From MVP to MVB

Knowing your Blind Spots

During Hyper Island Way Week (HIWW), which is sort of like boot camp to immerse ourselves in the Hyper Island Way, we learnt many models of self and team organisation and experienced new tools to help us develop better a better understanding of ourselves.

From giving and receiving feedback, to Wheelan’s Integrated Model of Group Development to the very powerful act of reflection.

But one of my favorites has got to be the Johari Window.

You set out choosing a few words you think describe yourself best and then send it out to your friends to do the same for you. What is known to yourself and others is the Arena, and what people see of you that you don’t see is known as the Blind Spot.

12 people returned with answers and the results were quite a revelation. What stood out for me was that most people felt I was “Dependable”. While I was doing a good job at hiding my nervousness from everyone else (not successfully at times when I stutter and stammer!)

This was a highly informative exercise because it informed me of how people saw me and not necessarily the way I saw myself, which got me thinking about the role of Branding for not just companies but even us as individuals. Branding is everything that you mean to say and do, and everything else that people perceive of you. There is only so much that you can do before people start creating perceptions around you and your ‘offering’

Which is a nice segue to the topic:

Start-Ups Need a Minimum Viable Brand

A fascinating article I referenced to, to complete my IRA for the StartUp module at Hyper Island, which was in itself a very thought provoking exercise for me.

This piece argues that “Having a brand strategy in place ensures that your internal team is aligned around the same goals, and helps determine how you plan to differentiate your product and win loyal customers. Real artists may indeed ship, as Jobs famously exhorted his team, but savvy businesspeople don’t do so without at least a basic brand strategy in place.”

For years, I’ve always been focused on helping a repertoire of clients transform for the Connected Age, which were for the most part clients borne out of the “Industrial Age” who were frantically trying to pivot themselves to stay relevant, asking for ‘Digital Strategy Playbooks’ that dictate the role of social platforms, drawing up their digital ecosystems, to Facebook content strategies, to campaign microsites, all in a bid to stay relevant to their customers.

The must-have chart in all presentations to show you are an expert in Digital in China — thanks CIC

The perennial question we were all trying to answer was ‘What kind of value can I bring for my customers instead of shoving my products into their faces? How should I leverage all these platforms to reach and engage with my customers?

Think Nike shoes to Nike+, what was the value-add to the current business model that enabled you to ‘get in earlier and stay in longer?’

Suddenly with this IRA assignment, it flipped everything on its head. What if you are a disruptor brand borne out of solving a real problem well? Do you even need a brand?

I started asking myself, what is Instagram’s brand? Is it warm and friendly? What about Whatsapp? Skype? These were disruptive technologies with razor sharp instinct that helped customers to their desired outcomes, but do we know what was their brand? Did I understand what emotions it was trying to elicit when I saw their logo? Could I find the right phrases that describe their brand personality? Do the people working in there even care?

As a consumer, I didn’t care, because these tools solved my problems exceptionally well. I used all of these services because it solved real problems. It brought immense value to my life and by itself made them relevant to me.