and article sites, and possibly...when they just can't get the answer, they're shooting the question over to ChaCha...all in the name of market research.  Not exactly our market research methods...or are they?  Are these our evolved research methods for conducting social media market research?

A few years ago I ran across an article in Quirks by Tim Macer.  He was doing an evaluation of a number of industry software packages.  Since then, when I run across his published articles, I try to take a look at them.  Recently, he and an associate published their "Globalpark Annual Market Research Software Survey 2009".  This was their sixth annual survey and well worth a look.  Pertaining to this post, a small part of this study was an evaluation of the online communities being managed by his sample.  The results were a little surprising given the amount of "chatter" that goes on regarding social media and research methods.  He found:

• "Communities are still very rare."
• "Early adopters are still operating very few communities."
• "Over half of companies have no plans to operate an online community."
• Of the companies that were running communities most were using the same software to run their communities that they were using to run their panels.

This recent "cheerleading" experience and the lack of established and solid social media based research tools, leads me to the conclusion that I stated earlier.  Social media research methods, and their accompanying technologies, are REALLY UNDERDEVELOPED and VERY UNSTANDARDIZED.  In fact, I'm not even sure that they are completely defined yet or even exist with any level of sophistication...they are EXTREMELY UNEVOLVED.  I appreciate the efforts by a few early adopters in our industry who have started writing about how to do this work more effectively.  If you've seen or written one of these articles, please post the link to your article here as a reference for the readers.  

Before we face the challenges of the unrepresentative online panel, we as a market research industry, should define what social media research is to begin with (even though the definition will evolve...much like the conversation evolves), and establish best practices for doing good, quality, social media market research that can be analyzed and/or evaluated in reportable ways that represent the opinions of engaged participants willing to add to the conversation. 

• Are you aware of a great article on how to conduct social media research?  If so, please link to it on this post.  For the good of the market research community. 

Social Research: Brand Evolution and Meaning through Horchata

Etymology is the study of the history of words.  Words, just like everything else, have a history.  They evolve, they change and they come to mean different things to different people.  Take the word "Thong" for instance.  Not many people would like to see me in a thong...let alone borrow a thong from me.  But, in the 80's, thong meant something else entirely.  It referred to a "flip-flop".  The idea of me in an '80's defined thong is much less repulsive.  Borrowing someone's thong to run to the store wasn't socially frowned on and it was perfectly acceptable to run out your front door...to your mailbox...in your mother's thongs.

More years ago than I'd like to admit, I had a professor in graduate school who was an expert in the history of meaning and how meanings come to be defined.  His name was James Aho and he's written a number of books on varying topics ranging from politics, accounting, enemies, health, how we experience our bodies, how we experience the world, etc.  I learned an important thing from him...that the way we experience our world and the meaning we assign to things in our world differ according to our culture, our family, our past life experiences, our politics, our country, our religion, the list goes on and on.  Even systematic professions like the medical industry and accounting have relevant social meanings that are different for different people.  What is considered "healthy" and "acceptable practice" has changed over time, differs according to current trends, and can be impacted by marketing.  

The food pyramid is a prime example.  In the first three minutes of a search on the food pyramid I found a pyramid for Vegans, Native Americans, Vegetarians, Low Carbians (All you can eat meat), and Diabetics.  My son has a t-shirt that includes the food pyramid and only includes types of pizza.  I even found a zombie food pyramid.  

The simple food pyramid of the  '90's evolved out of the notion of "food groups" (carbohydrates, protein, dairy, fats, vitamins, fiber, and minerals) and into the "new food pyramid" published in 2005 with an expectation of a re-release of an even "newer" food pyramid in 2010.  To complicate things, many different countries have their own version of the food pyramid...you may be healthy in one area of the world, but not in another.  Isn't it just food?  Is there JUST food?

Brands operate the same way and evolve over time.  What's the meaning of a brand?  You come to define who you are as a person by the brands you consume...or is it the other way around...the brands you consume come to define you as a person.  We've all seen (or written) the market research survey that asks what a specific consumer product means to you in characteristics that make very little sense to the physical make-up of the product but get to the bottom of the meaning of the brand.  What product comes to mind when you hear these trigger words?  Different products and meanings come to mind for different people.

