via http://www.btimes.com.my/Current_News/BTIMES/articles/Online_dating_for_brands20081031011301/Article/
WHAT do United Airlines and Starbucks coffee have in common? Take one of United’s US flights and you’ll find out.
On every domestic flight, you’re no longer served coffee. You’re served Starbucks coffee. In fact, the deal between the two companies requires flight attendants to say “Starbucks Coffee” when offering in-flight beverages.
What we’re seeing is the trend toward brand alliances. Brands that are mutually complementary team up with each other and with their partners’ brand missions. A quick look at several major US supermarkets reveals they offer Starbucks coffee. Starbucks cafés are situated in the stores.
Starbucks analysed its traffic flow and concluded people are in the mood for a cup of something while waiting around.
Successfully selling coffee to such customers optimises revenue flow for both the coffee chain and host establishments. Thus, brand alliances are born that benefit both the consumer and the bottom line.
Brand alliances are already in Malaysia, take Borders bookshop stores, for example. Each one of them has a Starbucks within their premises, reinforcing their strong brand values to the book loving patron who gets to enjoy Starbucks coffee with that favourite author. Until recently, low cost airline AirAsia had a “marriage” with global football giant Manchester United, another clear example of a marriage of brands.
During this cross-branding period, AirAsia passengers were able to purchase Manchester United paraphernalia such as jerseys, caps and other souvenirs during flight.
What’s this got to do with online branding? Brand alliances, as we know them, are in the midst of an interesting change. Some years ago, most brand builders would have been aghast at the thought of their brands being seen alongside other brands.
Brands should be perceived in exclusivity, they believed. That theory is no longer applicable. It’s impossible to be the best in each and every way. That’s why complementary companies need each other. Brand builders must identify the best companies within fields/disciplines/product categories that are complementary to their own and team up with them.
The potential for creative thinking in this type of cooperative brand building is massive. Key to its success is to ensure the values and brand propositions of potential brand alliance partners bear clear, relevant relationships with each other.
Australia’s national airline, Qantas, built a brand alliance with Hertz. Through it, the airline secures a referral fee and ostensibly offers customers an enhanced service. The World Health Organisation (WHO) teamed with British Airways to collect money for its cause.
Be prepared to see some innovative and interesting brand combinations in the future. Expect to see the trend mirrored online. The strategy ensures consumers are exposed to favoured brands in new contexts, their product knowledge expands and their brand use becomes more versatile.
Think through every aspect of your brand’s use. Determine how to fit your customers’ current product utilisation into new contexts. If you sell flowers, team up with a vase manufacturer, teddy bear supplier or balloon merchant.
If you sell computers, get together with an education provider and offer educational programmes to help customers learn more about their computers. Think intuitively. What makes sense to your customers? Identify a potential use area for your brand, select a brand whose values marry well with your brands and propose a branding partnership.
Brand alliances are set to become a dominant marketing approach. Brand alliances are cheap and effective and work in the mutual interests of brands and their customers.
A well structured, sensibly conceived brand alliance won’t dilute your brand. Be clear about what your brand stands for and what your partner brand’s values are. With a logical and meaningful relationship between the values of each partner brand, consumers will find cooperative promotions informative, expanding and useful.
Walk yourself through your customers’ experiences. Identify product categories they select; identify brands that represent those categories; then compare your brand’s values and proposition with those of likely partner brands.
The number of unallied, interesting brands is diminishing as the brand alliance game continues. Quick! Partner up before the number of potential partners shrinks, and with it, your revenue.
Comments ：Come to think of CIMB credit card promotion of BMW(MY), Brands chicken essence and Popular Bookstore(SG)
Friday, November 14, 2008
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Kepner-Tregoe
via http://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/methods_kepner-tregoe_matrix.html
The Kepner-Tregoe Matrix is a special, well-orchestrated, synchronized and documented Root Cause analysis and decision-making method.
It is a conscious, step-by-step approach for systematically solving problems, making good decisions, and analyzing potential risks and opportunities. It helps you maximize critical thinking skills, systematically organize and prioritize information, set objectives, evaluate alternatives, and analyze impact.
Kepner-Tregoe describes the following steps to approach decision analysis:
1. Prepare a decision statement having both an action and a result component
2. Establish strategic requirements (Musts), operational objectives (Wants), and restraints (Limits)
3. Rank objectives and assign relative weights
4. Generate alternatives
5. Assign a relative score for each alternative on an objective-by-objective basis
6. Calculate weighted score for each alternative and identify top two or three
7. List adverse consequences for each top alternative and evaluate probability (high, medium, low) and severity (high, medium, low)
8. Make a final, single choice between top alternatives
The Kepner-Tregoe Matrix is a special, well-orchestrated, synchronized and documented Root Cause analysis and decision-making method.
