The Value of Training

It's been a little under three weeks since my previous post here.  Two of those weeks were taken up by a class where I made an acoustic guitar.  That was a blast.  70+ hours per week of very hard work and learning but I ended up with a very nice guitar and far more knowledge and confidence than I was going to gain by myself in the next several years. This experience reminded me of the value of training.

When money gets tight training budgets are often the first thing to get cut.  It's easy to get into the mindset that training is a frivolous luxury but particularly in the technology sector it's also likely a very bad and wrong assessment. 

I've boot strapped myself numerous times on new technologies.  I've always learned enough to get the job done acceptably.  When I compare those experiences to the ones where I had an opportunity to attend some sort of training beforehand the difference is substantial.  Rather than spending a lot of my time learning the basics of the technology as I went along I was able to complete whatever project I was working much more quickly and deliver a better final product as well. 

Good quality training is a great bootstrap.  At the very least, it will save you time and money. In business taking longer to complete a task or project can have an opportunity cost so it’s reasonable to state that it might even make you money.

All of this ignores the fact that employees often view training as a desirable perk.  Taking that perk away is going to hurt morale and might encourage your most valuable people to look elsewhere.  I’ve seen this happen before.

Productive employees are a key asset to any company.  Timely and regular training helps employees maintain their edge. It’s easy to miss the signs that quality is dropping off in this area initially. This may be why companies cut here first. It's a fools savings in my opinion.

Where's The Beef! And Other Slogans/Jingles

You hear a lot about branding when you get an MBA.  It's one of those key concepts that encompasses a lot of ground.  To quote Wikipedia...

Brand is the personality that identifies a product, service or company (name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or combination of them) and how it relates to key constituencies: Customers, Staff, Partners, Investors etc.

Some people distinguish the psychological aspect, brand associations like thoughts, feelings, perceptions, images, experiences, beliefs, attitudes, and so on that become linked to the brand, of a brand from the experiential aspect.

The experiential aspect consists of the sum of all points of contact with the brand and is known as the brand experience. The psychological aspect, sometimes referred to as the brand image, is a symbolic construct created within the minds of people, consisting of all the information and expectations associated with a product, service or the company(ies) providing them.

That’s kind of wordy, but it describes the gist of the concept nicely.  One of the ways that companies have built awareness and influenced perceptions of brands is through slogans and jingles.

“Plop Plop, Fizz fizz, oh what a relief it is”

“Where’s The Beef!”

“From the land of sky blue waters, comes the beef refreshing”

“The San Francisco Treat”

“Fall into the Gap”

Unless you’re fairly young you’ll recognize at least a couple of those.  I know I’m devoting far too many brain cells to those and similar jingles.

The cool and/or scary thing about branding is that companies sometimes do very non intuitive things.  Anyone who has ever tried to eat rice with chop sticks knows that the fact that it is sticky is a good thing.  Yet Minute Rice which is not sticky ran commercials in the 1970’s showing frustrated house wives who were upset because their rice stuck together.  Enter minute rice with a solution.  Of course most Americans outside of the west coast had never tried to eat with chopsticks at that point.  I don’t watch TV much but I doubt Minute Rice would use a similar approach today.

Here are a couple more…

“Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce cheese, pickles onions on a sesame seed bun”

“Then I told two friends and they told two friends…”

Really good jingles and slogans stay with us for a long time, as do the brand images they help create.

Image via Wikipedia

Related Articles

• Own Your Brand (lockergnome.com)
• The mythology of your brand (thehumanracehorses.com)

Vacation Time

For twenty two of the next twenty three days I'll be honing my skills as a maker of acoustic guitars.  These skills are fairly meager right now.  I've completed one ukulele and am partially done with two guitars. to be clear, this is a hobby. Some day I'll hopefully be able to retire and I want to have a vocation that will challenge me and keep me busy.  This is the one I've chosen.

