MiNeeds Blog

I’ve been writing about branding and positioning for a while. In this post, I want to mention an important component of branding : the emotional engagement.

In marketing, any effective and successful message does have an emotional component to it. It’s simple: people act on emotions. Among the emotions that engage the people the most and trigger action, “fear” seems to be the most exploited one by the marketers. I won’t be judging the ethics of advertising messages here but if you look at car and insurance commercials you’ll know what I mean. Even baby diapers and tissue paper is sold on fear as we all are familiar with the usual pattern of a disaster scenario in commercials, followed by a solution offered by the feature of the product.

From a branding perspective we thought of ways to create the right emotion with MiNeeds. We went through a lot of iterations on what kind of emotion we’d like to evoke with the brand. We were designing an internet service company for the consumers and the focal point of any emotional statement of the brand would be on the website itself.

Expressionism & Branding:
Back in school, I took several classes on aesthetics and history of art. It was my way of getting my mind off of heavy logic and math exposure from computer science. What stuck with me during those classes was the usage of emotions in expressionist art form.

Expressionists were opposed to academic standards that had prevailed in Europe at the time and they emphasized artist’s subjective emotion, which went beyond the actual appearance of things. The subjects of expressionist works were frequently distorted or altered. To evoke intense emotional expression, violent colors and exaggerated lines were used in paintings. Expressionists were trying to pinpoint the expression of inner experience rather than the objective reality.

Take a look at “The Scream” from Edvard Munch, Norwegian painter who was a major influence on German expressionist movement. Such a masterpiece…I have always been fascinated by the power of this painting to express and create emotions.

We wanted MiNeeds to evoke the right emotion and were in fact inspired by the expressionist art forms to communicate it in a composition using the web site as the form. You’ll see the elements of expressionism on our new design with hand drawn elements and vivid colors. There are some conflicting goals of designing an intuitive, high performing, fast loading site versus using colors and images to do the emotional-engagement part right. In my experience, that was the most challenging part

This is only one of the ideas went into branding MiNeeds to make an overall and unique brand statement. A unique way to shop local services, a unique business model, with a unique, highly differentiating and expressive user interface. Did we reach our goal? The market will tell. Actually it has been telling us for a while. With the feedback we’ve been receiving, we’re in the process of making a few enhancements on the design of MiNeeds. Will it move it a bit away from the expressionist theme? Perhaps in the sense of vivid color usage and heavy emphasis of hand drawn elements. But in the core sense of heavy emotional engagement, it will be even better positioned.

Best,
Deniz Erkan, co-founder of Http://www.MiNeeds.com - a new way to shop local services

In my previous blog entry “Importance of Personas in Web Marketing“, I talked about the challenge of marketing in the dissonant Internet without first figuring out who your buyers are. In this blog, I’m going to briefly walk you through how we figured out one of our buyer personas for my startup, MiNeeds.

Step #1: Get Permission to Ask Questions
A month prior to launching the alpha version of MiNeeds website, we put up a very simple one-page prelaunch webpage on MiNeeds.com domain. This page hinted at what MiNeeds will be, and allowed users to enter their emails if they’re interested in receiving more information about it. Our goal was to collect visitors’ emails and earn their ‘permission’ to contact them further.

Step #2: Send Survey
We sent out an email survey to the people who signed up on our pre-launch page. The survey contained questions such as age and gender, and others specific to the services my company, MiNeeds, provides. MiNeeds website allows people to find local services and receive bids from service professionals on your needs. So one of our goals from this survey was to learn: who are the people shopping for local services? Hence, the buyer personas for MiNeeds.

Step #3: Analyze Results and Discover your Personas
We got an astounding 800 responses. We analyzed the respondents and learned that one of our personas is: women in their late 20s to late 40s. Their responses indicated that they make most of the decisions at home with regards to whom to hire to deliver services. They make the call for selecting the appropriate healthcare providers for their families, baby/pet sitters, home-related services, etc. With this piece of information, we defined one of our buyer personas. This substantially helps our marketing efforts since they can be a lot more targeted since we know who our customers are.

On the other hand, with online surveys, your audience will each get to do their surveys without any outside influence and at their convenience. And with one or two gentle email reminders, your response numbers can be great.

