Mar 14, 2010 | Change, Marketing, Social Media
One of the huge advantages of the web is that the small can look big, and professional, and able to tackle any challenge, and most important, confident of success.
In order to achieve this on your site, you need to spend a little, perhaps a little more than you would like, but the returns will be there when you generate the opportunity to over deliver to a customer.
On the other hand, the worst thing you can do, having built the expectation, is to under-deliver.
Sounds a bit like life before the web.
After the hype of the last 10 years, we are increasingly able to see the web as just another tool, and like all tools, you need the right one at the right time, and be able to use it effectively in order to get a result.
Mar 7, 2010 | Innovation, Marketing
The emerging generation of E-readers, Amazons Kindle, Barnes & Nobles Nook, and now the Ipad are as disruptive a technology as the invention of the printing press by Johannes Guttenberg in the early 1400’s.
Guttenberg’s invention of the printing press was in fact a number of innovations put together from a range of skills, some of which he had developed as a goldsmith, applied in an entirely new way.
Sound familiar?
Most innovations take bits of seemingly unrelated technology or behaviours and combine them in a different way, creating value for the user.
The ability to see possible connections, and synergies between seemingly unrelated technologies and circumstances, and see them before anyone else is the essence of innovation. Steve Jobs did not invent the technologies that made the ipod, he just saw a number of unrelated bits of technology and put them together, and then single mindedly marketed the outcome. The whole exercise has been about changing mind sets, seeing options others are not seeing, connecting the dots, and being in there first.
Mar 1, 2010 | Marketing, Small business, Strategy
It is very tempting for marketers to become all sweaty about the prospect of a message going viral, all that free awareness, when in the old days, it would take lots and lots of advertising, costing big dollars.
If only it was that easy, just make a funny video and load it up!
It is still a matter of deciding who you want to delight, executing, and then you have a chance that they will spread the word, but without the focus on the small group to whom the experience of whatever it is you are selling is compelling, it is unlikely anyone will make the effort to spread your word for you.
In the early stages, it is inevitably, “one at a time” marketing, and the web does not make it easier than it has always been, it is just a different tool.
Feb 24, 2010 | Branding, Innovation, Marketing
It seems that most innovation is aimed at getting more of the same for the same price, rather than making the experience with the product better.
Every time I see an ad for a new car, it seems to have more airbags, more electronic gizmos to go wrong the day the warranty ends, but who really needs it all to get from point A to point B reliably, comfortably, at a modest cost, which is the point of having a car.
Surely it is time to innovate backwards, do less, strip the glitter, simplify.
I used to shave with a single blade, now I am a poof unless I shave with five, my stringy beard is not five times tougher than when I was 21, just a bit more gray worked its way in.
Two businesses, Gillette and Intel have led the way in adding features that they think will give them a marketing advantage through differentiation, and then turning them into benefits.
For a funny, sarcastic view of the trend to complication, follow the link to the Onion site, and have a laugh.
Feb 23, 2010 | Change, Innovation, Marketing, Strategy
How often is the “next big thing” hiding in your organisation without you knowing?
Fairly often is seems.
Probably the classic example, is the development of the first digital camera by a Kodak engineer , Steven Sasson in 1975.
Kodak, with a totally dominant position in the film market had a huge amount to lose with the development of an alternative, and ironically, many of the adjacent inventions such as advances in storage volumes, which enables the digital photographic technology to be realised, and which also made the computer industry as we now see it possible, were also developed in their labs, but put aside, as Kodak commercial management saw little of interest to their business.
Way after the digital camera market had been populated by the likes of Sony, Kodak woke up, but way too late to preserve their market dominance, or even have a role in the shape of it.
Meanwhile, the inventor toiled away inside Kodak, watching others commercialise the technology he initiated.
The lesson here is that you need to creatively engage with all stakeholders, whilst seeing the opportunities through eyes other than those that restrict the view to the status quo.
Feb 22, 2010 | Branding, Marketing, Sales, Small business
What will be the continuing impact of the development of housebrands by retailers, and the current heightened value awareness of consumers? Most FMCG suppliers lose sleep over the retailers undermining their profitability by hogging shelf space with far cheaper imitations of their brands, brought to market overnight without much concern about the long term health and development of the category, but delivering short term profitability to them at the expense of their suppliers.
This apparent duplicity, retailers demanding innovation and category building activity from their suppliers, whilst undermining their ability and willingness to invest has to have its limits. Clearly, the old mass market model of branding is over, but what has replaced it?
Increasingly I see the evolution of focused brands and retailers serving the more niche markets, and segments of larger markets where something different is being delivered to customers. Retailers are enabling a new breed of supplier with deep category expertise to emerge at the expense of the older mass market model, and they are in turn fuelling the growth of specialist retailers.
