Don’t Be Boring

An interesting mantra for a new year. If this is the year that you want to do something extraordinary, don’t be boring. Be interesting. Do new things. Take chances.

And get yourself into an environment that rewards bravery. There’s no sense in leaping off a bridge if it’s not going to get you somewhere cool. Unless it’s fun.

- Christian

How (Not) To Make Decisions

Here’s the situation. You paid $25 million for a research study that is supposed to form the basis of your business strategy for the next 5 years. It turns out that market has changed. What should you do? How should the $25 million you’ve invested impact your decision? The answer is simple.

It shouldn’t.

It’s a sunk cost. A sunk cost is an incurred past cost which have already been that cannot be recovered. Because you can’t get that money back, it shouldn’t affect your decision making.

You bought a pair of jeans online. They were $150 and you can’t return them. They arrive and don’t fit. They looks terrible. Do you wear them? Nope. You give them to someone else. You donate them to the Salvation Army. You wear your old jeans from before. Or you buy a new pair. But there are always people who will try to squeeze their way into expensive jeans that don’t fit and hope that people don’t notice.

But people always notice.

You could have spent $25 million or five bucks. If it’s a sunk cost, it shouldn’t impact your decisions. The amount you already spent is irrelevant. What matters is what the benefit of doing what it takes to get back to a strategy that’s relevant to the market.

So ignore sunk costs. And wear jeans that fit.

- Christian

Inspired by a friend’s frustration as well as this article.

Introducing A New Holiday

In July, Seth asked the age old questions - So, what should we do on your birthday? My answer is usually pretty simple – go for drinks. But his was a little different.

With all due respect to Hallmark, the idea of sending people cards and presents on their birthday seems both selfish and small-minded. It seems to me that we could think bigger.

On your birthday, what should your friends do? Let’s say you have a shoe buying fetish. Perhaps on your birthday, your friends could buy shoes–for themselves, not for you. Share the joy, right? Or perhaps buy shoes for their friends?

It’s my birthday. So, I am proclaiming today International Talk To A Stranger Day. What do you have to do? It’s pretty simple. Just go up and talk to a complete stranger and have a conversation. Ask them where they got their cool kicks. What they think about the weather. If they’re into Mad Men. Whatever. Just talk to someone that you haven’t met before.

Everyone out there possesses a new perspective on life. People have interesting stories that you wouldn’t have considered yourself. But it’s human nature for us to remain comfortable in our current social circle. To exchange opinions with people that have similar points of view as us. So go out and talk to someone new and get inspired.

On a side note, it was a neck-and-neck tie between Talk To A Stranger and Eat A Peanut Butter Cookie. So, if you don’t talk to a stranger for my birthday, the least you can do is eat a peanut butter cookie.

- Christian

Where To Find The Time

The media landscape is changing. Why? Because society is changing. It used to be that people would come home from school or work and commune on the sofa in front of the television. In some places this is still the case. In fact, Americans watch over 200 billion hours of TV every year.

But things are changing. Now, instead of coming home and simply consuming media (like watching TV), people are doing something different. Sure, they still consume. But now some people spend the time previously spent mindlessly watching and are doing something productive with it: they’re now sharing and creating content.

Do you see what’s happened? We’ve shifted from zombies ingesting programing to being able to actually add value. We can spread the word about the good stuff. And when nobody is making stuff that you want to spend your time reading/watching, you can make your own.

Think about it. For every 10 hours of television that you watch, there are 3 hours of ads. What if you took all of that time that you were watching ads and did something productive with it? You could:

1. Brainstorm new business ideas
2. Figure out who the next pool of lucrative clients will be
3. Write an article on your area of expertise
4. Google yourself. And then clean up what you find.
5. Send a quick email, asking an expert for some insight into an issue

- Christian

Pitches, Sleepless Nights and Swine Flu

First of all, I apologize for not posting last week. I got caught up in the last minute craziness that normally accompanies new business pitches. For the uninitiated, it usually means late nights, greasy Thai food and for some reason, sore shoulders. On Thursday afternoon, I emerged from a post-pitch nap with stubble and red eyes. So, I decided to turn on the news. Apparently, I missed this whole swine flu pandemic.

