Pure Visibility has undertaken the strategic planning process described in Verne Harnish’s book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What you must do to increase the value of your growing firm. All of us here have read a fair number of management books, attended seminars on process, and the like. Heck, some of us have even taught seminars and workshops on process. But, we knew it was time to take a higher-level view, and Catherine Juon, our fearless Co-Founder, discovered the Rockefeller Habits book and inspired us to take it to heart.

She arranged that we each got our very own copy. In late winter (prior to our second quarter), we followed it and the supporting materials on Verne’s leadership and executive development website to conduct the critical first step – the One Page Strategic Plan.

In a 2-day strategy offsite, we constructed the following:

• Pure Visibility’s 5 Core Values
• Our Purpose, Big Hairy Audacious Goal, and 5 actions we can take in the next quarter to live these on a daily basis
• 3-5 year targets, our brand promise, and key thrusts/capabilities (our priorities for the next 3-5 years)
• 1 year goals
• Our quarterly goals (financials, critical #s, and “rocks”)
• Our quarterly theme, goal, and celebration/reward, and
• Individual accountabilities towards these goals

Yes, it sounds like a lot in 2 days. The participants were exhausted by the end, but it was a powerful process, not least because it bonded our team together and refreshed what brought us together in the first place. An especially powerful component was deciding what we were going to postpone – what we weren’t doing this quarter.

We recently had our second quarterly planning meeting, where we revisited what we’d accomplished, and then brainstormed this quarter’s priorities. Especially fascinating was that some of the tabled items from the previous quarter were now “ripe for the picking” in that we had the space to address them this quarter. Other tabled items stayed tabled until next time or never.

One of Verne’s key messages is in the first few pages of the book:

Anyone with children will recognize the fundamentals I’ve summarized as:

1. Have a handful of rules
2. Repeat yourself a lot
3. Act consistently with those rules (which is why you better have only a few rules).

p. xxi, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What you must do to increase the value of your growing firm.

Here’s to simplicity and focus, renewed and revisited. Go Team!

Stacy Williams wrote a very nice blog post about search engines and their influence on branding in a recent post that I wanted to share. I agree with almost everything the post says; I just think she’s using the word “brand” in a way that might not resonate with people who are actively involved in the creation of the things.

Here’s the essence of the article: search engines create two major effects for a company. First, they give validity to any company that ranks highly for that product category. Second, they level the playing field for other brands of the same type by giving search engine uses a chance to immediately and implicitly compare products in a result.

I’m not particularly impressed with first category of findings. But the second are very exciting. The most compelling finding in the post was this one:

People using search engines are more likely to consider multiple brands (77% did so) than Internet users that don’t use search engines (70%) or non-Internet users (46%). On average, searchers considered 2.5 brands before making a purchase (5).

Yow. That is a big, big, BIG deal.

Why does it matter? In product categories with low differentiation such as cleaning products, cereal foods, and other household items, brand preference is by the far the biggest determiner of purchasing decisions. Some studies suggest that people who have a brand preference choose that brand seventy percent of the time over other brands, more so by far than price, promotions, or comparable benefits. So, the opportunity to get them to even consider other brands is a chance to not only break that preference, but create a loyal consumer who is equally hard tempt away in the future.

Yet are the numbers Stacy describes really associated with branding? I would say they’re not; I would, instead, argue that what she describes is awareness, which is necessary step in branding, but really a very different beast at the end of the day.

A brand is organized around how people feel about a product–how its smell, shape, appearance, or image impacts on them emotionally. Right now, at least, a search engine doesn’t really impart those things to a user. Only the product itself, and the vivid image and marketing message around it, can do so. Without an appealing product whose impact resonates psychologically with a user, the only outcome of awareness will be consideration, then rejection.

A good example of this are studies showing that coupons used in isolation from other methods have almost no impact on long-term brand preference. Any spikes that occur through coupon use generally subside shortly thereafter into the previous brand preference patterns. They are a kind of “awareness”, but they don’t cause a change. It’s this reason that the only measure of advertising effectiveness in branding that has ever resonated with me is advertising’s ability to get someone to switch from another preferred brand.

So, a search engine doesn’t really change the core challenge of branding: getting people to switch. What a search engine does do, however, is create more opportunities to switch for companies with smaller budgets. With a search engine, marketers can introduce a new product to people to at price points that were unheard as compared to television, which remains the primary–and most expensive–medium for generating brand awareness in the United States.

THAT is exciting. THAT is new. THAT is worth all kinds of effort and investment.

Thanks for the article, Stacy! It sure got me thinking.

It’s nice having bosses who are very awesome. I’m sure that Linda and Catherine know they’re awesome, but like everyone else, they forget stuff. Fortunately people remind them all the time. This week, the Great Lakes IT Report named Catherine to their list of Leaders & Innovators. Makes sense to me. Here at Pure Visibility, we have tons of opportunities to see why our our fearless, Twitter-addicted, 1:30AM-email-writing, constant-enthusiasm-having company co-founder makes our company exceptional. And our clients see that too; Catherine’s constantly thinking about the web marketing strategies that our clients need to succeed now…and 5 years from now. Thanks to GLITR for reminding us all that Catherine Juon is awesome!

Luke Wroblewski’s Web Form Design is a useful and approachable book. Filling out a form is no fun at all, but the guidance in this book can help you make your form as painless as possible. Whether you design web forms every day or you just have a form on your website that you don’t know how to improve, this book will be a great read.

The pitfall of listing best practices for design is that context matters. There are design choices that are right in some circumstances and wrong in others. Take, for example, the decision of how to break up a form over multiple pages, if at all. This book does a good job of explaining the benefits and drawbacks of different design decisions rather than running through a checklist of prescriptions.

Web Form Design is also full of real world examples. It’s well organized, with the exception that it is hard to tell what chapter you are in if you open up the book to a random page or start flipping through it. The writing is clear and accessible. This is a good book to pass around the office because it not only gives design guidance, but also makes a case for why forms ought to be better.

This one definitely has a place on the Pure Visibility bookshelf.