Barnes & Noble’s decision to launch a new OS for its Nook e-reader that turns it into a fully functioning Android tablet is fascinating for several reasons.

First, it was out there anyway. Hackers had rooted the device, Android Central reports, and were voiding their warranties left and right to download Android apps on it, so it was a “known known” a few short weeks after the device had launched in November.

Second, it changed the device’s playing field from also-ran into real contender in the blink of an eye (or an updating of an operating system, whichever comes first in your world), reports GadgetBox.

One minute, it’s an e-reader running a distant second in the e-reader market that costs twice as much as the market leader.

The next, it’s the most affordable Android tablet on the market. And look! You can download all those books!

That’s a strategic shift.

In Killing Giants, I wrote about how Vibram shifted the playing field when they launched their Five Fingers athletic shoe. Faced with increasing commoditization from China, the company was actively looking for ways to innovate in a business that had limited possibilities – how many ways could you stamp a pattern on a rubber sole, anyway? But a graduate design student in Milan showed up with an outlandish prototype – a shoe with “fingers” for your toes – and the solution appeared. Today, the Five Fingers shoe is one of the hottest selling athletic shoes on the market and has spawned the “barefoot running” phenomenon.

How easy would it have been for the Vibram management team to dismiss this strange looking product?

What does this teach us?

#1. Inspiration almost always comes from elsewhere. The original hack of the Nook device, untethering it from the Barnes & Noble system, was unplanned. So was the arrival of the Five Fingers shoe. Both could easily have been dismissed. They weren’t. One has become a success story. Will the other?

#2. What we casually dismiss – or even ridicule – at first may be exactly the thing we need to study more closely. We ridicule things that don’t fit our preconceptions. And when we’re successful, it’s hard to admit to ourselves that we’re doing something wrong. That may be absolutely correct at this red hot second, but things can change pretty quickly, and soon the methods that won the last war will be hopelessly outdated. Take a second look while you can.

#3. Shift your perspective and look at your situation from a different angle. The Nook was “an expensive e-reader” compared to the Kindle – but “a pretty cheap Android tablet” compared to other tablet offerings. Ask yourself, “Compared to what?” and see how you can change your perspective – and your outlook. As Dr. Steven Feinberg, my partner at Decision Triggers, would say, “Practice tactical shifting!”

It’s a bit early to declare victory, but let’s celebrate the boldness of the move. Barnes & Noble is a company that deserves a bold move. When the platform is burning, times call for such decisions. By shifting from the narrowly defined e-reader world, where the Nook is an appendage of the bookseller’s electronic inventory, it now competes with all other Android tablets with a decided cost advantage – and it controls its own distribution through its well-known website and retail locations.

Is the Nook a Giant Killer? What have you ridiculed recently?

The post 3 Lessons the Barnes and Noble Nook Teaches Us About Shifting the Playing Field appeared first on Small Business Trends.

And we’re supposed to beat them, today and every day.

This is good news.

In Killing Giants: 10 Strategies to Topple the Goliath in Your Industry, I spoke to over 70 “giant killers” from 13 countries around the world, representing industries from consumer products to technology to B2B, and I learned that not only can you out-maneuver the giants you face, but you can often take advantage of their greatest strength in the process.

Here are three ways you can kill the giants.

1. Focus on Winning in the Last 3 Feet.

Is the giant spending millions on advertising? Are they launching a massive campaign or a huge product launch? Don’t look at this as a matter of their budget vs. yours – you’ll always lose that fight. Look at this from the perspective of them pulling millions of eyeballs and tons of foot traffic to the stores or to the Web. Now, you’ve got something to work with. Enter the conversation in the last three feet – between your prospective customer and the sale, when the giant thinks the game is over – and win there.

Here’s an example of what I mean. Oslo University is the second largest business school in its town. The Norwegian School of Management outspent it 200 to 1. With a budget of only 50,000 krone – roughly $8,500 – Oslo University turned to search search engine marketer iProspect for help. After a brief competitive analysis, they discovered that their giant’s US$2 million budget was everywhere but online. By targeting keywords that leveraged their competitor’s curriculum course names in the tightly defined time frame just before admissions closed for the term, Oslo University saw its admissions jump five-fold – and even beat its larger rival’s admissions numbers.

