Jul 12, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Social Media
Her we go again, another paradigm shift (cliché warning) in media.
The basis of the advertising business has always been cost per impression. Doesn’t matter about the medium, that is how the costs have been calculated, however, there is a pretty clear recognition that beyond low cost commodity items, cost is not the way we make decisions, they are made on the basis of perceived value. Therefore there seems to be a disjoint between what we recognise as the foundation of selling, and the manner in which we make most purchase decisions.
The emergence of social media is all about the opportunity to build connections and relationships, with people, brands, locations, groups, you name it, all there, so why would a banner ad work in that environment?.
Sooner or later, Social Media platforms will realise that their future is in finding ways to monetarise the opportunity for a relationship provided by access to the interactions of their users.
Facebook, the great IPO failure of the year, is in a prime position, being the place everyone goes, so the current stock price may be cheap if they figure out how to sell the value of the opportunity to engage in a conversation, rather than the charge for the opportunity to interrupt it.
Jul 5, 2012 | Lean, Management, Marketing, Social Media
It has always been so.
The father of the modern manufacturing revolution, W. Edwards Deeming probably said it first in a management setting, that led to lean, the TPS, 6 sigma, and a host of management articles, cliches, and learned papers, but it has been said before, in many ways. It is also a core component of the Balanced Scorecard.
Measuring advertising has always presented a challenge, throw an ad schedule on the box, and hope it works, has been the dominant method for many years.
Now we have the net , and a whole new set of measurement possibilities across websites and social media platforms. Like anything, simplicity is the gold standard, finding a few measures that get to the heart of the performance is a real challenge for management, as differing measures for differing platforms, differing markets, and platform/market/interest dynamics are always required, there is no pro forma to be used here.
Avinash Kaushik‘s great blog Occum’s Razor concentrates on measurement of digital performance, this entry on the measurement of social media, which should engage the minds of all marketers.
Jul 4, 2012 | Innovation, Leadership, Marketing
Contrary to much common usage, these two concepts are not synonyms, they are very different.
Creativity is the process of dreaming up something new, while Innovation is the process of making use of the new stuff.
How often has Van Gogh, or Beethoven been accused of being innovative? Just sometimes, when the discussion is about the way an artist wields his palette knife, or the structure of a symphony. Usually they are described as creative, because what they created opened a door that had not been opened before, made connections in a new way.
Make no mistake, creative and innovative need each other, one does the art, the other brings in the benefit. Van Gogh after all died mad and broke, must have been creative without innovative, but his brother recognised the value of his work, and made a buck. He was innovative.
Most artists create something for the intrinsic value, it sounds great, looks good, or feels right, whilst the innovator finds a role for the art to add some monetary or exchange value.
To be creative, you need, according to John Cleese who knows a bit about this stuff, Space, Time, Time, Confidence, and Humour. Yes, I know “Time” got two mentions, to understand why, you will have to listen to Cleese’s presentation, which should not be a problem, in fact to my mind, should be compulsory.
Jun 29, 2012 | Communication, Social Media
During times of stress, when there is too much to do and too little time to do it, we find ways to sort the tasks into categories to better manage our time.
In medical terms, Triage. Treat now, can wait till later, no hope so time is better spent elsewhere.
Running through my favorites list, and the email subscriptions I take, I realised I had done a similar thing with my social media options.
Some email subscriptions get opened every time, others sometimes depending on the headline
Some in the favorites list get looked at weekly, others once in a while, others I had not looked at for ages, so they just got deleted.
There is a hierarchy at work here based on my experience with these sites and my evolving interests, and weather we know it or not, we all do it.
The task therefore for the blogger, is to be on the first tier of the social media triage with as many readers as possible, and to do that, we need to be engaging to a pretty specific group of readers. Those that fall into the second and third groups are far less relevant.
This is not a numbers game, it is a relevance game.
Jun 28, 2012 | Branding, Marketing, Social Media
How many times have you heard from marketers “my job is to create the brands”, (often followed by the “yours is to sell it” when they happen to be talking to sales people)
Many marketers use it as the rationale for their existence. Pity it is nonsense.
Customer experience with a product creates a brand, not any amount of advertising, promotion, engaging games, and all the rest. At best, marketing creates the environment in which a customer will try, come back to, or stick with a product, but ultimately, it is the experience that creates the loyalty of an individual consumer, and that relationship multiplied many times, becomes the brand.
This simple insight has the potential to change the nature of your marketing significantly, and also enables some sensible measurement of the impact of marketing activity.
Jun 22, 2012 | Branding, Marketing, Operations, Strategy
Why are we so hung up about ethical sourcing of coffee??
What about the electronics industry, and shoes, rare earth minerals, and many others?
Who bears the responsibility for the conditions of workers in the supply chains of successful businesses.?
Apple is the biggest, most profitable company the planet has seen, but the depredations in the supply chain at Foxxcon are well known.
If the labour cost of an iPad is, as has been calculated, less than $15, adding a few dollars onto the price to lift wages would do little to damp the demand, or indeed, Apple could make a few dollars less, reducing its whopping billions in cash flow by a miniscule amount, but would it be a few dollars less?.
A significant number, albeit a small percentage, of coffee drinkers appear willing to pay a bit extra for the “ethical” badge, surely the same would be the case with an iPad, fancy shoes girls cannot walk in, and many other product categories where differentiation is a key challenge. Benneton does, why not others?.
