Mobile cultures

Widely reported on the net and picked up by wired magazine.
Keitai Deka is "the cell phone detective". It is a weekly show on Japan's BS-i channel. Each week she solves crimes with the help of her high-powered DoCoMo smartphone. (nice piece of product placement).
Smartmobs comments

Westerners might find the premise implausible, in Japan, where multitasking teens can thumbtext faster than you can type, it's practically a documentary.

And just for a few extra bits of mobile info, that have generated some serious money and success…
Following the lead of Hong Kong pop music duo Twins, who released their own line of branded mobile phones, subcriptions, phone covers, ring tones, logos, etc in 2002, a range of music artists from rap artist Nelly to Heavy Metal rockers Kiss have now embraced this powerful way to connect with their fans. By providing pre-installed music, custom games, a fan letter, chat, and special offers on upcoming music releases and concerts, musicians are laying their stake on the most communication powerful tool in the pockets of their fans.
The mobile phone is becoming an important social medium, apparently reconnecting us to our natural state of 150 social contacts, which we all had prior to the industrial revolution.
There is a school of thought that mobility is changing "reality" in subtle and profound ways. Robbie Blinkoff an expert on how cultures adapt to new technology believes that we are still romancing the mobile phone

On a very big level, it's important to understand that the phenonomen of people using their mobiles to take pictures and send them to their friends is just a blip in the process of behavourial change… they're just romancing the new technology. That's not what they'll ultimately do with it.

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Posted in: 7th Mass Media, Advertising, Broadcast, Convergence, Culture, Engagement Marketing, Engagement Mobile, Generation C, Marketing, Mobile, Music, Networks, Philosophy, Trends

Consumers: the next big player in consumer media?

A interesting article in MediaPost today about the power of the power of consumer-generated media (CGM). It relates the story of Peter Blackshaw, Intelliseek chief marketing officer, who had an unusual firsthand experience with the impact of online word-of-mouth.
Blackshaw purchased a hybrid car that was so good that he did what many early adopter/influential types across the globe now do on a day-to-day basis: he blogged about his experience on HybridBuzz.com.
Later Blackshaw discovered that his mileage was falling short of the car dealer guarantee and he expressed his displeasure on his blog. Others responded with similar complaints and by the end of the day there were 2,000 messages on his blog posted in response. Wired magazine and Slashdot journalists requested more information and within a few days he was fielding calls from CBS Evening News, which was poised to do a 3-minute segment on hybrid cars.
Blackshaw makes his living analyzing the effect of such online word-of-mouth on brands. At an ARF Webcast entitled "Consumer-Generated Media: The New Metric for Quantifying Word-of-Mouth," Blackshaw presented evidence of CGM's impact, discussing both the threats and opportunities it poses to brands.

The Web, really, is first about listening and consumer dissatisfaction, in the digital age, can be detrimental to a brand if it strikes a nerve in the wrong kind of person. These wrong kind of people are called speakers–and they represent roughly 10 percent of the population, but trickle through to influence 90 percent of the population, called seekers.
Speakers are finding reach in ways that have never been experienced before through various online mouthpieces such as blogs, bulletin boards, public/private discussion boards, forums, reviews and opinions on product pages, and consumer feedback on branded Web sites.

And we say, you'd better engage them

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Posted in: Advertising, Convergence, Culture, Darwin, Distribution, Economics, Engagement Marketing, Generation C, Marketing, Media, Networks, Social Networks, Trends, Web/Tech, Weblogs

The Digital Society

Have you noticed the renewed excitement about "new media" this year

The Sunday Times opined on July 11 in an article on the issues facing our digital society, Baffled by the new digital world.

Its all because the digital revolution ? which never went away by the way ? has moved into next phase? legal music downloads, television through a computer, up-to-date news on your phone, video on demand.

Michael Grade declared "the status quo is not an option". When launching the BBC's digital manifesto.
It seems the older generations are the challenge, whereas the young are growing up with and expect digital convergence.
Stephen Carter again from Ofcom says

Television cannot deliver a digital society. Only broadband can do that. The move to digital broadcasting and to broadband means that media literacy depends on a willingness to embrace new technology. That can be a challenge for many people. Changes often bring great benefits, but they can also bring added complexity. Ultimately, the real value of technology is what it can add to our daily lives.

The way businesses benefit is to think about clear perceived customer benefit; ease of use, time saving? an enhanced customer experience etc. And creating compelling reasons to take-up the technology? This is sometimes not a direct approach. You never educate someone reluctant to convert, if you tell them you are going to educate them. We need a subtler more creative approach.
The government has a very big challenge on its hands to convert the nation to a digital world. Putting back already the date when it plans to switch off the analogue signal.

