Feb 21, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Marketing
Remember the Arnott’s case, in 1997 they recalled millions of packets, and showed them being crushed on TV, in the days before u-tube. Tylenol in the US went trough the same thing in 1882, 6 packets were laced with cyanide, leading to several deaths, and J&J without hesitation recalled the hundreds of millions of packets in the market, and talked about what had happened, what measures they and the police were taking, and assisted the families of those who had died.
In the new techie world, the same thing applies, 37 Signals has a suite of software products on the cloud, they appear to work well, but when they go down, (every senior managers major concern with the cloud) as it is out of immediate control, it really hurts. 37 signals lost Campfire, but they turned the disaster into gold by communicating.
In most cases where a recall is deemed necessary, it is just a cost, often a huge one, sometimes a terminal one. However, by taking the public into their confidence, a recall, or outage as in the case of Campfire, can be used as powerful evidence that the company puts the welfare of their customers above all else.
Pretty powerful stuff in an environment of bland, commodity brands that have little to differentiate themselves.
Feb 19, 2012 | Communication, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media
Just a few months ago, QR codes seemed to me to be the answer to a marketers prayer, a simple way for products and services to connect with anyone with a mobile device, and an interest.
However, Aussies, often quick adapters of technology seemed not to be interested. At a recent wine symposium of a major wine region to which I was lucky enough to score an invitation to, I saw only one brand using QR codes, and yesterday in a major retail outlet, I scoured to the place to find, none. (great excuse eh, just looking for a QR code darling!). This lack of take-up by Australian wineries was a surprise to me, then Joan Muschamp posted on the Social media examiner site, and all became clear.
I thought wineries would rush to QR codes, perhaps the explanation in this article talking about the next big thing, leading to the early death of QR codes, Mobile Visual Search, that we humans are visual animals, and a big bar code does not do it for us, has something in it.
Soon we will be able to point our phone at a building, label, poster, product, whatever, and get immediate feedback on the object. Currently the technology is pretty early stage, Google have started marketing it as “Google Goggles” and Apple has their version as well.
Point is, the pace of innovation is still accelerating, and the opportunities are for the early adopters, the marketers who get on top of a consumer friendly technology early, and leverage it for the brand, by connecting to their content, and telling their stories.
Feb 17, 2012 | Management, Strategy
- Which customers?
- Which markets?
- What is the vale proposition?
- What are the processes that are required to deliver the value proposition?
- What capabilities are required to deliver the strategy?
- What technology is required to deliver the strategy?
- What are the organisational enablers of the strategy?
And most importantly,
- How do we engage our people to participate in the definition of all these, then in the delivery, management, and improvement steps that follow?
Pretty simple really, or how enormously complicated, challenging, and ultimately rewarding, depending on how deeply you think about the list
Feb 16, 2012 | Change, Innovation, Social Media
The world is full of paradoxes.
Apple, the ultimate closed system is now again, the worlds most valuable company, but was started by two blokes, one of whom was, and remains an advocate of open systems, Steve Wozniak, and the other, Steve Jobs, a passionate and demanding driver of closed systems, with commercial windows. It will be enlightening to hear the analysis of market share and profitability as Googles open Android enabled devices pull away from Apple’s closed version in mobile devices
IBM almost went broke trying to hold everything inside its business model, then opened up, completely revised their business model, and emerged from its near death as a much stronger business. Wikipedia 1.0 was tried as a closed system, but succeeded only when Jimmy Wales relinquished enormous amounts of power to the crowd. Similarly, Linux was started on the bulletin boards of the early web, by a small group led by Linux Thorvaldsen who simply wanted to get away from the control, then exerted by that early, and still, proponent of closed systems, Microsoft.
So what are the lessons in all this?
- Simply that there is no one cookie cutter model that can be applied, that differing models suit different circumstances, and times.
- Nothing lasts forever, the next iteration will call into question all the assumptions of the previous model
- The model is evolving all the time, trying to lock it in is a bit like Canute’s efforts with the tide.
Feb 14, 2012 | Strategy
Following up the post yesterday commenting on the changes the net has wrought in relation to Michael Porters ideas about substitutes. It seemed useful to add links to two useful articles by Joan Magretta, who has written a book on Porters work.
The first is the strategy mistakes Porters sees most commonly, and the second a great list of strategy do’s & don’ts.
There are many lists on the web, bloggers particularly know that response rates go up substantially with a list in the headline, but if you are going to take notice of anyone, it may as well be one of the giants of strategic thinking.
