Q101 The Alternative
Q101 (formerly on Chicago radio @ 101.1 FM) The Alternative - Chicago's New Rock Alternative - Everything Alternative - Chicago's Alternative - Gen X - Generation X
It’s easy to poke fun at the thousands of mediocre business books churned out annually. But planning a business book—regardless of whether it makes it to store shelves—is a useful exercise for business owners seeking to define their brand better and stimulate demand for their product or service.
First, come up with a title. Working on the title should prompt you to answer crucial questions about the story you want to tell your customers: What’s the common thread?
Loews Hotels’ Jonathan Tisch wrote Chocolates on the Pillow Aren’t Enough, reflecting the company’s premise that great products and services need to deliver “experiences that are unique, memorable, and deeply rewarding.” Starbucks’ Howard Schultz wrote Pour Your Heart Into It to share the values by which he built his coffee empire. And Bill Gates’s Business at the Speed of Thought made the case that a computer on every desk was only the beginning.
The discipline of organizing their thoughts into a book compelled each of these business leaders to examine what their companies stood for. And their books reinforced the elements they attributed to their success, suggesting the volumes belonged on the shelves of each of their employees as well as the local Barnes & Noble. A well-written business biography is as much a manual for corporate culture as it is good reading.
By going through the process of determining the essential idea by which your company is (or should be) known, you’ll gain appreciation for what your brand is all about. And you might find it doesn’t stand for much, which in itself would be a valuable discovery.
READ MORE
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-22/a-branding-exercise-for-your-business-write-a-book#r=hpt-fs
You can normally describe any new consumer electronics device or service with one of four words: bigger, smaller, smarter, faster.
Just looking around last week’s IFA event in Berlin, a whopping great 4K television set from Sony that comes in at 84 inches across; a Windows handset from Samsung that’s a “crazy thin” “powerhouse.”
What is changing?
Basically, product designers are becoming much more aware of the need to foster intimacy between the things they make and the people who use them—and we’re seeing a new vocabulary of ideas and services emerging that do precisely that.
Why? We often feel ambivalent and distanced about mass manufactured goods and try to find different ways to make them feel special, intimate, and personal. Now new methods (in both design and manufacture) are being developed to capitalize on that desire.
At a design level, creators are learning lots of new ways to foster intimacy before customers can even get their hands on the end result. They want to involve people.
That’s one reason Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms have been successful—they create a level of intimacy between the product and the customer. Partly, people are buying into a dream, supporting people they are fans of, or just paying for the entertainment value of being part of a movement—but they’re also joining in because they want to have a personal relationship with a product (and the product’s creators). They want to imbue it with a story.
Crowdfunding is really about a method of service design that creates intimacy while the product is still on the drawing board.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-05/what-do-future-products-look-like-personal-sensual-intimate#r=hpt-ls
There are currently no events to display.