Best Regards,

Raed Malhas
Co-founder
www.MiNeeds.com, A New Way to Shop Local Services 

Meet Pleo, the cutest infant dinosaur born this century! UGOBE is the mother designer. When it got pregnant with it, it knew that the internet is a great ally to propel its message about its coming product.

If you’ve attempted to do online marketing, you’ve realized how overwhelmingly chaotic and fragmented the Internet is. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of online social communities, blogs, groups, you name it! Where to start marketing and who-to could be a daunting question many face when they start attempting to market on the web.

The marketers of Pleo at UGOBE realized that in order to do an effective online marketing they needed to develop personas of their target audience. Initially UGOBE thought that the perfect “buyer” persona is children between the ages of 7-12. This is very logical, isn’t it? If you look at Pleo, it’s a captivating baby dinosaur with those wide eyes, engineered with senses of sound, sight, and touch. How can children not be the right persona!?

UGOBE found that it wasn’t right about the children being the main buyer persona. To determine the appropriate personas, they sent out an email survey (and regarding surveys I recommend reading my previous blog: The Business Idea) to 1,900 people who had registered at the pre-launch site they put together for Pleo. The biggest surprise they learned from this survey is that one of their main buyer personas is: women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s! Those women found that Pleo was wonderful and brings out a nurturing instinct that makes them fall in love with him.

The marketing team for Pleo now knew who to target for this persona. So, they developed a marketing message targeted for these women. And they positioned Pleo as the cute family pet.

Before you start marketing online, I highly recommend you research and define your buyer personas. Otherwise, you could waste a lot of effort and money targeting people that might not be interested. Besides, your marketing message might end up being too broad and not targeted. Defining your personas before you start executing your marketing is important as you saw with Pleo’s example. It could reveal some insights about your buyers that you never thought of. In my next blog, I’m going to tell you how we developed personas for my company, MiNeeds.

Best Regards,
Raed Malhas
Co-founder, www.MiNeeds.com, A New Way to Shop Local Services 

Brand performance is an interesting concept. The performance of a brand starts with the name of the company, supported by the tagline, messaging of the main specialty and differentiating aspect, and delivering on the same idea flawlessly, in harmony, through the customer interactions.

Picking a name is so important and not an easy task. It has to shine and has to be supported in unity with the rest of the branding elements. Picking a name is really a combination of art, marketing and consumer psychology. There’s a list of principles to abide by when picking a good name, among them are : Is it easy to pronounce, does it hint at the specialty, is it ownable?

Look at the story of eBizJets: Such a great name isn’t it? Without the tagline, slogan or the logo you get a sense of what the company does. eBizJets was an “aggregated charter”, a unique specialty as an answer to “fractional ownership” jet companies like NetJets. eBizJets would search thousands of affiliated charter operators to find the best deal for its business customers, promising them a value through better rate and flexibility. The business grew into a leading player with this model. Soon after, they faced a trouble. Somebody else claimed the ownership of eBizJets trademark, filed a suit and won. After that, eBizJets changed their name to “Sentient”.

Now, just imagine that you saw this name on a billboard or heard about it from your friends. What does that name mean? It’s not Sentient Airlines or even Sentient rent-a-jet, but just Sentient. It definitely violates the top three principles of a good brand name. This case study was covered in Bill Shcley’s great book on branding “Why Johnny can’t brand”.

Best,
Deniz Erkan, co-founder MiNeeds.com - A new way to shop local services 

There’s the concept of a message losing its power to reach out and stick in the market, the more it is diluted. In every aspect of branding, you say the most by saying the least. You go further by being leaner. Bill Schley and Carl Nichols in their fascinating book “Why Johnny can’t brand” call this the Universal Paradox: the narrower you focus, the wider your message goes. All the feedback we’ve been processing on MiNeeds so far has been in line with what the theory and basics of branding suggest.

I like backing our empirical data with what the theory suggests and after this my partner Raed and I were even more determined to lean down to one single muscle of MiNeeds to be the branding message. The core of what we do. The message we’d want to stick and be remembered with.

