Oct 17, 2012 | Branding, Marketing, Personal Rant
This is a situation where a modest intellect has learned the language, and so can spew out a bunch of marginally related clichés. They understand some of the obvious stuff, can look at the numbers, and have a superficial understanding of customer behavior, and the context in which that behavior occurs, so they can babble about brands, marketing, and communication sufficiently well to fool some of the people, at least some of the time.
Real marketing is done by a very few very smart people who get to the deeper reaches of motivation and behavior, who are able to scrape off the over-burden of verbiage, and get to the real guts of the strategic and communication challenges being faced.
Marketing is inhabited by a group that is pretty ordinary, just look at the UAI’s required to get into the various marketing courses around the place. The smart people are doing something else. Is it any wonder that there is a real lack of good strategy and marketing intellect at the top of organisations, the people at the top who make the succession decisions see the lack of depth in the marketing “profession” and act accordingly.
This rant was motivated by a bloke I was pitching to in a sufficiently senior role to say “No”, who not only failed to grasp the basics of the argument I was putting, which could have been put down to a lack of communication skill on my part, but he also asked a number of questions that demonstrated he knew nothing, and to top it off, talked about himself a lot.
Save us from the idiots making decisions with nothing more than dartboard tools.
Oct 5, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Social Media
My 28 year old son recently tried to get a mobile phone on a plan, and couldn’t, he did not have a credit rating. A bit unusual perhaps, but this is a young bloke who has been a self-funded student for a long time, always paid his bills, always met all his commitments, financial and otherwise, a far better bet than most that his mobile bill would be paid. Now graduated, he wanted to start being “normal” as he put it.
“Personal brand” is a term increasingly bandied around as we build an identity underpinned by on-line behavior. Headhunters are increasingly using it as they seek to find the best fit for roles they are filling, so are looking to social media as a behavioral metaphor for actual behavior in a workplace.
But it is going much further, much quicker than anyone anticipated.
The reputation you build in one place will be increasingly transferrable to another. Why shouldn’t your hard earned EBay and Amazon rating be considered when you want to rent a car or flat, borrow some money, or even take on a simple phone plan?
Collaborative consumption is a term coined by Rachael Botsman to describe the evolution of behavior made possible by the removal of the transactional friction we are used to by the collaborative capacity of the internet. We can now rent someone’s home on airbnb, raise venture capital on Kickstarter, share a car on GoGet, get the chores done by taskrabbit, and find thousands of other potential partners in peer to peer transactions that were impossible just a few years ago. In these circumstances, your reputation, your brand, is as good as money, just different, it has a value that others will consider in an exchange, and decide if they will proceed.
In this emerging digital economy trust is everything, trust between strangers a necessity for these types of collaborative consumption transactions. It follows then that we need a mechanism to replace the face to face interaction that through human history has built trust because you can see the whites of the other parties eyes, and make a very personal judgement about them.
Your reputation, the sum of all your behavior, will increasingly become manageable and transferable across platforms, and act as currency.
Sep 25, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Big Brother is watching where you are, if you have a smartphone. The GPS capabilities of the newer smartphones opens up an extraordinary Pandora’s box of opportunities to market to those in immediate reach, alternatively to deluge them with SPAM, as illustrated by Tom Fishburnes cartoon . (make sure you click through to his Google keynote)
You are a smart young thing, with a purchase history in a chain of fashion stores. As you walk into the orbit of a store, your phone tells them who you are, and that you are close, which offers the chance to mine your database, and come up with tailored specials, available for the next 20 minutes, just for you. Or perhaps as you move towards the cinema complex in George Street, the movie about to start that sits in your preferred genre, offers you a preferred location, and a coffee. The opportunities are endless, the potential to annoy by filling your phone with Spam almost as endless.
This evolution will require a rethink of the customer acquisition process. Aiming messages at consumers with the laser-like accuracy to avoid being a Spammer will require a sophisticated data mining capability, as well as a sensitivity to consumer preferences that will be hard to translate into an algorithm.
The downside for those who do it poorly is that potentially loyal consumers will move elsewhere, and block your messages, the emerging equivalent of retail purgatory.
