Keep ’Em Close

Defeat? Yes. Destroy? No.

Competition is healthy. That’s something businesspeople grasp almost intuitively. We understand that competition creates efficiencies and forces us to better serve our customers. It can even make our work more enjoyable. Some of us thrive on competition and enjoy the fact that it brings out the best in us.

But it can also bring out the worst. Quick self-diagnosis: Do you consider your competitor to be your mortal enemy? Ever use words like “destroy,” “bury” or “scorched earth” when describing your competitive plans?

Now that’s not healthy.    

There are very few industries in which competition is a zero-sum game. In other words, your competitor’s successes are not necessarily your failures. Thinking of them as such only leads to ugliness in the marketplace.

Instead, focus on areas of possible collaboration. Are there projects in which you and your competitor can form a strategic alliance? Failing that, can you pool resources to influence public policy on behalf of your industry at large?

If nothing else, just have a conversation. Take a lunch every now and then to talk through differences or just get to know each other. You don’t have to be best friends, but you should come to accept each other as decent human beings just trying to earn a living.

We’re all just trying to earn a living, but chances are, we’re all someone’s competitor. And it’ll take all our efforts to make sure that competition stays healthy instead of turning into something ugly.

The C4:

1. Business competition drives market efficiencies and creates choices for the consumer. All else being equal, it’s a positive force for our economy.
2. But competition can turn ugly. It’s all too easy (and far too common) to dehumanize our competitors and to work toward their destruction.
3. That’s not healthy and it’s not good for our economy. Competition is about finding an equilibrium. Very little in business is zero-sum. There is room for success for all of us.
4. Look for common ground. Look for areas of cooperation. Keep lines of communication open. Compete, by all means, but remember you’re competing with decent people who tuck their kids into bed at night. Hopefully they’ll remember the same about you.

The Name of the Game

Pretend it's your baby.

Building your brand starts the moment you start building your company. The decisions you make as you plan, create and launch a new business will inevitably have long-lasting impact on your long-term success.

And perhaps the most consequential of those decisions is a deceptively simple one: just what are you going to call this new company?

Resist the urge to rush that decision. And resist the urge for self-indulgence. Naming the company after yourself, or your kids, or some meaningless word that sounds nice to your ears — there have been plenty of entrepreneurs who’ve managed to make this work. But there have been plenty more who’ve tried it and failed.

Your first consideration in naming your company is the one that should inform all your decision making: what does this mean for my customers? To answer that, you must know your customers, or at least know the type of customer you’ll be targeting. If you sell to a staid, conservative crowd, then one of those edgy, modern monikers — think Tumblr, Skype and Etsy — probably won’t win them over.

Speaking of pronunciation, how does it sound spoken aloud? How does it look on a letterhead? Will lazy tongues or unfamiliar typefaces change its meaning? There’s an unfortunately high possibility of brand damage here. You must anticipate and mitigate it.

Finally, can you trademark your name and buy a suitable Web domain? You might eventually retain a trademark attorney, but why not just start with a Google search? See what companies are out there with similar names, and try to anticipate consumer confusion that might result. And do a search for available domain names, but be warned: there are “domain squatters” out there who specialize in buying up dot-com names based on others’ searches, only to sell them back later at exorbitant costs.

Try to settle on a name that makes sense to your customers, that tells them in an instant who you are, what you offer and why you’re the best at it. Choose a name upon which you can hang the entirety of your marketing program — because that’s exactly what you’re about to do.

The C4:

1. Choosing a company name is the entrepreneur’s single most important marketing decision. Success depends upon treating that decision with that level of seriousness.
2. Don’t rush it and don’t take it as an opportunity to pat yourself on the back. Do look for names that speak directly to the kind of customer you want to attract.
3. Anticipate trademark and Web domain issues, as well as every nuance in how the name will sound aloud and appear on the page and screen.
4. Create a marketing program that starts with that carefully considered, ultimately perfect name…then build your dream from there.

Beware of Greeks Bearing Debt

A symptom of a flawed attempt to unify.

Casual investors, beware: your world has been turned upside-down.

Stocks have become the relatively safe parts of your portfolio. Bonds, which used to be your hedges of first resort, have changed entirely.

Top-rated bonds are all but useless for growth, and will pay practically zero interest for the foreseeable future. Sovereign-debt bonds, a sterling investment just a few years ago, are now almost too risky to contemplate.

What’s changed? It’s easy to oversimplify, but we’ll forge ahead: Greece. Greece has changed everything.

We’re not blaming that incubator of modern democracy, only pointing to it as a symptom. Greece is demonstrating all the perils of the Eurozone, an unprecedented experiment in a multinational currency. Greece is showing how difficult it is for 17 nations to share monetary policy while maintaining economic independence.

There are no easy choices for the Greeks. If they stay in the Eurozone, they embrace another generation of fiscal austerity — strangling any chance of economic growth. If they revert to the drachma they’ll almost certainly default on their national debt.

