All You Need is Love

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

Have you ever wondered why certain products command “loyalty beyond reason”?  Why do some people obsess about a product and become so emotionally invested that all other solutions become a distant and unacceptable second best?  And most important, what can you do to create this kind of passionate loyalty?

The real question is – “How can you get people to have a love affair with your community?”

My friend and muse Kevin Roberts provides some enlightenment in his book “Lovemarks”. Kevin shares his knowledge and observations on what motivates people to become emotionally committed to certain products, and provides pragmatic guidance on how to operationalize that knowledge so you can begin moving a product from a Trustbrand to a Lovemark.  I’ve taken the liberty of translating Kevin’s principles into guidance on how to take your community on the journey from obscurity to Lovemark status.  Hopefully this post will inspire you to step out to the edge and see your community as the Lovemark it deserves to be.

“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over.  Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center” Kurt Vonnegut

IF THEY CAN DO, IT SO CAN YOU

Where do you start the journey?  It begins with truly understanding the story of your community.

If you ask most people, they will tell you that telecommunications is essentially a commodity service.  You simply find the carrier with the most reliable service area and best price.  It isn’t any harder than that.

Telecom New Zealand could have easily seen itself that way.  But, they knew if they treated their product as a commodity, so would everybody else.  Instead, they hired Saatchi & Saatchi to help them explain that Telecom New Zealand wasn’t simply about communication, it was about creating a more connected nation.  The story of Telecom New Zealand was told through a commercial spot titled “Father and Son”. The story struck an emotional chord among New Zealanders because it spoke to them personally.  It made a deep heartfelt connection, and it started Telecom New Zealand on a journey toward becoming a Lovemark.

Your community also has a story to tell. A story that is capable of connecting with people on an emotional level the same way Telecom New Zealand did.  You simply have to understand what it is, and how to effectively communicate it.  And the first step in the journey begins with understanding emotion.

TIME TO GET EMOTIONAL

“The essential difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to action while reason leads to conclusions.” Lovemarks, page 42.

Kevin identifies six primary emotions to be aware of – joy, sorrow, anger, fear, surprise and disgust.  These are emotions that enflame people’s hearts.  If your story taps into one or more of these emotions, you get engagement. However, the problem with these emotions in telling your story is they are hard to control and you can trigger an unpredictable response.  Kevin also defines six secondary emotions – guilt, shame, pride, envy, jealousy and the most powerful of all … Love.  These emotions engage both the head and the heart making them ideal as elements in a story.

To assess where you are today, take a look at the promotional efforts supporting your community.  Which of the 12 emotions are reflected in the stories you are telling?  If your promotion is focused on facts and statistics, it is falling dramatically short of the story your community deserves.  My guess is you will see room for improvement.  In my experience, given a choice to inform or inspire … choose to inspire.

I’LL RESPECT YOU IN THE MORNING

As in any relationship, the first step along the way in the journey to becoming a Lovemark is respect.  Kevin calls it a founding principle of a Lovemark.  You must respect your community and you also want to earn the respect of the people who hear your story.  There are eight things you can do to earn respect for your community.

1. Perform. Perform, perform.  Perform at each and every interaction.  Peak performance is the ticket to entry.
2. Pursue innovation.  Your community must adopt a continuous improvement mentality that focuses on fixing what doesn’t work and strengthening what does.
3. Commit to a total commitment.  Go the distance.  Your community will be judged at every encounter, every touchpoint, and will failure will be punished.
4. Make it easy.  Strip the complexity out of your processes.  Make it easy to get to know and evaluate your community.  If it is hard to get to know, your community will be doomed to obscurity.
5. Don’t hide.  People can respect your community only if they know what it stands for.  In today’s internet world there is nowhere to hide anyway.  Tell your story loud and tell it proud.
6. Jealously guard your reputation.  Built over a lifetime, destroyed in an instant.
7. Get in the lead and stay there.  Become the top selection choice by investing in asset creation, infrastructure improvement and public policy reform.  Once your community is seen as the ideal location, don’t backslide.
8. Tell the truth.  Admit shortfalls.  Believe in your community.  When something goes wrong, your reputation may be your best defense.

