Brand positioning in About-Us pages of Fortune 100 tell us

The about us pages can tell a lot about the company, it's current position in the market, it's aspirations, its values and the leadership team. I wanted to see if there were some key themes that emerge when we look at the about-us pages of the largest companies in the world. The fortune 100 seems as an obvious choice. Due to their impact they have a lot more to say, hence the about us pages are not just that, they are really about the world pages. Although I explore lot of websites reading 100 about us pages will take a lot of time so I resorted to text analytics. To simplify the text analysis I used mostly either "who we are" or "what we do" pages and although most fortune 100 are multinationals, I explored English language pages. In some cases, if the values page was readily available I took the content from that page as well, but that was exception then the norm. The aim was to get a general idea of topics on top of mind of these organizations and see if there are collective themes. Some of the companies did a great job of their first page but in many cases the about us was split into many sections. The argument can be made that it is tough to simplify the essence on single page. But some are doing a great job of it, for example GE's about us page does a nice job of putting re-invention front and center. For my purpose I found the "teaser" about us page sufficient for text analysis. To reiterate, mostly I was interested in "who we are" and the topics that surround that theme, then anything else. I found that the companies in similar domain (industry) had similar themes in their content and it is interesting to see how brands are positioning themselves in their space.

Let's get the methodology out of the way. Three techniques were used, including word cloud, frequency distribution of words, and latent dirichlet allocation (LDA). This post is not about LDA or text analytics, most implementation was borrowed and tweaked using internet. Not much originality is claimed in the text analysis. My interests lie in the essence of corporate branding and emergent themes top of mind of top organizations as manifested in one of the core messaging content piece on the digital front. The analysis also lends itself to other avenues for page optimization, analysis of content at scale for competitive or simply forming a robust opinion.

Word cloud, as nostalgic as it is from the early days of text analytics, it is still a very useful tool. It paints a picture of words that sets the stage for deeper look. Even at the birds eye view, if one of these large companies are your clients, then you can get a starting point on what general themes are coming through. At a glance, healthcare, which is mainly insurance carriers, messaging is centered around quality of service, improving lives of people and patients, comparatively the pharma, like J&J and Pfizer, are more research oriented focusing on medicines to cure diseases around the globe, the oil & gas and utilities' big picture revolves around long term sustainability beyond petroleum and protecting the world resources, the automobile industry is on electric and zero emission cars yet keeping safety front and center. Overall the messaging of fortune 100 companies as gleaned from about us, "who we are" and "what we do" type of pages in a world cloud, revolve around people and world, and the communities. It is lot more about people and communities then just about the product or service that the company offers.

Another simple view complimenting word clouds is frequency distribution. It gives a more quantitative view of the world clouds.

The general themes of customers people, world, communities remain on top. The global health crises that consumed the better half of 2020 and in 2021showed up in every organization as these organizations or some part of these companies is engaged in solving the pandemic crisis.

For topic modelling I used LDA, it allows interactive display to play with different topics, which is quiet fun. Those that like to know the devil in the details aka the model intricacies, quick synapses below. 

The only word types used were NN,JJ,NNS,VBG,VBP,CD,RB,VBD,VBZ,VBN. The coherence curve revealed few optimal values and after a little experimentation I settled on number of topics of 18 that gave above .33 coherence with a perplexity score of -10.5 for combined about us pages of all 100 companies.

Topical analysis is a very useful tool for training intuition with scaled information synthesis to key themes. The topic analysis revealed some recurring themes. As mentioned earlier the coherence scores improve greatly when the analysis was narrowed to a particular vertical. The improvement of topic coherence is directly related to recurring themes for companies in the same vertical. Taking the case of Utilities vertical with energy companies 3 unique topics come up. The distance between the topic circle also shows that the topics are relatively different. With 1st topic shaping to be around energy future with renewables, safety of employees the 2nd is around conservation of natural resources and third one around the scale of the company and different way to produce electricity. Now these topic definitions are pretty subjective but as the scope of the context narrows the topics become more definable.

