What sets a good consultant, mentor or muse apart? Yesterday I met with Lisa Turner, a very good friend and business partner, who helps people eat better with Inspired Eating. I’ve been helping her launch a new tasty, healthy iPhone application and address her holistic marketing needs more strategically. In less than 15 minutes brainstorming with me, she knew which direction she wanted to take with her product and what exactly she needed to do next.

I knew that “thinking in someone else’s box” has always been a skill of mine. I just did the Strengthsfinder test: Arranger, Connectedness, Empathy, Positivity and Adaptability. Pretty much right on the money. But I really liked the way Lisa described it – “You don’t just think Outside the Box or put your lens on my issues” she said, “you get completely outside of your box and into mine”. Other people gave her advice that would have started her down new, different directions. Instead, I focused my advice on fine-tuning where she wanted to go, and helping her find the shortest distance between that and where she was now.

So I realized – even though I’ve been very focused on FoodWired lately, I still enjoy getting out of my box entirely and jumping completely into someone else’ box. And now that I’ve finished up a pretty intensive engagement, I am looking for a new inspired box to jump into. If you need help launching or course-correcting your website, search engine marketing or social media, give me a shout. Like Lisa, maybe I will be the Muse you are looking for. I’ve got the new business cards to prove it.

I recently ran across a slide show put together by Alex Bogusky of Crispin Porter + Bogusky fame. In it, he proposes a new model for rapid social entrepreneurship. One of the key takeaways is to wrap everything around a “Common” brand – that by banding together under a “Common” brand, we will make conscious capitalism happen faster and more effectively.

While I agree whole-heartedly with their intent, I simply don’t think it’s the most effective way to crank the wheels of social change. I’ll disregard the fact that “common” sounds a bit too much like “communist” to me for now. Putting that aside, I believe that people connect emotionally with brands. I don’t want to connect with the same brand across all industries. I want a brand to reflect the passion and commitment of its founders and I want those founders to have a conscious understanding of how they impact the world around them while doing all they can to change it for the better.

I believe the resources that the Common model can provide new entrepreneurs are valuable. I wish they could be made available to entrepreneurs that still want to maintain their own brand identity and uniqueness. And perhaps one day they will.

I hope the Common machine pumps out lots of new businesses that truly impact the world positively. If my own ideas don’t take off, perhaps I’ll be knocking on their doorstep some day. But for now, I choose to steward my own fledgling ideas and brands into the universe to see what sticks.

So stay tuned – they are coming. And if you have an idea of your own – don’t be afraid to pull the trigger. Whether it’s “Common” or not.

I have been using Groupon for a couple of years now. I haven’t expanded to the other local coupon vendors popping up, because frankly – there’s only so much mail I can handle getting delivered to my inbox every day. And they were first. Another example of first-mover advantage. Very rarely have I been inspired by Groupon to purchase a service or product that I wasn’t already considering or a local brand that I didn’t already love. Moral of the story – Groupon’s true value to me as a consumer is in the deal. Unbelievably good deals are my expectation. When I get that deal, I don’t walk away associating that unbelievably good deal with the vendor. I associate it with Groupon. And as a consumer, I have been fairly happy with that.

The promise to local vendors by Groupon is quite different. Their value proposition to local small businesses is in delivering a slew of new customers. And I have seen it work. Too well. With the yoga studio who suddenly has two dozen people who want to sign up for a class that only holds one dozen, for example. Or the nail salon who has a Groupon expiring in one week and can’t fit in any more appointments. Suddenly, what was supposed to be a seemingly easy and promising way to attract new customers is turning off those customers, or worse – preventing them from becoming customers in the first place.

Any small business will tell you what the number one way to grow a business is – referrals! Word of mouth, viral marketing, loyalty programs, whatever marketing buzzword you attach to it, the reality for most small businesses with limited marketing budgets is that they can’t afford a fancy, high-priced expert consultant like myself. They pride themselves on doing a good job, selling a quality product, providing excellent customer service and asking those customers to refer others who would benefit. The companies that do well are the ones that grow and sustain themselves. Otherwise, the smoke and mirrors eventually fade away and the doors eventually close.