TELL YOUR STORY WELL

It is important your community be respected.  It’s the foundation for any emotional relationship, and a mandatory step on the journey to becoming a Lovemark.  It is important, but not sufficient.  You also have to tell your story in a mind and heart-opening way.  There are three more elements that must be in place to succeed.

1. Mystery – Mystery is created by telling great stories.  Stories about your community’s past, present and future.  Stories that tap into dreams, include myths and icons that can be remembered.  Stories that inspire.
2. Sensuality – Sensuality requires you to focus on including elements like sound, sight, smell, touch and taste.  You need to find ways to engage people in learning about your community that involve their senses.  That is why well design site visits are so effective.  It is also why integrating your Travel & Tourism efforts with your capital attraction promotion can produce such powerful results.
3. Intimacy – People need to feel the commitment of your community leaders and citizens.  It is important people can empathize with the challenges and successes of your community’s journey.  You want them to become fans who care.  Passion helps establish intimacy.  You need to be passionate, your citizens need to be passionate and that passion must be palpable to people.  After all, if you don’t care why should anybody else care about your community’s future?

FIND AND MINE THE GOLD

As you move forward on the journey to Lovemark status, you will inevitably uncover people who are exceptionally passionate about your community.  These inspirational citizens are like finding gold nuggets.  These people will proactively promote your community and you will want to give them the tools to easily do so.  These people will be passionate salesmen and sales women who are eager to tell your community’s story to anyone who will listen.  Social media tactics can be very effective in harnessing the energy and passion so it is strategically directed to support your broader capital attraction, retention and expansion efforts.  You need to have a plan that effectively finds these people and enrolls them in your program and enables them to deliver results.

NOW TAKE ACTION

Hopefully, I’ve nudged your curiosity sufficiently to check out Kevin’s book – Lovemark.  You will enjoy the read.  You might also enjoy checking out Kevin’s Lovemarks website.  It is a great source of inspiration and guidance.  Remember, guiding your community to Lovemark status is a journey.  You won’t get there overnight and it will require persistence and patience.  But along the way you will be dramatically strengthening your community image.  You’ll also become an even better storyteller.

If you need additional inspiration, who would have thought anybody could tell the story about making a cup of coffee in a way that touches people’s hearts and creates an emotional connection?  Folger’s has achieved Lovemark status in the minds of consumers.  Watch one or both of these commercials and think about how you can begin leading your community on its journey to Lovemark status.

The Ring

Coming Home

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Game Changer

Monday, July 26th, 2010

I was skimming through a copy of Game Changer authored by A.G. Lafley (my former Chairman and CEO of Procter and Gamble) and Ram Charan. During my career at P&G, I was blessed with several visionary leaders to learn from – John Smale (1981-1990), Ed Artz (1990-1995), John Pepper (1995-1999), Durk Jager (1999-2000), A.G. Lafley (2000-2009) and Bob McDonald (2009-present).  I learned a lot about effective business management and people leadership. Each was remarkable in their own right, and they all shared the common belief that success meant touching lives and improving life. Consequently, whenever I feel the need to get re-grounded in the important aspects of business, I have a habit of skimming through their books, their speeches, and my memories of their lessons. Game Changer is one of those books with common sense insight into how to lead a company to success. While the book focuses on explaining how to leverage innovation as a catalyst for P&L growth, it has a number of principles that can help you deliver even better results from your economic development efforts. I picked it up recently for inspiration in how to make a meaningful difference in the face of budget limitations. Here are the principles I found most relevant for reapplication. I hope you find them interesting and thought provoking as well.

