Dmitry Linkov

Dear friends. Can you please help me? If anyone read Buzzmarketing - I need your opinion about the book. Do you like it? Did it gave something to you?

Links:
http://www.buzzmarketing.com/
Amazon - here

Fabulous blogger Kathy Sierra stops blogging because of some morons. The story is here.

Just want to say - Kathy all the best to you! I hope the police will take care of those who are after it.

Presentation Zen blog is fabulous! Check out the fresh analysis of John Mackey presentation here

Sign on the McDonalds express window: "Open 24 hours. Technical pause: from 4 till 6 am."
For me this "24 hours" looks illegal after that!

Differentiation is in all product categories. But there still are anchors on which other products are based on. Here is an example of beer:
1. Lager - the most popular and most widespread (I believe). Let’s say that Beck will be the anchor, but actually any beer can be the anchor in this category.
2. Dark beer - and here Guinness is the anchor with no doubt.
3. Non-filtered and non-filtered dark - here Czech beer like Franziskaner, Krusovice are anchors (in my mind).
4. With some flavor, but still beer - Hoegaarden is the anchor in this category.
5. More alcohol but still tasty and still beer - Belgian Leffe is the anchor here.
6. Light beer - Velvet.

Of course there are a lot of other types of beer. But if you take a consumer, and give him to try all of the beer that is on the market - these are the anchors categories he will think about while trying. Of course everybody has it’s own favorites, but in general there are 6 tastes, and six anchors for every taste. Some of the anchors are very clear to identify (like Guinness) some of them are not (like in lager category).
So what is the point of all this? The point is - 6 categories it’s so tiny! Dear producers, is this all you can imagine - 6 types of beer? Simple statistics shows that there are so many things that can be invented (beer cocktails, mixed beer, really alcoholic beer, beer without gas, foam beer, hot beer etc.), there are so many edges not yet discovered.
So keep working and keep creating new markets.

Here Tom Peters writes:

I love best practices.
I hate best practices.
I love them when they are available to learn from.
I hate them when they demand mimicry.

I want to proceed with best practices idea a bit more. From Tom’s citation there are two types of best practices:
1. Best practices can be something that has to be done by everybody - so they become like a "standard of quality". Like Wi-Fi in coffee shops. It’s simply has to be done in every coffee shops, and this is not the thing that distinguish you from you competitors. This is a standard.
2. Also best practices can be something, that makes certain company distinctive, something "purple". And if you will do the same for your company - it will be a sort of mimicry. This won’t work, because you are not the first one to use it and it looses the remarkability.