My first thought was that this was another media-created panic. It’s justification for all of the taxpayer dollars spent preparing for another SARS outbreak. Plus, only 98 of the 33 million people living in Canada had come down with it. That’s pretty much the same percentage of people affected by scurvy.

But then I thought this irrational fear could be an opportunity for the right companies. Like Purell. As a PR stunt, Purell should donate tones of their hand sanitizer products to malls, subways and movie theaters. Use this opportunity to get their brand in places that they haven’t been before. Get a spokesperson touring around the major news networks educating people on preventing the flu through basic hand sanitation. And brand all of it.

When it’s raining lemons, make lemonade. Then add vodka.

- Christian

How I Would Take On Tim Hortons

It’s spring again. In Canada, that means two things: (1) there is at least one more snowfall to occur before it actually gets warms, and (2) it’s Roll Up The Rim time at Tim Hortons. Roll Up The Rim is the biggest marketing promotion in Canada. It’s so popular that companies pay to have their prizes featured in the contest. Think about that. The reach is so immense that they basically sell ad space on their coffee cups. Oh, and the ads suck. But it doesn’t matter because Canadians love this contest regardless.

One of my friends challenged me to figure out what you could to “take on” Tim Hortons. This is my answer.

You have to realize that you can’t beat them by being just 10% better. (Like what Coffee Time is doing with “Every Cup Is A Winner”). Having a larger prize pool doesn’t matter at this point. Besides, Tim Hortons is the largest coffee chain in Canada. That means, that they have deeper pockets. They could simply grow the size of their prize pool to trump yours.

So what do you do? You have to pull back and see the big picture. You have to see the opportunities to change the game. You need to get outside of trying to beat Tim Hortons on the grounds of a contest promotion. That’s their game. They own it in Canada. You need to strike out and attack their audience from a different angle. Offer them a different value proposition.

Tim Hortons targets the coffee drinkers who take their coffee “to go”. So what do you do? You make their take-out coffee experience better. How do we do that? Simple. You give them free cups. But the cups need to be cool. They need to have badge value. They need to be reusalbe and unique enough so that people can tell it’s a XXX coffee cup. It’s kind of like what POM did for its POM Teas with their glasses.
You provide people with something free and something with cool badge value. Simple. No rolling up the rims of coffee cup. No trying to calculate the winning odds in different provinces. Just a cool bonus from a cool coffee shop.

- Christian

3 Things I Learned In Sudbury

This past weekend, I decided that it would be a good idea to hop in a car for four and half hours and make a trek up to Sudbury for an ultimate tournament. In the snow. Here’s what I learned this weekend:

1. Go Ahead. Get Dirty.
Sudbury is one of the dirtiest cities I have ever been in. And I’ve been to Manila in the 90s. I think it has something to do with the mining town, but I feel like the entire place is covered by a layer of brown soot. In Canada, normally even the dirtiest places get covered by snow to look beautiful. Not Sudbury.

So what did we do? We embraced it. It was the situation that we were in, and we couldn’t change it. Too often, people search for the perfect idea. They automatically reject the “dirty” ones because they have flaws. You have to accept your circumstances and make the best of them. If only dirty ideas are coming to you, embrace them. Try to find a way to turn them into something you can use. Even if it’s a little dirty.

2. Be Nice.
Sudbury had some of the nicest people I have ever met. They were laid back and accepting. I found that whenever we were in a pickle, they were more than happy to help. All you had to do was ask nicely. It’s a concept that’s taught to us in elementary school: be nice. But it’s something that we often forget when we allow ourselves to get swallowed by myopia and busy schedules. Instead, we tend to focus solely on our needs and forget the power that politeness provides. In business, I’ve found that being nice to the “gatekeepers” (like the receptionist or secretary that controls people’s schedules) will get you farther than you expect.

3. Get Out Of The City.
Every Torontonian thinks that Toronto is the centre of the universe. The same applies for New Yorkers. And people who live in LA. The truth is that the vast majority of the world doesn’t live in those cities. You have to leave your safety bubble of a giant metropolis with countless entertainment and cultural options. You have to experience what it’s like to be a “normal” Canadian. To interact with the people who compose the majority of the country. Who buy the majority of your products. Who voted for the guy that you didn’t vote for in the last election. It’s always refreshing to exit the big city and interact with people who have different experiences, insights and perspectives.

