Four books....

In the last few months, I have been doing a bit of reading. Here are four books which have helped change my view on things (in no particular order of importance):

1. The Black Swan by Nicholas Nassim Taleb deals with the improbable and is sometimes heavy on philosophy but always radical in its ideas. The predominant idea is that these so called Black Swan events (which are unpredictable, rare and high impact) will occur whether we like it or not. The best one can hope for is to ride the tide. And the book is practical to boot. I mean the author actually employed his theory in his practices as a derivatives trader! For me it was an eye opener and single-handedly shattered the premise of an idea I had been working on for sometime (the Conceptual theory). Guess I'd have to go back to the drawing board [sigh].
2. The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto. Here the former head of the Peruvian central bank tackles the age old myth of poverty in developing countries. He is able to prove that the poor actually possess assets but the problem stems from their inability to convert these assets to capital. His ideas even appear to have close correlates in physics (remember E=mc2?) and perhaps, branding. The book's blurb captures this beautifully when it bemoans the developing and former communist nations' ability to imitate, from the West, everything from the paper clip to nuclear reactors but have failed in successfully copied strategies in elevating the poor above the $2 a day mark. His solution: a formal property system. Want to know more? Then you would just have to read it.
3. The Advent of Money by Niall Ferguson. From the cloak and dagger of the ancient Medici's to the reign of the Rothchild's this historian takes us through the dark corners of history and its parallel universe of finance. Brilliant piece. Opened my eyes to the import of the credit system and helped consolidate my thoughts on the relationship between money and branding.
4. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. The author takes on the curious and goes against the grain here once again. He proves that there is more to success than we care to understand. While not denying the importance of right character, attitude blah blah blah in the success matrix, he finds their causative effects somewhat exaggerated in our minds. He identifies opportunities and legacy as important factors in determining how far we can go. Scary right? Well I guess its (almost) all plain luck.

That's all folks!

Counterfeiters' alert! – How to decode a bank note

This is most probably my third, nay fourth consecutive entry on the beauty of commerce and money. Well what is branding if not an instrument embodying value, the tree sap of commerce. (Secretly, I think its because I still don’t have nearly enough money).

My friend, Dayo, had this interesting thought the other day. He had been researching the nature of trust in business relationships and had some brilliant ideas. We played around a bit with them and observed that a bank note could serve as conceptual model for understanding trust.

Think about it for a moment.

Money has been around since we were all born yet remains unchanged as the currency of exchange for our continued survival (You could check out my previous post, What brand is your money). Yet experiments have shown that we can nearly not tell the original coins or bank notes apart from a small group of imitations with minor alterations from the original. Hard to believe right? Yeah thought so too. Donald Norman in his book, “The Design of Everyday things” describes this as the difference between “knowledge in the world” and “knowledge in your head”. I guess that’s story for another day

Well, here are some things we discovered from observing a bank note:

• - The value it represents is darn obvious (often represents this in words and figures)
• - Security features (difficult to imitate and might only reveal themselves upon closer inspection)
• - Unique design language or theme
• - Recognizable parsonage, place or even symbol
• - Features indicating a sense of heritage (take the use of old font types for example)
• - Mystical or mysterious representations (for instance inscrutable writings or mystical figures)
• - Specific colors
• - Tactile prompts for easy identification by the visually impaired
• - Bears a unique identification number
• - Endorsed by some authority figure (e.g. the Governor of the Central Bank)
• - Name of the country

With this conceptual tool, I believe any one forging a brand could generate ideas for eliciting trust in clients. But isn’t it interesting that you are carrying in your wallet, a really cool brand strategy document?

What my next door Neighbor has to say about the Alaba economy

Alaba International is a financial hub in the heart of my adopted home city, Lagos. It’s a capital within a capital, if you know what I mean. It is a typical market but then it is different in a way. Like China town, there is an ethnic undertone to its trappings. The brand of the Alaba economy is “international” in scope in that (1) products sold here are from all over the world: from Malaysia to Italy, India to South Africa and (2) that it doesn’t discriminate in what is sold: whether imitations or originals, “no-testing” or brand new. If it can be sold, then it can be gotten at Alaba, some would say. It is a crucial muscle in economic arm of the Ibo Nation.

My neighbor like his Ibo “brothers”* is a player in this economy. His story testifies to that social contract which admits new pupils into this exchange and grooms them into astute business men. At the risk of generalizing and being somewhat simplistic, I would make a stab at how it works:

A young boy leaves his village in the care of a relative who is a Lagos-based business man. His patron feeds, clothes and generally takes over his upkeep for the tenure of this apprenticeship. The young boy works at his patron’s store and learns the rubrics of the trade usually for years. When he has proven himself and learnt what he needs, his master (as his patron is referred to) would provide him with capital in the form of money, inventory or even a few of his clients to get his ward up and running in managing his own business.

