Steve Shu on Management, Consulting, and Leadership

Stretching Your Personal Brand Through Brand Management Concepts

Linda VandeVrede invited me to post on her blog regarding brand-related topics, and I did so by providing some perspectives on "personal branding". "Personal branding" is not a widely understood term, so readers may find it interesting from a career and personal development perspective. In this post, I set the frame in the context of how companies look at a key aspect of brand management - in particular, brand associations. In my post, I take the position that personal branding is best built by making investments in three areas: 1) refining the meaning that defines where you want to be, 2) making conscious investments to improve yourself, and 3) ensuring that you use the prior investments to help and reach out to others. For more on the post, please visit Linda VandeVrede's blog.

Business Development May Be On The Upswing Careerwise, But What Is Business Development?

Earlier this year I had heard from sources at various business schools that given the recession and slower consulting and investment banking hiring, a lot of MBA graduates were looking to careers in business development. This is a great development, but in my experience the term "business development" means quite different things to different people. Here's a paraphrasing of some of the types of statements I've heard in the workplace:

• "Business development is about new customer acquisition and sales."
• "Sales personnel are divided into existing accounts and hunters. Business development looks for breakthrough, strategic sales."
• "Business development handles strategic partnerships & deals."
• "Channel sales are the primary focus of the business development team."
• "The VP of Business Development works financing, acquisition, and strategy activities."
• "Business development establishes the cross-promotional marketing deals."
• "Business development focuses on strategic initiatives (whether partnership, financing, product) identified by the Board."
• "The business development team is facilitating design of a new product with XYZ company and our development team."
• "Business development sells product to the channel."
• "Oh. You handle a mixture of finance, marketing & sales, strategy functions. You're business development."
• "Business development folks are jacks of many different trades."
• "Business development is about getting larger partners to commercialize on brand extensions that you may not be able to handle on your own."
• "The sales team does that. You want to know what business development does? We need to talk about that in my office. Come on in, and please shut the door so we can have some privacy."

There is an element of truth in all of these statements. Business development can be all of these things. It really depends on company. In my mind, however, the role of business development is to find new strategic opportunities for the company and start the company on the path to execute (incubation). It is not uncommon for business developers to have a combination of strategy, marketing & sales, finance, legal, and operations background.

Based on my experience in business development, here's the flavors I've run into (roughly from more to less common):

• Partnership development
• Strategic market development and sales
• Strategic marketing
• Mergers, acquisitions, and financing
• New business line exploration
• Channel sales
• New product development

What are your experiences with business development professionals? To what extent is it a well-defined function within your business? What types of issues have you run into?

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Mini-Brand Audit of Guitar Hero By Activision (Independent Research)

Listed below is a pre-release, draft copy of a brand audit on the Guitar Hero brand by Activision. I performed this mini-brand audit as a self-funded, independent party, and I created this document for reasons related to business development, marketing, and teaching purposes (brand management & consulting).

The purpose of a brand audit is to provide a company with a starting point for managing brand architecture, brand identity, and brand-building activities. Brand audits are often refreshed every one to two years and may be done by either internal staff of the company or external consultants.

Although I am a stickler for crafting problem statements, I did not explicitly articulate the problem statement assosciated with this audit (which is something I typically recommend in a consulting deliverable). That said, the general notion of an audit performed by an external 3rd party is to provide a wholistic, and independent view of strategy and tacics. I believe this document accomplishes that goal within the described limits stated in the document.

For the coming weeks, I would appreciate input and feedback from folks. I would also appreciate help in spreading the word as I am not a mainstream media channel. :)

Again, there are few angles I am thinking about in terms of releasing this note in the public domain:

• business development purposes for consulting
• general marketing & personal brand development
• instruction and teaching purposes

I plan to finalize version 1.0 of the document and re-release around September 1, 2009 before key milestones are reached by Activision and competitors.

Thanks for your interest. Please help to spread the word!

Draft copy of brand audit here (PDF file replaced by update below).

Update (8/30/09): Version 1.0 of Guitar Hero brand audit here (PDF file).

Update (9/4/09): Guitar Hero and related subbrand logos get a bit of a refresh (see here and here). The changes are consistent with the strategies outlined in the audit.

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Collecting My Favorite Multimedia Clips and Exhibits For Marketing Course

Starting to collect my favorite videos and photos on my new posterous site (marketing section at http://steveshu.posterous.com/tag/marketing) for teaching business school classes (e.g., marketing, brand management). Folks may find some of the videos and photos entertaining.

