These two stories made me reflect on the strategic considerations in naming businesses and when taking brands global:
This French Billionaire Is About To Invade America and FRENCH INVASION: Flash Sales Juggernaut Vente Privée Announces Plans To Kill Gilt Groupe.
One has to presume that the combined marketing staffs of Vente Prive'e and AMEX must have considered how their brand may be pronounced by non French-speaking US consumers. Or, may be not. Memories of Chevy entering the Mexican market with the Nova (in Spanish pronounced No Va = Doesn't Go) come to mind - it became a classic of international brand screw-ups cited in international marketing courses.
So let's consider a possibility: Vente, pronounced by a Yank and partly thanks to Starbucks will morph into Venti (itself a confusing term to many Starbucks customers unaware that Venti=20 in Italian, which is the size of the drink - apparently a fork in the road offering a choice between ease for the consumer and marketing mystique was traveled toward the latter). Since Starbucks commands more "brain share", Vente may well evoke images of "large paper cups".
As to Prive'e, since the accented e is not conveniently available on US keyboards, it is inevitable that it will soon be lost to create Privee, in turn most likely to be pronounced Privy by many Americans, evoking visions of toilets. Is "Large Cup Toilet" the image one would want to attach to one's brand entering a new market? I wonder.
These may all be conjectures, and yet possible outcomes. If you were launching your new startup in a new market, would you prefer avoiding a handicap even even if only a potential one? If you were the king of global reach (AMEX) would you not have international staff able to recognize the risk of a trap? Or did pride in one's extremely (domestically) successful brand deluded the marketer into believing he can tech French to the locals (traditionally a distinctly unsuccessful effort)?
Stay tuned you may soon hear of VP, VenPri, or some other variation on the theme.
PS If you are sufficiently opportunistically entrepreneurial to buy all domains with word combinations that could solve the above problem, let me know. It will make for a nice story on entrepreneurship.
Marco Messina
Mobile Apps Development. Formerly Startup and Angel Pitch Mentoring
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Thursday, April 28, 2011
LUCKY OR SMART? Secrets To An Entrepreneurial Life
A refreshing an honest reflection on: luck, making one's luck and knowing the difference; discovering what we are psychologically fit for and what not; learning to look for luck where we are fit and able to create it. Great lessons in business and self understanding.
Read the whole series of posts here
Marco Messina
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Learning to dance
Ballroom dancing is not an innate skill. Most people have to learn the basic technique that most other dancers are likely to use because it is the shared knowledge that makes possible for two near-strangers to move in step and unison on a dance floor. It often pas to learn it before stepping on the dance floor with a new date, or a new in-law at one's wedding.
The same can be said of learning to deal with investors. It is not an innate skill, although, as in dancing, some have an easier time than others. Learning the skills and preparing the relationships before being in a hurry to close a funding deal is likely to help the entrepreneur find a better match and a smoother dance when the time comes. Like in dancing it goes both ways, investors too can gain by being open to meeting not-yet-ready but up-and-coming entrepreneurs.
The following post says it well. Take a look.
If you can't buy your investor a beer, don't take their money - Sachin's Posterous
Shall we dance?
Marco Messina
Monday, April 18, 2011
The Crisis of Credit Visualized | BusinessBlogs Hub
In the public interest: this is the best explanation of the debt crisis that I've seen in non-technical terms. It took ten years to create a financial industry bomb, will it take ten more to fully digest the consequences? The optimist says yes, only ten: plan accordingly.
The Crisis of Credit Visualized | BusinessBlogs Hub
Friday, April 15, 2011
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Belief is the key
Belief (not stubbornness) is the root of achievement, that internal voice that makes us persist in the game.
Toady we see one such game playing in front of our eyes, on Jeopardy. It is the latest chapter of IBM's pitting the machine against the human. The last match was in 1997 and Garry Kasparov was our knight. He had belief to spare. He lost to Deep Blue and went into a deep depression as a result - some mountains are too tall and rocks too big, but letting go is always tough.
How would you like to be the Humans' knight in shining armor: Brad Rutter or Ken Jennings? It takes true grit and great belief. In the other corner, despite appearances, it is not Watson, it is the IBM team behind that multicolor-cyberface-cum-mawhawk, with seven years and $1-2 billion worth of dreams and persistence on the line.