2. Realize That Speed Kills.

It’s often said that in big companies, you get promoted for saying “no” to risky things. Having worked for plenty of big corporations, I know this to be true! Giants have their own cultures and rewards systems. Before they make a move, they first form interdisciplinary task forces, set up meetings, fly people around the country, bring agencies on board … and while they’re doing all this, you ship. They issue meeting minutes. You ship. They form a consensus; you ship. You’re three steps ahead, and they’re aiming at the product you replaced two cycles ago.

Mike Cassidy, founder of many successful Silicon Valley startups including instant messaging platform Xfire, described this “speed culture” mentality when he told me that his team was producing a new version of his platform every two weeks. His massive competitors – AOL, Yahoo and MSN – were conducting competitive product assessments on one version of their products, when he had already shipped dozens of revisions of his. By the time MTV purchased Xfire in 2004 for $110 million, Xfire had amassed over 16 million customers who used its software an average of 88 hours a month.

3. Eat the Bug: Do the Unthinkable.

Companies develop rules, guidelines and overall boundaries as they grow. They fight and win in the market, and their success makes them confident that they’re doing it all right. But their success often sows the seeds of their undoing. They continue to fight the last war until the realities of the new one catch up with them. Smart “giant killers”develop business models that the giants simply can’t imagine themselves following.

Cricket Holdings is in the business of direct response advertising, the red-headed stepchild of the marketing world. But what the business lacks in sexiness, it makes up for in performance. Cricket does what no advertising agency would dream of doing: It offers “customers” on a pay-per-lead basis. Once its predictive model looks at its customer’s category and day-part, it quickly optimizes the media flights to understand its variable cost per “customer” and then offers it at a fixed price markup to its clients. Now, the risk of performance has shifted from the director of marketing’s shoulders to Cricket’s – and CEO Victor Grillo is happy to bear the burden. When an advertiser wants to know what each dollar invested will bring in, Cricket is happy to step in where most traditional agencies would beat a hasty retreat.

Business isn’t just about how much money we’ve got to spend but rather how big our ideas are. Perhaps it’s easier to just throw money at problems, but small businesses can’t afford to do that. Besides, today’s times call for different tools and a different mindset. I hope these three tips give you a few thinking tools you can put to use today to give you the mental ammunition to topple the Goliath in your industry.

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Old Spice gave us a campaign that was equal parts entertainment, traditional television advertising and YouTube social media magic. But when the sales numbers started trickling in, something was amiss. Namely, sales. What ensued was a firestorm in the blogosphere with sharply divided camps fighting a holy war of mostly unsupported opinion.

When new data points started emerging, they provided the careful student of business a few nuggets to keep in mind for the future, when we’ll be spending our money and looking for real results. Here’s what I saw:

Problem 1: Where’s the beef?

First, the data suggests that campaign itself didn’t move the sales needle. For the first six months of the television media flight, Old Spice sales were first reported to be down 7 percent year over year, then flat in terms of share growth. Then, when the brand’s celebrated customized YouTube video campaign broke, sales hockey-sticked upwards, with sell-through increasing 106 percent. Upon further review, this big and much celebrated uptick coincided with an avalanche of buy-one-get-one-free coupons. 

What this means:

Of particular concern was the groundless optimism that many commenters on my blog post seemed to be clinging to. They just knew things would turn out all right because… because… they just had to! The campaign was so funny! It’s dangerous to convince yourself you’re doing the right thing simply because you love doing what you just did.  We need to keep our eyes open and our judgment as objective as the human condition allows.

No school like the old school? Possibly so. The coupon avalanche seemed to convince a temporary mob of people to try Old Spice. Would the coupons have worked without the ads and the viral social media campaign? Don’t know. Would the viral social media campaign have moved the needle without the coupons? The data suggests no. The ads alone certainly didn’t.

Let’s agree that activation and conversion are your goals as a business owner. Get people to buy more stuff, in short. Everything you do must be pointed at integration, at tactical face-to-face, in-the-store or on-your-site conversion. There’s no such thing as “buzz.” There’s sales and there’s money down the drain.