I am still trying to find the best way to organize the videos in the context of what part of the marketing or brand management framework is being covered. I may also find a better way to include more detailed marketing notes on each video or photo. In any case, please feel free to send me links of your favorite videos. I may extend the posterous site to include organizational behavior topics, depending on my fall teaching load.

As background, I am using my posterous site as a scratchpad space separate from this blog and Twitter streams.

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If I Was A Brand (Marketing Collage)

When one is thinking about developing a brand identity from a marketing perspective, it is best to think broadly so that a cohesive system and set of principles are built to support the underlying cause. Dr. David Aaker (e.g., in his book "Building Strong Brands") puts forth a system that challenges practitioners to decompose the way they think about brand identity (both core and extended) along several dimensions, including "Brand as a Product", "Brand as an Organization", "Brand as a Person", and "Brand as a Symbol".

Although I leave the terms above undefined here (because they are defined more rigorously in Dr. Aaker's book), it is a useful exercise in some marketing and brand management classes to have students build a collage as if "they were a brand" by clipping pictures from magazines. The visual imagery is intended to connote some aspects of your core brand identity (some of your "essence") along multiple dimensions (e.g., quality, personality, attributes, skills).

Here's an example that I pieced together for myself (note: first draft, essentially unreviewed). What do you see? What does it tell you about how I see myself? If you know me, does it fit with what you know about me? What consistencies or inconsistencies do you see?

Tony Karrer on LinkedIn and Web 2.0 for Management Consultants

Tony Karrer gave a Web 2.0 presentation in Los Angeles to an audience at the Institute of Management Consultants (unfortunately I was not able to attend having just learned about it that day).  He covers two aspects: serving clients and reaching prospects. Apparently, most of the interest was in the latter area, and as a summary of one of his theses, I reference the title of his blog post, "LinkedIn - Prospecting No - Conversation Yes : eLearning Technology".

For those looking for more info as it relates to consultants and LinkedIn, Ford Harding is one of the gurus I've looked to as a guiding light when I committed in early 2000ish to work at actively improving my sales and sales management IQ, particularly around professional services sales. Here's one of Ford Harding's posts on "Liking LinkedIn?". He has other posts regarding LinkedIn as well, so be sure to dig in and poke around if you have a chance.

Corporations Are Learning About Social Media Faster

A lot of people in Twitter circles characterize that twittering feels like the days of early majority blogging, for me circa 2004ish with an even less mature toolset (I am being generous). With respect to business use, it seems like everyone needed more help back then, as not everyone came out of the gate running. Here Dave Sify summarized the state of the corporate blogosphere in 2004. How few the companies were. Later at the beginning of 2006 and indicative of a forthcoming early majority, Robert Scoble and Shel Israel were motivated to publish their book, "Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing The Way Businesses Talk With Customers. Well, it's 2009 now, and we're in a large recession. But it seems like businesses are smarter this time around in the use of social media like Twitter. I recently ran across an article on Corporate Twitter Accounts worth following. Seems like we skipped the whole convincing phase this time around. Much less of the skeptical talk time this time around.

Kudos to those companies that are able to build brand, improve customer service, and potentially lower costs (latter less widely known) using Twitter. How often is it that companies are able to get marketing and customer service to sync up, let alone talk? It seems that we are making progress, even if it means we'll all have to learn the best practices of communicating in 140 characters or less.

Update (3/20/09): Not business-centric, but here's an article that indicate social networks more popular than email (see CNET article regarding Nielsen Online study)? Not sure how this was measured, but I don't think it is intuitively true for me, even though I consider myself a moderate blogger.

Update (3/23/09): Steve Rubel has a good post entitled, "Customer Service is the New PR". I like his post because it ties together some of the concrete stuff going on in the social media space (along with references to some of the more esoteric, forward-looking items).

Financial Times ComMetrics Global 500 Blog Index

For what it's worth (FWIW) - I just ran across this Blog Index (Alpha). Not sure when this was introduced (perhaps vintage 2008?). I don't fully understand the scope and rankings yet, but I find the discovery interesting given my time away from actively being involved in the corporate blogging space. Notes to self: one consulting firm (Accenture) on the list at #18 of 48, heavy tech in top 10, and mixed industries in top 30.

Update (2/7/09): Dr. Urs (CTO associated with the technology) contacted me to inform me that the tool is still in Alpha phase. More info on how the tool works can be found here. Registration and accounts can be obtained here. The is also a Twitter stream covering tool improvements, etc.