In some ways it's a little surprising to me that I've decided to make this investment in myself.  For every one day of enjoyment I've gotten out of this hobby I've had at least two days of frustration and months sometimes pass between sessions out in the garage. When I thought about it though I realized that the long periods of inactivity were always preceded by an especially frustrating experience trying to accomplish some task.  I've written mostly about the good times and occasionally about the bad times on my other BLOG.  To be fair, long periods of low humidity (Which are lousy times to be working wood) and the pursuit of my MBA a few years back played a part as well.

This is a big investment in money and time but it will accelerate my learning greatly. Having a firm foundation to build on is extremely important no matter what you are trying to accomplish.

So here I am, just a day away from two very busy weeks.  The course I'm taking is hands on, I'll end up with both a head full of new knowledge and a guitar at the end.

I've been very active on this BLOG for the past few weeks.  There is a very good possibility I'll be silent here for at least the next few, we'll see.  I'll almost certainly be posting about my adventure on my other BLOG, so please check things out there if you are interested.

Image via Wikipedia

Who Google Should Fear (Short Take)

In my previous posting I did a quick evaluation of how serious a threat Facebook is to Google.  In summary, I don't see a lot over overlap in the value they create.  This could change if Facebook continues to add services such as Email but for now I don't think Google has a lot to worry about.

A much more serious and emerging threat is coming from companies like Groupon and Living Social.  Rumored revenue numbers for Groupon have been all over the place with $500 million to $2 billion being the range late last year.  The number I find most credible is $800 million.  Even the low water number is very impressive for a company that celebrated its second birthday in November of 2010.  Facebook was launched in 2004 and has seen much slower revenue growth.  In light of these numbers I don't think it's surprising that Google tried to buy Groupon and is apparently planning a very similar offering of its own called Google Offers.

The reason Google is worried about Groupon is that both companies provide advertisers with an opportunity to deliver highly targeted offers.  Groupon has the additional advantage of actually getting customers to commit by way of the special offers that they enable companies to deliver.  So in effect, the groupon experience is a much more immersive and valuable one for both customers and businesses.

Facebook may have even more to fear since much of their ad revenue comes from small to medium sized businesses that will likely see much more value from using Groupon or a similar service.

Image via Wikipedia

Related Articles

• 'Google Offers' Launching As Groupon Competitor (blogherald.com)

Should Google Be Worried About Facebook?

With the recently announced shakeup in leadership at Google there has been a lot of speculation on the underlying cause.  Some of that speculation has centered on the threat of Facebook and other social media sites to Google's current dominance in the ad revenue space.  It's always wise to keep an eye on your competitors but I don't think the overlap between these two companies is as large as most people seem to assume.

From my perspective Facebook is like a never ending party while Google is the 21st century equivalent of the phone book.  I don't go to Facebook to find stuff to buy, I go there to hang out with my friends and find out what they are up to.  If somebody in my friends network recommends a product then yes, I might check it out but it's difficult to see how Facebook is going to be able to derive revenue from that other than indirectly through page impressions on their ads.

It is true that there are only a limited number of on line advertising dollars out there and both companies bottom lines derive substantially or exclusively from that pool.  Over the past couple of years I've spent much more time on Facebook than Google and have never once clicked on a Facebook delivered ad.  I have been known to tell them that an ad doesn't interest me but they are still doing a lousy job of figuring out what to try to sell me.  Google has had a much better track record and while I don't make it a regular habit I do occasionally end up buying something as a result of seeing one of the ads they deliver.

In theory both companies have a lot of useful data about me and should be able to do a great job of targeting their pool of ads to maximize the chances of me clicking through.  Again though we get back to the fact that when I'm using Google I'm searching for something, and therefore receptive to offers which is not the frame of mind I'm in when I frequent Facebook.

Where Facebook excels is in situations where I have an established relationship with a product or company.  Through the "like" mechanism on Facebook I have a way of both showing my interest and "keeping in touch".  I don't believe Facebook charges companies for providing this conduit.  If I'm correct then again, Facebook isn't deriving any revenues directly from that interaction.

