Why Courage Matters in Corporate Market Entry Strategy

"Erik: What are the keys to building and executing new market strategies working for large, publicly traded, multi-national companies? Alan: It’s interesting. I was just talking at lunch time today with a friend of mine who worked with Absolut Vodka when they were looking to launch their product. And it was a large company that I think owned, or at least wanted to launch this new product and what they came forward with was basically a clear bottle. And everybody up to that point in time was like, ‘You’re crazy! The label is the product! The label is what conveys the message!’ And they said, ‘No. It’s what’s inside the bottle is what matters and it’s Absolut Vodka and it’s crystal clear.’ And that took a tremendous amount of courage to go against everybody and to be the only clear bottle in the industry. What a fabulous opportunity. It could have been anything. It could have been rum. It could have been any type of whisky. So, to me it took a lot of courage and I think in large companies you don’t find courage. You know? And so when trying to launch a new product it is very much about connecting risk-takers, people that are prepared to take a stand in a new area and really be bold. That to me is critical to with a new strategy, going after new market opportunities is to think differently and try to be differently because typically what you’re seeing and finding in large organizations is just more of the same. Erik: Do you find it hard to keep those risk-takers around, that large company environment? Are those the type of people that tend to drift off and do their own thing? Alan: It depends. At Cisco it was just a company that grew and grew and grew through acquisition. I think the time that I was there we made over one hundred and seventy-five different acquisitions. And this was obviously through the dot com boom. So, to that extent the company was very, very focused on keeping and retaining. So, Cisco was a high growth company and continues to grow very strongly, although I think this most recent quarter wasn’t as good as they would have liked it, but to that extent, yeah I think the larger companies get, the more difficult it gets to branch out and be different and to sort of go beyond the standard."