So, this is what I learned this weekend. That, and playing ultimate in the snow is a lot of fun.

- Christian

Cologne’s Real Target Market: Women

I have a confession to make. I don’t get cologne. Seriously. The whole fragrance category astounds me. Their marketing is total fluff that I don’t understand. Fragrance industry, let me lay some consumer insight on you:

1. I automatically associate certain scents with douchebags. Like Davidoff’s Cool Water.
2. I have never bought cologne for myself. I’ve always received it as gifts.
3. I don’t wear it everyday. I wear it when I want to impress.
4. I don’t wear it for myself. I wear it for the people that I’m going to interact with.
5. I can’t tell which scents smell better than others
6. I always defer judgment to a woman.

So what’s the key insight here? Women are the target market. Why? Because men wear it to get a reaction from them. They appreciate it. They make it sexy to wear. They make it desirable to purchase. But most of all, they substantiate (or put down) your choice. Trust me, there is nothing more validating than when a women nuzzles next to you and whispers, “You smell nice.” There’s also nothing more embarrassing than this.

I have more thinking to do on this topic. Thoughts?

- Christian

How To Fill A Stadium

I was watching the Toronto Raptors on TV and noticed the swash of empty seats. The arena was half full. Why? The Raptors suck. That’s why. But after further thought, I concluded that this wasn’t the case. The reason why there were empty seats was because two reasons: (1) people weren’t buying tickets, and (2) people with tickets weren’t showing up to games.

Why People Aren’t Buying Tickets
I’ve been curious as to why price of individual games remains constant. Surely people would pay more to see the Lakers than the Grizzlies. People aren’t buying Raptors tickets because the value of the ticket doesn’t match the price. The Raptors are currently sucking, making is less engaging for fans to go to the games. The value of the product is decreasing, so shouldn’t the price match? At $15 a pop, I would rather go see “Yes Man” than suffer through seeing the Raptors tank from the nosebleeds. Decrease the price until the Raptors give me better value for my money than Jim Carrey. Give people good value and they’ll buy your product.

Why People Are Wasting Their Tickets
People are busy. Things come up at the last minute. A snow storm comes in. It all makes sense. Normally, if you can’t get to a game, you’ll try to sell your tickets or give them to someone else. But then you get lazy. You only call one friend who can’t go to the game and then you give up. Basically, there’s effort required to get rid of your tickets. And that cost of the effort is greater than the value that selling the tickets would bring. And people don’t decide not to go to the game until the last minute, when it’s too late to resell the tickets.

The Solution
The Raptors set up an official online auction site to resell tickets. If you are season ticket holder who can’t make a game, they make it easy for you to log-in and sell your tickets. The Raptors take a processing fee for each transaction (like eBay). If you’re a winner, all you do is take a winning bid code to a ticket window at the arena and pick up your tickets. Voila.

The team could also leverage the auction system to release tickets for their empty seats on game day. It allows them to price the seats low and allow the fans to decide the value of the tickets. If you really want to go to the game, you simply bid more. This way the Raptors would be to sell out the ACC every time. An empty seat is a sunk cost, so they could sell for as little as $1 and the team would gain revenue.

Conclusion
For every professional sports team, each empty seat represents an enormous opportunity cost. Especially when there are a limited amount of seats and a limited amount of games in a season. Why not maximize revenues by making it easy for people to access these seats at prices that fit the value?

- Christian

Take Your MLS Addiction With You

Apparently a lot of people are addicted to MLS, the website that lets you peruse all the real estate listings. I don’t really get it myself, but I suppose it’s more of a “grown up” yuppie obsession. The same type of people that have recently dumped their dumbphones for smartphones with GPS capabilities.

So here’s an idea: create a widget or iPhone application that marries the MLS listings with GPS. You download it to your phone. You set your preferences (let’s say that you only want to look at houses under $500,000). Then, whenever you come within 100 meters of a listing that matches your preferences, your phone lets you know.

- Christian