Laura’s Winning Ideas

Sometimes you have to wonder just what these executives are thinking when they cook up stupid stunts like this. . .

Adidas won a Trademark suit this week as covered in The Wall Street Journal here. (available for 7 days from this post, thereafter you’ll have to register in order to access the story)

It seems that Payless Shoe Stores purchased Adidas shoes, sent them to a Chinese manufacturer with instructions to copy but change the three strips to either two or four stripes. They sold approximately $400 million of these knock-offs.

The jury agreed with Adidas, that Payless had infringed the trademark of Adidas with the intention to benefit from knocking off the Adidas shoes. The award of $305 million drove down the stock price by over 16% with the news.

The formula for the award was as follows:

Actual damages = $31 million
Disgorged profits because the jury found willfulness in the defendant’s actions = $135 million
Punitive damages (equal to the disgorged profits) = $135 million
TOTAL VERDICT = $305 million (figures above were all approximate and added up to $305 million)

Payless says they plan to appeal, but they might want to rethink this strategy. The attorney for Adidas acknowledged that the verdict might be reduced on appeal, but it is possible it could be increased because the judge could add plaintiff’s attorney’s fees and may also triple the actual damages portion of the verdict. Add the plunge in stock price to the mix, and this was a very expensive stunt to pull.

Food for Thought

Copyrights and Trademarks are protected property. Next time someone delivers a nifty photo they found on the internet for a proposal, you might want to ask a few more questions before inserting it into your document. And don’t think a quick photoshop “editing” of an image makes it your own, it is merely proof of “willfulness” and expensive when discovered.

If you’ve heard me speak on the topic you know that photographs are exceptionally well protected by copyright law, so don’t think you’ll even get as much grace as the music industry has extended to folks caught downloading music files illegally. (which ain’t much grace if you’ve followed the news.)

A Duh! moment this week.

I’ve been waiting for several return calls from federal agency staff. Seems to be taking longer than expected. Then I reached one of my contacts and heard why she isn’t getting back to folks as quickly as usual. The President has ordered a freeze on DoD funds and is sabre rattling in Congress for funding approval.

What this means inside the agencies is that expendable contracts are being frozen, cancelled or delayed, and the attendant paperwork associated is being processed. Ergo, contract officers and other POCs may be underwater right now.

To top it off, Bush has threatened that he will begin laying off civilian DoD staff if the funding is not prompt. So, many are feeling a bit unnerved at the possibility that they will be laid off. So your POC may be a bit testy at the moment, and no small wonder why.

Hopefully this will resolve itself in the next few weeks.

Laura Ewing just showed me a new site to research federal contracts.

http://www.usaspending.gov

Very nice interface. I’ve played around with it a few minutes and easily found contracts for clients and their competitors, as well as which agencies are contracting.

Tuck this one in your bookmarks and backup your bookmarks!

Technorati Tags: proposal database,contracts database,competitor data

See if this has happened to you:

A group is assembled which has had experience with the client, and from whom intelligence will be gathered. These are all accomplished professionals, with a competitive nature.

The meeting seems like a squirming pile of puppies. Each person is jockeying to proclaim the most outrageous requirement they’d experienced from this client. As they progress from Pink to Red team reviews, the posturing continues. By the time you are rehearsing for Orals, it is obvious no one is reading the RFP.

Everyone offers advice based on their previous experience, but not tempered by the current RFP. They are all mired in the past, and using their stories to manipulate the future, where they imagine their stories will garner them career advantage. Very little energy is focused on the proposal at hand.

Here’s my advice: When I read an RFP, I’m looking for the differences between previous RFPs and the current RFP. I’m less interested in what the client “has always done” and more interested in the changes they’ve made recently. Ergo, I read the RFP carefully and often.

I’ve never met a client who isn’t trying to improve, prevent previous problems, or tweak the pending procurement. Therefore, looking at the RFP with previous experience is very helpful, as you can identify the changes which will guide you to the winning results. However, advising a proposal team based solely on your previous exposure is less than worthwhile, and may be dangerous.

I once sat through a red team review in which many suggestions were based on prior experience which was not tempered by recent changes in the buying organization. Some of the suggestions were outrageous, some were just plain wrong. One fellow couldn’t get over an experience with the agency that was 6 years old.

The touchy part comes in getting a group of senior folks to read the RFP. You can help by constructing a score sheet based on the RFP, and asking for scores on that sheet.The proposal manager helped this situation by providing score sheets strictly tied to the RFP, allowing comments to be provided on separate sheets, and then distilling the comments on the separate sheets to the few (very few) worthwhile additions to the proposal.