Groupon has an interesting business model. Those unbelievably good deals you get as a customer are not such unbelievably good deals for the business. In most cases, HALF of the money you are paying goes directly to Groupon, leaving very little left over for the business owner to truly run their business effectively and profitably. The problem then being – they are not incentivized to provide that quality product or enhanced service to gain your loyalty. And if they aren’t incentivized to do that, it can quickly turn into a customer detracting campaign rather than a customer attracting campaign.

Ever heard of Yelp? It’s another great way for local businesses to get the word out. Encourage customers to review your business. Read your reviews. If people are unhappy with your business for some reason, address it. Correct it. People will love you for it. If you need a visual example of what can happen when a Groupon campaign goes wrong, just check out Sweet Life Nail Bar in Denver, Colorado. (Click on the Rating Details link). Within one month of their Groupon expiring, their rating turned into a marketer’s worst nightmare and plummeted.

Note: I contacted the owner of Sweet Life Nail Bar to make sure she was aware what was happening to her online reputation. While she decided not to honor the expiring and/or expired Groupon certificates for pedicures, she suggested contacting Groupon for resolution. While that did not help in my case, it may help other folks who felt abandoned without recourse. If you successfully achieved resolution with Groupon, I’d love to hear from you.

For local businesses who have integrity and a good product, you are still better off following the golden rules of customer service than losing your shirt running an unprofitable Groupon campaign. If you do use Groupon to grow your business, make sure you have an offer with terms you can live with – without substantial breakage. Honor groupons or offer other promotions to customers who don’t have a chance to use them and you will win their business. Oh – and if you operate in Colorado (Denver, Boulder or Northern Front Range especially) and you have a healthy, local and/or sustainable focus on food – I have a project to help you. Drop me a line.

The CDC is requesting public comments on new federal menu labeling requirements. Take this opportunity to make sure they know what you care about.

*** Federal Menu Labeling. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is seeking public comment and information to help the agency implement a new federal law that requires the posting of calorie content and other nutrition information on menu items at certain chain restaurants and similar retail food operations and vending machines. The new law, Section 4205 of the Affordable Care Act signed into law March 23, 2010, sets uniform federal requirements for such labeling. Comments should be submitted to the FDA by September 7, 2010.

For more information, please visit http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2010/2010-16303.htm.

Is your brand tired? Need to kickstart it this year? Here’s a great article by AdWeek on some principles to innovate your brand and your customer experience along with it.

1) Create better realities.
Why not provide real value to your customers? Your Customer Experience is the embodiment of your Brand. Make sure both are aligned with what your customers’ are actually looking for.

2) Don’t be design blind.

3) Be “brand led”.

4) Think 365 – not 360.

5) Be interesting.

I was doing a search for “practical innovation” tonight – can’t help it, it’s in the name – and stumbled upon an interesting post titled “Practical Innovation - John LaGrou’s Safeplug”. I really do want to learn more about this invention after watching this video of LaGrou’s TED presentation. 

In a nutshell, it turns your building’s electrical system into an intelligent network. That means you can save electricity, save money, operate more safely, lots of good stuff.

Cool, right? It could be amazing. In all seriousness, I’m thrilled to see another viable, game-changing example of practical innovation. It’s just the kind of product I want to help launch. One of my open questions and potential concerns is the role patents may play in further commercial advancement of this technology, or any other for that matter.

Filing over 400 patents? What are the implications of these patents, and thousands more like them, in advancing or deterring a sustainable society? Whomever controls the intellectual property typically controls whether or not products will ever see the light of day – or the inside of your kitchen or car.

How can we ensure patents that have a benefit to society fulfill their ultimate purpose and aren’t blockaded in a basement? I don’t have the answer, but I’d love to hear your perspectives.

I just found out about the C3 Summit from a fellow CORE member on LinkedIn. Thanks to Jo Ann Hair for pointing out this inspiring video. It seems logical that as conscious consumerism begins to spread, businesses must respond in a significant way in order to succeed but I had no idea that such large players had already figured that out. It turns out I didn’t come up with the concept at all. Don’t you hate when that happens? I am, however, happy to join the movement and help spread the word.

OMG! R U BPMF?

If I were to ask you what you’re selling and who you’re selling it to, what would you say? Seems like two straightforward questions that are easy to answer, right? Yet, failure to find a good fit between your product and your market is one of the most common things that will prevent a struggling startup from becoming a wildly successful business.  Hint: if you said something like “this cool thing” or “the masses” in the above statement, you have a huge challenge. I hope you’re well-funded.  But if you don’t have a big bag of cash lying around and you’re not ready to take on Google quite yet, reading this primer may help clarify your focus.