It is a quixotic battle: like that against Deep Blue before. Watson will eventually win for no other reason that IBM will find the Rutter and Jennings of artificial intelligence and put them to work pushing that rock to the mountain top. In this sense defeat of the Humans is inevitable. It may happen tonight or tomorrow or by an average of three nights (BTW Deep Blue won not all matches, only 3.5 to 2.5 over 7 matches). Perhaps we'll have to wait longer yet, but it will come. Our brightest Humans can make machines "smarter" over time but we have not yet found a repeatable and fast way to make ourselves smarter.
Regardless of who wins Jeopardy, the human ability to imagine, belief and commitment will have won again. And now go back to pushing your rock, you don't have far to go.
Marco Messina
Monday, November 15, 2010
Twitter, Facebook and Questions with Unintended Consequences
Last night I worked very late, so late that I fell asleep at my desk. I found myself walking into a huge building by the sea, a convention center. Admission was free, inside there were many rooms. The doors were labeled with subjects of interest: Politics, Business, Poetry, Religion, Internet Services, Sustainability, Global Warming, Venture Capital, Innovation, etc. I entered one that appealed to me. In it I found thousands of people standing elbow to elbow, people of all sizes and colors, speaking many languages, but English for the most part, many with interestingly English-as-second-language sentence structures and words. Their attires reflected the world, and activities and lifestyles ranging from poets to explorers to programmers to marketing consultants to business managers and entrepreneurs just starting new internet ventures. Those you could single out from the unassuming clothes and visible optimism and excitement in their faces.
They all stood around, some in clusters, each seemingly shouting to all and occasionally attentive especially to someone at the center of a cluster. They all spoke short statements beginning with “Did you know” followed by few words. Frequently they’d move on across the crowd, as in a Brownian motion, until they orbited a new cluster where they seemingly recognized the shouter at the center. One cluster was notable for its size, over 200,000 people coming and going. The man at the center had his nose to his laptop’s screen typing frantically at high speed. Every few minutes he’d shout “Did you know: I just published blah blah blah”. The participants of the cluster would eagerly elbow their way toward him and each would pull away a page he had just written and read it attentively. Some would then turn around and, raising the page in the air, would shout “Did you know: Marty Zwilling just published blah blah blah” and people from other clusters would eagerly reach for the page held up high. The cacophony of Did-you-hears was almost like white noise, but with practice I learned to listen. There were some twits shouting “Did you hear: I am Bozo, I woke up this morning, you all have a nice day”, others holding a book of quotations of famous people they did not know, shouted “Did you know: carpe diem – make good of the day” (thank you for the translation) “Did you know: DailyWisdom: "He who guards his mouth preserves his life, But he who opens wide his lips shall have destruction" or “Did you know: I took my dogs for a walk, they are so sweet” or other personal world-stopping insights. Despite the apparent annoyance of the people surrounding them the twits of the Inanities Club persisted with their pronouncements “Did you know: I am at Starbucks at Park and Main” - no one went to meet them, so they shouted it again – another replied “Did you know: I am Mayor of that Starbucks and I unlocked the public toilet at 1st and Union”. Most people, clearly aggravated, ignored them.
It took me a while to learn to filter out the twits, the mayors and the small minds repeating big thoughts. Eventually I learned to be on the lookout for Marty’s shouts and of others like Dakshinamurti, Steve Blank, Smart Planet, TED and Smart Bear, Venture Hype and more. Even filtering out the useless shouts, it was tiring, but the value of the worthy shouts made it almost addictive. It was like having the Smarts Club doing research for me on what to read and what to learn, publishing their findings seemingly just for me. Despite the addiction, I exited the room then the building on my way home.
I woke up staring at my Twitter page and wondered about it all. If only a filter could be built to separate the twits from the Smart Club, imagine! What if this whole Twitter thing had started with “what are you reading” or “what did you learn” instead of “what’s on your mind” or "what's happening" – Some questions do have tragic unintended consequences. Well, let’s hope someone is working on that “twits filter”. I got up and went to bed.
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