How to Brand Private Labels

Price it right: If the price is too low, consumers suspect that corners have been cut. Generally, thesweet spot of pricing is 10% to 20% below national brands

Pay attention to packaging: Make packagingmore distinctive than national brands to set the product apart on the retail shelf.

http://fusionbrand.blogs.com/fusionbrand/2004/05/how_to_brand_pr.html

Jagabee

Turning Great Strategy into Great Performance

7 basic rules for setting and delivering strategy:
Keep it simple, make it concrete.
Avoid long, drawn-out descriptions of lofty goals and instead stick to clear language describing what your company will and won’t do.
Debate assumptions, not forecasts.
Create cross-functional teams drawn from strategy, marketing, and finance to ensure the assumptions underlying your long-term plans reflect both the real economics of your company’s markets and its actual performance relative to competitors.
Use a rigorous analytic framework.
Ensure that the dialogue between the corporate center and the business units about market trends and assumptions is conducted within a rigorous framework, such as that of “profit pools.”
Discuss resource deployments early.
Create more realistic forecasts and more executable plans by discussing up front the level and timing of critical deployments.
Clearly identify priorities.
Prioritize tactics so that employees have a clear sense of where to direct their efforts.
Continuously monitor performance.
Track resource deployment and results against plan, using continuous feedback to reset assumptions and reallocate resources.
Reward and develop execution capabilities.
Motivate and develop staff.
Following these rules strictly can help narrow the strategy-to-performance gap.

The Strategy Process: Making the Link with People and Operations

The strategy process defines where a business wants to go, and the people process defines who will get it there. The operating plan provides the path for those people, breaking long-term output into short-term targets.

Where the Performance Goes [Turning Great Strategy into Great Performance]

This chart shows the average performance loss implied by the importance ratings that managers in our survey gave to specific breakdowns in the planning and execution process.

Strategies for Two-Sided Markets

The crucial strategy question is, Which side should you subsidize, and for how long?

Users will pay more for access to a larger network, so margins improve as user bases grow. In traditional businesses, growth beyond some point usually leads to diminishing returns: Acquiring new customers becomes harder as fewer people, not more, find the firm's value proposition appealing.

{ Networked Markets / Side 1 / Side 2 / Platform Providers }

Cross-side network effects: If the platform provider can attract enough subsidy-side users, money-side users will pay handsomely to reach them.

Same-side network effects: snowballing pattern, when drawing users to one side helps attract even more users to the same side.

Charting the strategy

Drawing a strategy canvas - 1. strategic profile of industry, 2. strategic profile of current/potential competition (which factors to invest in strategically), 3. company's strategic profile (the value curve)

Focus - setting the agenda;
Divergence - look for uniqueness; value curves of innovators' strategies always stand apart; create new factors;
Compelling tag line - strong and authentic; (Southwest Airlines: "The speed of the plane at the price of the car - whenever you need it.")


4 steps of visualizing strategy - visual awakening, visual exploration, visual strategy fair, and visual communication

Value innovation is about offering unprecedented value, not technology or competencies, and not the same as being first to market -- achieved through a combination of eliminating features, creating features, and reducing and raising features to levels unprecedented in their industries. A radically different value curve is difficult for incumbents to imitate, and the volume advantages that come with value innovation make imitation costly. 3 platforms on which value innovation can take place: product, service, and delivery.

Pioneers - value innovations. Migrators - value improvements. Settlers - me-too products.

Marketing: Customer Intimacy and Other Value Disciplines

operational excellence - superb/lean/efficient operations, reasonable quality at competitive prices with minimal inconvenience (FedEx, American Airlines, Wal-Mart, Dell Computer)

customer intimacy - segmenting and targeting markets precisely, tailoring to match specific demands of those niches, so to build long term customer loyalty. The business processes stress flexibility and responsiveness. (Nordstrom, Home Depot, Staples, Ciba-Geigy, Kraft, Frito-Lay)

product leadership - strong in innovations, brand marketing and commercialize ideas quickly, relentlessly pursue new solutions to solved problems, lifetime value concepts, products/services that consistently enhance customer's use, thereby making rival's goods obsolete (Johnson & Johnson, Nike)

... pick one value discipline and vigoriously pursue it while meeting industry standards in the other two ...