Retired

After a whole lot of years and a whole lot of fun I have finally decided to hang it up and retire.  Enjoying it fabulously!

Daniel Edward Wiese Presented with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award by Marquis Who’s Who

I was surprised and very honored to receive this award. This link connects with the press release announcing it.
http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/press-release-service/452762

How to Run Your Business (Into the Ground)

At my age, it seems time to go ahead and say what I think. My thoughts are not meant to call anyone out; they are the result of 65 years of watching what’s going on. I firmly believe many businesses inflict practices upon themselves that hamstring their potential. It’s like they tie one hand behind their backs and it creates a drag on the whole economy. Here’s what I’m suggesting for businesses, including non-profits and really any organization. So there’s no misunderstanding, this is sarcasm. If you’re unsure of exactly what that means, better Google it.

Use acronyms every chance you get in all your communications, especially with promotional materials targeted to prospects. This creates a sense of curiosity, a game if you will, and people like games, so trying to figure out what you’re talking about with your sets of initials will be highly entertaining for prospects, not to mention customers.

Don’t forget this is sarcasm. Using acronyms in copy is approved by journalism authorities after first spelling it out, so it must be the correct thing to do. It certainly doesn’t matter if people have to keep going back to the beginning of your piece to remember what your acronyms mean. This improves comprehension by repetition. And of course people are definitely into doing a lot of reading these days. And most folks are infinitely patient in recent days.

Again…sarcasm. Make sure your name is meaningless. After all, what’s in a name anyway? Let people imagine what it might mean and then try to connect it to anything they care about. Nice mind game and, again, people like games.

Be sure to be as clever as possible with your name so people are curious about what it might mean or what you do exactly…more importantly what you might do for them. After all, having a name that is descriptive but dull, while it will tell people what you do, takes all the fun out of it.

If by chance your name explains what you do, as soon as possible turn your name into an acronym. After all, IBM is highly successful so there’s no question you’ll be successful if you follow their lead. By the way, what does IBM stand for?

Don’t be concerned if prospects get the impression from your use of acronyms that you are arrogant, exclusionary, special because you have the “code” and they don’t, uninterested in them by making it hard for them to understand you, and several other problems you create. Or maybe they’ll think you’re just too lazy to spell things out. That’s all helpful in establishing a productive business relationship.

Since almost everyone uses acronyms, you should, too. The key to success is to follow the herd. Be sure to communicate as you would with Twitter. OMG, u’ll b so cool. Even if your customers can’t figure out your gibberish you’ll still be so cool.

Use plenty of jargon in your customer communications. It makes you look really smart. And include plenty of the latest lingo being used by the young. It makes you look like you’re with it. So what if the most important thing is to be understandable and clear with your communications. Doesn’t matter if your customers aren’t as up on the latest stupid jargon as you are.

Be sure to make the first person to greet someone who contacts your company for the first time is your lowest paid employee. Their role is very secondary versus yours, for example. A receptionist or a telephone operator are menials at best. And certainly don’t waste money training them on how to do their jobs. So what if this person is the only one who can make the all-important first impression on a potential customer?

Better yet, let an automated voice system be a new prospect’s first contact. And make sure it has plenty of options because you never know why people might be calling. This is especially impressive if you are a small company because people will assume you must be big to be stupid enough to do this.

Another great money saving technique is robo calls. Why waste money using live callers when you can have a robot do it for pennies? Gee, I wonder how many people hang up immediately when they realize there’s no one there? Plus, maybe they’ll stay on long enough to figure out who the fool is who’s behind the call.

Don’t bother to consult the menials who actually use your equipment when making buying decisions on replacing it. They lack the know-how and mental capacity to make these kinds of important choices. You, of course, know best what they need. Don’t blame them when your choice turns out to be totally impractical and unusable.

Hire customer service people from overseas in order to save money. A good percentage of your customers will probably leave you since they can’t understand much of what these people are saying, but you’ll continue saving money until you’re out of business over it.

Another good way to cut expenses is to unload your older, higher salaried employees and replace them with young kids at much lower salaries. Who needs all that accumulated wisdom you’ll be unloading? Plus you’ll be going a great service to the young kids by letting them screw up so they can get as smart and experienced in several years as the old folks you canned.