When you’re a startup, the laundry list of things to tend to and worry about keeps growing every day. The more focused you are as a company, the more likely you are to succeed. For small companies without dedicated marketing staff, it’s not uncommon for the product marketing focus to be limited to a few paragraphs in the business plan. The short-term priority quickly transitions to making the phone ring or getting traffic to your site – in short, generating leads. You can sit in a comfortable chair and create market research surveys and product feature sets until you’re blue in the face, but it’s not going to earn you a living until you get out there and sell something.

The secret is to find balance in both the planning and the execution. If you’ve already made some educated guesses about your market and filled in a few product holes with assumptions, congratulations! You have to start somewhere. If you can afford to offer significant discounts or even give your product away until you’re able to validate those assumptions, don’t pass up the opportunity. Make sure you get valuable feedback (and testimonials and references) in exchange.  Look for common characteristics in people who find your product appealing and take the time to truly understand what they like. Early market tests and iterative product releases can give you a ton of insights that you never would have discovered sitting in that comfy chair back in your office.

If your product isn’t flying off the shelf as fast as you want it to, then it may be time to re-examine both your product and your target market and make sure they’re a pair made in heaven. In fact, some folks would say it’s the only thing that matters in determining whether or not you’ll be successful – so much so that Marc Andreessen, who came up with a little product called Mosaic – the first web browser, defines a company’s stages by the acronyms BPMF and APMF (before product/market fit and after).

These two little questions have some big implications. Which challenge do you tackle first – the product or the market? Which is the chicken, which the egg? We all have a passion – your passion may be the product you build or the market you serve. Follow your passion first if you haven’t yet invested heavily in either. The reality is that you’ll probably have to do some fine-tuning, if not major overhauling, to both the product and the market. So this is a great time to remind yourself why you started this journey in the first place and where you really want to take your company from here.

“What do I have of value to offer?” Analyze your product.

If you haven’t found the secret sauce yet, it’s time to ask yourself tough questions about your product and company. What are your strengths and weaknesses? How do you measure up to the competition? Yes, ladies and gentlemen – it’s time for a SWOT Analysis. Please don’t do this by yourself sitting at your desk. In his book, How to Create an Unstoppable Marketing & Sales Machine, Christopher Ryan says the first deadly sin of marketing is “Lack of Self Awareness”. You can help avoid this sin by engaging others including your employees and your customers. Find out what your partners think about you - and your competitors if they’re working with any. Reach out to your competitors and/or their customers if appropriate. Listen to people or companies you wish were your customers. Don’t just think about your end product – think about all your internal processes that go into delivering the end product. The goal is to truly understand what makes you different and what makes you better than other alternatives the customer has available, both now and in the future.

Write down everything at this point – you’re green light thinking. Once you’ve collected a wealth of information, you will see patterns emerge and can start to narrow your focus to a few actionable insights.  And remember, just because you toss something aside now as unimportant based on your current customers, doesn’t mean it won’t be the golden nugget that leads you to the Promised Land with a different target market. So keep your brainstorming notes on file. They may come in handy down the road.

“Do I know who wants it and why?” Analyze your market.

What do your existing customers have in common? There are some obvious answers like geography or vertical category that are good places to start. If your market is Colorado or Denver, remember this in your strategy and execution. It can be much easier to rank for “Colorado green hosting” than for “green hosting” for example.  There are tons of opportunities across the Web including search engines and social communities that offer geographic targeting.  But don’t stop there. What problem are you solving for your customers? What does your perfect client look like when you dig deeper? What size are they? How long have they been in business? What common characteristics or problems are you looking to help them with? Write it all down.

Now brainstorm different segments that have similar needs. Start with peripheral markets – other types of companies up and down the supply chain of your existing customers. Have fun with this. Ask for suggestions from employees, family and friends. Out of all this brainstorming, you are likely to find a few key target markets that make sense to test first.