MiNeeds is a big platform targeting to enhance the interactions in between local service providers and consumers. It has a powerful search engine as well. But the core of what we do is really to introduce a new way to shop local services, where consumers post their needs to receive bids from local service providers. It’s a paradigm changing phenomenon that instead of consumers doing the search, they are actively searched by interested businesses.

That was what our vision was to begin with, but along the way, since we built way too much technology to make it happen, we were trapped in the positioning paradox.

It’s like putting the pieces together in the triangle paradox. The way you arrange the components in the below triangle leaves extra space. Where’s that one extra square coming from?

Well, I’ll leave it up to you to point to the source of this apparent paradox in the above picture, but for us it was too many components speaking out too loud.

I’m glad to say that we did a great iteration on how we brand MiNeeds. Our main page tells the story clearly with animated characters now. If you’re interested in how we got out of the positioning paradox, check out our new page.

Of course, it’s just an opinion until it’s tested and approved by the market. For those of you closely watching the evolution of MiNeeds, I’m greatly interested in what you think of our all-new sharpened up branding. Comments and questions are welcome.

I’ll write more about the principles of branding and what we’re doing to apply them to MiNeeds in my upcoming posts.

Best,
Deniz Erkan, co-founder of MiNeeds.com

In my previous blog entry, “Using Online Videos to Expand your Business“, I talked about how online videos are starting to play a substantial role in business marketing. I also mentioned that I’ll be sharing some case studies that show the powerful effects online videos can have for small businesses.

Below, I selected two case studies that I was fortunate to witness for a couple of business members of my company, MiNeeds. While analyzing the effect of the videos that we created for those businesses via our filming service, we saw some extremely inspiring findings.

Case Study #1: A Chiropractor
Holly Hochstadt practices a very unique style of chiropractic care, which is a gentle style care from a holistic perspective. Holly decided to create an online video for her business and post it on her service profile page on MiNeeds (click here to view it).

Soon after her video was posted, we closely tracked her service profile page to monitor if there were any changes in traffic. It was incredible what we saw happen! The traffic on her page went up by multiple folds compared to before. Traffic numbers to her page at one week were over a 1000 unique hits, and continued to be higher than other chiropractors’ pages on MiNeeds in Seattle area.

Case Study #2: An Artist
Consider Erika Brumett. An extremely multi-talented artist in oil painting, wood burning, candle making, you name it! Erika recently created an online video on her service profile page (click here to see it). While tracking the traffic numbers for her page, we at MiNeeds noticed a spike in the amount of traffic Erika’s profile page was getting soon after her video was posted on her page.  

We notified Erika of the traffic outcome. Inspired by the reaction of clients and the increasing traffic due to her first video, Erika bought her own simple camera gear and started filming herself while creating the art pieces. Her goal is to show clients how each art piece is made. Also, give her clients the opportunity to hear, in the artist’s words, what each piece means from every angle!

Imagine buying a piece of art and getting along with it such a video clip from the artist. What a unique smart gift! It’ll be hard to believe that clients won’t be loyal to such an artist for life! 

Summary & Thoughts
Online videos have the ability to give small businesses a great unique exposure on the Internet. It’s an easy low-cost method to stand out. It gives the business strong branding. And the fact that online videos are available for online searchers to view at anytime is a great advantage for businesses.

In the coming few years, I believe that we’ll be seeing a dramatic transformation in small businesses’ focus on utilizing online videos to deliver their messages/advice and describe their products and service – to the world wide web.

I’m very keen on having my company, MiNeeds, continue to monitor, track, and analyze online videos’ effectiveness for businesses. In the next few months, I’ll be tracking direct sale returns based on online videos for businesses on MiNeeds. I’ll definitely be sharing any interesting case studies that arise so other small businesses can leverage.

Best Regards,
Raed Malhas
Co-founder, www.MiNeeds.com: A New Way to Shop Local Services 

The core drive behind Microsoft’s move is Google’s dominance in online advertising and search.

Advertising landscape brings together the publishers, advertisers and consumers. In a digital world where the ads are being brokered centrally through ad delivery engines, such as Google’s, the largest broker has the advantage of riding a vicious cycle.