Make money the key to your business success. After all, that’s what life is all about, right? And, of course, money drives people to do good work. So be sure to make all your motivational techniques revolve around money. And also make sure your motivational techniques are based on punishment, rather than reward.

In fact, make sure money is a major part of your vision statement so everyone knows how crucial it is to you. That way, their focus will be on that, even though it will be at the expense of any thought about customer service.

Be sure your vision statement is highly detailed so everything is covered. Don’t worry if no one can remember it when they are under stress, so they’ll know what matters when the chips are down. Those vision statements are mainly good for impressing potential investors anyway.

Ignore all the nonsense about differences between the generations in the workplace. They’ll just have to learn to get along or they can hit the highway. Besides, you’ll find it a lot of fun to witness the disagreements, arguments and resentments fester.

Treat everyone the same and hold them to rigid rules. Fairness uber alles. Eventually only those who like your one-size-fits-all approach will be in your workforce.

Never give employees the highest marks in their evaluations no matter how good a job they do. Gives them something to aspire to so they’ll try all the harder. Ignore the reality that many of them will say the hell with it, there’s no pleasing the boss, so why bother to do my best work.

Place top priority on profit and squeeze every last dime you can out of both employees and customers. You owe this to your investors. Who cares about the turnover you’ll generate.

In your marketing strategy, focus on a one-size fits all approach. This will be the most efficient way to go and will save you a lot of money on advertising. While you’ll miss a lot of targets by failing to focus on the wants and needs of different segments of the market, saving money makes it worth it.

Rely on your gut to make all your important business decisions. After all, who knows your business better than you? Just because your customers have the money you’d like them to give to you is no reason to pay attention to what they want.

If you decide marketing research might be a smarter way to go than relying on your gut, just use Survey Monkey or some other cheap method to do it. That stuff about random sampling is just academic nonsense. Same thing with low response rates and non-response bias. Doesn’t really matter if your results are accurate. Marketing research is mostly done to be able to say you did it.

Certainly don’t waste your money on advertising. If your organization is good enough at what you do, obviously those who need what you’re selling will come to you. People are plenty smart and are very well aware of what’s out there in the big old world. Anyway because people are exposed to hundreds of ads daily doesn’t mean they’d see yours anyway. So why bother? Just because no one ever heard of you doesn’t mean you can’t do good business.

If you do advertise, make sure you include everything you possibly can in your ads. There’ll probably something that’ll catch your prospect’s eye. Don’t worry if they are overwhelmed by the quantity of stuff in your ad and have trouble distinguishing your cluttered ad from all the other over-cluttered ads out there.

Mind Position Matters!

In 1981 Al Ries and Jack Trout published a landmark book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.  It seems to me that the lessons they taught are being ignored more and more in these days of emphasizing new media, email campaigns, Facebook, Twitter, etc.   Here’s the highlights of what they said:

In our over communicated society (even more so in 2012), very little communication actually takes place.  There’s just too much noise in the market to expect you can just say something and expect it to be heard.   To communicate, a company or other entity must create a “position” in the prospect’s mind.  The position must take into consideration not only the company’s own strengths and weaknesses, but those of its competitors as well.  The easy way to get into a person’s mind is to be first.  If you can’t be first, then you must find a way to position yourself against the product, the politician, the person who did get there first.  To cope with our over communicated society, people have learned to rank products on mental ladders.  Before you can position anything, you must know where it is on the product ladder in the mind as measured by top-of-mind awareness.  Then you have to recognize you must do the positioning in an entirely different way depending upon where you are on that mental ladder.  If you are not first, you lack the communication advantages available to whoever is first.

Ries and Trout had a lot more to say, including the importance of your name in communicating a definition of what you do and, if possible, even creating interest and intrigue.  They also offer some sage advice on the perils of line extension.

So what does this have to do with the fortunes of your business or your non-profit?  First of all, understand that the following is the backbone of Adoption/Diffusion Theory and the Purchase Funnel.  There are lots of ways to present this.  I’m going to take the approach of dealing with Nirvana, painting a picture of the ideal situation for an entity.  Here’s what perfection looks like, followed by an increasingly more realistic picture.