This simple system is the life blood of the entrepreneurial success of this great market place. It is replicated in different parts of Nigeria wherever Ibos may be found. I remember visiting a village in the North which was roughly a street long. True to nature, an Ibo trader was there running a store. Where ever there are people who have got money to buy, there is an Ibo man to sell, people joke.

These businessmen have had their minds stewed in the fundamentals of business, from negotiation to international strategy. Small wonder they command vast empires of wealth while some MBAs in my country are still on the unemployment line.

There is a system of doing business that enables these businessmen circumvent the more formal sector with its bureaucracies, expenses and delays. In the place of these bottlenecks, Alaba economics accommodates entrepreneurs raising capital from money lenders or “brothers”; monetary transactions across international boundaries without banking routes; the presence of agents of their own ethnicity resident in foreign countries serving as some unofficial “Chambers of Commerce” to protect and facilitate their business interests there. Their capabilities are numerous. They have perfected an extralegal system that is as old as an empire. And it works.

In truth, the Alaba brand epitomizes that unique ability to adapt to change. Or what do you think?

*The word “brother” is a colloquial expression common among some Nigerian ethnicities. It could refer to friend, relative or even business partner.

What brand is your money?

Although I don’t make nearly enough of it, I have a theory about money. Its history is long and convoluted and I never tire of telling a condensed version. These days, I am careful not to emphasis my imaginative bits which bridge the gaps between the islands of facts. Well, here it goes.

Every school boy knows that barter was the early means of commercial exchanges. You know, the “I-trade-you-a-piece-of-lamb-chops-for-some-tubers-of-yam” business. With the obvious limitations of divisibility or a standard of what value represents what or difficulty in moving cumbersome inventory for exchange at the market or the risk of spoilage of perishable item etc, it fell to other representations to be veritable carriers of value. Modern man toyed around with a few standards and then settled on gold. It was the perfect candidate: precious metal, scare, inanimate and definitely not perishable. He even took upon himself to fragment it into smaller standardized pieces for ease of carriage. And for a while, things were peachy in the world of commercial exchanges. At least up until, certain individuals began to dope gold with lesser metals after heating them at very high temperatures. This was in order to increase the quantity and hence the size of the “gold” coins after they had cooled in the melting pots. In this way, these individuals were able to literally increase their wealth. To curb this, the ruling government began to brand gold with a special seal on one side, attesting to the authenticity of every coin and then perhaps later began to imprint the value of specific gold coins on the flip side. The apparent progenitor of the coins we use today.

Another interesting occurrence was the increasing popularity of gold smiths in the community. Together with merchants, these artisans began to keep gold for members in the community in their safes (the gold smith worked on gold items and as such had to develop strong safes against robbery and theft – duuuuh!). You see, the fear of being dispossessed of their valuables led people to begin to pay a fee to the gold smith in the community in order to have their money kept in his safe. He in return would issue a receipt which may have read something like “this receipt backs such and such number of gold coins which have been deposited on this day [state date] in my vault, signed: Goldsmith”. With time, the gold smith would even begin to issue receipts to individuals as loans even when there was no gold to back it up. And they even did this with interest!

Lets take a scenario in which a man wants to return the money he owes or wants to make a purchase at the market but doesn’t have his gold with him but he has his receipt from the gold smith. Now the gold smith is known and respected in his community. He is practically an institution. So its not a problem if this man simply hands over his receipt in payment. This was to become the precursor of the paper money we use today. Hence, that old idea that money was backed with gold. Unwittingly, these “bankers” had established a new financial system in which the essence of money which is value was now travelling in paper form in place of gold itself.

So we leap, say, another century. Then comes fiat money. Perhaps, some genius in government decides that the best way to go was to remove the backing of gold from money as we know it. Bank notes could then be printed at the discretion of the authorities irrespective of the quantity of gold in their vaults. Thus the government was putting out its reputation that these notes (or currency as they would now be known) represented their said value. In other words, the brand of the government was money’s new backing. And then the story goes on….

What I think is obvious from this lengthy tale is that the essence of Money is value but if we take a closer look, we notice something else - the entire financial system is credit driven. From the time when vault receipts were like glorified IOUs claiming that there was some money somewhere which you could access when you wanted. Or that in issuing a bank note out to someone today, what you are saying is that some government or bank somewhere is promising the recipient that they are good for it. All of this rests on the concept of trust.