1. The CEO is Boss.  Okay, A.G. actually says the customer is boss, but in the world of capital investment that is more often than not, the company CEO. Your goal should be to ensure CEOs in your target industries understand your community’s promise and the asset package that supports it. You need to be certain the image CEOs have of your community is consistent with reality. Misperceptions need to be eliminated or you will find that your community is left off the short list of locations for consideration. I continue to be surprised at how most community promotion is focused on site selection consultants. This target audience of decision influencers is certainly important, but they are also focused on the rational side of the decision (facts and figures) which reflects only the “ticket to entry” and often do not represent the emotional basis for differentiation and final decision. It is important to remember, at the end of the day, the site selection consultant’s job is to provide the CEO with the information to make an informed decision. Net, the CEO is the site selection consultant’s boss as well. The more you focus on understanding and communicating what the CEO needs to know about your location the more effective your promotional program will be.  And, site selection consultants will actually be grateful that you are providing them with relevant information to share with their “boss”. Take a quick look at your promotional efforts and determine if you have the CEO as the focus of the communication. If you decide you don’t, then meet with a few CEOs from companies in your community and ask for their insight on what changes would be important to make. The more relevant you can make your messaging on a limited budget, the more effective you can be.
2. Where to Play, How to Win. These are two simple strategic questions that are so important to answer any yet so difficult to get alignment on. The biggest issue is the answers require you to make a choice. “My economic development efforts will focus on attracting, retaining and expanding capital from these select industries and not these.” It is the “not” word that creates so much debate. Part of the problem is executives and support groups included in the “not” category feel slighted and left out, so they push back on the choice. One of the keys to success is to restate the position – “My limited economic development promotional dollars will be preferentially focused on attracting, retaining and expanding capital from these select industries over the next 24 months.” “Not” industries in your community provide tax revenue and represent job creation potential. They should be valued. The problem is you have a limited promotional budget and must make a choice on where to invest it for the greatest potential return. Make certain the executives in your “not” industries feel the love or you may find them leaving your community. Don’t alienate them with the way you communicate your promotional investment choices.

   Different from Where to Play, How to win, means making a select number of specific choices on how to differentiate your community within the target industries you plan to play.  The hardest thing in making these choices is being objective.  You need to understand the image your community has in the minds of the CEOs in those industries. Often, this includes misperceptions that need to be addressed. Or, it may be a complete lack of awareness regarding your asset package. In either case, your promotional efforts must talk to the CEO and not to yourself. That means explaining what the benefits they will derive in selecting your location. Stop talking features and start talking benefits.

3. Leverage What You Do Best. It is okay if your community is not the best choice for a company.  No location is the right solution for every potential capital investor. Yet, we feel bad when an RFP is rejected or we didn’t get an opportunity to even compete for a specific deal. Sometimes a rejection is actually the best outcome. Particularly, if an acceptance would create a major distraction because the company needs are not aligned with your community strengths. The core paradigm in economic development needs to shift from a landlord-tenant relationship to a real partnership where you can easily see both the business and community growing stronger together. The easiest way to do this by attracting investment that leverages the strengths of your community, and by investing to make your strengths even stronger. Think in terms of Jim Collin’s hedgehog concept. Stay focused on what your community has passion for, can be great at and can build an economy around. Do this and your economic development will move from “good to great”. Do this, and your community will be a true business partner versus a landlord.
