Category: Business Strategy

PressRelease – Sydney’s famous graphic designers team show off their impressive creative design portfolio in an attractive responsive website.

Bubblefish, a 10 years old, established brand design studio launched its new website that showcases its impressive portfolio of work in an interesting and attractive way.

Speaking on the occasion, Delia Suteja, the Chief Brand Builder of the brand design agency touched upon the team’s core philosophy. She said:

Bubblefish is where thought bubbles of strategy meet ideas fished out of our creative pond. Insight and imagination work together to form purposeful marketing action. The designs we develop, the campaigns we deliver, the products we promote, and the brands we build are all meant to achieve one singular purpose: Scaling up your business which is the Bubblefish brand promise.

Bubblefish uses its own experience and learnings from working with nearly 200 brands in food & beverages, consumer goods, retail, real estate, health & beauty, resources, and travel & tourism to help other businesses find new opportunities, attract new markets.

On the new website, case studies of brands that Bubblefish has showcased on the website – Thainabox, Collins Butchery, FBI Fashion College, Hippie Lane, Zuru Inc. – provides an opportunity for students and young professionals to learn about the strategic brand development process. The key insight that brand design is much more than graphic design is reflected on the portfolio pages of Bubblefish. The agency’s work across branding strategy and development, corporate identity design, packaging design, retail branding, websites and applications tells a story of how Bubblefish combines the magic of creativity and the logic of strategy to grow the top line of your business and the bottom line of your balance sheet.

Please visit http://www.bubblefish.com.au to learn more about Bubblefish or to contact Delia Suteja to discuss the latest approaches to strategic brand design and development that is oriented towards scaling up a business. She may also be contacted for importance of strategy in brand design for established companies as well as new ventures, for initial strategy as well as rebranding.

About Bubblefish
Bubblefish is a reputed creative branding agency based in Sydney that combines the magic of creativity with the logic of strategy to launch, nurture and renew brands while helping to grow our clients’ businesses in Australia and overseas.

If you find the prospect of crafting a Business strategy over aweing – you are not the only one. The truth is that many Business entrepreneurs don’t really see the need. Nevertheless the is that most successful businesses have well defined business strategies.

A robust business strategy can mean the difference between a lucrative business and you working 60 to 80 hours a week all year long – and not making enough to make ends meet

On the other hand, many high performing entrepreneurs who have a business strategy are not married to their business and make piles of money – and they usually attribute their fortune to having a strategic plan which guides their business.

Your Business Strategy determines the focus, vision and aims for your whole company. A written business strategy will help guide, but not dictate, your day-to-day operations. Defining, sharing and communicating your business strategy influences and guides operational decisions.

So what is the process for preparing your business strategy?

1. Define your business vision. In your perfect world, just what your business look like What markets would you seek to dominate?

2. Decide your company’s core operating values? You are looking for the core beliefs and values that you wish your company to be known for. Once your key values are clear they form your guiding principles. In other words, why are you in business and how do you do business?

3. Strategy concerns long-term plans. Your strategic is based on the over arching objectives that will help you get from where you are now, to where you want to be.

4. Medium Term Planning. Strategy is about the large scale – long time scale. You need to include elements to guide your day to day, short-term performance. Remember to be “SMART” when setting your annual goals SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely. As with any plan you need to define the tasks, who by and when. Figure out what resources you’ve already got, and what resources you need to get you past any barriers. And then create an action plan that clearly lays out how you will achieve your goals. Consulting with your staff will deliver much richer solutions.

5. It is important that you carefully monitor progress on your strategy and plans. Develop a set of milestones. Don’t underestimate the importance of this step. Being able to communicate progress to all stakeholders: investors, shareholders, partners, staff, customers and your local community is immensely powerful.

6. Communicate your strategy and plan. The short-term plan from your strategy creates the momentum and direction for your day to day activities.

7. Walk the Talk. Now that you have the roadmap, it’s time to begin the journey.

8. Make sure you know exactly how you are doing on a day by day basis. Create a dashboard to report on your key performance indicators.Prompt corrective action is often more important that the plan itself.

9. Follow the same cycle next year. (Dream, Plan, Act, Check).

Building a robust, realistic and achievable business strategy is not easy. It requires commitment, effort and discipline. Yet the rewards are obvious. Juat about every successful business has an active, documented business strategy.

Before describing the HRM model, it is important to define the assumptions and attitudes towards HRM and strategy, which the model is based on. The objective is to ensure a critical evaluation of the model and to decide whether the entire model, or maybe only certain elements, can be used in the specific organisation.

The model provides a framework for a HR strategy process and splits the process into seven steps. It is not significant whether the model is applied in a specific organisation, in an exact manner or in an adapted version. The importance is to use the same framework consistently throughout the organisation. When all sections/managers work strategically based on the same model, the management is able to follow the performance of each section/manager and take action when the business strategy is not followed.

Paul Kearns has written numerous books within HRM and he has extensive experience within HR. Based on his knowledge about HRM, he believes that an HR strategy should be based on the following principles:

– “A business strategy should give you a competitive advantage”.