It is a conscious, step-by-step approach for systematically solving problems, making good decisions, and analyzing potential risks and opportunities. It helps you maximize critical thinking skills, systematically organize and prioritize information, set objectives, evaluate alternatives, and analyze impact.
Kepner-Tregoe describes the following steps to approach decision analysis:
1. Prepare a decision statement having both an action and a result component
2. Establish strategic requirements (Musts), operational objectives (Wants), and restraints (Limits)
3. Rank objectives and assign relative weights
4. Generate alternatives
5. Assign a relative score for each alternative on an objective-by-objective basis
6. Calculate weighted score for each alternative and identify top two or three
7. List adverse consequences for each top alternative and evaluate probability (high, medium, low) and severity (high, medium, low)
8. Make a final, single choice between top alternatives
Six Thinking Hats
via http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTED_07.htm
Each "Thinking Hat" is a different style of thinking. These are explained below:
White Hat:
With this thinking hat, you focus on the data available. Look at the information you have, and see what you can learn from it. Look for gaps in your knowledge, and either try to fill them or take account of them.
This is where you analyze past trends, and try to extrapolate from historical data.
Red Hat:
Wearing the red hat, you look at the decision using intuition, gut reaction, and emotion. Also try to think how other people will react emotionally, and try to understand the intuitive responses of people who do not fully know your reasoning.
Black Hat:
When using black hat thinking, look at things pessimistically, cautiously and defensively. Try to see why ideas and approaches might not work. This is important because it highlights the weak points in a plan or course of action. It allows you to eliminate them, alter your approach, or prepare contingency plans to counter problems that arise.
Black Hat thinking helps to make your plans tougher and more resilient. It can also help you to spot fatal flaws and risks before you embark on a course of action. Black Hat thinking is one of the real benefits of this technique, as many successful people get so used to thinking positively that often they cannot see problems in advance, leaving them under-prepared for difficulties.
Yellow Hat:
The yellow hat helps you to think positively. It is the optimistic viewpoint that helps you to see all the benefits of the decision and the value in it, and spot the opportunities that arise from it. Yellow Hat thinking helps you to keep going when everything looks gloomy and difficult.
Green Hat:
The Green Hat stands for creativity. This is where you can develop creative solutions to a problem. It is a freewheeling way of thinking, in which there is little criticism of ideas. A whole range of creativity tools can help you here.
Blue Hat:
The Blue Hat stands for process control. This is the hat worn by people chairing meetings. When running into difficulties because ideas are running dry, they may direct activity into Green Hat thinking. When contingency plans are needed, they will ask for Black Hat thinking, and so on.
You can use Six Thinking Hats in meetings or on your own. In meetings it has the benefit of defusing the disagreements that can happen when people with different thinking styles discuss the same problem.
A similar approach is to look at problems from the point of view of different professionals (e.g. doctors, architects, sales directors) or different customers.
Example:
The directors of a property company are looking at whether they should construct a new office building. The economy is doing well, and the amount of vacant office space is reducing sharply. As part of their decision they decide to use the 6 Thinking Hats technique during a planning meeting.
Looking at the problem with the White Hat, they analyze the data they have. They examine the trend in vacant office space, which shows a sharp reduction. They anticipate that by the time the office block would be completed, that there will be a severe shortage of office space. Current government projections show steady economic growth for at least the construction period.
With Red Hat thinking, some of the directors think the proposed building looks quite ugly. While it would be highly cost-effective, they worry that people would not like to work in it.
When they think with the Black Hat, they worry that government projections may be wrong. The economy may be about to enter a 'cyclical downturn', in which case the office building may be empty for a long time.
If the building is not attractive, then companies will choose to work in another better-looking building at the same rent.
With the Yellow Hat, however, if the economy holds up and their projections are correct, the company stands to make a great deal of money.
If they are lucky, maybe they could sell the building before the next downturn, or rent to tenants on long-term leases that will last through any recession.
With Green Hat thinking they consider whether they should change the design to make the building more pleasant. Perhaps they could build prestige offices that people would want to rent in any economic climate. Alternatively, maybe they should invest the money in the short term to buy up property at a low cost when a recession comes.
The Blue Hat has been used by the meeting's Chair to move between the different thinking styles. He or she may have needed to keep other members of the team from switching styles, or from criticizing other peoples' points.
Key points:
Six Thinking Hats is a good technique for looking at the effects of a decision from a number of different points of view.