You say you own no Greek debt? Hold tight anyway. A Greek default, managed in the best possible fashion, will only encourage other teetering European economies to follow suit. Spain, Portugal, Italy, maybe even France, are all at high risk. This scenario, which is unfortunately one of the better possible ones and probably the most likely, means the bottom is going to fall out of the sovereign-bond market.

Forewarned is fore-armed. Think seriously about adjusting your portfolio accordingly. And spare the kindest possible thoughts for our friends and allies across the pond, who are guilty of nothing except a flawed attempt to unite their continent.

The C4:

1. The Greek debt crisis is demonstrating the vulnerabilities of the Eurozone, and pointing to a grim future of cascading defaults.
2. That likely result, coupled with already historically low interest rates on “safe” bonds, means we can no longer rely on the bond market as our hedge against other investment losses.
3. Casual investors (all investors, in fact) need to rethink their strategy. This is a slow-motion crisis that’s giving us time to adjust. Use it or wallow in regret.
4. But don’t blame the Greeks, nor the rest of the Eurozone. They tried. Economic unification is simply an idea ahead of its time.

Dimon In The Rough

$2 billion loss wakes people up early in the Morgan.

Over at J.P. Morgan, it feels like 2008 all over again.

Three weeks after CEO Jamie Dimon said “tempest in a teapot” when asked about the company’s renewed interest in credit derivative swaps, J.P. Morgan revealed that such trades resulted in over $2 billion in losses. The market immediately punished J.P. Morgan, by wiping out nearly 10% of its stock value in a single day.

Two facts make this loss all the more stark. First is that J.P. Morgan isn’t just an investment house. In the latter twentieth century J.P. Morgan benefited from deregulation, which allowed almost unlimited horizontal integration within the financial industry. As a result, J.P. Morgan is now the largest bank in the U.S.

“Too big to fail” almost doesn’t do it justice.

Secondly, we now know the lengths to which Dimon and company went in order to weaken the so-called “Volcker Rule,” which is designed to limit the amount of its own capital a bank can risk. It’s clear now that loopholes in the Volcker Rule, which J.P. Morgan lobbied heavily for, permitted precisely the sort of trading that just cost the company $2 billion.

There’s one hopeful glimmer, though. Perhaps heeding the Golden Rule of Public Relations (i.e., own up to your mistakes, immediately), Jamie Dimon is loudly and publicly admitting the company’s error.

“We were dead wrong,” he said on Meet the Press. “We made a terrible, egregious mistake. There’s almost no excuse for it.”

What comes next? Probably a lot less lobbying to weaken financial regulation. J.P. Morgan and others in the industry recognize this incident does far more to damage their credibility than it could ever do to their bottom line. So they probably won’t want to be seen jockeying for more loopholes, at least not in the short term.

And maybe that’ll lead to the ideal outcome: a financial industry governed by rules that quash recklessness while still encouraging growth. That is, after all, exactly what financial regulations are supposed to do.

The C4:

1. J.P. Morgan announced last week that credit-derivative trading has cost the company more than $2 billion over the course of about six weeks.
2. The day after the announcement, shares in JP Morgan lost nearly 10% of their value.
3. CEO Jamie Dimon quickly admitted culpability and promised a thorough investigation.
4. Only a robust system of financial checks and balances, that encourages growth through responsible business practices, can prevent those “too big to fail” from dragging us back into the nightmare of 2008.

Mondelez? Puh-leeze.

Has a crafty committee, once again, created a camel?

Mondelez: If you’re a Kraft shareholder you still have time to stop that word, Mahn-duh-leez, from becoming the new parent company name for fav brands like Nabisco, Cadbury and Oreo. Later this May, Kraft Foods will ask its owners’ permission to change its name to Mondelez International.

There are slews of consultants and observers already calling it a dunderheaded idea, and chattering about all the branding rules being broken: a name with no equity, no apparent meaning, difficult even to pronounce…

And then you hear how they actually picked it: through a global employees’ suggestion box. And not only that, they actually combined two entries to pick that winner: ‘Monde’ meaning the world, and ‘delez’ being a version of delish.

No, really.

But hey, who knows. Who knows whether chop-sawing the brand of Kraft (using plans drawn up by a committee) will work, rather than failing as spectacularly as expected. Stranger things have happened.

Branding rules are rules for good reason. But rules can be broken for good reason. And rule-breakers often create success stories.

Besides, as long as the Oreos taste the same, who really cares about the nonsense word on the corner of the package?

The C4:

1. Kraft Foods plans to ask its shareholders’ permission to rebrand the parent company of Oreo, Nabisco, Trident and Tang as “Mondelez International.”
2. That’s trading away a trademark that’s worth billions and known round the world. It’s replacing it with a word that no one has ever heard before, and that you need to be coached to pronounce correctly.
3. But who knows. If they’re smart with their marketing and they keep delivering top products maybe the Mondelezians will have the last laugh.
4. A company’s name is always the lynchpin of its branding. It pays to know what works and what doesn’t in naming a company, and when it’s OK to break the rules (next C4 Blast teaches just that!).