In a marketing research study, 100% of people in your target market say your name first when asked what names they think of for your product/service category.  You can’t do better than that, but it’s very unlikely to happen.  More likely and a second best result is that the majority of people name you first, but some name you second, third, fourth, etc.  That’s still very good.  However, memories being what they are, it is more likely that there will be some people who can’t name you at all, but recognize your name when the interviewer reads it to them.  Now things are going downhill.  Unfortunately, there may be some people who don’t even recognize your name when it’s read to them.  And if a lot of people don’t recognize your name, you have a real problem.  As a marketing analyst I’d tell you that you’d better improve this before anything else and make people familiar with your name.

You may think you know where you stand on awareness, but understand you are dealing with peoples’ perceptions and their perceptions are what matters, no matter how far from correct you may think they are.   You must care what the folks who have the money (or whatever) you want think.  Even if you do no advertising and only do cold-call selling, awareness is critical.  Your sales people will have much more success calling people who have heard of you and, more importantly, have at least some interest in what you might be able to do for them.  Your good name can be almost as helpful to a sale as a reference from a friend of your prospect.

Along with awareness, the marketing research that forms the blueprint for your marketing plan includes:

• A measure of interest in your product category
• How important it is perceived to be by your target audience
• Their level of knowledge about you and your product category
• How square their knowledge is with reality
• The degree to which they’ve considered using or buying you
• And their take on that consideration

If you’d like to know more or have any questions, please just let me know.  I’d be very pleased to help you manage your mind position and improve your business.

The Trust Edge

Friends,
I support a lot of causes and organizations, but one of the most important to me is the Better Business Bureau. My A+ Accredited Business status is a huge source of pride. Besides supporting the Bureau with my dues, I also serve on the Cedar Rapids-Iowa City Advisory Council and the Statewide Iowa Better Business Bureau Board. This Spring I attended the Better Business Bureau Integrity Awards Luncheon in Des Moines. The speaker was Dave Horsager from the Minneapolis area. And I was blown away by what he had to say. He spoke on trust, what it is, how you earn it, how you can lose it and why it is so vitally important. As a bonus he did it while doing clever and meaningful sleight of hand tricks to emphasize his message.
We spoke afterward and he is a personable, friendly young man (compared to me) who exudes trustworthiness. As many speakers do, he had copies of his book, The Trust Edge, available for sale and I bought one. I’ve been reading it a little at a time each day and in my mind it is the most meaningful book I’ve read since Positioning, the Battle for Your Mind. I strongly recommend you get a copy and read it. It’s an easy read and extremely important, especially for resolving many of the political, financial and integrity problems we are facing these days. I believe if you follow what Horsager presents you will be successful in life and in business. If you don’t think trust matters, ponder the difference between “I’d trust him with my life” and “I don’t trust her any farther than I can throw her.”
One of the “pillars” of trust he discusses is clarity. It has inspired me to do two things. One is to clarify my vision of my business, which I now say is to “find the practical truth for my client that adds to their success.” Second, I will add a “trustworthiness” question to my usual battery of brand positioning questions.

Creating a Mosaic of Knowledge

I’ve talked about proper sampling and mentioned that I’d gotten a fix on proper use of the so-called “research” that seems popular these days.  Here’s my thinking:

 I’ve had problems with believing we’re achieving random samples with on-line, social media methods, etc.  And we’re not, but that’s not what they should be used for.

 I hate to use a military analogy, but I understand military from my training.  Multiple regression was hard for me to grasp in spite of Iowa State’s best efforts to educate me.  But when I went to Artillery School at Ft. Sill after ROTC in college to serve my 6 months duty, I understood it.  In the Fire Direction Center you measure range and direction to target and then consult manuals (computers now) that crank in a whole bunch of things: number of powder bags, wind speed and direction, the age of the howitzer’s tube, etc. and arrive at a direction and range that should hit the target.  That’s the same thing as multiple regression.  Hmm, thought I, I get it.

