Successful Corporate Strategies

But another familiar issue with corporate strategies is that they stay nothing but boardroom talk. (Don’t take me wrong here; there’s absolutely nothing wrong with talking about strategies at boardroom level.)
Yet you don’t want to end up with too many employees even failing to name the mission and vision statement of their own organization.

What you do want is your company’s strategic vision to become successful.  This is only possible if your company’s vision is translated in practical plans that work.

Where Are We Heading At, Captain?

Could you imagine how a ship set sail with a crew which isn’t aware of the location they’re heading at? Probably not.
Let’s use this metaphor to describe how you managers will execute your vision for building your organization.

Preferably a ship has only a single captain who decides about the direction.
And you don’t want to have any of the crew members interfere the wheel, because it this will make the ship drift about.
Also it’s important to keep the ship on speed, so the crew should set the sails properly and the process of  raising the sails should elapse flawlessly.
Besides, there should be proper communication in a way that the captain can adjust the direction based on physical conditions like the depth of the water or the weather forecast.
And finally, sometimes there’s just a need to set anchor and get all resources filled up again.

Visualization Can Make People Move

If you want to get people enthusiastic for an idea, one of the most powerful ways to do so is to describe in detail how the future could look with that dream realized.

This illustration part is so important, because it makes it possible to put things in context through comparison (this is actually one of the first topics covered in Predictably Irrational – you should read it).

“We are all beings of habit and we tend to repeat what we are comfortable with.
This constrains our creativity, prevents us from exploring new ideas, and hampers our dealing with the full complexity of new issues.”
- Noel Tichy (1983)

Visualization is one of the most powerful ways to break through the comfort zone.

Are you using it already?

Post from: Conversion Stream

Breaking Through the Comfort Zone

The Importance of Advertising

While Google’s mission states:

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Hopefully, they are using a somehow more enhanced version of this statement internally.

The most important change I presume that have been made is the Who part. This would bring things in a more ‘consumer-centric’ perspective, i.e. a marketing perspective. Especially since the switching barriers are so low on the web.

Advertising Is Essential

Anyway, as 97% of Google’s revenue is from Ads and 67% of the total revenue is being made on Google’s websites they should be really focused on making the ads a valuable addition within the user experience.

And that is what they do.

So, What Is It They Change?

And they improve the system:

1. Increasing Customer Satisfaction
   Making top positions more expensive, to make them only affordable for websites with high conversion rates;
   
2. Improving Trust
   Adding branded elements to increase user trust and gain more control on the advertisers websites;
   
3. Leverage Existing Brands
   Offering premium services for free to large advertisers, to improve the visibility of brands in the search engine;
   
4. Creating Experience
   Experimenting with features to improve the attractiveness of the ad area, while promoting other Google services like Product Search.
   

They offer quality tools for free:

1. Google Analytics
   By offering a great a web analysis product like Analytics for free, they help website owners to improve their websites and thus improve the resources they send traffic to from the search engine results;
2. Google Website Optimizer
   Another great example is Website Optimizer – their free A/B and Multivariate testing tool – which of course has the intention to improve conversion rate and is another way to improve the user experience.

Where Is Google Heading With Search?

Most, if not all, changes Google is going to make to both the paid and organic part of their search experience does have the intention to increase perceived service quality.

Let’s have a look at a marketing services model (Grönroos, 2000) which shows how to manage the perceived service quality:

Expected Search Quality

So far, Google has relied heavenly on consumer needs and word of mouth. It was recently they started experimenting with television as a communication medium.

It’s quite common for Google to push products through users, like they did with invitations for Gmail while playing with the attractiveness of scarcity by limiting the number of invitations.

They push their image in many ways:

1. Implementing tons of small features and communicating them aggressively to support the perceived innovative character of Google
2. Decreasing product launch time by offering services and products in beta to users to increase consumer loyalty
3. Offering access to services like Google Labs to stimulate word of mouth
4. Imitating features launched by competitors or suggesting they study algorithms as if they can copy, improve and use to keep their product superior
5. Put forward that the impossible is possible, for example by putting a ticking inbox size counter on the homepage of Gmail

Sometimes there are rather subtle ways of communication, like the Google Doodle which has of course the intention to visualize change and progression.

Experienced Search Quality

Technically, it’s of course about the search results. Which is in terms of quality ambiguous: the same result can be good for the one or bad for the other. So far there have been two notable ways they’ve introduced to improve the results:

• Presentation of Search Results
  For example by introducing Universal Search while pushing their vertical search engines (Google Images, Maps, News, Blogs, Books, Products, etc.)

• Personalization of Search Results
  Using the Google-account to aggregate user data which is useful for both personalization of search results and targeting options for advertisers

They seem to spend as much time on the process side of the experienced quality:

• Way of Searching
  The exacter (in terms of context and interpretation) a search query, the better results can be presented. So Google has changed the way we search, especially by moving us away from broad search terms by listing related searches and of course by the slow introduction of suggestions.

• Speed of Searching
  Google has almost an obsession for speed, probably because users currently associate speed with the quality of a search engine. Sometimes leading to ridiculous propaganda, like keeping the number of words on the homepage at 28. Sometimes by technical changes. They even offer free hosting of AJAX libraries to webmasters to improve the speed on external websites.

The Lack of Google Brand Power

While Google’s brand a top or maybe the highest valued brand in the world, the basis seems to be pretty small.
But please understand that:

1. Their customer’s loyalty is nothing more than a habit
2. The switching costs for web services are nil

They are actually missing high-level symbolic associations to their brand now. The current technical proposition is weak in terms of customer behavior and that’s precisely the reason why I believe Microsoft’s $100 million budget for Bing can make more possible then respected search engine experts or great marketers think.

Profitability Is Not A Short-Term Objective, Branding Should Be

A click on a result, organic or paid, is in the perception of the user Google who endorses this specific resource.

Therefore, it would be short sighted to think Google is raising the bar (for example in terms of CPC) to increase their profit. They really do understand that’s not to way to go to survive on the long term.

While Google works on customer lock-in methods by conquering the browser market and developing a mobile phone operating system, I believe they should understand that customer behavior is not rational.
Luckily, you do know though.

Post from: Conversion Stream

Google’s Search Strategy Uncovered

In general there are three ways how this can be managed:

1. Playing Safe
2. Try New Things
3. Beat The System

1. Playing Safe

Most managers spend their time by only keeping the group pleased. It’s by far the safest option, but has the lowest chance of getting the group to come up with something that matters as well.

2. Try New Things

Some managers choose to ‘put the music on’, i.e. they initiate a change.

On one hand this feels comfortable to the group as everybody is moving at that moment. On the other hand there’s this issue when the music gets shuts off: you have the risk of getting a chair which is worse than the previous one. Or even worse: losing your chair at all.
This feels uncomfortable and scares the group off. The manager probably experiences resistance. And since he had to stand up to put the music on he might be the one losing a chair.

(Most of the time you’ll see external consultants or interim managers who initiate this kind of change. The reason why they have to get in is simple: they can’t lose a chair.)

3. Beat the System

Leaders play the game different.
How? They simply change the rules. Why struggle for chairs if there’s enough space on the couches?
It takes leadership to create a movement which will follow you to the new seats, mostly because you have to go through the dip to get to the unknown.

What kind of manager are you?

Post from: Conversion Stream

Changing Chairs