Generally speaking the fortune 100 messaging is around, people, their impact on communities, their commitment to the planet and their customers. Health and safety were present nearly in all verticals. The key stake holders, customers, employees across the globe were part of the narrative. 

Electronic Marketplaces, participation considerations

When it comes to play or not play in electronic marketplaces a good majority of economic agents are still debating the issue. The question about participating or creating an electronic marketplace is pondered by producers and intermediaries alike. Most of the manufacturers, retailers, wholesalers, distributors etc. already have some semblance of online store that act as multisided electronic marketplace with myriad of participants on demand and supply side. The question is whether to become a supply side partner in an established marketplace if it serves the intended consumer of articles offered or own an electronic marketplace connecting demand and supply sides; in the name of finding new avenues of growth or improving transactional efficiencies. The overarching reasons for such a debate stem from eyeing the platforms with increasing share of demand side and the potential network benefits of building a demand or supply side aggregations using digital competencies. A detailed understanding of electronic marketplaces is needed to make such decisions.

Electronic Marketplaces (EMPs)?

The classification of electronic marketplaces is a complex endeavor even if it is sifting through the available literature and collating attributes. In most basic terms electronic marketplace can be defined as an online platform that connects participants from demand and supply side and facilitates transactions digitally. On a more technical note, electronic marketplaces can be viewed from perspective of different dimensions, such as the number of participants, ownership structures, market mechanisms, relations, articles offered etc. In the interest of this writing, classification based on co-ordination of economic activities through aggregation, collaboration, auction and exchange, are curious paths to explore. The other two dimensions that are related to the topic here are the number of participants from many to many, one to many, or few to few, and lastly the market or hierarchical orientations. Since this is not a conversation on economics, it is practical to assume that EMP is a business oriented digital marketplace which combines concept of governance and process optimization. Amazon business for example, can be considered a hybrid agent, focused not only on governance of transactions by reducing the search and pricing costs, but also on creating hierarchical optimization of related processes from relationship management to streamlining procurement workflows. I would think that most multi sided EMPs have similar designs or are moving towards it. 

Commonly EMPs are termed as, e-hubs, exchanges, portals, auction houses, pricing engines, extranets, comparison engines, meeting places, collaborative platforms, e-stores etc. The proprietor ship can be neutral owners to competitive owners. The definitions, to a degree follow a narrow or broad needs of transacting parties and their industries with varying number of participants in either side of the platform. As a governance mechanism EMPs reduce the coordination and search costs while connecting sellers to buyers in an efficient manner as compared to searching and communicating through other medium. An argument can be made that the efficiency and ease of transacting through an EMP can be achieved with other medium if a relational context with trust in few key suppliers is paired with expertise on specific assets and their application. In that case the broader online marketplace becomes the means of lowering discovery and search costs where the buyer in few clicks can find the competitive metrics and still choose the trusted partner. As the risk associated with a transaction increases the EMPs pose an adverse selection argument. To that, the technology has come a long way in a short time with connected systems and specialized platforms covering every business process. The enhanced content forms show cased through sophisticated presentation layers are bringing senses closer to acceptable validation. Couple this with the inherent transparency of internet, the adverse selection costs will continue to decline albeit at a different pace for different assets.

Why the question?

If EMPs improve transaction efficiencies and provide a critical mass to demand side, why the hesitation by any supply side participant to join a thriving demand side EMP? The contemplations are not without merit. The most prevalent concern is the cost of disruption to status quo. The core tenets of that fear are destabilizing an existing eco system, the value based hierarchy which is exhibited in discounts on either side of the platform, the competitive pressures resulting from EMP (competitive) owners’ participation on top of other partakers, and the loss of customer intimacy which, although, high in transaction costs, is still a valued asset for intermediaries and producers alike. The threat of replacing high cost, high value relation with, an impersonal and transactional in nature, digital intermediary, can undoubtedly have some, long term consequences and business model implications. The discussion is exasperated by the evident aim of EMPs to provide more substitutes and product liquidity, (which is understandable since demand side participation is partly fueled by competition driven choice and price). Whether one enters perfect or pseudo perfect competition the end result is the same. The marginal cost is the eventual expectation of return for participants in the long run and once you enter the marketplace the pricing strategies from backward induction point to same result for survivors; profits slightly above marginal costs or at marginal cost. Unless a single participant offers endless products on an EMP it will eventually exit as the price game at each single product level will become an attrition war, and the profitability thresholds are breached one by one.  

