Strategic Planning Archive

In his premier film appearance in the blaxploitation send-up “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka,” Chris Rock inadvertently illustrates a key pricing issue faced by most entrepreneurs when they initially launch a new product or service. Watch this 93-second clip and see if you can identify the pricing pitfall addressed in this humorous clip. Caution: the clip contains a bit of profanity. It is Chris Rock, after all.

Note: This is Part II in a three-part series on Fast Followers. Click here for Part I and Part III   When Superman was introduced in 1939, he was truly a breakthrough comic book character. At the time, most comic heroes were very human, such as Dick Tracy, The Lone Ranger and Tarzan. The very attributes which caused Superman to be unlike anything that came before subsequently became clichéd conventions, which makes it difficult for modern audiences to appreciate just how startlingly different Superman was at the time of his debut. His super powers, costume, dual identity and crime-fighting focus have been endlessly imitated, sometimes a bit too closely. Within months of Superman’s first appearance, Fox Features Syndicate created Wonder Comics, starring “Wonder Man.” As shown at left, he had super powers, wore a red uniform, fought crime and had a large “W” on his chest. Sound familiar? The public rejected this dismal imitation and the comic sold poorly. Copies which lack originality are similar to those successively made on a Xerox machine. Each copy is an inferior imitation of that upon which it is based.

Note: This is Part I in a three-part series on Fast Followers. Click here for Part II and Part III Lou Pearlman, owner of Trans Continental Airlines, watched five teenagers crowd into one of his private planes. He asked himself, “How the hell can these kids afford to charter a private plane?” The answer surprised him. The “kids” were the pop singing group “New Kids on the Block” (New Kids or NKOTB), which at the time was one of the most successful musical acts in the world. Pearlman was unimpressed with the group, but his chance meeting with them sparked an entrepreneurial adVenture. He wondered, “How hard can it be? Get some cute kids who can sing, teach them to dance and unleash them on the public.” With no experience in the music industry, no musical talent and no fear, he developed musical groups and solo artists that collectively sold over 160 million records, twice as many as NKOTB. Pearlman’s most successful artists include The Backstreet Boys, ‘NSync, Aaron Carter and Jordan Knight. Whether or not you like or even respect the music created by Pearlman’s performers, the manner in which he conquered the music industry offers relevant lessons for any entrepreneur attempting a fast-follower market-entry strategy.

Salmon live most of their lives swimming with the current. However, once they reach reproductive maturity, they make an arduous journey upstream, often jumping up waterfalls, in order to reach the spawning grounds of their birth. Salmon do not decide to make their epic trek based upon weather conditions, the flow rate of the streams they must traverse or even how far they happen to be from their destination. Rather, they begin their journey when their biological alarm sounds, irrespective of exogenous conditions. This is the same mindset that would-be entrepreneurs should have when deciding the right time to jump into the startup world.

“With a name like Smucker’s, it has to be good.” Really? I would think that with a name like Smucker’s it has to be a vile disease or possibly a large, poisonous, South American leech. If “Smucker’s” can be slapped on food and annually generate billions of sales, chances are that your company name, no matter how mediocre, will not preclude you from achieving significant success. Thus, join the ranks of Yahoo, Google, Amazon, eBay, Cisco and Microsoft and focus your limited time and resources on perfecting your customer value proposition, not on devising an ideal company name. When selecting your company and product names, consider the following: Uniquely Familiar Buzzless Intuitive URL Brief Avoid Hyphens No Numbers Sans Acronyms Not Abbreviated .com Suffix Phonetically Spellable Readily Pronounceable Extensible Single Connotation Each of these naming considerations is discussed at length in the remainder of this entry.