– “A human resource strategy turns the way you manage your people into a competitive advantage”.

– “An HR strategy is a business strategy”.

The strategic basis of the model is that the organisation and its surrounding environments are dynamic and subject to change, which is why the HR strategy should not be expressed as a linear strategy. There are too many uncertain variables, which is why the strategy has to be flexible towards these. The HRM model is a holistic model that seeks to include as many variables as possible. This is connected to a basic assumption about the high degree of complexity in most of the causal relationships, which makes it impossible to objectively predict what happens to activity B if we make changes in activity A.

In terms of strategy, it is more sensible to use a systemic perspective, which entails that an organisation should be viewed in consideration of the system, in which the organisation operates, e.g. more or less all internal and external factors that influence the organisation. In practice, considerations in relation to the strategy may include political decisions, economic conditions, consumer trends etc.

According to the HRM model, an HR strategy should aim at considering all known variables and possible scenarios. This is obviously an idealistic target that is impossible to reach completely. Nevertheless, it should be the ambitious objective, characterising the approach to HR strategy.

There are many possibilities to get a further education in the field of HRM for example through online courses from PROBANA Business School.

Creating a blog involves much more than merely choosing a theme, posting an entry and publishing it live to the internet. If you are going to be blogging for money how do you intend to monetize your site or even generate traffic since you will need a steady flow of visitors to your site. Before all this however, consideration must be given to what your subject is going to be and your ability to supply the content needed for your blog posting. This in fact is the most critical stage of the blog building process because the direction you choose will dictate the degree of success you experience! And if you intend to be blogging for money the stakes are even higher, making this stage all the more important!

Here are 5 critical stages through which you must pass to help establish the direction your blog building efforts will take and the probability of your success!

Got an Idea

Do you know what you want to write about? Is it something other people will want to read about? Remember a blog is actually a small ‘niche specific’ social network site so to be able to successfully generate traffic there will need to be an interest. But regardless of demand your very first step is focusing on what you will be writing about.

Got Passion

Blog posting will take a lot of time, research and just plain effort so it is advisable to always choose a subject with which you have an interest. This interest or passion will be the driving force behind your motivation to continue learning about the subject your site is based upon. This research will supply you the content you will need for your posting and will serve you well during the blog building process which tends to take time. And speaking of time…

Got Patience

As previously mentioned blog building takes time and results are often slow in developing. If you are blogging for money results may take even longer since you first have to gain reader loyalty and then their willingness to spend money on your site! Are you patient enough to continue investing time and effort even before you have any measurable results to show for it? This is a question only you can answer so if you do not want to devote a lot of your time into something and then walk away before you are successful, you may want to think twice

Got a Strategy

Are you blogging to be heard or to be paid? Personal blogs involve more of a ‘go for it’ type strategy whereas business blogs needs more structure and of course a business plan! If you are blogging for money you will need to determine how you will get paid and when you will even start marketing products on your site. Some business bloggers launch their sites and immediately begin to promote products while others first develop a strong and loyal following. In this area you will have decisions to make as to what direction you want to take.

Got a Blog

If you answered yes to all of the above then the only thing you seem to be lacking in is motivation if you do not already have a blog! Time to get busy but relax, setting up your own site is relatively easy and can actually be a lot of fun. Enjoy!

Creating a blog successfully is dependent upon the ‘developmental’ stages you take before even selecting a host or determining how you will generate traffic. It is the thought you put into what subject you will focus on and your honest determination as to the level of your commitment. The 5 stages reviewed above, will help you evaluate both your commitment and abilities to create the content needed for your blog posting. Whether you will be blogging for money or for personal reasons, success in terms of how you choose to measure it will likely take time and definitely effort! Knowing and excepting this beforehand will increase your chances of achieving whatever goals you may have established for your blog!

In many industries the pricing models are as old as the industries itself, and the rules of the game were set a long time go and are well known by everyone. This is not the case of SaaS. Being a young software delivery model, the key factors of a good pricing strategy are not that clear.

It seems, just by taking a look at the pricing models of many SaaS offerings, that traditional licensing model of the on-premise software is not the best idea for OnDemand software.

Also, the traditional services (like consulting) model “I charge for the time you are using my resources (professionals) and their value (junior, senior, etc…)” doesn’t seem to be the best way to approach the SaaS pricing problem (probably fits better when talking about cloud computing). We are not talking about traditional services, we are talking about pricing a subscription business.

In SaaS, the change from offering “products” to “services”, from “acquire” to “subscribe” implies the need of defining the best way for charging for the solution offered.

So, any SaaS provider faces the problem of fixing the right price to its solution / services. There are many alternatives and factors that should be considered when dealing with this.

Most of the proposals out there use some (or all) of this ideas:

* Pay periodically: This means charging the customers on a regular basis (usually monthly).

* Pay for each user: Very widely used, from Salesforce to that new SaaS start-up that two college students just started.

* Pay for the resources: This usually means computing resources: CPU/hour, GB, Bandwith, etc… it is used very often in IaaS or PaaS.

