Jaime Polo's Blog

(Para leer este artículo en español, pulse aquí.)

Focusing on business, making promises and keeping them is a difficult relationship because as more promises you make, the harder it is to keep them.

This becomes specially difficult in the market. In order to attract customers, you have to make promises and create expectations. If your promises are below competitors’, your potential customers will go to them. On the other hand, if your promises are over competitors’ but you cannot make them real, your customers will be disappointed and no longer will buy from you.

As a marketer, you have to create a balance between the promises made and the ones you can perform. It is much better that your customers get a “wow” with previous low expectations than it is to simply accomplish expectations. Perhaps, it is better to have less customers but more loyal.

Last night, I was listening to a soccer radio show from a Spanish radio station. The coach of the Spanish national team was being interviewed. The interviewers were flattering at him because of the World Cup and the results obtained during the Euro Cup qualifying round.

I think that Vicente Del Bosque, the coach, is good at his job. However, there are some evidences to think that he is not as good as they say and that he doesn’t deserves the salary he earns nor the compliments.

First of all, the best managers aren’t willing to train national teams. It is better to train a great team, like Chelsea, Manchester United, Milan, Real Madrid, FC Barcelona, than a national team. Therefore, his talent is below than his colleagues from big teams, like Ferguson, Guardiola, Mourinho, etc.

Second, it has to be taken into account that Spain won the 2008 Euro Cup with another coach, Luís Aragonés. Before winning the Euro Cup, Aragonés didn’t have a good reputation among Spanish journalists nor among Spanish soccer world. As well,the Spanish national team style of playing soccer was exactly the same with Del Bosque and Aragonés.

Third, they had the same style in both competitions because they almost were the same players. Casillas, Puyol, Torres, Villa, Xavi, Iniesta, Cesc, Capdevila, Ramos, Silva, all of them and some more won both championships.

Fourth, they might be mere coincidences but, the brain of the team has been the same in both championships, Xavi and Iniesta. And, as well, both play for the same team for many years: FC Barcelona, and, also, FC Barcelona has probably been the best team in the world in the last 3 years.

I cannot say that Vicente Del Bosque is a bad coach, of course not. But, what if the coach had been a second division coach, would they have won the World Cup? Would he have had enough courage to change anything of this team?

We can apply this to business, if a person with education and 15-year experience in business was appointed as the new Coca-Cola CEO, would the results of the company be the same? I think there are some companies that don’t need much talent to be the same as they are. Only revolutionaries need and have that talent to succeed.

Having once decided to create a Social Media Consultancy, that was the time to clearly define the service. I have always thought that the most important thing at the beginning was to define the mission and the vision of the company. But, since you are only doing one thing and, specifically, a consultancy, there is not too much to set.

We started defining the service, and it was specially strange because if you want to grow, you have to set every small aspect of the service in advance. That is what we did, we clearly defined the service and we agreed to write different internal handbooks that will help future employees understand what to do in every step of the process. It is really important if you want to grow, using this method, a new employee arrives, you give her the handbooks and she can start to work immediately. You save money and time training her if you hadn’t these tools.

Recently, Facebook announced a new feature: Community Pages. In my opinion, this is a turn in their business model. It was only based on online advertising and I expect they will be charging for owning an official fanpage. With so much companies around the world, and with more than 400 million users, business will be willing to pay that money for being there, and using all the features available to increase their sales.

Pay-per-click is not profitable enough. As people gain experience online they become aware of frauds and they tend to reduce clicking on advertising. As well, visual advertising becomes invisible as users visit the same page more and more. In conclusion, the probably new Facebook’s strategy is reasonable.

Since I read “Linchpin” by Seth Godin, which I totally recommend, I have been thinking of how to show the projects I am involved with. The idea of transforming my blog into a diary in which I explain what I do in my life has become a reality, and, from now on, I will illustrate my activities and my projects’ evolution. Furthermore, I will use it to give my opinions about marketing and business issues as well as experiences I have with companies that are not performing well in terms of marketing or strategy.