So, in summary Google appears to be a much better advertising channel when a company is looking for motivated buyers with specific needs and Facebook is a superior venue for maintaining and building existing customer relationships.  Google has a well established and lucrative business model while Facebook may be vulnerable as they don't appear to be deriving revenues directly from the things they do that create the most value (customer recommendations and enabling companies to build communities around their products).

I haven't given this topic a lot of thought and would be very interested in what others think.

Image via Wikipedia

Related Articles

• Did Google move Schmidt aside to better take on Facebook? (infoworld.com)
• Facebook Isn't Growing As Fast As Google Did In Its Early Days (GOOG) (businessinsider.com)

Apple iPad 2 Rumors Continued (Short Take)

The free buzz Apple gets on future products is in large part a result of their secretive ways. The recent rumors of a 4x improvement in the screen resolution (from 1024x768 to 2048x1536) certainly sounded good but now the counter rumors have begun.

An upgraded processor and graphics processing unit are almost a given. Those items alone aren't very exciting as they wouldn't substantially differentiate the iPad 2 from the original iPad.  We humans like visual cues and packaging changes or much nicer displays are more likely to catch the eye than under the hood upgrades to parts of a product that aren't currently viewed as lacking. Tech savvy people may get excited about such things, but that only goes so far.

Having said that, Apple is in a place right now where they almost can't do any wrong.  A less than obviously spectacular upgrade to the iPad wouldn't hurt sales in the short to mid term (think about the iPhone 4 grip of death debacle) but this early in the iPad's history it would risk starting Apple down the path of mediocrity and that would be potentially problematic given the importance that is being placed on the mobile computing space.

It's not outside the realm of possibility that Apple is in to some extent responsible for the rumors and counter rumors.  They do love their secrecy and it has to be increasingly difficult to keep things under cover as they continue to gain market share on almost every front. Literally thousands of people are involved in bringing something like the iPad 2 to market. One way for Apple to gain some control is to become involved in the process.  There have been claims to this effect before from informed sources.

Image via Wikipedia

Steve Jobs, iPad 2 Screen Rumor (Short Take)

I wrote the second half of this post last night before the news that Steve Jobs is taking a second leave of absence from Apple for health reasons broke. It would be difficult to overstate Job's impact on Apple.  As in the past details as to why he is taking time off are intentionally sparse. Apple did fine when Jobs took his previous leave. Rumors will emerge over the next few weeks as to how he is doing and what his prognosis is.  I hope he's back soon.

When Jobs failed to show up for the Verizon iPhone announcement the assumption was that his absence was prompted by a lack of new features in the Verizon iPhone. Given this development it may simply have been the case that he wasn't feeling healthy enough to make an appearance.

I wrote the rest of this last night.

In my year 2010 wrap-up I predicted that we would see only a modest improvement in the screen resolution on the iPad 2.  If the rumors are true I was way off on that one. Not even one month into the year and already my odds of batting a thousand prediction wise are dropping fast.

An increase in resolution to 2048x1536 would be significant, and not only from a technical perspective.  With the deluge of tablets coming to market Apple is almost certainly looking to maintain their edge as the premium provider in the tablet space.

Another iPad 2 related prediction I made was a modest drop in price.  I'd likely be wrong on that one as well if this scenario plays out.  In fact, a modest increase in price wouldn't surprise me.

While I could claim that making predictions is difficult, the truth of the matter is I didn't really think this one through very well.  If you're Apple you always want to stay ahead of the competition.  Modest improvements aren't likely to to keep the public excited about a new product line. You're going to want to deliver a significant upgrade every year for at least the first few years. The benefit of this approach is that Apple not only improves their chances of maintaining share, they also establish themselves as the company that defines tablet computing.  Everyone else will be viewed as playing catch up.

We didn't buy a first generation iPad. We will almost certainly purchase one of the second generation devices.  If rumors and the past are to be trusted Apple has taken an already excellent product and managed to yet again jump well ahead of their competition.

Image via Wikipedia