Author Archives: Diego Rodriguez

Playing with Brand Fire

Posted on by

Here’s the headline of an article I just read:

Ferrari Outsources F1 Engine Design Work

Shocking!  It got me all worked up.  My mind filled with visions of hell freezing over and Enzo Ferrari’s body spinning (at 19,000 RPM, mind you) in his grave.

I have nothing against the concept of engineers from India working on Ferrari motors.  Bear in mind that the day of tragic, cigarette-smoking Italian craftsmen hammering out Ferraris from stolen Cinzano signs is long gone; today Ferrari’s general manager is French, the chief of design is American, and its head mechanic is British. 
No, what matters to the Ferrari brand is that the motors and cars continue to be designed and built in Italy.  So, no matter where they were born, the designers at Ferrari need to feel, act, and think Italian, imbibing lambrusco, eating pork products and parma cheese, and dreaming of screaming motors whenever they look out at the foggy expanses of Emilia right outside their drawing offices.

But.

Read the article carefully and you’ll see that Ferrari isn’t outsourcing anything.  They’re just buying design software created by the Indian company Tata, and some Indian engineers are going to live at the Ferrari factory (lucky bastards!) to support it.  No engine design work will occur outside of Italy. 

The lesson here isn’t that outsourcing is bad, it’s that the essential Ferrari brand idea that Italy is Ferrari is Italy should be guarded as if it were a life and death matter.  At the very least, Ferrari’s business development people should have put a gag order on Tata. 

Often times effective brand management is more about influencing what other people say about you, not what you say about yourself.

Hammers & Nails

Posted on by

If you ask a group of mechanical engineers to create a land mine detection system, they’ll likely develop a system which prods the ground.  Electrical engineers might create a detector using magnetism.  In contrast, the biologists at Aresa Biodetection are using a color-shifting, genetically modified plant to signal the presence of land mines:

Plant_land_mine

In the presence of chemical compounds released by explosives into the soil, the Aresa plant turns pink.  While there are certainly ecological and political barriers to implementing this solution, one has to admire its elegance.

If you’re a hammer, the world looks like a nail.  Aresa’s plant is a wonderful example of how innovative solutions often arise when technical domains and professional disciplines collide.  While you’re probably not creating landmine detection systems, you could be doing this today.  For example, if your goal is to create an innovative, record-setting promotional campaign, why not add a nuclear engineer to your existing marcomm team?  Mix some screwdrivers in with the hammers and good stuff will happen.

The Dreaded Knowing/Doing Cat

Posted on by

Though I spent a couple of years getting my MBA (which was a great, fun thing to do), I’m a bit wary of the whole MBA thing in general.  The degree is getting a bit too rubber stamp-ish for my comfort level, as exemplified by this excerpt from a Slate article:

The
Pennsylvania attorney general’s office Monday sued an online university
for allegedly selling bogus academic degrees — including an MBA
awarded to a cat.

Thing is, I bet the cat made some pretty good contributions to the class discussion.  At least enough to get a "2".  Takeaway?  Assess the person, not the degree.  Did they really learn anything?

Buying Word of Mouth

Posted on by

Great article in today’s NYT Magazine on creating (and paying for) formal mechanisms to foster word of mouth communication around a market offering.

So long as they keep things real, agencies like BzzAgent and Tremor offer a fantastic addition to the traditional marketing mix.  Of course, as with all promotional activities, formal word of mouth campaigns should only be used in addition to, rather than in lieu of, having a remarkable, human-centric offering worth talking about in the first place.  Even better, that offering should be designed to foster word of mouth behavior on its own, so that most of your word of mouth can be earned, rather than bought.

Mr. Butt’s Human Approach to Retail

Posted on by

There are blogs that focus on original (or somewhat original) content and thinking, and there are blogs that focus on cataloging and linking to interesting things.  metacool is mostly about the former, but once in a while I find something remarkable that I want to pass along, like this:

I’ve built my professional life around putting humans at the center of business activities.  To that end, I love this Cool News bit about a Mr. Butts of HEB, my favorite (really!) grocery store in Texas.  Want to create a better offering?  Create a culture of deep empathy for your users — HEB gives employees $20 and tasks them to see what it really feels like to feed a family of four for a week on that bill.

Pagani, Successful Automotive Startup

Posted on by

I was fortunate enough to spend an afternoon hanging around the Pagani factory a couple of years ago.  Actually, to call Pagani’s facility an automobile factory is quite misleading, as the term conjures up visions of dirty wrenches, flying sparks, and piles of sheetmetal.  If anything, the Pagani factory resembles an Intel chip fab — clean, quiet, and orderly.  And the cars produced inside are exquisite.

Located a short drive outside of Bologna, Pagani sits but a stone’s throw from the headquarters of Ferrari and Lamborghini — part of the high performance internal combustion industry cluster that’s existed in Emilia-Romagna since the 1920’s.  The factory is very compact and sits, almost invisible, in a quiet suburban neighborhood.  It is divided into three main areas, each sitting side-by-side: a carbon fiber fabrication area with several autoclaves, an assembly area (big enough to fit three cars on jack stands) and an entrance lobby/museum.  The design offices sit above the museum, and the entire facility oozes quality and attention to detail, as do the fabulous cars that roll out the front door.  For example, most Pagani owners choose to have their car painted, but one car being assembled during my tour had been left in its natural carbon fiber finish.  Why?  Because the carbon fiber layup at Pagani is done with care and workmanship worthy of fine jewelry; every adjoining weave pattern met up with its neighbor with the unwavering precision of a Savile Row pinstripe.  Simply gorgeous, technically superb, utterly and completely to the hilt:

How to the hilt?  Well, when you order a Pagani Zonda, you also receive, at no additional cost, a pair of achingly beautiful leather shoes crafted in Bologna out of the same custom leather used to cover the interior of your car.

Amazingly, Horacio Pagani has been able to buck the odds (I reckon the last successful automotive startups were Honda and Ferrari, and those started in the unusual economic circumstances of the aftermath of WWII) to create a real, going automotive concern not unlike the famed atelier of Ettore Bugatti.  Conventional wisdom tells us that it’s impossible to start a new car company.  Perhaps.  But Horacio Pagani built his venture in a smart, calculated way not unlike that of Burt Rutan at Scaled Composites: first, he paid his dues (learned the trade at Lamborghini) to pick up tacit knowledge, then started a composites fabrication business to get some cash flow and create option value.  Only once those steps were successful did he begin making cars with the passion of someone doing what he truly loves. 

Pagani is a great example of designing a venture and building it via an iterative process.