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Posted in: Broadcast, Convergence, Culture, Darwin, Distribution, Government & Politics, Media, Networks, Society, Trends, Web/Tech

The New Bottom Line

The New Bottom Line, published by Capstone and authored by Alan Mitchell, Andreas W. Bauer and Gerhard Hausruckinger is an important addition to the research that is currently fuelling the debate that Stephen J. Gould would describe as a period of punctuated equilibrium.
For many years, the authors argue

traditional old bottom line businesses have created the richest, most extensive and dynamic wealth creating system the world has ever seen. Wherever there are new economies of scale to unleash or old technologies to apply, this model still has enormous potential.

However, our world has changed which requires a new response. New information technologies offer up the very real possibility of richness and reach. And this has contributed to placing the consumer at the beginning of the value chain rather than at the end perhaps for the very first time.
This challenges the fundamental principles of how businesses go to market, as they can no longer attempt to align large audience to their own agendas. Today business growth will be delivered by businesses aligning themselves with the customers needs.
The second key issue, is marketing. SMLXL has published a whitepaper entitled The Long Goodbye exploring what are the key and fundamental issues facing all marketers today.
In the New Bottom Line the authors comment:

A hundred years ago, roughly a quarter of all economic activity was taken up with the core marketing tasks of matching supply to demand and connecting buyers to sellers. The other three quarters was invested in actually making stuff. Since then this 3:1 ratio of 'making' to 'matching and connecting' has been transformed into a 1:1 ratio. The costs of matching and connecting now account for half, or more, of all economic activity.
This is why A.G.Lafley, CEO of Proctor & Gamble now says that marketing has to be 'reinvented'

Add to that the 56 million Americans who have signed the "do not call me" register and the knowledge that interruptive marketing overload makes us more resistant to these forms of communication.
One can see that we need marketing 2.0. Or in simple words a more smarter, more intelligent way to do things. That adds value to customers and exploits the latent assets residing in some many companies.
New information technologies offer up great opportunities for businesses to talk and engage with their customers in more meaningful ways. As Tesco have so successfully done. As have Apple, as have Dell.
SMLXL think that too often companies are from Mars and customers are from Venus.
Each have their own P&L account. But the customer P&L is based upon value.
For example, critical contributors to this 'personal' P&L include:

• Value for money
• Value for time
• Return on attention (was it worthwhile paying attention to this?)
• Emotional return (was it a cause of happiness or hassle?)
• Return on labour (I worked hard to realise this experience – was it worth it?)

"Was that experience worth it or not?" should be the question customers asking themselves.
Value for money as a yardstick simply isn't adequate.
Our research tells us there is a staggering amount of activity going on in certain industries. But often we observe in talking to a considerable number of businesses that, there are many that seem to be waiting to arrive at the cliff before they decide to alter or change their business and marketing strategies.

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Posted in: Advertising, Books, Culture, Darwin, Engagement Marketing, Engagement Organisations, Marketing, Society, Strategy, Trends

Context is King

Interbrand has recently published the list of the top 100 brands, reported in design week

29 July 2004, Design Week By Mike Exon
Apple and Amazon have made the biggest gains in brand equity this year, with Kodak and Nintendo topping the list of worst performers, according to figures released recently.
In its annual survey of global brands ranked by brand value, Interbrand concludes that the values of the top 100 brands increased collectively by 2.2 per cent over the 12 months from June 2003.
At the head of the table the top five names are unchanged. Coca-Cola remains in pole position with a brand valued at $64 394m (?35 000m), down 4 per cent on last year. Microsoft, IBM, General Electric and Intel retain their positions of second to fifth respectively, while Nokia was the biggest faller in absolute terms, losing $5400m (£2900m) of brand equity in the past year.
Apple, 43rd in the table, improved its standings by 24 per cent, thanks largely to the success of the iPod range, says Interbrand chief executive Jez Frampton.
On-line brands Amazon (number 67) and Yahoo (61) saw the next biggest rises in brand value, with gains of 22 and 17 per cent respectively, according to the figures.
Biggest risers
Apple +24%
Amazon +22%
Yahoo +17%
Samsung +16%
HSBC +15%
Biggest fallers
Kodak -33%
Nintendo -21%
Nokia -18%
AOL -15%
Ford -15%

Is it in fact that brands and busiinesses wax and wane on a meaning and context index. Perhaps it is context that is king rather than content?
It is something that the author and brand strategist Mike Bayler has written about in his book Promiscuous Customers.
Brands and their businesses work when they play a clearly perceived role in peoples lives, Enabling, enhancing, navigating.
Why is it that Apple and Amazon have made significant leaps in the brand league table? Because in Apple's case their technology which is marketing driven answers an unmet need. Whilst the music industry has navel gazed for far too long, Apple has delivered a compelling new distribution service for the always on generation. Amazon, just gets on with providing a great service all from the luxury of your armchair.
Enabling, enhancing, navigating…. customers come back when what the brand delivers is a valuable experience.