It allows necessary emotion and skepticism to be brought into what would otherwise be purely rational decisions. It opens up the opportunity for creativity within Decision Making. It also helps, for example, persistently pessimistic people to be positive and creative.
Plans developed using the '6 Thinking Hats' technique are sounder and more resilient than would otherwise be the case. This technique may also help you to avoid public relations mistakes, and spot good reasons not to follow a course of action, before you have committed to it.
Comments : It does work but require more than colours. To be exact, giving definitions to the issues that need to be discussed
Each "Thinking Hat" is a different style of thinking. These are explained below:
White Hat:
With this thinking hat, you focus on the data available. Look at the information you have, and see what you can learn from it. Look for gaps in your knowledge, and either try to fill them or take account of them.
This is where you analyze past trends, and try to extrapolate from historical data.
Red Hat:
Wearing the red hat, you look at the decision using intuition, gut reaction, and emotion. Also try to think how other people will react emotionally, and try to understand the intuitive responses of people who do not fully know your reasoning.
Black Hat:
When using black hat thinking, look at things pessimistically, cautiously and defensively. Try to see why ideas and approaches might not work. This is important because it highlights the weak points in a plan or course of action. It allows you to eliminate them, alter your approach, or prepare contingency plans to counter problems that arise.
Black Hat thinking helps to make your plans tougher and more resilient. It can also help you to spot fatal flaws and risks before you embark on a course of action. Black Hat thinking is one of the real benefits of this technique, as many successful people get so used to thinking positively that often they cannot see problems in advance, leaving them under-prepared for difficulties.
Yellow Hat:
The yellow hat helps you to think positively. It is the optimistic viewpoint that helps you to see all the benefits of the decision and the value in it, and spot the opportunities that arise from it. Yellow Hat thinking helps you to keep going when everything looks gloomy and difficult.
Green Hat:
The Green Hat stands for creativity. This is where you can develop creative solutions to a problem. It is a freewheeling way of thinking, in which there is little criticism of ideas. A whole range of creativity tools can help you here.
Blue Hat:
The Blue Hat stands for process control. This is the hat worn by people chairing meetings. When running into difficulties because ideas are running dry, they may direct activity into Green Hat thinking. When contingency plans are needed, they will ask for Black Hat thinking, and so on.
You can use Six Thinking Hats in meetings or on your own. In meetings it has the benefit of defusing the disagreements that can happen when people with different thinking styles discuss the same problem.
A similar approach is to look at problems from the point of view of different professionals (e.g. doctors, architects, sales directors) or different customers.
Example:
The directors of a property company are looking at whether they should construct a new office building. The economy is doing well, and the amount of vacant office space is reducing sharply. As part of their decision they decide to use the 6 Thinking Hats technique during a planning meeting.
Looking at the problem with the White Hat, they analyze the data they have. They examine the trend in vacant office space, which shows a sharp reduction. They anticipate that by the time the office block would be completed, that there will be a severe shortage of office space. Current government projections show steady economic growth for at least the construction period.
With Red Hat thinking, some of the directors think the proposed building looks quite ugly. While it would be highly cost-effective, they worry that people would not like to work in it.
When they think with the Black Hat, they worry that government projections may be wrong. The economy may be about to enter a 'cyclical downturn', in which case the office building may be empty for a long time.
If the building is not attractive, then companies will choose to work in another better-looking building at the same rent.
With the Yellow Hat, however, if the economy holds up and their projections are correct, the company stands to make a great deal of money.
If they are lucky, maybe they could sell the building before the next downturn, or rent to tenants on long-term leases that will last through any recession.
With Green Hat thinking they consider whether they should change the design to make the building more pleasant. Perhaps they could build prestige offices that people would want to rent in any economic climate. Alternatively, maybe they should invest the money in the short term to buy up property at a low cost when a recession comes.
The Blue Hat has been used by the meeting's Chair to move between the different thinking styles. He or she may have needed to keep other members of the team from switching styles, or from criticizing other peoples' points.
Key points:
Six Thinking Hats is a good technique for looking at the effects of a decision from a number of different points of view.
It allows necessary emotion and skepticism to be brought into what would otherwise be purely rational decisions. It opens up the opportunity for creativity within Decision Making. It also helps, for example, persistently pessimistic people to be positive and creative.
Plans developed using the '6 Thinking Hats' technique are sounder and more resilient than would otherwise be the case. This technique may also help you to avoid public relations mistakes, and spot good reasons not to follow a course of action, before you have committed to it.
Comments : It does work but require more than colours. To be exact, giving definitions to the issues that need to be discussed
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