May 10, 2011 | Customers, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Pretty big aspiration, to outcompete the two businesses that have consistently demonstrated the power of innovation as the core competitive tool over the past 10 years, and have reaped the rewards by creating and redefining markets and then taking all the gravy. The story of Skype since the company was initially bought by Ebay is enlightening, and shows how it has been done.
Ben Horowitz, a tech entrepreneur and angel investor got into the act by being part of a consortium that bought Skype for just over 2 Billion $18 months ago. They withstood full frontal assaults from both Google and Apple, who both have a habit of winning, and have just announced the on-sale of Skype to Microsoft for 8.5 Billion. Reasonable return.
In Bens blog entry, where he announces the sale, and articulates the short history that netted$ 6.5 billion in the time it takes my local council to consider an application to build a fence, the key to this stunning outcome is in the first sentence in the second last paragraph, where Ben referrs to the quality of the people, and the network effect of existing Skype users as being the key to the success.
The power of an idea whose time has come, coupled with the best of the collaborative and networking tools of the net 2.0, and great customer service.
May 3, 2011 | Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
A friend works for the local council who have banned the use of social media, “Just a time-waster” is the view.
Here’s the thing, I thought local councils were there to serve the community, to reflect the way they think, work, bring up their families and play in the manner in which their rates are used to provide services. How can they do that efficiently when they do not communicate in the way their constituency communicates? How can they connect and engage?.
Social networking is not primarily about sales, or brand building, or communicating widely, it is about relationships.
Successful relationships can lead to those other things, they can be a useful outcome, but if you make them the objective, the relationship will not build, and it is the relationships that evolve into sales and brand preference.
Social networking is more P2P, (person to person) than B2B or B2C, and as in any relationship, you need to put in before you can take out.
Apr 26, 2011 | Strategy
“We will reduce the carbon going into the atmosphere, but it will not cost anyone (who votes) anything”. Sound familiar?
How about “The budget calls for increased sales and margins, which means we will have to do more with less people and put prices up “.
Never have I seen anything achieved without some sort of choice being made, even in the school yard, if you wanted to be friends with Bill, you could not be friends with Sam. Problem is, we all want it all, are unwilling to make the choices that enables stuff to get done, someone else can make the sacrifice, but not me Jack!
In 2009 Frit-O-Lay relaunched “Sun Chips” a brand of potato crisp in bio-degradable packaging, something consumers, advocates, and uncle Tom Cobbley had been calling for long and loudly, but the trade-off was the bags were noisy! so noisy sales dropped, there was a facebook page set up to whinge, and U-Tube videos collected thousands of hits. The packaging was changed back to the old, environmentally destructive poly film.
Achieving anything requires that the objective be pursued, choices, sometimes tough ones, be made, compromises be struck, but nothing is achieved by pleasing everyone all the time.
Apr 26, 2011 | Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
The line between advertising to build brands and entertainment continues to blurr, and a whole new arena for creativity has emerged in our marketing mix, unheralded amongst many of those who run the corporations that create most of our old fashioned mass marketing.
Last week in the UK, just talking to some kids on fancy bikes in the high street of Chichester, it was clear they were a band of brand apostles for Red Bull, but it wasn’t the exploits of Sebatian Vettel and Mark Webber in the F1 cars, but a bloke I had never heard of, Danny MacAskill, and his exploits on a push bike captured on u-tube that hooked them.
Red Bull, a brand that has been rapidly built on extreme, aspirational, sports performance, does not make an appearance until the credits on this clip, a 7 minute “bike trip” but the impact on these kids was powerful. Advertainment, not advertising, created the powerful connection between the kids and the brand.
Apr 21, 2011 | Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Apps are a part of our lives, a very recent innovation, and they are not going away any time soon.
The commercial challenge is how to monetarise them, make a return, build a business. We have learnt since the tech bubble a decade ago that if you build it, no matter how virtual, the rules of commerce still apply, you need to add real customer value before anyone will fork out their hard-earned on it.
Some of the best minds around are experimenting with ways to turn an buck from Apps, some like Amazon, Zappos, Apple, Groupon, and a few others have been sensationally successful, but for every success, there has been perhaps thousands of failures.
It is relatively easy these days to get someone to “like” your post, or site, getting them to “buy” from it is much, much harder.
Apr 15, 2011 | Management, Strategy
Scenario planning was a popular tool 20 years ago, but seems to have been supplanted by other tools, and priorities, or forgotten. In an increasingly unpredictable world, it makes sense to step back, and consider a range of perhaps unlikely scenarios, after all, those doing budgets in early 2008 when oil was $45 a barrel would hardly have predicted it would be $145 just 9 months later, then drop back under $100 almost as quickly, or that The gulf of Mexico would become an oil bath, and more recently, that a single persons protest in Tunisia would start Egypt on the rocky road to democracy, followed by the riots and perhaps revolution in Libya, that an earthquake would lead to a tsunami and nuclear “incident” in Japan, what else can happen?
Stepping back, and using the tools of scenario planning, identifying the fundamental drivers as an input to your own planning makes more sense now than it has for 30 years.
