Feb 25, 2010 | Change, Innovation, Personal Rant
It has been interesting listening to the “debates” over the last week or so on two different topics, the latest of the seemingly endless versions of a NSW transport plan, and the redevelopment of the area of Sydney harbour now called Barangaroo
On both issues, it seems if talkback radio is any indication, that everyone has an opinion, and wants everyone else to hear it.
It also appears that the conversations vary from loud opinions based on fluffy thinking at best, to sensible opinions based on a series of assumptions that even if you choose to disagree with the opinion, at least the assumptions upon which they are based are transparent. There appears to be some correlation between the level of noise and the ignorance of the mouth from which the noise emanates, particularly when responding to an opinion leading view expressed aggressively, as Paul Keating has done on Barangaroo.
It seems to me that if you are going to be taken seriously in a debate, any debate, about the changing of the status quo, you had better have some facts, transparent assumptions, and a vision of the preferred outcome in order to be taken seriously, and to have a useful role in the debate.
Making noise just distracts from the real work of driving change.
Feb 24, 2010 | Branding, Innovation, Marketing
It seems that most innovation is aimed at getting more of the same for the same price, rather than making the experience with the product better.
Every time I see an ad for a new car, it seems to have more airbags, more electronic gizmos to go wrong the day the warranty ends, but who really needs it all to get from point A to point B reliably, comfortably, at a modest cost, which is the point of having a car.
Surely it is time to innovate backwards, do less, strip the glitter, simplify.
I used to shave with a single blade, now I am a poof unless I shave with five, my stringy beard is not five times tougher than when I was 21, just a bit more gray worked its way in.
Two businesses, Gillette and Intel have led the way in adding features that they think will give them a marketing advantage through differentiation, and then turning them into benefits.
For a funny, sarcastic view of the trend to complication, follow the link to the Onion site, and have a laugh.
Feb 23, 2010 | Change, Innovation, Marketing, Strategy
How often is the “next big thing” hiding in your organisation without you knowing?
Fairly often is seems.
Probably the classic example, is the development of the first digital camera by a Kodak engineer , Steven Sasson in 1975.
Kodak, with a totally dominant position in the film market had a huge amount to lose with the development of an alternative, and ironically, many of the adjacent inventions such as advances in storage volumes, which enables the digital photographic technology to be realised, and which also made the computer industry as we now see it possible, were also developed in their labs, but put aside, as Kodak commercial management saw little of interest to their business.
Way after the digital camera market had been populated by the likes of Sony, Kodak woke up, but way too late to preserve their market dominance, or even have a role in the shape of it.
Meanwhile, the inventor toiled away inside Kodak, watching others commercialise the technology he initiated.
The lesson here is that you need to creatively engage with all stakeholders, whilst seeing the opportunities through eyes other than those that restrict the view to the status quo.
Feb 22, 2010 | Branding, Marketing, Sales, Small business
What will be the continuing impact of the development of housebrands by retailers, and the current heightened value awareness of consumers? Most FMCG suppliers lose sleep over the retailers undermining their profitability by hogging shelf space with far cheaper imitations of their brands, brought to market overnight without much concern about the long term health and development of the category, but delivering short term profitability to them at the expense of their suppliers.
This apparent duplicity, retailers demanding innovation and category building activity from their suppliers, whilst undermining their ability and willingness to invest has to have its limits. Clearly, the old mass market model of branding is over, but what has replaced it?
Increasingly I see the evolution of focused brands and retailers serving the more niche markets, and segments of larger markets where something different is being delivered to customers. Retailers are enabling a new breed of supplier with deep category expertise to emerge at the expense of the older mass market model, and they are in turn fuelling the growth of specialist retailers.
Feb 21, 2010 | Branding, Management, Marketing
Many brands over time have been built by using “mystique” as an ingredient, generally in the form of information withheld, scarcity, price, and the stories that surround the product.
In this connected world, we are bombarded with information, almost everything we could think of to ask is there, a few clicks away, and so it has become counter-intuitive to build a brand based on a lack of information.
Could we build Coca Cola from scratch today, its “secret” recipe held in a bank vault? Would that story hold, or would an employee be on a blog giving us the recipe, and dismembering the bank vault story.
There is a marketing trade-off to be made, mystique against a real, quantifiable product benefit, but how do you demonstrate a benefit that is essentially qualitative. Pepsi tried it with its “Taste Test” marketing, and came unstuck.
In the end it comes back to making the brand stand for something specific, and hard to copy, so it says something about those who choose to use it.