The proprietor of the ecommerce marketplace such as Amazon, Walmart etc. strongly mediate their eco systems and mandate certain conformity, a necessity in their eyes for building and maintaining a critical mass demand side. These established EMPs essentially absorb the transaction governance costs that would been transferred to participants transacting in other mediums, yet they come with low to zero onboarding costs for supply side partners while offering a well-established demand side. It takes considerable resources even with skilled partners to launch an EMP and create a desirable demand side to attract supply side partners. The resources needed to handle the complexity of creating an EMP and the critical mass of demand side needs to be balanced with any realized and perceived efficiencies. 

The importance of access to information and the ability to unveil opportunities through information, cannot be ignored. The current technological advancements undoubtedly provide different means of exploiting slightest of information edge than ever before. Although the EMP proprietor may give all participants access to, some competitive information, not all is given or can be given hence creating an information asymmetry that is not the hallmark of physical marketplace. In physical marketplace, players have similar uncertainties and information asymmetries, and each player according to his understanding of the market and its value chain may have a leg up through specific information. Competitive EMPs differ from physical marketplaces in this regard. In EMPs the requirements of property ownership and the cost of participation are lower. In an EMP the information unbalance favors not only the consumer but also the marketplace owner specially if owner is also a participant. The free flow and lower acquisition costs of information, shift the market power to the marketplace proprietor and consumers.

The producers creating a hierarchical marketplace for suppliers have the potential benefit of consolidation and supply chain resilience but that can come at the cost of buying power if the marketplace is many to one. On the flip side the entry by producers to EMPs as supplier even with limited assortment may be perceived by existing intermediaries as a less risky foray by producers to eventually replacing traditional intermediaries.

Produces considering third party EMPs also need to think about substitutes. This is not a new market phenomenon, but the EMPs drastically reduces the search costs and with the improvements in machine intelligence the EMPs can offer fast and accurate substitutes, all of which further the opportunistic behavior. Even if the brand name is a synonym for the article and its application, EMPs can speed the erosion of brand connection to an application due to availability of easy substitutes therefore increasing producer’s risk. 

Conclusion

Core value proposition of the multisided marketplace owner is the facilitation of the matchmaking between participants from demand and supply side and the enabling of transactions at lower costs. Whether one is connecting a certain demand side to a specific supply side or just making strides from reselling intermediary to a multisided platform ownership, the key question is understanding the value creation. Success factors include critical mass, collaboration support and measuring critical mass by the number of participants or transaction volume per participant while balancing channel disruption, brand dilution, and competing as a substitute, or with the substitutes. Whether you draw influence diagrams, resort to payoff matrix or look at indifference curves for the target audiences there is enough fun in the decision-making process. It is a matter of understanding participants; the true nature of demand and supply side and what exchange is being optimized that will fuel network effect.

Customer focus is a data imperative

Age of information is really the age of confirmation and it is upon us. Gone are the days of naive customer focus termed as providing the best service to the customers. Customer focus, now, is the ability to understand the customer and serve each customer based on their particular needs and expectations while increasing their value to the organization. The key here is to understand before serving and the level of understanding determines the depth of relationship with the customer. The best form of understanding is quantifiable knowledge, attained through cycles of data analysis converted into domain expertise, is empirical in nature and forms the basis of apriori expansion.(We can have separate debate on the chicken and egg dilemma of whether an idea comes first or the experiment to knowledge foster ideas)

Role of Technology & Data 

Why and how does technology and data help shift focus to customers? I will quote from one of my favorite reading on the topic

 "in an ideal customer centric organization everyone is focussed on increasing the customer value and understands that this requires learning from each customer interaction and ability to use what has been learned to serve customers better."