Problem 2: All the hammers think you’re a nail.

Second, it seems anyone who has never managed a P&L or met payroll thinks Old Spice was the greatest campaign the world has ever seen. And that person is probably pitching you their agency’s services right now.  Listen to the venom in roughly half of the comments coming from digital agency types. This is a red flag.

What this means:

There’s an undercurrent that thinks marketing – and advertising, and particularly video designed for the Web – is all about entertainment. It isn’t. Advertising is supposed to sell stuff. And when your agency types come in the door breathlessly telling you they got a billion views on YouTube but look positively insulted when you ask if it had a positive ROI (gasp!), you need to wonder – assuming that your marketing dollars are finite and you care about making the company money – if you’re with the right people.

Preconceptions are dangerous, especially when it’s their preconceptions and your money. Demand facts, not feelings.

Problem 3: They score, but you lose.

Third, the biggest winner seems to be Old Spice’s advertising agency, which pocketed the coveted Film Grand Prix at Cannes for the campaign.

What this means:

This may be a personal bias, but any time the clear winner isn’t you – meaning the paying customer – there’s a problem.

When asked at Cannes whether the campaign was a success for Old Spice, the brand representatives gave a “no comment.” For good reason, apparently. Later, after some much-needed media training, we were told that the brand was “thrilled” with its results and couldn’t be happier. This doesn’t inspire confidence.

The post-mortem:

There’s nothing wrong with spending money on video aimed at viral success. Go ahead. It might work. And there are many, many people who will tell you how to go down this path. But the real point of spending money at all in business is to get more business, so ensure – regardless of what you’re promised – that everything you do is pointed towards converting that casual viewer into a buyer.

The secret of many successful advertising campaigns is that they can be leveraged in-store or online. Look at the Pepsi Challenge. It wasn’t just a brilliant campaign – every time a consumer walked into the store and saw those two pallets next to each other, the ad replayed in their heads – but the fact that it was running the campaign at all gave Pepsi the opportunity to convince those retail buyers to stack its pallets next to King Coke. Advertising drives merchandising, and merchandising drives sales. Especially when it’s paired with advertising.

Am I being unfair to the Old Spice brand and the agency? No, not really. The campaign ran for six months, and the brand experienced a 7 percent volume decline, with a spike driven by coupons. It lagged many of its competitors in the category. And yet, the campaign is held up as a paragon of marketing genius. Careful there; that’s dangerous talk.

Let’s learn from this “case study” – the good, the bad and the hopelessly overblown – and use it as a cautionary tale to grow our own success stories.

The post Old Spice Revisited: Lessons and Cautions for Small Business appeared first on Small Business Trends.

The show itself was fantastic. But the real story was what the band did after the show was over, and it holds a lesson for every brand – and band – that is striving for loyalty in an increasingly jaded world.

As the show ended, the band announced that they would be out front to meet and greet fans. My son, who is a budding guitarist himself, elbowed his way into line – third, in a line that now stretched hundreds deep. As we stepped up to the table where the musicians were sitting and signing autographs, Steve Berlin, the band’s sax player, looked at my son and said, “Are you a musician?” Hearing that he plays guitar, Berlin turned to lead singer and guitarist David Hidalgo and said, “Hey, David – this guy’s a guitarist, too!” Hidalgo stood up, shook my 12-year-old’s hand, and the two of them talked privately for five minutes. The line waited.

When we seek to build a relationship, the most powerful decision trigger in our arsenal is reciprocity: We feel strong social pressure to give back when we’ve received something of value. When the gift is unexpected and personal, the social pressure is that much higher. You wonder why so many $80,000 sports cars are sold because of an $8 T-shirt given to the child of the prospective customer? Wonder no more.

Our defenses drop when we’ve been given a gift. At Decision Triggers, we work with clients on bringing this psychological lens to bear on our clients’ customer-facing initiatives so that they can get to yes faster, and often we see opportunities to apply the trigger of reciprocity.

How many ways can we, as businesspeople, give gifts to our customers, prospective ones as well as current ones? Does this cost a lot of money?