4. Optimize by Building Enabling Structures. One learning from my career is that systems are perfectly designed to produce the results you get. If you are getting mediocre results, then your system needs attention (or you could reset your expectation so mediocre is acceptable). A model I have always found useful when working “on” the system has been the Galbraith Star. It is an organizational development model to help you understand the driving and restraining forces that conspire to produce consistent results. Armed with that insight, the next step is to optimize the system to produce competitively superior results. You do this by creating processes, programs, assets and policy change aligned to the desired outcome. When you’ve successfully answered the “Where to Play and How to Win” questions, you are in a position to evaluate your systems and determine if they are sufficiently robust to deliver the results you seek.  If not, then optimize.
5. Manage Risk. I want to contrast managing risk from eliminating risk. On the road to breakthrough results you will have to deal with risk, there is no way around it. That means you need to get good at identifying and quantifying it. The fact is all change entails risk. Equally true is most people and organizations don’t understand how to manage risk effectively. And yet, it is one of the skills that often separates winners from the losers. Risk management is a process and with a little practice can be learned and applied to your economic development decisions. Effective risk management allows you to make purposeful choices that help you change your community so it can continually be seen as relevant, competitive and authentic. It also helps build confidence in the strategic direction you select to help create jobs and prosperity. Getting good at managing risk allows you to change faster and more dramatically, creating a competitive advantage that is difficult for other locations to duplicate. How much risk is your community taking? Is it enough to facilitate change so your community can be competitive in today’s interdependent global economy?
6. Be Courageous and Connected. Being courageous is all about your willingness to continually challenge the status quo in a productive way. It is about being open to purposefully destroy what appears to be working in order to invent an even more effective path to greater success. It doesn’t mean being foolish or cost inefficient though. It speaks to making choices that are thought through. It means not being caught up in analysis paralysis waiting for that last piece of data that tells you exactly what to do. In my experience it also means accepting the principle of Occam’s Razor – the best course forward is the one built upon the fewest assumptions or the choice based on the set of assumptions with the lowest expected variance. The principle is often expressed (actually incorrectly) as “the simplest solution is generally the best solution”. In my experience, reapplication in economic development means recognizing that systems and processes that have historically worked well, may have become unnecessarily complicated (14^th century Franciscan friar William of Ockham’s notion of plurality without necessity). If you strip a system or process back to the original intent underpinning the design, it gets easier to identify the root cause of any current failure. Take legislation for an example. If you understand the purpose of the original legislation by stripping away all subsequently legislated exceptions you can begin to understand why it no longer meets the needs of today’s economic reality.  In these cases, yet another a bandaid is probably not the best solution because you’ll be pushing the original execution well beyond the designer’s intent.  It would be better to reassess and create a new simplified solution. Remember, if your operation gets too complicated the chances of getting a manageable solution are slim. On the other hand, if you are in touch with what is really happening in your community, you are always in a good position to design a simple solution that has a high probability of success. The challenge isn’t so much identifying what is right to do, as it is unraveling the years of politics that add “plurality without necessity”. Net, strip out the complexity and keep it simple if you want to increase your probability of success.