Sep 24, 2012 | Branding, Change, Marketing, Social Media
So, the Gruen team is down a member as Russell Howcroft moves on to take over running the ailing Channel 10. There must be a sense of irony here, he moves from career as a “Madman” moonlighting in a successful public subscription TV channel where he has pontificated on the merits and foibles of various advertising, to a struggling channel with an eroding advertising revenue base at a time when TV’s are turning off (my assumption) in favor of alternatives.
There are still plenty of TV’s out there, but are they being used as TV’s the way they were a decade ago? Probably not, they are playing recorded shows, either downloaded, bought via a subscription service or in a boxed set, and played when, and where it suits the viewer, on a whole range of devices, not when the “prime time” usage model of a fixed set and time table dictates.
How will an old school advertising guru perform in this environment of rapid and disruptive change? Even the disrupter, Google, who made a fortune out of placing ads in the way of what you are searching for has recognised that where you are is as important, and so are investing in Maps as a representation of the interface between the real world and the virtual one, seeing the next wave of innovation coming.
Good luck Russell, but my instinct is that a 30 year old social media whiz Kid may have been a better choice.
Sep 14, 2012 | Branding, Innovation, Marketing, Strategy
The shape of Apple after Steve Jobs has been a source of much scribbling, and the launch on Friday of the newest version of its golden goose, the iPhone 5 has given us a peek.
The razzamatazz has been huge, Apple all over, but they delivered what the pundits view as a pretty limp offering. Nothing new, apart from a different case, and behind current offerings from Samsung and HTC on a number of parameters.
However, what Apple does deliver that nobody can get close to is profits. On $150 billion forecast revenues this year, Apple is delivering an astounding 28% EBIT, double a year ago, and considerably more on phones according to Creative Strategies Tim Bajarin. All this as their sales in a market growing at 42% are increasing at only 27%.
Apple has its own ecosystem, so to some extent is protected from commodity type comparisons that erode price, but how much of a premium can they sustain, and for how long? Googles Android operating system now has around four times the share of Apple, from “even-stevens” just a year ago, and Google spends 14% of revenue on R&D, to Apples 2%. In dollar terms, they are about the same, and Apple has less of a product portfolio to manage, but the tide of initiative is now with Google, and the momentum is really hard to break.
It seems to me that Apple is mortgaging their future, putting the dough in the bank, much as Microsoft did in its halcyon days, and not continuing the drive that got them where they are today. In a sharp reminder of priorities, Apple is spending big on protecting its current position by suing everyone standing in the tech space, which must be a huge distraction from the disruptive innovations created almost yesterday that put them where they are now.
Aug 30, 2012 | Branding, Customers, Innovation, Strategy
Apple has beaten Samsung in the US court, protecting a raft of patents that apply to mobile devices, acquiring a pile of cash, and the probable withdrawal of a number of Samsung products from the market. Competitive nirvana.
Whilst it is understandable that Apple protect its commercial position through the courts, it is nevertheless a hypocrisy of vast proportions, and breaks the cycle of innovation that has characterised the mobile space over the last 5 years, and changed, if not enriched our lives, and is now turning into a legal quicksand that can only hamper innovation, whilst embedding incumbents into our wallets.
Tim Cook, Apple’s MD released a note describing the win thus: “For us this lawsuit has always been about something much more important than patents or money. It’s about values. We value originality and innovation and pour our lives into making the best products on earth.”
Excuse me whilst I throw up.
This contrasts to Steve Jobs 1994 statement that Apple had been “Shameless about stealing great ideas” then later reversing that position by saying Apple would go “thermo-nuclear to protect its position” when others sought to build on their innovations.
Copy, Transform, Combine.
This is the thesis articulated by Kirby Ferguson, that everything is a remix of what has gone before, creativity emerges from and builds on the efforts of others. In his TED talk, and outstanding series of short videos which expand on the ideas, he traces the source of our patent and copyright laws pointing out the purpose of the laws is no longer what they are used for, competitive forces have fundamentally changed them into something not intended.
Apple built on the ideas of others, adding remarkable creativity to them to bring us a series of innovations perhaps unequalled in their immediate impact on our lives, but now is using outdated legal interpretations of patent law to protect its position from others seeking to do exactly what they have done so shamelessly.
Hypocrisy for the sake of money, undermining innovation. Understandable, but very costly to the consumer, and to the march of innovation.