Here are five gifts you can give right now:

1. Inside information: Do you have access to insider information that your market wants? News about new products, market trends or future happenings? This information, particularly when scarce, is valuable. And people appreciate hearing it from you. This makes you a trusted source and someone they’d love to do business with.
2. Analysis: You are more of an expert in your own field than your prospective customers are. What value can you add to their understanding of your field? This is something you can offer that they will value. We live in a digital age and publishing tools are all around us.
3. Knowledge: Make your prospects experts. The more they know, the more they want to share with their friends. We all have egos and we like to be thought of as experts.
4. Time: Did David Hidalgo spend money when he talked to my son? Did he give him a CD or a T-shirt? No. He spent time and personal, undivided attention – something we can give freely.
5. Honesty: How many ways can you convey credibility to your market with an honest perspective on a blog, on Twitter or elsewhere? Can you argue against your own self-interest for a moment and show your audience that you are someone they can trust?

I recently spoke to a colleague at one of the largest consumer sentiment tracking organizations in the country and he shared a big insight with me.

He told me what I already knew – that the economy is a mess, we don’t trust companies – or institutions of any sort – and we expect them to let us down.

But he mentioned that in the research his firm had done, he noted how we are increasingly responding to brands that are trying just as hard as we are. This is a powerful insight. And using reciprocity in a smart way helps us build that trust that is so lacking today.

My son is now a Los Lobos fan for life. So am I. And while the show was great, it was the demonstration of commitment to the next generation of fans – these guys are all grandfathers now – that struck me as so unique.

We bought a CD. We’ll buy more. A strong relationship has been built – just because of five minutes of time.

PS:  Here’s more on reciprocity for further reading! Feel free to join our newsletter mailing list if you’d like to hear more about using the social psychology of influence to tap your customers’ decision triggers here.

The post Los Lobos, Reciprocity and 5 Ways to Build a Brand Relationship appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith has a lot going on. His company filed for its IPO on June 1. He’s adding cities to Zipcar’s expanding international footprint. And he’s also playing a central role in re-imagining what urban cityscapes will look like with fewer cars on the road.

But what stands out is more subtle.

Scott Griffith is also creating an Eigen Value.

Let’s back up for a moment. Have you heard of the concept of an Eigen Value? An Eigen Value is a self-defining entity: its outputs are identical to itself. “This sentence has five words.” This is an Eigen Value. It’s a truism. It’s unarguable.

If I were to say, “This sentence has lots and lots of words,” this would not be an Eigen Value because it’s subjective and frankly depends on what you think “a lot” means. In any case, it lacks vividness and we quickly discard it.

And that’s the point.

When we create Eigen Values in our cultures and our marketing, we create images that are sticky. They’re vivid. They reinforce each other so that calling the brand’s customer support line is as much a branding “moment of power” as opening its retail packaging or visiting its website would be. Everything is working together to reinforce exactly the same message.

Why is this important? Two reasons come to mind:

Because we have limited resources. We need every bullet to count. We can’t afford to have our website looking like one company while our customer service people sound like another and our press releases look like a third. We need to make every ounce of effort amplify every other.

Because they have a limited attention span. Them, they, those customers out there, beyond the footlights – they really don’t care about your brand. It’s only remarkable to them when they desperately need you or when you fail while doing what you’re supposed to be doing. You need to break through the ambient noise. And when you approach them sounding like five different companies, none of which speak their language, they move on very quickly.

Back to Zipcar. The company is re-imagining urban cityscapes by offer personal transportation – cars, in this case – as a service, not as a product. This takes a lot of cars and their requisite infrastructure, like parking, out of dense urban environments. They offer flat, no “gotcha” pricing – often as low as $8 an hour – including gas and insurance. They exist to serve those customers who want to have a lighter footprint in their communities and save a lot of money in the process. Look at their core values on their website and you’ll see the heart of this strategy transparently written down in public for anyone to see.

What we see in the company’s product portfolio, from pricing options to the actual cars themselves, as well as its pricing and corporate positioning all emanates from these principles. Zipcar is an Eigen Value.

And an Eigen Culture, said another way.

The post How Zipcar Creates a Self-Defining Brand – And Why This Should Change How You Think About Marketing appeared first on Small Business Trends.