Diamonds Are Forever

First: I apologise for not blogging since the past many weeks. I find myself a lot busier than anticipated and at the end of the day, I'm left with no energy to write "well".

This blog is your backstage pass and you'll get to see how strategies and ads are developed and how a marketer markets his own agency. But today, lets start with something totally different and a bit irrelevant.

Maestro's & their Music

My fav inventor - Thomas Alva Edison invented the phonogram in 1877. Now music could be recorded and played back!

It was magic for most people! But a few people were mad with rage. A few people resisted the new invention. These were the managers and maestros of "old" music.

People paid good money to see 80 musicians play together in a symphony orchestra. A single symphony earned its backers thousands of dollars. If this symphony is recorded and sold to the masses for chump change, what would happen to their industry? Who would ever come to listen to a live orchestra?

Maestros of old music tried to resist. But what they found shocked them. The demand for live orchestra's didn't dwindle. Yes, people could listen to the same music in their homes now, but they were still willing to pay big money to come listen to the real thing!

The old maestros didn't go bankrupt. But the new millionaires emerged from the new industry - that of selling recorded music.

--

The New Diamond Age

Its been close to 130 years since the phonogram was invented. There is a new resistance going on. In a different industry - the multi-billion dollar diamond industry.

Mother nature pressurizes sedimentary carbon and turns it into diamonds. This process of turning carbon into diamond takes place over millions to billions of years. Today, modern machine has cut short this million year time duration to a few days.

Diamonds claim such exhorbitant prices because they are rare. But these machines have the capability of producing as many diamonds as needed - turning luxurious diamonds into commodity products. And thats why the diamond merchants are scared.

(Disclosure: Every elderly person I ever knew in childhood worked in the diamond or jewelry industry.)

In my recent conversations with diamond merchants, I come across this "resistance" sentiment. "Something's gotto be done to stop such innovations." "DeBeers and DTC has to come out with an invention that can differentiate the natural diamonds from these new machine made cultural diamonds." "The entire diamond industry will go bankrupt!"

I don't concur with such sentiments.

But of 3 things I'm certain:

1. The acoustic, electrical and computer industries will be the biggest benefactors. They won't have to find substitutes for diamonds because of its high cost anymore. Good bye silicon. It'll soon be the diamond age.

2. The old diamond industry won't go bankrupt. But they will shrink.

3. The new millionaires will be made in the new cultural diamond market.

The question is: will the old merchants invest their bundles of money in this new diamond technology or spend it on trying to find ways to (unsuccessfully) crush the new wave?

Advertisement for a Client

Here is the first draft of an ad I just wrote for a client. It'll run in a few glass industry magazines next month.

Naming The Company

Disclosure: I'm the number-one name plagiarizer.

Because I'm bad at naming, I steal and tweak good names for my own purposes. Case-in-point: While thinking of a name for a website 2-3 years back, I just took Sean D'Souza's PsychoTactics.com as my template. And came up with BizTactics.com.

A year and a half back, while thinking of a name for a Marketing newsletter, I stole Dien Rice and Michael Ross's newsletter name. They called their newsletter "Entrepreneurs Hotsheet." I called mine "Marketing Hotsheet." (When I emailed Dien Rice and asked him if I could steal the term Hotsheet, he said he himself had stolen the term from Gordon Jay Alexander. Hehe :0)

While naming my new marketing agency, I started searching for the BEST name out there.

And in my opinion, that is: Guerilla Marketing. That one term launched an entire empire for Jay Conrad Levinson.

When people hear the term "Guerilla Marketing" - they instantly recognize that it means low cost irregular marketing ideas. Yet, the term "guerilla" surprises people when it is associated with marketing instead of warfare. And thus its instantly memorable with a deep meaning associated with the memory.

My idea was to replace Guerilla with some other cool term. Came up with "Neuro" (because I've been researching the depths of neuroscience and how people are motivated, how to gain their attention, how to seep into their memories...).

But Neuro Marketing had already become a "generic" term as a few articles had used it to describe the new and controversial brain-scanning-for-marketing-purposes topic.

So switched to "Neuro Branding".

(btw, chatting up with a few people in the last few days, I find that biz owners in Bombay like the term "branding" more than "marketing." So it might be a stroke-of-genius after all! Or maybe its just that I'm finding proof to back me up now that the name is finalized! Ha!)

Anatomy of a Good Name

What makes a good name?

1. Some people simply use their own names to call a company. Especially lawyers and doctors name their firms after themselves - something like - Dead, Boring & co. Some of the biggest companies of today are named after someone. Procter & Gamble. Dell. I'm not that big a fan of such kind of naming. A name could be your best form of advertising. Naming a company after a person is just massaging the ego. It has no benefit.

2. Some people invent names. These words have no meaning of their own. Its like a blank black board. Any meaning can be associated to the name. If you have a lot of money to advertise, this is a good idea. Such names have the possibility of becoming house hold names. Xerox. Kodak. Igor (a name consultancy company.)