 (Micahel J. Berry and Gordan S. Linoff )

The authors go on to profess that such an organization records each and every customer interaction. In short the firm keeps an extensive historical record of every customer interaction. But a practical caveat to above is that the extent to which the organization leverages such information to manage relationships largely depends on the multidisciplinary capabilities of the firm. What we do know from evidence is that the most valuable companies in the world are able to do this better than the rest.

Before we get further into this debate we need to explore few related concepts and then we can direct a company's ambition to be customer centric. The key concepts is what I call the 3 Cs of customers focus for an organization.

1. Customer

2. Customer value

3. Customer Relations

Customer

To measure anything we must define who the measure applies to what is being measured and to what extent the concept is explained by the measurement.  Is the entity an abstraction or a tangible body e.g. customer is an abstract concept and the person or a company is a tangible entity, similarly a household becomes the abstraction and husband, wife, child1, child2 etc become entities. The abstraction may encompass number of organisms or further composites that can be quantified by some aggregation of individual measures and some grouping of individual properties of its entities, 

The abstraction of the customer can take many forms depending upon the definable singletons, specially in B2B scenarios where the entity can be an organization, a building, a department, a person, a function, a title or a combination of these, which in turn can be cumulations that can be further dissected to users of products and services or appropriators(pre and post sale included) of the same. This can raise questions like is the customer the service or product acquiring entity, or the payment facilitating agency, is it the end use facility or the end user, is it the entity paying the bills, is it the user making the transaction on behalf of the end user or organization; any of which can be stemming from a single or multilayer abstraction. 

The answer to customer definition dilemma is not single or hierarchical groupings but a correlated set of abstractions of various entities that have measurable dimensions of interrelated attributes. 

Customer Value

Ultimately the customer value to the company are the transactions (historical and future discounted or not). Do we need a rigorous analysis of customer value? And why can't we just sell to everyone that wants our goods and services? If an organization can sell and serve everyone, that desires its product then it absolutely should. In reality there is a cost for the enterprise, to be discovered, considered, chosen and carry forward, attached to every phase of selling and serving. This problem is mitigated when the firm has either a large customer base where the volume of transactions subsidizes the cost of intimacy with masses or leverages technology for customer relationship management albeit at a cost of intimacy. The other ways include marketing tactics to increase mindshare at various phases till it becomes top of mind.

Critical is to understand that the customer value on a time horizon quintessentially measures the effectiveness of the acquisition not in terms of how valuable the customer is but how valuable the essence of the interaction with the company is to the customer. To an extent one can predict the need of the customer, bucket it in value segments and then try to acquire those classified by similarity factors, in hopes that just by definition the inherent properties of the firm will resonate with intrinsic customer nature and the firm will increase customer value. In reality the acquisition is simply enlarging the sample set to test the enterprise value itself. 

At the end of the day business is to fill a need by providing products or services. Knowing how the need arises, or creating the need in first place, understanding how the need is being filled and what the consuming organization holds as valuable in the process of identification and fulfillment of its needs is the landscape of customer value creation.

One can say that life time value measurement is brand equity governance.

Customer Relations

How can an organization have better customers relations? By understanding its interactions with the customers! The point to note is that an interaction is not just a record of every transaction (recording a transaction is a given must for most organization with any real legal bearings) but it is the record of every implicit or explicit touchpoint. It is not only communication in traditional sense, it is any and all touches, implicit or explicit, the customer has, with the organization, from minutest glance at a marketing collateral to the experience of an hour long call with an company associate. Implicit interactions maybe defined as the ones that are not based on direct two way communications but the customer witnesses in company operations, its marketing, its service pre and post sales, all its visual components, messaging components, informational pieces, fulfillment timings, packaging details the list is huge and the importance of implicit interactions cannot be overstated. That is where technology has shifted the pendulum in favor of companies that can understand implicit interactions at scale.