If you get a chance to read Game Changer, please do so. There is a lot of wisdom in the book that I left out of the above discussion. I know you’ll enjoy it. Hopefully my take on the reapplication of the principles is helpful as you think through how you are going to do more with less. I also know the conversation on Occam’s Razor may be a bit self-indulgent. But, my undergraduate degree is in theoretical mathematics and old habits die hard. To those of you who did read it, thank you for your perseverance.

Do you have personal examples of any of the 6 principles at work in your community? Or, do you have thoughts on how you might reapply any of the principles to do more with less budget? If you do, please share your thoughts as a comment. Your willingness to add personal perspective to the discussion will help everybody get a better educational experience from reading the post. I appreciate your participation and look forward to your thoughts.

The Seven Essentials For Success in Tough Economic Times

Sunday, July 18th, 2010

Operating budgets for economic development are getting even tighter as increased demand is placed on declining municipality and state tax revenues. As a consequence, economic development organizations are being asked to do even more with less. In light of concerns over the current slow rate of economic recovery, it doesn’t appear this situation is going to markedly improve any time soon.

So, if you can’t count on getting adequate resources for your current economic development plans, what can you do to help ensure success in these tough challenging economic times?

Here are Seven Essential things you could (and should) be doing to maximize your economic development performance.

1. Know your community assets and the benefits they deliver for your capital attraction, expansion and retention target industries. Now is when you really need to invest time and energy into sharpening your unique selling proposition and sales story for your target industries. It is important you understand how capital investors objectively assess your community strengths and weaknesses. It is time to ensure the language you are using in your RFP responses are adequately answering the question – “What’s in it for me?” versus the classic construct of “Let me tell you how wonderful this community is.” Stop talking features, and start talking benefits. You need to generate insight into why an executive in a target industry might select your community and determine the most compelling bundle of assets you can authentically deliver. Now is the time to invest in candid introspection and community self-awareness. You rarely have time for this when your promotional budgets are strong and you are focused on project deadlines. Now is the time to do the assessment, when the project side of your operation has a temporary lull.
2. Focus on a few industries and do the job exceptionally well. When your budget is cut, you need to redouble your efforts to understand the drivers of success in attracting capital from the industries you are targeting. You have minimal dollars to waste, so improving the effectiveness and efficiencies of what you are doing is paramount. Conduct a work out session in your shop to eliminate non-value added activities. Take a hard look at why companies have rejected your RFPs in the past and focus on strengthening the weak parts of your proposal package so you can increase the conversion rate for leads to investment. Seek to know what is really going on in a select few of your highest priority industries and try to meet their needs better than any other community.
3. Resource your initiatives adequately.When your budget is cut, don’t try to maintain your promotional effort across a wide range of industries by cutting investment across the board. This is the easy, but often fatal, approach. Instead, make the hard choice about which industries you are going to prioritize and then make certain you can afford to invest at a level that ensures competitiveness. This approach will actually result in a higher probability for a return on investment. In addition to making the priority choices, you also need to reset expectations with your Management and contributing members. If you do not reset expectations, then you will be under constant pressure to expand your industry focus and your community leaders will be consistently disappointed in your performance no matter how remarkable it is under the circumstances. Recalibrate expectations. Get them aligned with your program’s ability to deliver results and then you will be in a position to win.
4. Get even closer to your business community. You cannot afford expensive market research when budgets are tight. But, you cannot afford to fly blind either when it is so important to minimize the risk of making a wrong decision. How do you reconcile the dilemma? The key is to forge even closer, personal relationships with the business leadership in your community so you can learn about their industry directly from them. Often the insights you will get are informed by industry omnibus market research in addition to their own experience. It is unlikely company leaders will reach out to you and offer the knowledge. You will need to proactively reach out to them to explain your information needs and ask for their help and insights.
5. Partner with other economic development organizations to cost share. We often view other communities as competitive. However, just because everybody’s budgets have gotten tighter doesn’t mean the cost of success has decreased. It just means you can’t afford to play the game the same way you used to. These are times when Regional collaborations really shine. They create opportunities for cost sharing that frees up your cash for redeployment to support mission critical activities only your organization can deliver. My general counsel to everybody who asks is to follow the OPM – OPR – OPK model (Other People’s Money, Other People’s Resources, Other People’s Knowledge). If you get the model working for you, then you are well on the way to a successful outcome.
6. Enroll your business community as active advocates. It will take an increase in sweat equity from your team, but it won’t require a tremendous investment of promotional dollars to create a grassroots program to support your economic development efforts. Now is the time to reach out to the community and make them even more active partners in your work. To be clear, this is not as easy as it sounds. This is not as simple as creating a Facebook page or a community newsletter. You need to have a sound strategic and tactical plan to utilize the community’s voice in your selling efforts. You should think about this opportunity both systemically and on a project specific basis (e.g. using specific executives in your capital attraction program to accomplish specific goals).
7. Create a team of trusted advisors and listen to them. Managing in tough times with a limited budget is hard and demanding work. But, it can be made easier if you tap into the collective wisdom of the business leaders in your community who have led their operations through ups and downs and have both personal experience and insight to share. Not only will you get great counsel, but you will also gain a lot of confidence from listening to people who have successfully maneuvered through similar rough seas as yours. Even if you simply learn what mistakes to avoid, you will be in a much better position to succeed.

None of the seven tips are “rocket science”. But, we often forget to pay attention to the basics or we are afraid to make difficult prioritization choices when economic times are difficult. Legacy systems, unchanging expectations, over burdensome bureaucracy, all conspire to create a “deer in the headlight response” and we tend to operate the same way we did as when we had budget to invest. This Organizational behavior leads to poor performance and dissatisfaction among your key stakeholders. Instead of business as usual, as a leader in your economic development organization, you need to rethink priorities, retool delivery systems and reset expectations for what success looks like. Do this, and even in tough economic times you will make progress in moving your community toward economic prosperity.

If you have an eighth essential to add to the list, or a thought to consider, please add a comment to this blog post.

P.S.  Your support of the Place BrandAid project is important. Help the economic development professionals in states affected by the BP oil spill by sharing your thoughts on how you might tackle their challenge to rebuild their community image. The contribution of your thinking matters and will make a difference. Thank you!