Oct 16, 2012 | Communication, Marketing
The way most of us see things is dependent on what we expect to see, and how it affects us. If you were a farmer with a just planted crop, rain is a great day, but if you are about to go on a picnic, rain sucks.
Similarly, marketing is about setting the context in the way we want our customers, and potential customers to see out product.
The iphone is widely understood to be a disruption of the phone industry, but as John Gruber of daringfireball points out with great insight, it is not. Rather, the iphone is a redefinition of the mobile computer, it just happens to have as one of its capabilities, the ability to make and receive phone calls, but that has almost become a minor item. What is really important is that it put the net into out pockets at all times.
Those phone makers left high and dry by the iphone, RIM, (Blackberry) Nokia, Motorola, at al, all tried to outdo the iphone by addressing the disruption, and building a better phone, but failed. It took those with the capabilities in software and computer hardware to get it at least partly right, Samsung, Google, and perhaps more recently Microsoft (although yet to be successful in the market) to make headway. These guys had little to do with phones, they built computers and the software required and evolving, and are flourishing.
Much is made of the “sameness” of the iphone 5, it is outperformed by Samsung’s galaxy on most objective parameters, but is still making all the money, so which is the more successful? Depends on your context doesn’t it.
Oct 5, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Social Media
My 28 year old son recently tried to get a mobile phone on a plan, and couldn’t, he did not have a credit rating. A bit unusual perhaps, but this is a young bloke who has been a self-funded student for a long time, always paid his bills, always met all his commitments, financial and otherwise, a far better bet than most that his mobile bill would be paid. Now graduated, he wanted to start being “normal” as he put it.
“Personal brand” is a term increasingly bandied around as we build an identity underpinned by on-line behavior. Headhunters are increasingly using it as they seek to find the best fit for roles they are filling, so are looking to social media as a behavioral metaphor for actual behavior in a workplace.
But it is going much further, much quicker than anyone anticipated.
The reputation you build in one place will be increasingly transferrable to another. Why shouldn’t your hard earned EBay and Amazon rating be considered when you want to rent a car or flat, borrow some money, or even take on a simple phone plan?
Collaborative consumption is a term coined by Rachael Botsman to describe the evolution of behavior made possible by the removal of the transactional friction we are used to by the collaborative capacity of the internet. We can now rent someone’s home on airbnb, raise venture capital on Kickstarter, share a car on GoGet, get the chores done by taskrabbit, and find thousands of other potential partners in peer to peer transactions that were impossible just a few years ago. In these circumstances, your reputation, your brand, is as good as money, just different, it has a value that others will consider in an exchange, and decide if they will proceed.
In this emerging digital economy trust is everything, trust between strangers a necessity for these types of collaborative consumption transactions. It follows then that we need a mechanism to replace the face to face interaction that through human history has built trust because you can see the whites of the other parties eyes, and make a very personal judgement about them.
Your reputation, the sum of all your behavior, will increasingly become manageable and transferable across platforms, and act as currency.
Sep 25, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Big Brother is watching where you are, if you have a smartphone. The GPS capabilities of the newer smartphones opens up an extraordinary Pandora’s box of opportunities to market to those in immediate reach, alternatively to deluge them with SPAM, as illustrated by Tom Fishburnes cartoon . (make sure you click through to his Google keynote)
You are a smart young thing, with a purchase history in a chain of fashion stores. As you walk into the orbit of a store, your phone tells them who you are, and that you are close, which offers the chance to mine your database, and come up with tailored specials, available for the next 20 minutes, just for you. Or perhaps as you move towards the cinema complex in George Street, the movie about to start that sits in your preferred genre, offers you a preferred location, and a coffee. The opportunities are endless, the potential to annoy by filling your phone with Spam almost as endless.
This evolution will require a rethink of the customer acquisition process. Aiming messages at consumers with the laser-like accuracy to avoid being a Spammer will require a sophisticated data mining capability, as well as a sensitivity to consumer preferences that will be hard to translate into an algorithm.
The downside for those who do it poorly is that potentially loyal consumers will move elsewhere, and block your messages, the emerging equivalent of retail purgatory.
Sep 20, 2012 | Innovation, Marketing, Small business
“Big data” appears to be the coming cliché amongst my propeller-headed friends, as it gets cheaper to gather, store, and mine data, they are like excited 21st century versions of Oliver Twist, “more petabytes please sir”!
Surely at some point diminishing returns occur, more and more of the same data cannot to my mind possibly lead to the insights that make a difference. What is needed is different data, meaningful insights generated from the data, better assembly of data into project plans and performance measures, curation of key bits of data to those who can use it to solve a problem or provide insight into a circumstance.
Imagine if you will, a black and white photo taken with a 10 megapixel camera, compared to the same photo taken with a 100 megapixel camera (does this exist?) same photo, better definition although hard to distinguish, you can blow the one taken with the 100 up to the size of the opera house and still be recognisable, but it is still the same photo, just more data of the same sort. Now consider the same picture taken in colour, at 5 megapixels, same photo, less data, but what a change is wrought by a bit of different data, even if it is just an added bit of small data.
More of the same is never as good as a little bit of different.
Sep 19, 2012 | Leadership, Marketing, Strategy
Strategy is about choice, which market, customer, technology, and so on.
Never has this black and white choice been so stark a challenge as in publishing, as the established operators struggle to find profitability in the electronic age.
Fairfax in Australia recently announced a record loss of 2.7 billion dollars, a continuance of their recent performance, on top of a series restructuring announcements and a precipitous drop in the share price over the last couple of years. They are not alone in the world of print media.
However, all is not lost. A few weeks ago I heard the editor of the “New Yorker” Henry Finder being interviewed on Sydney radio, a whimsical interview, but the astonishing difference is that the New Yorker is thriving in the new digital environment.
Instead of chasing the commodity, fluffy stories available anywhere, the magazine is going deeper into stories, rewarding readers with superior journalism and a range of views not available elsewhere.
They made a choice, not just to be different to everyone else, but to do it in a way that is consistent with the history and culture of the magazine.
My revered old mentor, Jim Hagler, scion of Harvard Square said to me almost 40 years ago “son, create a niche and then OWN it”. Jim had never heard of the internet, or the disruption it would bring publishing, but his wisdom still holds, and the New Yorker has listened. Wisdom has a context, but it remains wise.
