Taglines or Tag Lines

While driving to work this morning, I saw "Global security - an interface company" on the side of a truck. I had no idea what they did. That got me thinking - coming up with a tagline is an extremely difficult task. Companies spend enormous amount of resources and often engage marketing companies to find the right tagline. A 'tagline' should not become a 'tag line' - a line that just tags along for the sake of being there.

We all know taglines. Some are ingrained in our daily vocabulary and our thought process, they may as well not have a company name. Case in point "The ultimate driving machine" (if someone is wondering who they are you must be living in a forest for the past few decades.)

The reason we have taglines is because a company name cannot describe the products, services or the values/commitments. The best way to come-up with a tagline is begin with the one most important thing your customers value you for.

Next, should people have a tagline as well?

Ram. Read more!

Big Switch - A book by Nicholas Carr

I was discussing "Big Switch by Nicholas Carr" with Ven - a friend of mine. For those of you who don't know about the book, go to Nicholas Carr's site - http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/bigswitch/.

It is an excellently written book about transformation of computing as a utility. Nicholas compares computing to the evolution of electric utility and points out a number of similarities.

Ven has a number of years of experience in the computing industry and has worked for many a big names. Not having read the book, his immediate response was - but the cost of computers is a major factor. What he meant was the TCO for computing infrastructure (including hardware, software and operations costs) even for high performance environments is fairly low enough to motivate people to go the utility way. The only true advantage is data redundancy.

More to come on this...

Ram. Read more!

Identify the business you are in...

Okay, so how do you identify your business? In my last post, I said “think customers”. Well one way would be identify what you are not. And what you are not…and what you are not. Then the only thing left would what business you are in.

So now you get to identify all the of the possible answers first.

Ram. Read more!

Hardest task is to “identify the business you are in”

Back in the dark ages at the beginnings of Internet, one of my friends said to me “…this is really a publishing industry. Very similar to publishing newspapers and books.” While he sounded logical, it was difficult to believe him. Everyone else was talking about online applications and e-commerce and websites, etc.

Fast forward to now. Internet is a publishing business. The newspapers get information to the readers and get paid by advertisers. Readers view advertisements. Television companies show (publish) programs and get paid by advertisers. Magazines ditto.

But almost the entire traditional media people lost out.

The classic MBA example is the buggy whip manufacturers vs the automobile people. The buggy whip people though they were in the business of producing whips. So continued to produce fancier and fancier whips. But were they in “long stick-like device” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whip) or in “transportation” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation)?

So before you begin ask “What business am I in?” Iterate to get the right answer. Hint: think customers.

Ram.
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