ok...i see why brand innovation is big

For the past 24 hours I have been an observant (not an ethnographer, of course, I simply don't satisfy the criteria) in this strange mishmash of culture and energy called Shanghai. This place makes New York look like a suburb of Cleveland - if NY is always on, then Shanghai is ALWAYS ON. I've been trying to pay careful attention to the brands that people are wearing, buying, listening to, looking at, inundated by, and so on. My tentative conclusion is that the Western brands that are here are more visible, but that the majority of regular folks are most into Chinese brands that I don't recognize.

So if you're Pepsi, I guess you just do stuff like buy up lamppost real estate and hang signs on every single post in the downtown area and make them big and colorful and light up and night. And if you're KFC, you buy all the greatest real estate - and build up so you can sell even more of the Colonel's secret recipe. And if you're Zegna, you take really, really good care of the white people that walk into your store, because they might just drop enough cash to underwrite the store's profitability for the next month.

But what do you do if you're an average brand trying to make it? What do you do if you're Clif Bar, or Crate & Barrel, or any one of the "small" businesses in America that could do really well here? Trapped between the big spenders and the established Chinese players, can you really afford to just "test" market to the Chinese to see how your products or services fly? Doesn't it cost a lot to develop the relationship capital that's necessary to succeed here? And aren't there new companies springing up every day in China?

I think the answer is that these guys can come to market , but they have to know a couple things. First and foremost, establish that there's an unmet need. There are a lot of candy bars, but what abot one that's healthier and tastes better? Next, think about the potential size of the market. Just in terms of magnitude. Are we talking about 1 million people or 10? It makes a big difference in how much you can spend (invest) today in order to bank on the probability of a reward tomorrow. Then, think really critically about the probability that someone will jump in before you. If there are zero to two players in a market, or if it's new, or if barriers to entry are really high, or if suppliers are super concentrated, then you probably have a good shot. If those factors are in the opposite direction, consider whether it's even worth the investment. Then talk to potential customers. Don't underrate or overrate this part - Ford and Starbucks would never have been born if people just got ideas from customers. But find out what they like and don't like, what they get mad about, what they wish they had, what they've heard stories about, and so on. Capture their imagination and see if it fits what you're good at producing. If it does, now might be just the right time to get in here.

But most of all, don't adapt an existing set of brand equities to this market. Pizza Hut is a semi-luxury restaurant in China, one where we today paid $10 (yes, US Dollars) for 5 pieces of 2x2 inch garlic bread. The same amount of garlic bread in the US costs about 15% as much. But good (deep dish, lots of toppings) pizza is hard to find here, and Pizza Hut realized that early on - so they transferred the product and concept really easily, but created a more upscale environment and alluring restaurant feel, and walk home with probably a decent day's pay for a day's work. Budweiser touts itself as a fancy import, not the neighborhood water. Starbucks? Well, people are probably pretty sick of being able to get tea every single place they go, so why not take a chance selling Frappuncios? We were in 3 Starbucks today and I can report that almost none of the scores of drinks we saw being consumed were anything but coffee-based. I guess the bottom line is: retain the core of your brand equity, but make sure that it's delivered in a way that uniquely fits an unmet need and excites people. I could have academically told you that's the way it should be before I got here, but it's so obviously relevant now. More to come from the Mainland, I am sure...

where it all goes down

So i do work in a lot of different places. At Haas, I work in the computer lab or I'm in meetings with professors or other students in the MBA lounge, BofA, or a room in the lab. But, I do at least as much reading/studying at Strada as I do "on campus" because we lack any sort of charming facilities in which to feel an enjoyable vibe while also being constructive/productive.

At home, this is my setup. I have a fairly decent amount of space in which to work, but our place is pretty small overall (950 square feet). Amy and I are good about giving each other space to focus on school and work stuff. We just moved into a new condo, so we still have to spend some time stepping over things to get to where we need to be, but it's fun to go through this together. Anyway, I digress. Note the Golden Bears (Nayhoo and Naytoo) atop the speakers and the cup of Starbucks.