In this blog, my partner Raed and I have been writing about the network effect in certain industries. Here’s an excellent example of the network effect on a larger scale:

One key nature of online advertising industry is its network effect: The more publishers you have, the more consumers you have access to. The more consumers you have, the more advertisers you attract. The more advertisers you have, better yields and economies of scale for all the parties…And the cycle feeds itself forming a nurturing cycle.

It’s this cycle that Google has been riding for a while, and it’s this cycle that Microsoft is trying to break into with a Yahoo deal.

Microsoft’s public disclosure of its interest to buy Yahoo at a 62 percent premium is designed to put pressure on Yahoo’s board to do a deal with Microsoft. By going public with its interest, rather than just giving up and going away, Microsoft engages in what is called a “bear hug” play.

Microsoft’s approach to Yahoo dates back to 2006 with a series of discussions on how to do partnerships. It looks like, Microsoft did not receive much attention for its discussions and took the approach of putting more pressure on Yahoo through a public offer.

If anything, dropping a public offer like this essentially means that Microsoft wants Yahoo shareholders to make the decision.It’ll be interesting to see how Yahoo shareholders will take this.

Best,
Deniz Erkan, founder of MiNeeds.com - a new way to shop local services 

Not more than a decade ago, TV advertisements were the most dominant way to reach the masses and spread the word about a business, a service, or a product. Back then, television was the main hub that people used to get information and learn about their local community, its news, its services, and so on.

Today, the internet is rapidly replacing the traditional media, such as TV. People have become dependent on the internet to perform research about local services and businesses. Having credibility online has never been more crucial for businesses that want to continue to have an edge in their industry and local community. Therefore, businesses must be focused at presenting themselves in the most personable and approachable methods online. They need to educate their potential customers on the internet about their services and products.

The best way to educate your customers and let them know who you are and what services you offer is to meet them personally. Customers want to meet you and learn about you and your services. Therefore, creating an online video that describes your business values and services and possibly show your office space – is an extremely effective way to allow your customers to meet you before they even hire you.

One of the main advantages of online videos is that customers can learn about you at their convenience, whenever they do a search on your service. Unlike TV, your online video doesn’t just air at a certain time on a certain date; it is always there to stay. Anytime a user is searching for you, they can find your video and meet you online.

At my company, MiNeeds, we highly encourage businesses to create extremely personal service profiles so customers can learn more about them. We’ve been closely monitoring the profiles that contain videos and comparing them against other business profiles within the same industry category with no videos. The findings are amazing! In a nutshell, businesses that added online videos on their profile pages substantially increased their traffic. Moreover, their traffic became multipliers of the amount of traffic that other businesses are getting within the same domain that did not have videos.

In my next blog, I’ll be sharing some case studies from service providers on MiNeeds that created online videos, and share data on their traffic and how videos altered the way they think about marketing their business.

Best Regards,
Raed Malhas
Co-founder, www.MiNeeds.com; A New Way to Shop Local Services 

In my previous post, I gave a summary of the principles of a social epidemic from Malcolm Galdwell’s Tipping Point. The three principles are “law of the few”, “stickiness factor” and “power of context”. You can read more about them in my previous post.

How can we use these principles in engineering our own social epidemic? More specifically, how does it apply to an entrepreneur’s challenge of designing a product or a service and forming the marketing strategy?

In any epidemic, the first adopters of a new idea is typically the innovators. These people would like to take risks in adopting new ways of life or a new product. Though they are mostly concerned to live a differentiating lifestyle and like to feel good about themselves by living that way, any idea needs a chasm to be adopted with early adopters and to mass users. If forming a social epidemic is simple with a three-point plan, why do we not take enough advantage of it? Gladwell’s take on that is that we are “linear thinkers”, meaning we expect output to be linearly proportional to the input.

For example, imagine a sheet of paper folded in half, and then in half again, and so on for 50 folds. How tall do you think the folded stack would be? The thickness of a telephone directory perhaps, or the height of a refrigerator? No, says Gladwell, the folded stack would reach from the Earth to the Sun. It is this counter-intuitive power of geometric progression that allows little things to make big differences-small, well-directed changes can push your idea past the tipping point to create a full-scale epidemic.

