As a big-time music enthusiast, I spend a lot of time on Spotify. It’s easily one of my favourite apps, but, every time I use it, I can’t help but think that the app’s lacking something. It wasn’t until I read the article “What Spotify Can Learn from The Roman Slave Trade” on www.musicindustryblog.wordpress.com that I finally figured out what’s missing: innovation.

The author of the blog says, “Spotify has made immense progress but it and the overall market have done too little to innovate product and user experience.” While apps like Facebook and Instagram have gone out of their way to push out updates with new features on the regular, Spotify has largely remained the same. It’s a music streaming service and always has been. This inspired me to do some more reading on transient and competitive advantages.

Competitive advantage was the first kind of advantage to be written about. According to Investopedia, “competitive advantages provide an edge over rivals and an ability to generate greater value for a firm and its shareholders.” For a long time, it was believed that the best way for a business to achieve success was for it to latch onto a competitive advantage. The stronger the advantage, the harder it would be for rivals to neutralize it.

The theory of competitive advantage went unopposed until Rita McGrath published an article on what she called ‘transient advantage’ in the Harvard Business Review in 2013. “In a world where a competitive advantage often evaporates in less than a year, companies can’t afford to spend months at a time crafting a single long-term strategy. To stay ahead, they need to constantly start new strategic initiatives, building and exploiting many transient competitive advantages at once. Though individually temporary, these advantages, as a portfolio, can keep companies in the lead over the long run,” writes McGrath.

To quote What Spotify Can Learn from The Roman Slave Trade, “the way to think about Spotify right now, and indeed streaming as a whole, is that we have built a great engine. But that’s it. We do not have the car.” Spotify needs to consider diversifying its services. It needs to set itself apart from competitors such as Apple Music and Pandora – all of whom use the same ‘engine’. If Spotify doesn’t embrace the theory of transient advantage, it may end up losing its customer base when it inevitably loses its current competitive advantage.

Word count: 402

References:

https://hbr.org/2013/06/transient-advantage

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/competitive_advantage.asp

What Spotify Can Learn From The Roman Slave Trade

Images:

https://qmunicate.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/spotify-logo-horizontal-black.jpg

https://hbr.org/2013/06/transient-advantage

Corporate social responsibility is a notoriously polarizing subject. Milton Friedman’s well-known response to the subject is “a corporation’s responsibility is to make as much money for the stockholders as possible.” Echoing a similar mindset, Patrick Luciani, in an article for the Financial Post, writes “people-before-profits is just code for increasing the costs of goods for all of us.” On the other end of the spectrum, Freeman says that a corporation has a duty to all its stakeholders.

I’ve always found myself leaning towards the Freeman end of the spectrum. I thought that if a corporation could do good for society while maintaining its profits, it would be a win-win situation. I recently realized that CSR isn’t as straight forward as I thought.

As I read the words “I believe what BC Ferries is doing is wrong and they are horrendous to treat their customers with such a lack of care” in Gemma Broadely’s third blog post, I couldn’t help but think about the timeless aphorism: “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Gemma talked about BC Ferries’ new regulations that will ban smoking on ferries and force all passengers out of cars and to the upper decks.” When I read about the new regulations, my immediate reaction was that BC Ferries was trying to do good for the community by limiting second hand smoke and allowing passengers to stretch their legs on the upper decks. I was surprised to see that not everyone perceived the new regulations the same way I did. This realization made me think about how easy it is for companies’ good attentions to turn awry.

Francis Frei and Anne Morriss, writing for Fortune.com, say that there are three main ways a company’s good attentions can go awry:

1. Trying to be good at everything
   “Great service providers tend to over-deliver on the things their customers value most, and under-deliver on the things they value least.”
2. Getting your employees to work harder
   “When things go wrong, lack of effort is an easy target. Many think service should improve with a little more commitment, usually from your direct reports. But this argument obscures the fact that you may be systematically setting your employees up to fail.
3. Giving service away
   “Generosity is at the core of great relationships, and customer relationships are no exception. Create tremendous value for the people who pay you, and then capture some of that value for yourself. Those are the generous economics behind successful service companies.” Some companies make the mistake of giving too much away.

What then is the best approach to CSR? Anticipating how your good intentions are going to be perceived and altering your approach accordingly.

Word count: 446

Works referenced:

https://blogs.ubc.ca/gemmabroadley/

https://bfi.uchicago.edu/news/feature-story/corporate-social-responsibilty-friedmans-view

http://business.financialpost.com/opinion/corporate-social-responsibility-has-gone-off-the-rails

http://fortune.com/2012/03/28/the-good-intentions-that-will-kill-your-business/

Images:

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/ugc/articles/2017/05/23/corporate-social-responsibility–how-renewables-have-expanded-the-field.html

http://www.vancitybuzz.com/2016/03/polish-shipyard-bc-ferries-upgrades/

You don’t need to take Psyc 101 to know the difference between the left brain and the right brain: Our left brains are logical and our right brains are creative. As a future marketing major, I believe the beauty of marketing is that it brings the two halves of our brain together, striking a balance between science and art to deliver powerful messages.

