Apr 29, 2010 | Alliance management, Communication, Demand chains, Social Media, Strategy
Democratising knowledge, isn’t this a lovely term! I have heard it used on a number of occasions recently, and it came up again in an extraordinary TED presentation by Stephen Wolfram .
In just two words it nails the complex changes happening in numerous ways in our lives. Knowledge used to be power, now it is freely available, it is simply a tool, and the ones who use it best will win, rather than in the past, where the holder of the knowledge had a huge advantage.
Amongst all the other things that have changed, is the potential to turn simple supply chains that pump product into a channel driven only by capacity, into demand chains that respond backwards to demand signals from the customer.
This opportunity for change driven by a combination of the communication tools on the net, and the ability to assemble and analyse the drivers of demand in your particular market offers huge potential for innovation, efficiency, and differentiation based on the capabilities of those in the chain.
Apr 28, 2010 | Communication, Management, Social Media
Anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorised that the maximum number of people any individual could maintain a relationship with was 150, which has become known as Dunbar’s number. It reflects the cognitive maximum for someone to know everyone in a group, and to be aware of the relationships between them all.
Social media has led to people into having many “friends” sometimes thousands, but in the human sense, they do not have a relationship, it is something different, for which I suspect we need a new term.
Human beings are social animals, and no matter how valuable our digital networks are to us, they are no substitute for the human interactions that define us, but are limited to around 150 individuals at any one time.
Apr 27, 2010 | Category, Customers, Innovation, Sales
Running a qualitative consumer research group recently, one of the participants surprised me with a metaphor that made great sense.
She said that the web had taught her to “forage”, her term, looking for stuff of interest, checking out the Sku’s available in a category far more widely than previously, when she had a modest “basket” of regulars, with a pecking order, and that did not change much from month to month. This reminded her of the behavior of the farm dogs she had as a kid, always looking for something to eat, in different places, and always nuzzling something new when it became available, and then deciding if it had any interest.
The implications are pretty clear. Experimentation within categories, and into adjacent categories may have been encouraged by the transfer of the “nuzzling” behavior we undertake every day as we cruise the web, looking for tit-bits of interest.
Sku numbers in supermarkets have exploded over the last 20 years, and I always thought it was just the drive for shelf presence and often minor differentiation in an effort to attract consumers that had driven it, but perhaps there is something more primal in our reaction to variety.
Apr 18, 2010 | Communication, Demand chains, Innovation, Social Media
Can you imagine the changes that would have occurred in the behavior of the tobacco industry in the 70’s and 80’s had there been the “net-enabled” communication tools available then, when the big tobacco companies were conducting a rear guard action against those who sought to have the lethal effects of tobacco on health made public.
Simply, they would not have got away with 20 years of denial, the ridicule circulating via blogs, twitter, Digg and all the rest would have been overwhelming.
When you think about it, the negative reaction that would have occurred may have been better than all the public advertising that has gone on since the 80’s, sanctimonious adults telling youngsters what to do (again) whilst still taking the taxes.
Apr 12, 2010 | Marketing, Strategy
Great marketing strategy is hard to develop, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it.
The difficulty lies in the need to hold several often opposing ideas in the brain at the same time, very hard for most.
First, where to compete. This may be geography, channel, product category, market segment, and so on.
Second, how to compete. This may be the media used, branding strategy, articulation of the value and differentiation of the product, which of a choice of initiatives will be followed, which measures will be used, and so on.
Following one logic is easy enough, but the necessity to reconcile and make the trade-offs and choices necessary to hold two, many of which are mutually exclusive, is very hard.
Apr 9, 2010 | Branding, Category, Marketing
Value is an outcome of the price and the benefits delivered.
Value = price + benefits
As marketers, we are normally consumed by price, it drives our priorities, measures our success, and dictates channel and NPD priorities.
Consumers by contrast, are generally driven by value. Yes, they will take the cheapest price in a category, all other things being even, and given marketers pre-occupation, it often is, but our task is to create value, not just deliver a price.