• Rugged
• Refreshing
• Fresh
• IT
• Accountant
• Religious
• Socially Conscious

Brands invoke feelings and meanings...feelings of nostalgia for the past and anticipation for the future.  I may drink Coca Cola because I want to feel happy all year round.  I purchase Go-Daddy domains so that I can hang around attractive women and look cool (even if I'm a disheveled IT guy).  I drive a Subaru so people will see me as active.  If I feel like I'm doing these things than, in essence, am I not these things.  Who wouldn't want to be happy, active and attractive?  

Finally, my fourteen year old son had a recent experience that really illustrated this point to me.  The other day at a restaurant he filled his drink cup with Horchata.  It was the first time he'd ever done that and seemed like a simple act.  Many of you have probably consumed Horchata and may do it with some regularity.  The meaning of the act, for him, was much different than the meaning you apply to drinking Horchata.  You may like how it tastes, you may come from a culture who has a background in Horchata consumption, you may drink it to offset spicy food.  My son does not.      

My son identifies with all things alternative.  We are from the US, but my father lived in Wales through his young adult years.  My son has grown up watching EPL (English Premier League) football (soccer for those in the US) and particularly identifies with the Chelsea Football Club/Brand instead of an American football, basketball, or baseball team.  He plays soccer instead of American football, and is submerged in the soccer culture.  He has long hair (instead of the typical "short" cut typical of Salt Lake City) and listens to alternative music.  So, how does he make the connection to his identification with all things alternative and Horchata?  He listens to a New York originating band called Vampire Weekend.  They sing a song called Horchata.  Through some meaning that he's defined to his limited life experience, consuming Horchata connects him to what he likes best...all things alternative.  He now consumes Horchata because that is who he is.

What does your brand say about you?  Whether you provide consumer products, business to business services, or you're a market research company, your company brand says something and means something to those around you.  Do you know what your company...what your brand means, what your customers experience is, what they view themselves to be when they use your products and services? If you don't know, I would suggest that you ask.

• What brands do you identify with...and what meaning do they take on for you? 
  

Business Strategy - Sometimes a Tie Feels Like a Win

I'm an avid soccer fan (some say rabid).  I watch as many games as I can (yesterday I watched three) and study the game through books, coaching, and playing whenever opportunity permits. Soccer is truly an international game and in the United States, is culturally very different than other US sports. If you've ever been to a professional game, you'll know what I mean.

One of the characteristics of soccer that isn't true for most (if not all) other US sports is that many times, soccer games end in a tie.  As a result, something occurs in soccer that just might be unique to the game.  Yesterday (October 14), the US Men's national team played the Costa Rican Men's national team.  It was a very exciting game.  The Costa Rican team (The Tico's) scored two beautiful goals in the first half of the game, going ahead of the US 2-0 at the end of the first half.  Two goals are often insurmountable in soccer.  In this case they weren't.  In the second half, the US team kicked it into gear and scored a goal in the 72nd minute (of a 90 minute game).  Soccer has "extra or stoppage time" that is given at the end of each half to compensate for injuries on the field.  The second half of this game had five minutes of stoppage time.  In the last minute of the game, the US team scored a goal to tie the game.

One of the unique characteristics of soccer is that "sometimes a tie feels like a win"...yesterday was an example.  On the flip side, "sometimes a tie feels like a loss."  For the US, yesterday's tie was a win.  For The Tico's, yesterday's tie must have felt like a loss.

Yesterday's tie started me thinking about whether this situation exhists in business or whether a "tie" is ever an appropriate business strategy.

1.  Are there ties in business...I think there are...what are some examples?

2.  Is a "tie" ever an appropriate business strategy?

3.  Are there other sports where games end in ties and the ties feel like wins or losses?

4.  Did you watch the game or have you ever experienced this in business or in sports?