* Pay for the features: So the customers pays just for the features in our solution they really need. Maybe new functionality or maybe simple using ‘more’ of the tool (for example more applications in a PaaS offering).

Each of this ‘ideas’ have its own pros and cons. For example, ‘paying for each user’ has the problem of generating fear in the customer about adopting the solutions widely, or ‘pay for the resources’ has the problem of the customers not knowing what they will pay the next month…

In one word, usually SaaS pricing models are more flexible than in the traditional license-based on-premise software, and mean less risk and a wiser spending. This can, though, lead to a problem of complexity that should be taken care of.

Let’s take a look about something one should always keep in mind, the goals that any pricing strategy for SaaS should pursue in order to sustain a profitable business model.

* Make it interesting for a new customer to start using the product. Having a free version, a trial version, or simply a ‘pay-as-you-go’ strategy starting low, usually solves this.

* Make the costs for the customer predictable. Everyone likes to know what to expect when talking about paying… some SaaS offering have this problem (specially those that have cost based pricing models). One should let the customer know, and decide what they want to spend. Though we should keep in mind the next goal.

* Try to increase the customer share once the customer is using the tool. This can be achieved in many different ways, most of them related to the ‘pay-as-you-go’ model (features, users, resources, etc…). The customer should feel that spending more really means extracting more value from the tool.

* Don’t make the pricing model too complex. This is a problem very often found in SaaS offerings, and that can make the adoption of the tool by the market slower and harder. Let’s keep in mind that many companies are not used to SaaS yet.

* Make sure that the customer does not abuse in the use of the solution. This can happen quite easily in solutions where lots of data are involved, like those that use video, business intelligence tools, etc… the provider should be protected against this.

So, how would this goals and the main ideas explained in the first post be applied when defining a SaaS pricing strategy?

Let’s take a look at a real world example: coghead

Coghead is a very good, and quite veteran PaaS offering that distinguishes itself by giving the chance of developing an application on their platform mostly by visual “drag and drop” operations. They are well funded and should be considered as a strong competitor to companies like Intuit with quickbase or Salesforce’s force platform.

So, let’s analyze their pricing model without talking about money, we are interested in the model:

* They charge basicaly on three different concepts: users, records and file storage.

* They offer a free account with: 1 user, 2000 rows and 100MB of space.

* From there you have two options to scale: the workgroup bundles (with discounts) or the ‘pay-as-you-go’ more flexible depending on your needs.

* There are four different workgroup bundles: plus, pro, premium, business, each one with a fixed price for a certain number of users/records/space. Of course a bundle is cheaper than having the same amount of usage via ‘pay-as-you-go’.

* The ‘pay-as-you-go’ model basically charges you for each user/10000 rows/1 GB you use.

You can take a deeper look at Coghead’s pricing model here.

Let’s talk now about how does this pricing model relates to the “model ideas” and goals we talked about:

* They, obviously have a periodic (monthly) payment. Something that makes perfect sense for a PaaS offering.
* They charge both for the users and for the resources used. This is very often used in PaaS offering, that can be very easily overused. Charging for number of rows or space is a way for Coghead to make sure nobody abuses the platform.
* They have some feature pricing also: Limited users and acces point for applications that wish to be public.
* They have both ‘pay-as-you-go’ and a ‘package’ alternatives.

So, they seem to use all of the ideas we talk about, this, of course brings a problem of complexity but gives the users a lot of flexibility.

And now the final question, does this pricing models achieve the goals we wrote about in this post?

* It is certainly atractive for a new customer/developer to start knowing/using the platform via the free basic account.
* About making the costs for the customer predictable: They offer this through their bundled-workgroup choices. You know what you pay for. This is not true in the ‘pay-as-you-go’ option, which is also more expensive, so their pricing model tends to bring customers to the ‘workgroup’choices.
* Increase the customer share: This true for the ‘pay-as-you-go’ , but not so true for the ‘workgroup’ option, where de customer could hesitate before buying the next and more expensive bundle.
* Don’t make the pricing too complex: We really think Coghead fails at this one, their pricing model is quite complex for the average user. We didn’t even talked here about their partner offerings or the concepts behing the different kind of users. We asume that, for a PaaS offering whose customers are both business and technically skilled, complexity is not such a big problem.
* Avoid customer abuse: This is quite covered there is no easy way that a customer could make a very extensive use of the platform without paying for it. Maybe they could have a problem with bandwidth, something they don’t charge for (they actually have limits at least for public/web users of an app).

We consider that the usual behaviour of a customer would be to:

1. Try the free account.
2. Go for the first bundle.
3. Then the second, third, and finally the ‘business’ option.
4. If the customer has further needs they wouldn’t have any option but going for the quite unpredictable ‘pay-as-you-go’ model.

So, in the end, increasing the complexity of their pricing model by using most of the usuall ideas in SaaS pricing, (they made some changes recently) Coghead has been able to cover most of the goals. We think they have an strong pricing model (complexity is not such a big trouble for this kind of PaaS tool) that supporting their excelent flex-based tool, should help them in becoming a big player in the PaaS area.