In this article we’ll look at some more examples of entrepreneurship in its many forms, and continue to analyze what methods and insights can be applied to your business to help you achieve your own business goals.
David Ogilvy made his way in the world with his highly successful ad agency Ogilvy & Mather, and is an advocate of ethical business strategy and its desirability over propagandist marketing. In early life he was commissioned to write a handbook for other salesmen while selling Aga stoves in England. He once said ‘the consumer isn’t a moron; she is your wife’, showing his belief that treatment of the customer as an individual and a coeval, even someone with whom you have a close relationship, is the key to success in marketing.
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfeld, better known as Ben and Jerry, as the story goes, took a five dollar class in making ice cream, and after a huge amount of highly original marketing campaigning received the US Small Business of the Year award in 1988. Their business model came from and was mutually nurtured by their belief in community involvement and their happy-go-lucky, rather quirky image. With their Cow Mobile they drove across America handing out free scoops, of their humorously-titled flavours, and so made their name and solidified the kindly, fun-loving brand as an international favourite. ‘When you are led by values, it doesn’t cost your business – it helps your business,” said Greenfeld, illustrating the duo’s core idealism.
Trevor Baylis is an English inventor and entrepreneur whose ability to identify market gaps and shrewd business sense guaranteed him success in both his own businesses and in his dedication to design. He is best known for his clockwork radio, which proved a great success in Africa to promote communication and to bring Aids education to remote villages. Many of his inventions and innovations deal with disability and the underprivileged, showing his ability to assess and act on market requirements, as opposed to the business model of creating a non-existent demand for a product. His clockwork radio was unanimously ignored until it appeared on Tomorrow’s World.
Akio Morita, the founder of the Sony electronics company, is noted for his go-it-alone method in branding, and his attention to maintaining a benchmark of high quality in his company’s vast range of products. He achieved the second of these goals by breaking with traditional Japanese sub-production methods to monitor and homogenize product quality. By escaping from the confines of the traditional technology market, Morita managed to shake off his rivals and produce an expansive and lucrative model, emerging in the US as the first Japanese company to be listed in the US Stock Exchange.
Daniel Ek, founder of music streaming business Spotify, has created a highly-successful and legal subscription-based music streaming service through a paradigm shift set to render the iTunes monopoly obsolete. Challenging the pay-per-download format of other providers and re-thinking the way users can access music online, Spotify creates its capital from 30 second advertisements interspersed in the streaming channel, and advert-less subscription. Ek has created a workable model which has managed to shorten the gap between legal-to-pirate music download ratios. The complete overhaul of the mp3 format is not an original idea, but the huge popularity of Spotify shows that he has properly understood the desire for a more suitable medium, and has promptly catered to it.
There are instances, hopefully, in most of these examples to show where originality, innovation and a little courage has seen otherwise unremarkable people defying the status quo and creatively solving the problems that arose to meet them. Perhaps that’s what being an entrepreneur is all about; meeting difficult problems with a good attitude. One thing is for sure – entrepreneurs don’t give up, a phrase that will hopefully give hope to the problems facing your business choices. Vertex offer a range of services which could have helped such entrepreneurs with things such as business consulting and business process outsourcing.
I write articles about business and try to focus on giving advice and inspiration to small business owners. In the past I have covered topics such as ‘how to help run your business more effectively’, employment tips to business Process outsourcing (BPO) with recommendations for such business services from the likes of Vertex.