Few years ago the quantification of a customer relationship was mostly transactional (be it POS type transaction or web based activity; a click is a transaction of sorts). It was difficult if not practically impossible to gauge the essence of all interactions, that is spoken, unspoken, written and unwritten observed and unobserved. With the improvements in technology to capture, gather, store and analyse at scale the transactional history, and footprints that can be detected and the users that can be identified, albeit at cost of privacy, the true nature of customer relationship can be defined. 

Although data is termed as "the new oil" , gathering of data itself has to be tamed to customer expectations of privacy as well as maintenance of service levels. If the customer is bogged down by providing data to the organization, more than likely it will stress the service and the relationship at the contact point. That's where data mining is most effective as it can connect the dots between end points where the customers voluntarily give out information as part of the expected interaction or transactional necessity. The organization can accurately know, not only its (soft) relationship with its customer but the value of that human communication previously left to the domain of human understanding and appraisal. The advancement in speech recognition as well as gathering and connecting expressed opinions using NLP gives an organization further insights about its customer, previously not possible.

Customer focus is understanding the composition of your customer, measuring the effect of all the implicit and explicit interactions and their value to the customer, and finally building the relationships by affecting every interaction and ...lets not forget continuous evaluation of the 3 Cs of customer focus.

Simple yet not!

This seems simple enough but in reality the category managers and every one from call center associates to top managers are usually focused and rewarded on amount of product sold while trying to exceed the firms service touchstones and the margin made. That culture shift to measuring and increasing customer value on rolling basis is different, if not difficult. To blame the product focus on culture or the product profitability mindset is a naivety and who can really argue with growing the company profitability. The challenge is to translate those product margin metrics to customer value metrics and tune the sum product of organizational effort to measuring and growing customer profitability, which may very well be product profitability in customer definition and customer value but it has a different long term impact on how the organization is held in the eyes of the customer and the enterprise's ability to manage those expectations.

The organizational imperative is to create every type of customer definition, find out value of each, record all interactions, map them back to value tiers, connect operational excellence to value tiers, and product or service, connect value segments to all interaction types then find out the best models that predict any and all of those clusters. Finally choose which classifications and associated measures are best at predicting the company level KPIs. At the end of all this activity a virtuous cycle will emerge creating an ecosystem of generating insights from people and data, and using those insights to tune implicit and explicit customer interactions from training of staff to tuning of resources and operations.

Ultimately, creating a virtuous cycle is a joint venture between technology, data, analysis and people.

Predicting Google's next acquisition

What does the company that has almost everyone, in the world, touch its properties once a week in some way want more? What is the real race?

We know by now the race.

People are getting intelligent(or let's say digitally savvy), information is getting larger, discovery is getting harder, computing power is increasing and algorithms can be processed.

In the quest to get ever so close to predicting the action, you have to connect intention and context. The intention is non linear but is predictable. That's where the the build up to intention has its own trail of breadcrumbs that we leave, thanks to dopamine that our brain receives with every touch; a context is spun, an intermeshing of connected strands. But those bread crumbs and those signals still can't match what's really happening; inside us. 

Close to your heart and mind, in literal terms, what is happening in you, within you, that is the last frontier of connecting to a human. The genetics are decoded. The carbon form can disagree with its disposition but the composition of its code along with the indicators of his body and mind, and the temporal shaping forces of environment, circumstance  will be more accurate than the subject's, ... you and me, assertion of its own path to a decision . Emotion and motion are connected, physical reality is spiritually inspired. That leads first to acquiring the physical vitals of the carbon form, and although they are good for many a conclusions (think Fitbit), they are still not enough, close enough is not enough. 

If you have a computing device that can presumably process and break long bits of intertwined complexity, you can definitely feed it the vibrations of a human brain to decompose. And that my friends will be the next play for the big players. Of the remaining senses to be captured, thoughts are the only direct playing field up for grabs. 

I have not dug into which one of these already have investments from big four, but I believe this is where you will find the next acquisition, or maybe a close akin to it. Elon's got something in mind, he is thinking of your mind...