Ricky’s Online Business Blog

First of all, let me confess I’m not familiar with the market of instant noodles.  I’m not a regular consumer of instant mee and I don’t how many such brands or types of noodles in the market.

But a discussion yesterday and today inspired me to think about how to compete in the instant noodles market.

Let’s say you have a brand new XYZ mee to sell, how would you compete against giant brands in the market, say Maggi Mee or Cintan Mee?

Are you thinking of new flavors? You want to introduce new tastes currently not offered by Maggi and Cintan? Do you think they can’t do the same and do it better than you?

How about lowering your price and sell cheaper than them? If they charge RM4 per pack (I don’t know how much), then how about you sell at RM3.50? You think they can’t just lower some of their prices and immediately kill you off?

How about competing by promotion?  Good if you have more money and better resources than Maggi and Cintan. What if you don’t have? Even if you have, why waste so much money doing the same things as they do?

Build a better brand? You know how many years it took Maggi and Cintan to imprint their brand into our minds? Will you do a better job and do it faster than them in branding?

How about these ideas?

1. Focus on cup noodles - Don’t stretch yourself too thin. Just focus on cup noodles.
2. Sell the cups - Shift your focus from the noodles to the cups. Sell the cups instead of noodles.
3. More than just noodle cups – Make the cups green and friendly to the environment.  Make it versatile that it can be used to fill water and other stuff too.  Make it attractive with varieties like iPhone covers that people will admire you for carrying the cups.
4. Give away the noodles - For those who come to buy noodles with their cup, sell the noodles at dirt cheap price. I’m thinking of 20 cents per cup or even free!
5. Build community - Build a community of fans who are proud to carry the noodle cups around and show off to their friends. Make good use of Internet and social media to build a strong following.

Do you think Maggi and Cintan can do the same? Sure they can try. But somehow this is a whole new rule of game and it’s not easy for them to change their business model overnight. Doing so might just harm and cannibalize on their existing offerings.

So, don’t sell the noodles, sell the cups! Don’t think inside the box, but get out of the box and think!

Does it work? I don’t know. You tell me. But it sounds better to me than selling another Maggi clone.

And if there are such noodle cups for sale in the market, will you buy and refill the cups with cheap but tasty noodles every now and then?

Perhaps then I’ll start to consume more instant noodles

In business and entrepreneurship, we often talk about “business model” and “revenue model”. Put simply, a business model describes how a business work and compete.  A revenue model says how the business earns its revenue and profit.

It’s my first time to come up with a more formal model on real life problems. It is not meant to be complete or entirely accurate.  A model is just a representation of the real world.  It is meant to help us make decision on real life problems. It has weaknesses and we shall not depend on a model entirely.

I came up with this model on personal branding as I’m preparing for a talk on the topic.  The model doesn’t try to cover everything about personal branding. Nor does it explain why we should do brand our self, or how to go about doing it. But it’s more on the elements of personal branding and the kind of questions we should ask our self when developing and evaluating our own personal brand.

I hope to elaborate more on the model soon. But for now, I’ll let the mind map do the talking. Click on the map to get the full picture. If you can roughly get the ideas I want to convey simply by looking at the mind map, then I know my mind mapping skill has improved

Your comments and criticisms are much welcome.

FB post #1 – Have you been saying you want to do something, but your action just doesn’t show you are doing it? Perhaps you need a little more motivation? Perhaps many things in life keep distracting you that you can’t focus? Perhaps you are over ambitious that your goal is just not practical? Or perhaps what?

FB post #2 - Have you been working diligently but other people just don’t see your hard work? Perhaps your performance is not yet good enough to attract their attention? Perhaps you need some “selling skills” to make them notice you? Or perhaps you are not exposed enough that they don’t even know your existence?

FB post #3 - Sometimes what we want to do conflicts with what other important people in our life expect us to do. Maybe we haven’t learned enough of their needs. Maybe we don’t know enough of our own ability. Or maybe we haven’t communicated enough with them on what we can do for them.

How do you respond to these posts and questions? I’m in brainstorming stage to prepare for an upcoming talk on personal branding. Your comments are welcome.

A customer asked me how to “erase” the web pages which contain negative opinion in Google search result pages about a public figure, whose perceived image is less than perfect.

Well, it’s not possible to “delete” those pages from Google (unless you get a court injunction ordering Google to do so). But he can add in more positive content about the person, and try to boost these web pages up the ranking using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.

But if an individual, a business or an organization’s reputation is already bad due to their behavior, no matter how much positive content is generated, even more negative content can still get its way into the search pages. This is especially so when everyone can publish nowadays on the Internet by means of blogging.

With the advent of Internet, and social media more recently, reputation management has become very important for individuals, businesses and organizations in their branding, marketing and PR efforts.

Perhaps the best policy is do like what Google says, “Don’t be evil”. Be good and people will talk about us well on the Internet.

But in case there is any negative content, one can contact the web site owner, or participate in its forum or blog, and try to set things right, perhaps by posting feedback or comments on the web sites. Be professional and don’t hide behind anonymous email address which I believe some commentators did on this blog when I talked about them. Be respectful. Don’t point fingers and don’t lose temper.

Today we no longer can ignore what people say about us on the Internet. The long term solution is to be good and not evil. As for my customer, all the best to him for what he intends to do.