In fact, here is something interesting: George Eastman's comments to the British Patent Office when registering a trademark for Kodak:

"This is not a foreign name or word; it was constructed by me to serve a definite purpose. It has the following merits as a trade-mark word: first it is short; second, it is not capable of mispronunciation; third, it does not resemble anything in the art and cannot be associated with anything in the art."

3. Some people pick a word to name their company that means something completely different. Amazon.com for an online book shop. Apple for a computer company. A Hundred Monkeys for a name consultancy company! Frankly, I don't know why they do that. But this type of names are easy to remember. And with some advertising, can become associated with the product.

4. Some people simply open the dictionary and pick out generic terms to name their company. Like America OnLine. International Business Machines. These names are good because they instantly pass on their meaning to people. No guessing required as to what the company does. The problem with these names is that they are sometimes too long. And usually, people shorten it to AOL or IBM.

Rule of thumb: keep names shorter than 3-4 phonemes (pronunciation sounds). Or people will shorten them while speaking.

My favourite names are a mix of option 3 & 4. Using names that don't require any guessing to know what the company behind them does. But yet, these names should not be generic, but should have some out-of-the-blue meaning.

In the next post, I'll tell you about why I chose the name I chose for my marketing agency.

Business Card Design

This is going to be the back of my business card

Most business cards are boring. And thats why most business cards are thrown away.

So I'm creating "double duty" business cards. I'll be using both the sides of the business card. The front side is not yet done as I had to ask someone else (a friend of a friend of a relative) to create the logo for Neuro Branding. But it'll just have the logo, my name, address and phone number.

The back of the card is where all the magic is.

People read the title of a report on the business card. If they want it for free, they call me. I take down their name and address. And send them their report with some sales material. They are also added to a mailing list and receive educational + sales material every so often.

The report is full of ideas on how to make sure that business cards aren't thrown away. I'm still writing it. And will post a link on this blog for you to see.

These business cards are surely going to be more expensive than the normal boring ones. But they'll actually work in earning business!

How do you like it?

Business Plans

I was talking with a friend and explaining to him how I'm opening a marketing agency in Bombay. After a lot of enlightening discussions, he asks me if I have a "business plan" to show to him. And I told him:

"I've never created a business plan"

Long time back, I'd read a book on starting a business - which gave a plan on how to write business plans in detail. To me, creating 30 page business plans seems like a lot of work. And so till date, I've never created the "traditional" business plans.

Now if you want external financing, then I think it makes sense creating business plans and financial plans. But I've always self financed all my little ideas and ventures till date. My first business, which is now defunct, required around Rs. 60,000. I bartered and brokered a deal for services worth Rs. 56,600 and took a loan of Rs 400 from my dad. Maybe I'll tell you about it some other day. But that first business gave me enough money to fund a few other ideas I've had over the years.

But business plans are important!

Yes, yes. I've heard it all before. Business plans help you make your thoughts tangible. They give you a map that can guide you towards your goals.

Its all true. Its just that these usual 30 page business plans are extravagant. And most entrepreneurs don't need these fancy plans.

My business plans have always been 1-2 pages long and very unconventional. Once, as romantic as it sounds, I fleshed out a whole business idea in a restaurant on a paper napkin. :)

Here is how I now create my one page business plans

I draw down 2 lines to create 3 columns on a piece of paper. First column is Production. Second column is Marketing. Third column is finance.

• I write every small thing that will be required of me to do or get in the production column. Rent, employees, business cards, phone lines, inventory - everything goes here.
  
  
• In the marketing column comes 2 parts: 1. How will I find new clients for the business. 2. Things I'll do to keep these clients loyal.
  
  
• In the finance column, I simply write down what every item in production and marketing column will cost me. This requires a lot of calling to find out what things actually cost.

Thats about all my business plans have. Some time back, I learnt the art of mind-mapping from Sean D'Souza. And if I'm in the mood, I use mind maps instead of columns too.

Production. Marketing. And Finance. If you are running a business, you can't afford to ignore even one of these 3 factors.

(Most businesses have a strong grip on production. But not so strong a grip on marketing and/or finance. Even if you outsource any of the 3 factors to others, its necessary to have a general idea about them.)

(I don't have access to a scanner. Or else, I would have attached the edited version of my marketing co. business plan to this blog for you to see how really simple it really is.)

Marketing for a Marketing Firm

How does a marketer market his new marketing agency?

If you would like to know the answer to that, stick around with me. I'll be narrating my experiences of opening a marketing agency in Mumbai, India - where many small businesses don't think marketing is necessary - that if the product is good, the public will come!

You'll read about my frustations, breakthroughs, eureka moments, $%^& curses (edited to keep this blog clean) and just about everything I do to market my own marketing agency.

As the saying goes "Fools learn from experience. Sages learn from history."

Here is your chance to learn from my experiences of starting and marketing a new firm on a shoestring budget!

kind regards from warm Bombay,
- Ankesh Kothari