Hey, happy Monday!
Nokia recently decided to tackle a significant rebrand. You’ve probably already had a chance to read this news, or if not, I’ll leave you the link to the project directly on the website of the agency that oversaw it: Lippincott.
I want to take this opportunity to tell you about Nokia not as a brand, but as a business.
The company that later became Nokia was founded in southern Finland in 1865 as a manufacturer of semi-finished wood products. Over the decades it expanded into emerging fields such as power generation and telephone manufacturing.
In the 1960s, Nokia was a conglomerate selling everything from toilet paper to car tires. But by the late 1980s it had spun off many business lines, except for its telecommunications business. By 1998 Nokia was the world’s largest cell phone manufacturer. The one we all know.
There are 3 things that fascinate me about Nokia’s untold story.
1/ The Art of Pivoting
This story-and many others I have collected-demonstrates how it is quite natural for any company to make a large amount of bets and prepare to lose most of them in order to find its way.
I think the secret of the art of losing well is to be found in the processes these organizations have, particularly in a certain category of processes absent in many companies I know: those of dismantling. What do I mean by that?
Some easily add projects and initiatives to the to-do list, but have no processes to stop executing things that are not working and redistribute learning and resources.
No one can acquire the ability not to lose bets, but one can certainly develop the ability to limit damage. For example, Nokia divested businesses in which its operating structure was not efficient to specialized companies and reinvested in stronger lines.
2/ We always see one side from the story
When we look at competition we form a mental model of competitors’ strategy that many times is limited if not wrong. It depends a lot on the quality of the information you are able to gather, and unless you have an industrial espionage network it is difficult to understand how a competitor is moving until the moment its moves are visible in the marketplace. And at that point it may be too late.
3/ Analyzing the competition is not enough
Unless you have an incredibly larger distribution scale or budget to invest in marketing than your competitors, slides with the title “Competitive Analysis” done by consulting firms piecing together articles found on Google won’t get you very far.
Instead, the more effective alternative is to shift the focus from competition to people.
Realigning the organization to customer needs and possibly being able to anticipate them.
It is very common that competition often does not come from the same product category from which the analysis is conducted.
A funny but realistic example I always give is to think about how much the demand for burners has dropped since Spotify has been around. They certainly didn’t destroy this segment, which I think stands on the shoulders of Italian health care otherwise I can’t explain why they still give you a CD rom that you can’t read when you take certain exams…
Joking aside, cloud services and increasingly faster bandwidth have caused people’s behavior to change and made it ridiculous as well as inconvenient to exchange physical media rather than have access to a streaming service.
What would you do if you could sit behind your customer’s back and watch how they use your product?
You would have first-hand information that would allow you to understand what other products he interacts with in his day and what tasks he tries to accomplish. You would find out in what sequence of activities your features intersect, and you would certainly come up with others to make his life easier.
That is exactly what we will do if you would like to join the cohort leaving on March 27.
Resuming after this brief interruption…
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In the B2B software industry, these kinds of processes are bread and butter for product managers.
For example, in the business analytics segment, many products position themselves as a substitute for Excel and shape their marketing to make that behavior seem a bit lame and spotlight their product.
Patrick Campbell of ProfitWell has done exactly the opposite. That behavior, while inefficient, is extremely complicated to change, even and especially because of the distribution issues mentioned above. So why, instead of being anti-excel, don’t we make data entry easy in spreadsheets? This simple insight allowed them to make a $200M exit! If you want to learn more about this story I recommend listening to his interview on Lenny’s Podcast.
On Thursday, March 9 at 12 noon, I decided to replicate the live broadcast on JTBD.
If you were unable to attend the previous one, or would like to learn more about these issues, please join us by registering at this link
See you in the room,
ALWAYS MAKE PROGRESS⤴
– Antonio