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Posted in: Advertising, Culture, Darwin, Economics, Engagement Marketing, Marketing, Retail, Statistics, Strategy

Coca Cola takes mobile engagement into Spain

New Media Age reported on 18 June 2004 that Coke

had made one of its biggest commitments to mobile media to date, selecting Spain as the launchpad for a branded mobile internet community. The company's Mobile Community features mobile services and content ranging from chat forums to voucher redemption.
Coca-Cola has tied with mobile services form Buongiorno in order to extend its online Coca- Cola movement concept to mobile. The service is intitially available, via i-mode or WAP on Telefonica's content service MoviStar e-mocion. Content will include ringtones, logos, competitions, news & chat.
Customers will also be able to redeem vouchers from on-pack product promotions in order to purchase any content.

In August's Wired Magazine Frank Rose commented on how big advertisers are transferring significant budgets to other media because of the death by mousebite of the changing media habits of young males. TNS Media Intelligence CMR had provided stats on the fact that Coke amongst 5 other big media spenders had significantly shifted media spend from 2002 to 2003. It would be interesting to see this years figures.
But when there are more mobile phones in the world than there are TV sets, that makes sense.
The only big difference is we have to move from an interruptive model of marketing to one of engagement. From push to pull. And that is about creating things that people really want. Especially for the Generation "C" – the Community Generation.

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Posted in: 7th Mass Media, Advertising, Culture, Darwin, Engagement Marketing, Engagement Mobile, Generation C, Marketing, Media, Messaging, Mobile, Social Networks, Strategy

Joined up thinking

Tivo just got smarter boingboing have posted a note on the very smart things that Tivo can do these days… re-routing a whole variety of formats to other devices in the home… we will see more changes in the next 10 years than we did in the last half a century

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Posted in: Broadcast, Convergence, Culture, Trends, Web/Tech

Living in a mobile world

During much of the 1990s mobile phones were gadgets for techno-geeks. It was only at the end of the decade that the number of mobile phones started to accelerate past all others. But any annual statistics are reported in the following year. Thus until the Spring of 2004, you could not find stats on mobile phone usage that were more current than those from 2002. And up to that year all radically new mobile phone innovations appeared in remote countries like Finland, Korea and the Philippines. It is no wonder you were never told of this revolution.
The numbers for mobile have suddenly passed all "sanity checks". For 100 years the only gadget man would carry every day was the wristwatch. Not only has the mobile phone succeeded to repeat that globally, but now younger users in advanced countries are abandoning the wristwatch in favour of the mobile phone.

The growth of SMS text messaging is breathtaking with 1.5 billion SMS messages sent globally every day. To put it in context, after you remove spam, there are about 15 billion e-mail messages sent every day around the world. Think about that for a moment. E-mail has been around for over 30 years and
all of e-mail is free. SMS has been around of 12 years and each text message costs on average 12 cents (8 pence). What is more, most of SMS users have access to e-mail, yet they choose to send short messages from their mobile phones.
Of course you, as CEO, encounter "disruptive" technologies in every issue of Business Week, the Economist etc. How can you decipher Wi-Fi from I-Pod from TiVo, etc. Let me put the emerging technologies into perspective. Blackberry is an exciting wireless e-mail solution. It has less than 1.3 million users worldwide. The i-Pod just passed 2 million users. Personal Digital Recorders like TiVo total about 3.5 million. While Wi-Fi (aka W-LAN, aka 802.11) has about 60 million deployed devices, most of those never leave the home, office or campus. Only 3 million Wi-Fi users take their laptops and PDAs to hotspots like Starbucks or a hotel. Talking about PDAs, there are 60 million of them.

IM Instant Messaging has 140 million users. Notebook PCs number about 150 million. Total PC population of notebooks and desktops is 600 million globally. Now contrast them with the dominant digital device. Worldwide there are 1.4 Billion mobile phones and over 500 million new ones are sold every year. One in seven humans on the planet can be reached by SMS, in fact every economically viable person in the Western World can be contacted via SMS – but only about half of that population has access to the internet.
Many digital delivery solutions are significant, PDAs, I-Pods, PDCs, Blackberrys, notebook PCs etc., But only one statistic is seismic, and that is the population of mobile phones. At 1.4 billion users, this is your digital platform. You have to understand it to survive in the world where it dominates.
For more information go here. 