The natural tendency of many companies is to think that they need a very broadly defined target market because if their market is bigger, they’ll make more money. Typically that’s not the case. It’s usually easier to excel in one targeted market first and then expand to related markets than it is to tackle one huge generic market with a vague value proposition. Of course, the market requirements are entirely different for a VC-funded business with aggressive growth goals than they are for a sole proprietor who wants to start a sustainability education program for local schools. But either way, it’s important to do some homework quantifying your target market. There’s no exact science for doing it, but you can get amazing insights by doing some online research and quick math. Be sure you have a market worth going after based on how cost-effectively you can deliver your product and what your ultimate goals are.

“How do I know when I’m done?” Your “customers” will tell you.

Is there a magic formula for achieving product/market fit? Sean Ellis, author of the Startup Marketing Blog, advocates that you’ve achieved product/market fit when 40% of your customers say they would be very disappointed if they didn’t have your product. That’s assuming you’re able to follow his advice and give it away for free. That works for some businesses, not for all. Your unique circumstances may be slightly different, however the big pictures is still the same. Before producing mass quantities of your product or spending millions on expensive infrastructure and development, be sure to test as much as you can – focusing on beta releases and feedback loops – and be sure you’ve got a product that the majority of your customers love before you run to the bank with it.

If you don’t have customers yet and can’t give away your product for free, try developing strategic content that positions you as an expert within your most likely target markets. Use them as the centerpiece for warm networking, email and social marketing campaigns. Evaluate and compare their responses.

“What do I do now?” There are lots of options.

It all sounds good, but the reality is that it’s not an easy thing to do or everyone would have done it already. There are blogs for self-starters and specialists throughout the country for folks who want a helping hand. Practical Innovation is one of them.  We’ll help evaluate your current state and get you to the next level. Because BPMF isn’t a place you want to be for long.

Aleece Koss is a Strategic Marketing Consultant with Practical Innovation. She is an Internet veteran who has been helping startups as well as Fortune 500 companies build and grow their Internet businesses since 1994. After making millions of dollars for consumer brands primarily in travel and retail, she now focuses her talents on helping conscious entrepreneurs who want to improve the communities and world in which they live, especially within the healthy living and sustainability industries. You can reach Aleece at 303-586-1656 or aleece@practical-innovation.com.

I stumbled upon this slideshow from Sean Ellis while researching tonight. It was presented at SeedCamp 2009 in September in London. I especially enjoyed Sean’s perspectives on the importance of product/market fit before moving up the growth pyramid. However, be sure you’ve carefully defined your target market when you conduct the surveys he recommends. I’ve seen too many startups without a defined target market end up trying to serve customers all over the spectrum and end up with a bloated product that doesn’t fit the needs of any specific market well enough to transition to growth.

So remember, achieving fit can lead to changes in both your products and services as well as the target markets you serve, which means you may need more tools in your arsenal than the survey example provided.

Confused? Too stressed or busy to do it yourself? Let us help you achieve product/market fit.

We’ve embarked on an adventure to join the video self-publishing world as part of our newest project, Be-Eat-Drink (b-e-d). My friend, Cory, inspired me. Introducing b-e-d cuisine. Both the recipe blog site and the YouTube healthy food and lifestyle channel are prototypes and testbeds at this point, quick and easy ways to develop proofs of concept while working on the broader vision.

For now, I’m simply using my digital camera’s video recording function. Thanks Sqooby and friends again for such an amazing birthday present. It outputs AVI files so I am looking for a simple but functional AVI video editor. I’m willing to pay a small price, but I’m not looking for a cadillac program.

Unlike Cory and other hip designer friends, I don’t have a mac so I am now on a quest for PC video editing programs. I initially tested Video Edit Magic 4.4. It took awhile to navigate but that wasn’t the worst of it. It resulted in a night of continuous application crashing and pc rebooting, so I decided to test some others. My second experiment was with Pinnacle VideoSpin. It provided a similar interface as Video Edit Magic and the learning curve wasn’t as steep after having used another editing program.

I still have plenty to learn but found the Pinnacle VideoSpin program sufficient for my prototyping needs at this time. Have another program to recommend? I’d  love to hear about it. Have an insider at YouTube you can introduce? Even better. It’s about time YouTube jump in bed with a strategic partner or two to offer free and premium video editors. I’m happy to facilitate discussions if you like!

Interested in eating healthier? Check out the site, We’d love your input on future iterations.

Need to figure out what you should really do about youtube, blogging and other social media and internet marketing buzzwords? We’ll help you figure out how it all fits in your overall marketing strategy.