Left Brain Marketing

Left brain marketing is the data analytics side. In an article for insights.samsung.com, David Gilbert says that being able to “quickly identify patterns in data collected from customers can be a major boon.” Market researchers comb through massive amounts of data to gain a better understanding as to how a company’s product or service is perceived. Data is collected through either primary or secondary means and then processed with the help of analytical tools such as Kissmetrics or Google Analytics.

This element of marketing is highly technical. Questions a market researcher might ask, according to a blog by Anne Murphy, include:

• What is our strategy?
• Will it generate leads and revenue?
• Has this worked in the past?
• Are we aligned with sales?

Right Brain Marketing 

Right brain marketing is the side that focuses on “emotions, visuals and telling stories,” according to Bulygo. Copywriters, graphic designers and social media managers all fall under this side of the marketing spectrum. Right brain marketers are responsible for creating awareness about a company’s brand image and the products and services that the company sells.

This element of marketing is highly creative. According to Murphy, questions a right brain marketer might ask include:

• How will it make our audience feel?
• Will it stand out?
• Does it tell a story?
• Is it truly innovative?

Putting the two together

Just as the two halves of the human brain work together, the two sides of marketing are inherently intertwined. Right brain marketers come up with campaigns based on insights generated by left brain marketers. Left brain marketers then analyze lagging indicators following a marketing campaign to generate more insights. These insights go back to right brain marketers starting the cycle all over again.

A good chief marketing officer needs to be able to strike a good balance between right and left-brain marketing. In a blog about analytics and marketing, Zach Bulygo writes: “If you focus too much on the science side, your website and marketing will become robotic.” He goes on to say: “favoring the art side too much means that you won’t know what’s actually resonating because you’re not measuring.”

The two sides of marketing are inseparable. One must aim to find the ideal blend between logic and creativity to launch a truly successful marketing campaign.

Word count: 444

References:

Pictures taken from:

• http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/whats-blocking-corporate-creativity/
• https://insideiim.com/tag/data-analytics/
• http://depressivedisorder.blogspot.ca/2009/12/ice-water-and-googles-therapeutic.html
• https://insights.samsung.com/2017/03/02/a-winning-cmo-marketing-strategy-must-combine-art-and-science/)
• https://marketeer.kapost.com/art-and-science-of-content-marketing-infographic/

Here lies the business plan. Once integral to every new business, it’s now been reduced to a cold, lifeless body on a mortician’s table. Who delivered the killing blow? The business model canvas, of course. How? Let’s take a look.

For a long time, business plans were considered essential to the development of any new business. Typically 20-40 pages long, the document sets out a business’ objective and lists out strategies that could be adopted to achieve them.

Therein lies the business plan’s first fatal flaw: it attempts to predict the future. In an article for inc.com, entrepreneur Steve Blank said, “Entrepreneurs often mistake their business plan as a cookbook for execution, failing to recognize that it is only a collection of unproven assumptions.” Soon-to-be entrepreneurs often rely too heavily on the assumptions made in a business plan. It is impossible to predict the future, so a plan can’t be set in stone. While business plans aren’t intended to be followed word-for-word, they often aren’t dynamic enough to keep up with rapidly changing market conditions.

Business plans’ second hamartia is the fact that they are too long. We’ve grown accustomed to articulating ourselves in 140 characters or less, sending and receiving 10-second-long disappearing videos and watching 2 minute videos instead of reading 5 page articles. Business executives want information delivered to them as quickly and concisely as possible.  For better or worse, we simply don’t have the patience to read 40-page long business plans anymore.

Finally, business plans tend to place too much focus on results, partly through the heavy focus they place on projected income statements. A new venture is a means, not an end, according to an entrepreneur.com article by Martin Zwilling. Business plans often focus on the end goal of a business without considering key activities in depth. To quote Brigid Schulte, “You can’t think your way into a new way of acting, but you can act your way into a new way of thinking.”

What then led to business model canvases usurping the throne from business plans? In short, business model canvases – the brainchild of business theorist Alex Osterwalder – solve the issues associated with business plans presented above. They are dynamic, concise and place a strong focus on action. They are only one page long and can easily be updated to reflect changing market conditions.

Some might argue that the business plan is still alive and kicking. There are certainly entrepreneurs that do continue to use it. It remains to be seen how long business plans stick around for, but in my mind, there is no doubt: business plans have lived long past their prime. Business model canvases are the way forward.

Word count: 442

References:

https://www.raconteur.net/business/death-of-a-business-plan

https://gocatalant.com/blog/the-business-plan-is-dead-here-is-what-to-replace-it-with

https://www.inc.com/steve-blank/startup-owners-manual-customer-development-rules.html

https://steveblank.com/category/business-model-versus-business-plan/

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/229804

Picture: https://canvanizer.com/new/business-model-canvas

Picture: http://moziru.com/explore/Drawn%20tombstone/

https://nomorestartupmyths.com/the-death-of-the-business-plan-and-the-successor/

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