Jun 4, 2012 | Change, Innovation, Management, Marketing
On a flight from a regional town last week, the attendant went through the nonsense of the “safety speech”. Instructions on how to do up the seat belt as if nobody knows is pretty dumb, but of total irrelevance is the instructions on how to use the life-jacket. I remain unconvinced that a little whistle and light will do much good if the engine stops at 20,000 feet, and the only water within 100km is in farmer Browns property dam. What about a parachute?
However, it is all taken so seriously, passenger jokes are not appreciated at all. Surely an example of a mould that needs busting.
Another mould more likely to be busted by the avalanche of mobile and electronic payments innovation is the banks credit card and cheque business model.
I have observed the missed opportunity by banks before, and the pace of change is accelerating rapidly picking up as Apple, Google, Paypal, and a host of startups like “Levelup” “Square” see the opportunity in disruption, and are chasing hard, often using technology that evolved in an ecosystem with nothing to do with banking.
These changes pose a huge problem for banks, one that their legacy structures and business models are apparently having big problems addressing. The role and performance of banks around the world over the last decade, and in the current European mess has removed any residual loyalty consumers may have had, and opened them up to non bank competition that will change the nature of banking in the coming decade. Opportunities abound to bust the current mould.
May 30, 2012 | Branding, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media
This new avenue to live broadcast, as distinct from posting a video on Youtube, seems to me to be a game-changer.
Social media lives by interaction, engagement, that is what gives it its power, and to be able to go live to an audience, even if it is just your own family at first, offers the opportunity for the networking capacity of social media to accelerate at a logarithmic rate.
For a while I have wondered at the task facing Google competing against Facebook, which has an established base now of a billion, they have built formidable barriers to exit and entry, but “on air” could just change the equation.
The momentum seemed to be moving slowly towards Google, but this innovation will give it a great big shove, particularly in the light of the facebook IPO, with the shares currently being traded at 10% less than the issue price, and 25% below the peaks reached on the big day. There appears to be a healthy dose of cynicism that has suddenly emerged as a result of the obscene amount of wealth facebook insiders have skimmed, whilst the gullible have done their dough, and this cynicism can only assist Google+ build some much needed competitive momentum.
May 25, 2012 | Change, Management, Marketing, Operations, Personal Rant
Last week speaking to a gathering, I told the group that Australia was now a net importer of food with a $2.7 billion deficit in 2010-2011, according to the AFGC State of the Nation report . Utter disbelief was the primary reaction, “how could that be” being a typical response.
The Australian food industry is dying at a rapid rate, the pressures on local suppliers are heavy, and increasing all through the supply chain. Retail oligopoly, high $A, regulatory impositions that make no sense, costs of supporting local government social initiatives, and all the rest of the stuff that clogs up the wheels of competitiveness and productivity.
Heinz moved to NZ last year, SP exports, Australia’s largest tomato grower in liquidation, a second major grower hitting the wall in April, and this week, fresh tomatoes hit $10/kg in supermarkets. A sign of things to come in many categories.
We are watching the death by a thousand cuts of an industry, small businesses that garner little exposure are hitting the wall all over the place, Golden Circle gone, Goodman Fielder on the skids, growers are going broke across the board, dairy processing almost all owned overseas, about all that is left is meat, because we are amongst the biggest producers, and horticulture, because most fresh produce does not travel well.
Now, if we continue to go the way it seems we are destined to go, housebrand NPD will eventually overtake proprietary NPD as it has now done in the UK, and you need to ask where that NPD will occur. Certainly not here, because not only have we seen off the manufacturing businesses, we have substantially depreciated the technical capabilities necessary for innovation. Even the CSIRO is a shadow of its former self in the food industry, having removed much of the intellectual infrastructure as its masters re-aligned the priorities to other areas, and progressively trimmed the resources.
The recent drop in the $A will help, just a pity there are few businesses left to take up the slack.
May 23, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Customers, Marketing
The holy grail, the prime objective of billions of dollars of advertising, the wall behind which many campaigns that have failed to generate incremental sales have hidden, Brand Loyalty.
I cannot help but wonder if the label “Brand Loyalty” is sometimes just a metaphor for making the purchase choice easier. The environment we inhabit is now so absolutely over-run with messages information, and tactics to build “customer engagement”, that we all must have a serious case of cogitative overload, weather we know it or not, so we need a mechanism to sort the options.
In this context I am reminded of the old “KISS” principal, Keep It Simple Stupid.
Apple is often cited as the greatest marketing machine we have ever seen, an accolade I am comfortable with, but perhaps there is another dimension. Rather than building brand loyalty, perhaps they have just so simplified the purchase decision in an environment that is psychologically threatening by the number of alternatives, and the techno-speak that most use as communication , that they grab the sales almost by default.
Apple has successfully made buying a piece of tech few buyers understand simple, and attached a cache to that simplicity. This spoof makes the point, but mind the language.
May 18, 2012 | Customers, Marketing, Strategy
Marketing groups usually set about segmenting markets by one of two basic ways:
- By demographics, age, sex, education, income, with/without children, and so on, or,
- By product category, for example meat is usually segmented by breed, cut, pack size, price.
However, there is a third way, one that disregards the traditional segmentations, one that recognises the difference between cause and effect.
You do not buy fillet steak because you are a 35 year old graduate earning 150k +, with no children, you buy filet steak because you like it, or your partners school friend is coming around for a BBQ, you buy it because it is the right product for the job to be done. Nobody buys a Ferrari to get from point A to point B, they buy a Ferrari to make a statement, as a car costing 10% of the Ferrari will offer reliable, relatively comfortable transport.
The marketing of every product can benefit from these simple questions, asked from the point of view of the prospective customer:
- What job do I want done?
- How will this product deliver on the job to be done?
- Which of the acceptable product options offers the best value, however the I define value in the circumstances?
May 17, 2012 | Innovation, Marketing
Years ago I worked for a Marketing Director who took his job seriously. That meant that every pack design, advertisement, poster, publicity shot, research proposal, all the day to day business of a busy marketing function had to be OK’d by him.
Not only did this lead to a huge bottleneck, it virtually stopped anything worthwhile, or a bit different getting through the approval processes.
We had a bad, almost terminal, case of the “Marketing HiPPO’s”, highest paid persons opinion. Its sibling, highest paid persons wife’s opinion (HiPPW’sO) is the only condition affecting marketing management that I can think of that is worse.
The antidote is a dose of marketing by analytics, using data to guide decision making. When dealing with innovation, things that are genuinely new, data can be misleading because assumptions are easily fumbled, but for all other situations, data is king.
Edwards Deeming said years ago that “in God I trust, all others bring data” and that still holds, it is just that we are now able to gather and analyse so much more data, much better, giving us the potential for huge increases in the productivity of marketing investments.
The emergence of A/B testing via the web is in the process of transforming the way marketers approach their markets, by enabling lots of small scale experiments, differentiated offerings tested against a standard whose performance is understood. It is a technique used for years in labs, particularly in applications like optimising manufactured food products that are a mix of flavours, densities and textures, and has become routine in software development in the last decade.
Now with the advent of theflexibility and tools on the web, the potential for use is far wider, and the returns tangible.
