To develop an efficient marketing strategy, it is important to understand what the customers want and how the company can create value into their product better than the competition. The goal is to a better sense of what the customers want than your competition, and even the customers themselves: this is customer insight. To achieve superior customer insight, five different simple steps are recommended. These are: interacting personally with the end user, spend “quantity time” with the customer more than your competitor, watch customers buy your product, watch customers use your product and lastly engage end users as product designers. Read More >>
Monthly Archives: May 2019
4 Qualities Venture Capitalists Look for in an Entrepreneur
Rick Desai, venture capitalist argues that a successful business can come down to the individual you are more than to your great idea. Some have it innately and others have to learn how to work it out. Through his experience, Desai shares with Kellogg Insight 4 qualities he looks for when deciding to support entrepreneurs. These are: demonstrate a drive that inspires belief, do not wait for the money, understand the importance of thinking small and mitigate risk. Read More >>
The Decelerator : How Do You Shut Down Your Startup ?
What do you do when your startup doesn’t take off ? According to Harvard Business School, 30 to 40% of all startups fail. The number goes as high as 80% if you measure failure by if the startup achieved its projected returned investment. Abigail Edgecliffe-Johnson is the Founder of The Shut Down, an open source project trying to build a road map for people who are trying to wind down their startup. Edgecliffe-Johnson’s goal is to build a guide for anyone trying to shut down their startup through a detailed customized checklist and hopefully, make this process less painful for the entrepreneurs. Like this, she hopes it would be easier for them to move forward in building more businesses. Read More >>
A Surprising Simple Way to Encourage Customers to Take Risk
Marketing researchers have explored many factors that influence the customer’s decisions while choosing a product over another. Some such as personality traits or how ads frame a question are a bigger focus than others, such as how your surroundings affect your decisions. Indeed, in Ati Jami, research assistant professor of marketing at the Kellogg school stipulates that things in our surroundings that seem irrelevant to the decision can still influence our choices. New studies focused on viewing images reveals that high elevation can push people to take more risk, suggesting that high elevation make us feel more in control. But these images are not suitable for every situation and marketers should test different viewing images to gauge the customer’s reaction. Read More >>
HOW INTROVERTS CAN LEARN TO LOVE NETWORKING
Networking events can be complicated to navigate for introverts. But according to Holly Raider, a clinical professor of management at the Kellogg School of Management, introverts can be just as skilled as extroverts in networking and with some help, they are able to transform this trait into a real networking superpower. She offers four different tips for introverts looking to thrive in the networking experience and enabling them to enjoy it. These are : prepare a repertoire of questions, maintain a curious mindset, focus on relationships, not business cards and know when to move on. Read More >>
STARTUPS AIMS TO WIRELESSLY CHARGE INDUSTRIAL DRONES
Global Energy Transmission’s new drone recharging technology has a lot of value for the energy and infrastructure inspection industries. Indeed, the company’s new technology uses electromagnetic field to charge drones in flight. With a max power transfer rate of 12kW within a charging area of 8m, the Get Air system claims to have a transmission efficiency up to 80%. Leonid Plekhanov, founder of the firm believes that the wireless charging technology would be ideal for inspecting oil, gas pipeline infrastructures. The company is currently under a series of temporary waivers from the FCC and hopes to be approved to sell it to customers. Read More >>
Take 5: Fine-tuning Your Powers of Persuasion
Kellogg company is sharing five tips to get people to agree with your idea and jump on board. Firstly, you need to persuade people that your idea is a good idea. This is achievable through strategies such as letting the audience know what they are missing, let them experience the benefits and win a critical mass that will influence the surroundings. Secondly, it is important to understand power dynamics to persuade people to agree with your idea. Indeed, to persuade highlighting your competence or appearing warm depend on your audience and how equally powerful they feel in the situation. The better the power balance between communicators is the higher the chances are to persuade your audience. Thirdly, the use of communication tools for complex idea such as visuals, storytelling, and stressing audience participation can help others in buying into your product. The fourth tip shared by the Kellogg company is on ads. Customers consider some marketing tactics to be more trustworthy than others, therefore it is helpful to know which ones to adopt. Lastly, to persuade your audience, you should study how room lighting shapes decisions as research shows that dim lighting can influence us to pick what we want rather than what we think is approved by the others. Read More >>
A Three-Part Formula on Fueling Startups
While exploring how a new venture can succeed with their paper “Turning Lead into Gold: How Entrepreneurs Mobilize Resources to Exploit Opportunities”, Bala Vasaa and his co-authors were able to come up with a three-step process to mobilize business resources. Step 1 is to search for resources such as financial capital, human capital and social capital. To do so, entrepreneurs need to identify where to find the resources and this task can be tedious as too many entrepreneurs limit their search on the world they already know. Step 2 is to persuade the ones with the appropriate resources to come on board. Entrepreneurs can access resources in many ways from a successful pitch, to convincing potential employees, to alliances and affiliations with other companies for their social network. To successfully acquire the resources, research shows that a compelling narrative of the startup weights a lot on persuading investors. Lastly, step 3 is to deploy the acquired resources. Entrepreneurs may still face brakes from formal contracts, informal agreements or authorities even after acquiring the resources as they depend on the resource holders. This dependence is good because it favorizes transfer of resources but at the same times, makes the founders sometimes vulnerable. Read More >>
How a blockchain startup with 1M users is working to break your Google habit
Google over the last decade has completely taken over the internet. Anyone or any company that has tried to put their stake in has immediately been shut down. However, Presearch, a 2017-founded, pro-privacy blockchain-based startup that’s using cryptocurrency tokens as an incentive to decentralize search hopes to loosen Google’s grip. As far as users, Presearch has just passed a million registered users — and says monthly active users for its beta are ~250k. For now, Google remains dominant in search but for how long can this dominance really last? Read More>>
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