Feb 14, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Social Media
20 years ago you could block book advertising across three TV channels, a few newspapers, and radio stations, and be pretty sure you would catch almost everybody.
Not now.
No matter how much you spend, you simply cannot block book all the channels that now attract our attention. The last 20 years has created communication channels inconceivable a generation ago.
Like time, attention is a non renewable resource, there is only so much of it, and unlike 20 years ago, there are almost infinite opportunities for us to spend our attention.
Marketers therefore have to reverse the order in which they approach gaining your valuable attention, as no longer can they easily access mass attention by intrruption. Now they have to earn the right to communicate, person by person, as just turning up and interrupting you will not work. Even if we happen to be there to be interrupted, we will ignore you without a very good reason to give you some of our valuable attention.
Feb 8, 2013 | Branding, Small business, Social Media
Like most bloggers, I watch how many people visit this site, how many pages they access, how long they stay, and how many “likes” the posts get, and it feels good when the numbers go up.
However, these superficial measures do not really mean much.
What make the real difference is how much I write gets amplified, by reposting, commenting, and the number of click-throughs to the links included that occurs.
“Likes” are generally just passers-by, casual visitors, or “like-counters” who want you to reciprocate and “like” their site, when what you want is engagement, people who are touched or motivated in some way by the posts.
I would rather have one of those engaged visitors than 10 who just visit and leave. In Australia, there is an old expression, ‘Wombat”. Calling somebody a “wombat” is rarely complimentary, as a wombat is a slow, sometimes destructive native animal that eats roots and leaves, not complimentary when you add comma’s. Most visitors to your site that just tick the “like” button without thinking about what you have written, often not even reading it, are just “wombats”
Jan 24, 2013 | Branding, Marketing
“Graph Search” may offer the potential of a financial bonus to the beleagured facebook shareholders sucked in by the IPO hype, I suspect it is, but what were they thinking when they dreamt up the name?
A brand is supposed to convey a promise, be a memorable badge for the product, and in the case of a sub brand, add to the whole. Writing this post, and the one a few days ago, I had to return to the facebook page several times to remember what the silly thing is called.
Graphs?
Greater?
Giraffe?
“Grape search” (cab sav anyone)
I know that to insiders, a “graph” is a metaphor for the map of a persons networks, a diagram that represent all the friends, comments, reviews, updates, and connections, but not everybody is an insider.
Perhaps they shoul have snuck down the road and thrown some money at the branding boys at Apple, they seem to know what they are doing.
Jan 17, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Social Media
The value of Facebook has tanked since the IPO last year, largely because after the hype, people wondered how the returns would be delivered when the obvious source, advertising, does not really work on Facebook.
However, Facebook is in the throes of launching an extensively re-engineered search facility, “Graph Search“. This facility will enable placement of extremely focused advertising in situations where the search being conducted is for things other than friendly e-conversation. This change potentially removes the barrier to successful adverting on Facebook, the disinterest in anything commercial when interacting with friends.
This Wired article on Graph Search offers detail, but essentially, the new search facility reflects peoples networks as a graph, or network chart, and the search capability can interrogate the network, and answer questions, with extensive auto-complete suggestions based on your previous activity.
Google cannot get at the data held by Facebook, that is a huge resource of people, networks, preferences, links, and reviews that can now be leveraged in searches conducted from within the Facebook community.
Similarly, the power of Linkedin is the connections between people and their work. Want to see who is connected to someone at a competitor, supplier, potential customer, and so on? now Facebook will be able to do it, perhaps better than Linkedin, particularly for the under 35’s.
An underutilised aspect of Twitter is the search capability, when used well, it is an enormously valuable addition to a Google search, and contains links that enable a deeper dive from any starting point in a topic. Other services like Pinterest also now chase the available advertising dollars, making media choices a complex nightmare.
Graph Search makes the battle for on line advertising even more interesting, and will add some extra lead into the saddlebags of newspapers as they try to monetarise their offerings. News Corp is in the middle of splitting their operations, separating newspaper film and television assets globally, restructuring to enhance revenue generation options, already having paywalls in place for their newspapers. Fairfax is expected to introduce some level of paywall sometime in the next few months in an effort to stem the bleeding.
As the search capabilities improve, and paywalls emerge, the attraction of free sources of information will increase, with the minor irritation of the presence of advertising. Facebook now appears to not only to be in a position to cash in on their huge network, but to potentially extensively disrupt the current web and remaining legacy media advertising options.
Jan 2, 2013 | Branding, Change, Marketing, retail, Small business
This is the first post of the new year, so it seemed appropriate to hop on a hobby-horse, the indiscriminate use of the word “iconic”, in all sorts of situations.