 So how does the military apply to sampling?  The job of the Intelligence Officer in the Army is to gather information from any and all sources, analyze it and decide what’s actionable.  Some info is only suggestive…from commo intercepts, squad reports of hearing something out there, maybe…twitter, social media searches, etc.  You wouldn’t move your troops based on it nor should you take any action with your business.  Some info is a little better…indicative…focus groups, qualitative probing.  But you still wouldn’t commit troops.  Only when you have definitive info from eye witness reports or flyovers…quantitative results based on valid random samples…do you commit troops.  Or change the strategic direction of a company.  I think all the potential ways to gather data are useful, but should be used to create a mosaic of knowledge that you then confirm and verify before committing to major changes.  If a company thinks they can’t afford to do that, they take an enormous risk of heading off into left field.  Just like you can march your troops into an ambush based on incomplete data.

Another Slant on Sampling

This post looks kind of like the last one, but it’s different.  It’s the same table but there’s some added text that I wrote in response to my reaction to a lot of the “research” that goes on these days. 

HOW BIG A SAMPLE DO YOU NEED? 

 Here’s the answer. You can be 95% confident the results of your survey will be plus or minus the percent point shown in the table below for various sample sizes. This means the range should contain the result in 19 out of 20 times the survey would be repeated. If your survey result is 50%, for example, you can be 95% sure it’s really between 44% and 56% if your sample size is 300.

 STATISTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF SURVEY RESULTS

Sample Size	95% Confidence Tolerance
2,000	+/- 2 percentage points
1,000	+/- 3 percentage points
500	+/- 4 percentage points
400	+/- 5 percentage points
300	+/- 6 percentage points
200	+/- 7 percentage points
100	+/- 10 percentage points

 

So that’s all there is to it, right? If you just broadcast your survey to thousands of people and get a really big sample, you’ve got it made, right?  Wrong!  It’s not quite that simple.  Here are some additional considerations:

 The above table only applies if you are dealing with a random sample.  And that’s not always easy to get.  Random samples cost money and there is some exacting science involved.  Don’t assume you have one unless you’re aware of the many considerations comprising randomness.  Why?  Because if you don’t have a random sample of the target you want to understand, you can easily be misled by interpreting the results as an accurate portrayal of your market when in fact it isn’t.  You’ve just successfully defeated the purpose of most marketing research.

 The table above gives you a measure of sampling tolerance, i.e. the precision of your survey.  This means, in gunnery terms, how close you come to the same spot with repeated shots.  It does not tell you about the accuracy of your survey.  That means, although the precision of an answer might be excellent, was the question one that accurately measures the things you are trying to measure, i.e. did it hit the bulls-eye?  Just because you asked the question you can’t assume you got the answer you need.  Again this is a job for an expert.

 Then there is non-response bias.  If you send your survey via mail, email or some other method and only 5, 10 or 15 percent respond, you have a significant case of non-response bias.  It’s the same with telephone interviewing.  Non-response bias emanates from the strong probability that those who responded are different than those who did not.  It’s extraordinarily difficult to determine whether the results of your survey are legitimate.  There is an art based on years of hard-won experience in taking steps to minimize bias.  It is really easy for amateurs who design and execute their own survey projects to come up with answers that are erroneous.  Naturally, that not only defeats the purpose of marketing research, it can be more dangerous than doing nothing at all.

One of the questions I get asked a lot is how big a sample do I need. The information below provides the answer. It gives you a guide to how precise the answers to a survey will be and is a useful tool for me. Hope it gives you some future direction for your planning.

HOW BIG A SAMPLE DO YOU NEED? 

Here’s the answer. You can be 95% confident the results of your survey will be plus or minus the percent point shown in the table below for various sample sizes. This means the range should contain the result in 19 out of 20 times the survey would be repeated. If your survey result is 50%, for example, you can be 95% sure it’s really between 44% and 56% if your sample size is 300.

STATISTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF SURVEY RESULTS

Sample Size	95% Confidence Tolerance
2,000	+/- 2 percentage points
1,000	+/- 3 percentage points
500	+/- 4 percentage points
400	+/- 5 percentage points
300	+/- 6 percentage points
200	+/- 7 percentage points
100	+/- 10 percentage points

 

Compliments of

Dan Wiese Marketing Research

2108 Greenwood Drive SE

Cedar Rapids, IA 52403

(319) 364-2866

danwiese@mchsi.com

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