From value to credit to trust. Quite the leap, I admit. But it all comes down to trust. The very basis of all commerce – “I trust that this product am buying would deliver” or that “the TV repair man possesses the skill to do my work”. It is one of the earliest feelings we learn, psychologist tell us, in the oral stage of psychosexual development.

Perhaps that is the reason why Money is the ultimate brand document. A bank note even encodes some of the most important concepts on trust. Maybe more on that next time.

What Iya oni robo taught me on my way to Lagos

She appeared to eye us cautiously – or was it a weariness I sensed? – but then it was fleeting. She was alive again, bracing herself and gathering her wares as she approached our station wagon. You see, we had stopped at a petrol station on our way to Lagos and while the driver hurried to get the tank filled, we chatted amongst ourselves or tried to keep awake in the back seat.

This woman (who I would go on to call Iya oni robo), displayed a small transparent plastic bucket half filled with what appeared to be miniature brownish balls which had coloured the water they were soaked in. This was robo, in its pristine form. “Factory-fresh”, so to speak. She shoved her display into my field of vision and launched into a spiel.

“Brother”, she said in the Yoruba dialect, “how many should I bring.” Here she broke into familiarity both with the use of the appellation and the tribal tongue that suggested I was one of her own. And as such would be more favorably disposed towards her as we had something in common. Also, she lightly ventured an assumption: that I had made a decision to buy her product. Apparently, the only question was how many.

“I will sell one to you for ten naira while two for fifteen naira”, she smiled, luring us to purchase a product we perhaps did not cared for. I think by offering us an apparently good deal, she would tip us from our indecision in her favour. She had formulated the perfect antidote to buyer’s remorse.

And then one person bought a few which she eagerly presented in a polythene bag. And then another passenger perhaps sensing a silence endorsement of the product in the previous purchase, offered money for some. A third grew curious and asked questions about what it was made from and she happily explained the production process. It is made from melonm she said - bringing the unfamiliar finished product into the context of its familiar raw material. Two more passengers volunteered that they had tried it and it was nice.

Whether its is actively displaying a product/service offering; knowing the customer; assuming the customer already has a need your product or service would sate; the buy-one, get-one-free, gimmick or the generation of word of mouth marketing, I realized that the fundamentals of selling remain the same. It could be an insurance salesman in a business suit or a small time trader who both produces and markets her product by the road side.

As the car pulled away, I smiled and waved at Iya oni robo, musing over the last five minutes of my practical MBA as I scribbled my next blog entry into my note pad.

Coming soon

Would have 2 blog entries coming up over the next couple of weeks

Confessions of a brand hit man

(conversations with my dark alter ego on how to tank a brand)

What Iya oni robo* taught me on my way to Lagos

(my elective MBA)

*a yoruba expression for a woman who sells robo, a south western Nigerian snack made from melon

Mini case study: Personal brand positioning

Here is the question:

A friend of mine had this bit on his mind. You see, he is a football aficionado and as a result has done a bit of sports journalism. He often serves as a sport’s analyst on TV and radio shows. However, he had developed interests in brands and branding and has begun building a career for himself as a brand strategist. Yet he finds that he is more recognized as a sport’s analyst than a brand strategist. In a sense he has come to occupy a position in the collective consciousness of his audience as an analyst.

Posted on my wardrobe door in my room is a quote by a Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto. He wrote “It is always easier to remember a difficult concept in one of its tangible forms than in its essence”. This brings two things to mind:

1. 1. It is imperative to articulate the essence of an idea beyond its tangible forms and

2. 2. Most people may find it easier to remember the tangible representations than the essence of an idea.

And so while in branding one works from the brand concept or values (essence) to the brand collaterals (tangible representations), the audience appreciates it from the other way round. it is the same way one appreciates a work of art from the brush strokes to its prevailing mood.

Back to my friend: now he is an energetic chap with a bit of an infectious personality. So how about that for essence. But then like we observed, his audience wont necessarily experience his “energy” without the tangible representations. In this case, his talent as a sport’s analyst. And as such they are more likely to remember this.

So for instance, if he builds his brand on the essence of “energy”, he would have to craft his collaterals in a form his audience would be familiar with and recognize. To fail at this might lead to him confusing his audience and diluting his brand in his bid to extend it.

What I think is, he could grow his interests in sports branding. That would marry sports and branding suitably in the mind of his audience. And then he could extend to branding across other industries while maintaining his position as a sports analyst.

Or what do you think?