My beef today is specific to the food industry.
The call to receivers to sort out “Rosella” has created a lot of noise, of the “another “Iconic” Australian food business goes to the wall” type.
Whilst it is true that the Rosella brand has been around for a long time, it has not been owned by an Australian company in my memory in the food industry, which is disturbingly long. Rosella was owned by the British/Dutch multinational Unilever for many years, who sold it to the Dutch trader Stuart Alexander probably 15 years ago. They failed to give it the breath of life, and on-sold it to the South African group that ultimately owned Gourmet Food Holdings, as their vehicle to assemble food brands. They also owned Aristocrat, which in my memory was owned by an Australian family who actually cared about their products. Problem was they had a factory in Chatswood in Sydney, now prime real estate, and insufficient marketing grunt to maintain retail real estate,
So, what makes an “Iconic Australian business”?
I might be persuaded that “Rosella” was an Australian brand, as you could not buy it anywhere else, but certainly not that it was an iconic Australian brand, or Australian business, which is the other epithet often used.
To me “iconic” has a number of dimensions:
Longevity.
Market share, but more importantly than share, the potential to shift markets due to consumer trust and loyalty.
Consistent delivery of value to customers/consumers.
Over time, it has managed to evolve so that it accurately reflects the core proposition of the brand in a manner relevant to the customers/consumers of each of those times.
On all but the first of these parameters, Rosella fails the test. Ask yourself “who will miss Rosella?” and the real answer is very few.
So why the hand-wringing?
Simple. The demise of Rosella in another example of the decimation of the Australian food manufacturing industry, particularly the small manufacturers. Here we are, in a geographically enviable location close to the burgeoning Asian markets, with advanced R&D, skilled workforce, high and transparent standards, able to produce commodities at world competitive costs, but we are failing to feed our own people from our own resources, huge amounts of manufactured food is now imported, (more than $10 billion last year) and the trend is accelerating.
We have White papers dealing with the Asian century and our place in it delivering cliches, and task forces examining the woes of the food manufacturing industry, and making grand recommendations, but not much activity that is useful, so I guess we have to kid ourselves to feel better.
Happy new year, I hope it is “iconic” for you.
Dec 9, 2012 | Branding, Change, Lean, Operations
Tim Cook, the Apple CEO has just come out and announced that Apple will restart manufacturing in the US, starting with an unnamed Mac computer model, some time in the near future.
The driver of “offshoring” to sources of cheap labour to escape the high manufacturing labour costs in developed countries, has been a convenient excuse for a lack of ideas by the management of many companies. Virtually all the manufacturing businesses I interact with have an operational labour cost of substantially less that 20% of total BOM and operational logistics costs, so why not work on the other 80%? Often I suspect because it is easier to join the herd charging towards China than do the hard yards on their own business model.
“Outsource the manufacturing, and let the capacity utilisation be someone else’s problem”. Clearly this happened in Apple’s case, as the business tanked in the late eighties, cost cutting led to the closure of factories, and outsourcing of manufacturing and key parts of the technical design, remained the model through the revival led by the ipod, iphone, ipad, and siblings.
However, the competition has now caught up, and volumes are not growing the way they were. Apple may be hugely profitable, but as they no longer ship the volumes, capacity utilisation in their supply chain must now have swung away from over utilised to underutilised in a very short space of time. Android is rapidly becoming the OS of choice in both phones and tablets as Apples share drops, so the Apple profit bubble must be getting a bit fragile.
It is significant (I think) that Samsung is a major supplier to Apple, what a competitive advantage they have been handed by foreknowledge of component specifications, and delivery dates, and now the supplier has become the major competitor, competing on the ground they are in a position to choose.
This boom/bust cycle of manufacturing volumes imposes huge costs on the supply chain. Having too much capacity and carrying the unrecovered overheads is as bad having too little, and chasing output targets that end up in carrying high logistics and operational costs while compromising quality. Weather this is owned capacity, or outsourced, it remains a part of the supply chain, and somebody is paying for it, generally the consumer who has little motivation to pay for stuff that does not add value.
Perhaps I am a cynic, certainly I have no insight into the workings of Apple, but the move to announce the re-opening of manufacturing in the US without any detail at all sounds a bit “iffy” to me, perhaps a PR gesture to deflect some of the odium from the ongoing saga of Foxconn. Just put the word Foxconn into the search engine of a media outlet, this one Huffington Post, and you get over 6000 articles in response, and not one is doing the Apple brand any good at all.
Too little too late, or the beginning of another swing in the cycle?