How do we build the bridge between the three principles of a social epidemic and the concept above to form a three-point plan to engineer our own social epidemic? Gladwell touches that point in his book as well, however, I like how Dr. Paul Marsden, a research psychologist at the London School of Economics, worded it:

The answer, according to Gladwell, is simple. Translating the mathematical squiggle-babble of sociological epidemic models into clear, well-written English, and using entertaining examples from his experience as a journalist for The New Yorker, Gladwell outlines a three-point plan for engineering your own social epidemic in The Tipping Point.

• First, do not waste time marketing your idea to the masses: focus your energies on the trendsetters, the socially promiscuous and those with the power to influence. Place your idea or product with these people and, by the force of word of mouth added to an innate human tendency to keep up with the Joneses, your epidemic will snowball through society.

• Tweaking your idea or product to make it more infectious or “sticky” (Gladwell’s preference) is the second step. This does not mean major surgery to transform a mediocre idea into a brilliant idea-a cosmetic makeover will work wonders, so just “tweak and test” with a view to involving your target audience, telling a story, somehow making it relevant to them.

• Finally, get the context right. The human mind is wired to be receptive to ideas only in certain situations, so make sure your idea fits the context in which it will be adopted, and make sure it fits the context of a mind still primarily adapted to a distant hunter-gatherer past. There you have it, the three rules for a social epidemic: “The Law of the Few”, “The Stickiness Factor” and “The Power of Context”. Best,
Deniz Erkan, co-founder of MiNeeds - A new way to shop local services 

As traditional advertising and marketing models are being challenged by not being as effective as they used to be, viral marketing has been one of the hottest topics lately and there are tons of books, studies and workshops on it. Viral marketing…word-of-mouth marketing…guerilla marketing…buzz marketing…Different terms for the same problem : how do we get the attention of the consumer in this world of attention deficit disorder, caused by the plethora of products and services in almost anything you can imagine. And, more importantly, once we get the attention of the consumers, how do we become sticky enough to jump start an epidemic where they talk about your business?

This week, my first post will summarize the principles presented in “Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell. In my second post, I’ll outline an approach to engineer social epidemics using those principles and in my last post of the week, I’ll talk about how it inspired us and we used it in building product features and marketing strategies of MiNeeds, my new startup.

Tipping Point covers all types of social epidemics from revolutions to spread of diseases to even how fashion and trends in clothing take place. However, in Entrepreneur’s Journey, we’ll take a different slice of the book, looking at the principles from an entrepreneur’s point of view and outline how to use it for small businesses.

First, the 3 principles of a social epidemic according to Gladwell:

Law of the Few:
Gladwell defines three types of people: Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. Connectors are the type of people who know unusually large number of people, and thus are connected to separate and unrelated circles of social networks. These people are very enthusiastic and personable which makes them excellent at building networks.Mavens are the type of people who take a special area of interest to the levels of near-obsession who acquire such detailed knowledge of a product that others turn to them repeatedly for advice. These are the people who make massive amount of research just to buy a $500 TV set or would read everything about drive terrains and suspension systems just to make their next 4×4 car purchase. Salesmen are the type of people as the name suggests. They convince people on new ideas, turn seemingly complicated features of any product into understandable, affectionate and appealing product statements to convince people to sell the idea or product. 

Stickiness Factor:
How do you hold the attention of people long enough to deliver a message that really sticks. Sticks, in the sense that, the message is a memorable and remarkable one that stays within people. It’s like your friend repeatedly whistling “Deck The Halls” with a new blues twist, and next thing you know, you unawarely sing the same song all day as it sticks with you. In the modern world of constant exposure to advertising and ideas, attention deficit is a major issue and stickiness factor plays a huge role in re-defining or re-engineering the whole marketing message and the product around it to stick.The Power of Context
Power of context is about how people change behaviors in a given context. The context here could be the environment from a micro scale, say in a family, to a massive scale, say at the Nation level. Power of context also talks about how a certain idea could tip in a given environment while others don’t. Timing and environment are very important here. Think of a clean subway station where everybody tries to keep it clean, whereas at a nasty and rundown subway station, same people don’t seem to care as much. This is a typical example of how the same people would act differently in a changing environment.

Best,
Deniz Erkan, co-founder of MiNeeds - A New Way to Shop Local Services