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Posted in: 7th Mass Media, Convergence, Culture, Marketing, Media, Mobile, Philosophy, Statistics, Strategy, Trends

The Challenge of Customisation, operations and marketing

There is a new dominant logic for marketing.
This is about just in time rather than just in case marketing and marketing communications.
But let's go back to 1939 Bound for glory America in Color 1939-43 presents an oddly startling world of small towns and country roads ablaze in the vivid hues of real life. In it is a drugstore. Its clapboard sides covered in typographic descriptions of the stores contents: baths, pans, beds, tobacco etc. In many ways it seems so curiously innocent. This little drugstore waiting for people from the surrounding countryside to passby and enter the store to buy something. Its just in case marketing model seems apt and non-invavsive.
But just in case communications becomes destructive and intrusive, like a B52 bomber dropping its payload over a vast area just in case you might be there.
In terms of marketing communications it is called intrusion like any intruder: unwelcome and unwanted.
There are many reports, from the CIM, Deutsche Bank, Yankelovich that have measured and described the varied circumstances of why we feel so assualted by conventional marketing communications. This is what Yankelovich has to say:

Consumers see two principal benefits from marketing and advertising? The social benefit of helping the economy and the personal benefit of providing useful information. In fact, perceptions of the information value of marketing and advertising have increased somewhat from 1964 to 2004. The top dislike that consumers had of advertising in 1964 has gotten worse. Intrusiveness has always been the one thing that consumers dislike the most about marketing and advertising. The greater percentage of consumers mentioning this dislike in 2004 arises from the exponentially greater degree of clutter and intrusiveness true of the marketplace today.
Negative opinions and concerns about intrusiveness give rise to consumer resistance to marketing. And this resistance reduces the effectiveness of marketing and adds to the cost of doing business. The fervor with which consumers are resisting marketing suggests that the impact on marketing productivity is considerable.
60% describe themselves as a person who tries to resist or avoidbeing exposed to marketing and advertising.
69% say that they are interested in products and services that enable them to block, skip or opt out of being exposed to marketing and advertising. Contrast these overwhelming percentages with the mere
15% that were estimated by the 1964 AAAA study to be concerned enough about advertising to believe that it needed some attention and change. Marketing resistance affects buying decisions as well. The marketing practices of products and brands can lose customers.
54% say that they avoid buying products that overwhelm them with marketing and advertising.

So what do you do as a business, as a CEO, as a marketer?
Perhaps one way forward is in bringing together Operations and Marketing
The low cost airline Go, so successfully hardwired its marketing communications into selling inventory, that Easy Jet bought Go to take out its fiercest competition, is one example whilst Thomas Cook TV is another? 150m of inventory sold from a? 2.5m operating base.
Streamlining marketing and operations can create new marketspace and a very different type of demand.
At this point marketing becomes a valuable strategic tool as oppposed to the mongrel dog, that it seems so often to be seen as.
As Mike Bayler describes in his the book the Promiscuous Customers we now live in an age when context not content is king. Where meaning customer knowledge and advocacy are now recognised as the fundamental source of competitive advantage.
SMLXL have undertaken research in a number of industry sectors. And from this research started to, as Tom Peters would say Re-imagine what the world might look like from a customer perspective. That in turn would deliver growth and increased profitability to companies.

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Posted in: Economics, Engagement Marketing, Marketing, Media, Trends

Gone in 30 seconds. Marketing 2.0

Frank Rose writing in Wired magazine has added to the weight of evidence proving that things in the world of media and television advertising are just not what they used to be in his article The Lost Boys.
In fact Jim Stengel Chief Marketing Officer for Proctor & Gamble says that he believes that interruptive TV advertising stopped working around 1987.
Plus he highlights a changing male culture which is different in how it now interacts with media and entertainment. In fact it is not just males which are changing.
The Lost Boys reinforces the work SMLXL has been undertaking over the last 24 months on how brands and businesses can respond to these dramatic changes.
It requires an holistic approach to marketing communications, it requires companies to understand we need to move from the push strategies so well suited in the past to pull strategies that are essential in a world of customer empowerment.
I thank Frank Rose for bringing these issues to light in such a good magazine as Wired. I hope CEO's, boards and marketers are waking up to the fact that if they embrace fully this new reality, they are far more likely to keep their revenues, grow their profits and their marketshare.
Interruptive communications will be seen very soon as a crude tool in trying to persuade people to buy a companies products and services. Brand and marketing strategy can help companies grow and differentiate in a crowded marketplace. But its version 2.0 we need not more of the same.

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Posted in: Advertising, Broadcast, Convergence, Darwin, Engagement Marketing, Generation C, Marketing, Trends