When I'm in SF, I tend to study a lot at Starbucks because it really helps me both focus and have fun. I got really into the "coffee experience" concept as an intern there and I also happen to think they make some of the best espresso drinks in town. Now I just moved to Noe, so to be fair there are other places with free internet that I need to try, but I have had mediocre coffee experiences at the others so far (as relates to the product - you can't beat the people in this neighborhood).

What does all this have to do with C&I? Well I don't have any pictures of my brain, so this is my expression of where my thinking gets done.

might be onto something...

So in our midterm write-up, we talked about how one of the key constraints we'd experienced was related to logistics and timing. But, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that almost all the groups have a similar constraint. We just took longer to be creative about how to solve it. I suggested that, for our final project, one improvement we might consider is the use of a wiki or a google doc, a place where we can have a "virtual whiteboard" instead of (a) trading emails, and/or (b) having to slug out a lot of ideas in our limited time together where people aren't always at their best (because they're tired from a long work or school day). We are trying a google doc - this way people can contribute both when it's convenient and when they have their best thinking going on. We're committing to just getting as MANY ideas out on the whiteboard as we can in terms of "whose life do we want to make easier here?" - there are so many people whose shoes we could possibly step into, and so many ways to solve the problem...in some sense, scope is the hardest part.

The other thing about this whole process is that it's supposed to be FUN. Brainstorming is not supposed to be something that you email 10 times about and set up a time and then get ideas out and then go back into class, not to see each other's faces for another week. It's supposed to be an exercise in which you feed off each other, get into a flow, and allow one idea to be the next idea's foundation. Doing it virtually may hold some people less accountable in theory, because it's more OK to "sit silent" by not posting than it is to do so in person (at least in b-school groups it feels this way) but I think our group is pretty darn imaginative when it really comes down to it and I think this will be cool.

We don't want to do the data collection opportunity in class though. Another surveymonkey of "MBA students' perspectives"? No thanks!

excited for mozilla

So Pamela and I had a great brainstorming session on Wednesday at Strada. Abel had done some background research since he was away in Europe, and Wednesday was the first time that more than one of the group was going to be on campus this week.

I could just tell it was going to be a good day. Our negotiations class had some really interesting discussion, our Game Theory group had just had a really excellent discussion and brainstorm about some ways to qualitatively and quantitatively think about and present our project, I'd had a good conversation with a first-year looking to make a career decision, and the coffee at Strada was great.

Pamela and I were really firing ideas well. In the spirit of the 6 Hats, we whiteboarded, talked about the data we'd ideally have, lightly critiqed other ideas, talked about the best possible scenarios, and got really creative. We didn't specifically set the use of the 6 Hats as part of the agenda, but it turned out that they gave great structure to the discussion, so we just kind of went with it. I think they were so powerful for a couple of reasons. First, Pamela and I had not done much work together in the past, and we didn't have a great sense of how the other would approach the challenge...this was kind of a risk-free model that gave us structure without having to tangibly set expectations. Second, I think we'd both been in SO many meetings and presentations where posturing and seniority rule the day as former consultants, and we wanted to use the freedom we'd been granted as MBA students to see how it would play out.

So, almost all of the ideas that we came up with seemed really legit, but the one we landed on seems really elegant in its simplicity. We had talked a lot about how to achieve social impact in addition to financial impact and market share, and we think we found a way to do it that really jibes with Mozilla's ethos and history. It's kind of cool - because of the great brainstorm, the familiar-but-not-intimate nature of Mozilla as a "client," and because they're here in the Bay Area, I'm more excited about this "little" assignment than I have been for anything else this semester, in any class. I hope all goes well with Asa and that he likes the quality of our thinking. The only shortcoming I can see is that we're kind of riding on coattails for the social impact piece, but it's less of a shortcoming and more of an opportunity to look at this as a starting point (after all we only have 2 minutes)!