lead/marke | ralf schwartz

Business Innovation: Collaborative Consumption - by Rachel Botsman

Via David Gillespie. More at Collaborative Consumption.

Collaborative Consumption is a great example about human's new individuality, independence, and impatience - and their consequences concerning brands, consumption itself, retail, and corporations!

What will Collaborative Consumption mean for your brand? To assess this in more detail, below please find a Video of Rachel speaking at TEDxSidney:

lead/marke NET: Tom Fishburne > "The Art of Planning"

Note: 2011 ahead we recommend rolling planning, micro strategies, and Tom's quest for the best plan. Please enjoy!
(lead/marke NET proudly features Tom's inspiring posts on a regular basis.)

 

(to instantly download this cartoon, click here)

For many businesses, planning for 2011 is in full swing, particularly the horse-trading, haggling, and negotiating to choose the revenue target. The core business team develops a bottoms-up plan they feel is achievable. The leadership team sets an top-down stretch target that is much higher. Then everyone bickers over the gap between the two numbers.

There are a few schools of thought on where to draw the line in between. Set your target too low and you can reliably hit the number, but you may not have achieved anything remarkable. Set your target too high and it may spur you to breakthrough growth, but it will feel like failure if you then miss the number. 

A plan is outdated the moment it's inked. Things change: customers change their minds, new opportunities surface, roadblocks appear. The key to hitting a plan is having a constant list of upsides to chase and downsides to mitigate so that you have contingiencies. I once saw a plan with a long list of downsides, but no upsides. Someone asked why the team hadn't come up with a list of upsides. It turned out that they had, but they then baked the upsides into the plan. They then had nowhere to go when bad news inevitably came. 

The best plans are neither sandbagged or full of hot air. They find the right equilibrium in between. But, they then provide extra incentives to the team for beating plan by different levels. This approach motivates the team to find breakthrough growth, but not at the expense to morale of having a plan perpetually out-of-reach.  

Tom, when not cartooning (eg. for Marketing Week), is method's international managing director. Based in London, he frequently speaks at campuses, companies, and conferences about marketing, cartooning, and how to spread business ideas. (twitter: @tomfishburne)

Never Forget: Not Brands, but Consumers Decide What Brands Stand for Today!

Via thefuturebuzz.

"I understand Bing is trying to target techies, geeks, early adopters & “super-nerds” (whatever they mean by that last one). Except advertising isn’t the way to reach this crowd. It never was. The reason Google owns this audience is simple – Google deserves them.  They deserve them through a remarkable product, through a focus on experimenting, delivering a high quality experience, market innovation and creativity. And then sharing those stories in a compelling, real way. Not because they proclaimed themselves “the official” search engine of the audience. Official? According to who? In this case, themselves."

Addendum

"Let's Be Honest: Microsoft's Mobile Business Is A Fantasy", Silicon Alley Insider.

Coke: Real Life Facebook-Like Integration

Via workatplay.

"Marketing with a Hammer"

"Designers believethat the ability to operate a Mac combined with the ownership of 15,000 typefaces equals talent. It does not. It equals 30 quid an hour."

... plus some more brutal truths from 'I am the Client'.

lead/marke NET: Tom Fishburne > "Jumping the Shark"

Note: You need guts and brains and self confidence to not 'jump the shark'! Please enjoy!
(lead/marke NET proudly features Tom's inspiring posts on a regular basis.)

(to instantly license this week's cartoon, click here)

My friend Michelle introduced me to the expression, Jumping the Shark, which is used to describe "the moment of downturn for a previously successful enterprise." It comes from the fifth season of the classic American sitcom, Happy Days, when Fonzie donned swim trunks and his trademark leather jacket to perform a ridiculous water ski jump over a shark.

The guy who coined the expression describes it as "a defining moment when you know that your favorite television program has reached its peak. That instant that you know from now on...it's all downhill. Some call it the climax. We call it 'Jumping the Shark.' From that moment on, the program will simply never be the same."

Indiana Jones "jumped the shark" in the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull when Indiana was hit by a nuclear weapon blast while hiding in a lead-lined fridge.  While the fridge was hurled a great distance and everything else was obliterated, Indiana emerged unscathed. This lead to a similar expression, "Nuking the Fridge", which was one of the top buzz words of 2008.

Brands and businesses "jump the shark" and "nuke the fridge" all the time, often in a desperate attempt to reignite growth. They abandon what made them successful and drive away their most loyal consumers.

In her wonderful book, Different, Youngme Moon applies "Jumping the Shark" to product categories, which often reach a point of product proliferation where they leave their consumers behind.  Bottled water is a classic example of this.

"As these categories mature, the products within them get progressively better over time, with consumers benefiting along the way. But somewhere along the line these categories jump the shark, having undergone too many plot twists and turns for consumers to stomach any more."

Youngme describes this as "a consumption trend that I contend is one of the most significant challenges facing business today."

In the rush to maintain momentum, there is huge pressure to "jump the shark".  Jumping the shark attracts new attention and feels necessary in the game of competitive one-upmanship. But the volume of attention is far less important than the caliber of attention. And more important than grabbing fresh attention is maintaining the loyalty of those already buying.

The risk of jumping the shark isn't getting eaten by the shark. It's leaving your loyalists behind.

Tom, when not cartooning (eg. for Marketing Week), is method's international managing director. Based in London, he frequently speaks at campuses, companies, and conferences about marketing, cartooning, and how to spread business ideas. (twitter: @tomfishburne)

Innovation is Not a Tool!

Managers almost always want to get a tool for innovation. Want a button to press to deliver innovation. A button on their co-worker's forehead.

There is no tool for innovation. There isn't even a strict process for innovation. Of course many consultants are knocking at your door to sell one - because it is easy to sell a tool, much easier than to sell a philosophy. Germans don't like philosophies. They need spread sheets, tools, figures, computability.

But innovation is a way of living. A way of doing business. A way of thinking. A philosophy. You cannot systemize innovation ("Trying to systemize Innovation is like somebody who is not cool, trying to be cool. It's painful to watch." - Steven Jobs, via Leander Kahney, author of Inside Steve's Brain).

Innovation is a context and a culture. Innovation is diversity, creativity, and curiosity. Innovation is letting people do what they want. Let them go - and let them want to come back with an idea.

Innovation means to grow talents in people. Innovation means to let people live up to their potential. Innovation means to break the rules. Innovation means to change the game, the field, the players.

Innovation means to start anew - not to dwarf your thinking into a tool.

lead/marke NET: Adrian Ho > "Modern Brands 2.0: Revenge of the Corporation"

Note: Brains AND Budgets! Unbeatable! Unbeatable? Please enjoy!
(lead/marke NET proudly features Adrian's inspiring posts on a regular basis.)

I mentioned a while back that I thought big corporations were starting to adopt Modern Brand strategies with a twist. Since then, we’ve found some more examples of innovation from big companies that adapt the principles of Modern Branding, but which take advantage of the specific attributes and strengths of large companies.

Some context before I launch in: I think Modern Branding evolved through necessity rather than by design. Small, innovative startups, faced with larger, better funded competition, decided they had to be more resourceful and smarter about using what they had to compete.

As a result, they developed strategies that enabled them to use their existing assets in creative ways in order to offset the fact that they had no money to spend on outbound marketing. However, this is actually a strategy that favours those who have more assets. And, if you have more to work with and you have money, this is a strategy that can take you even further. That’s what I think these examples show:

Barnes & Noble more in store.

While it’s questionable whether B&N can compete with Kindle and iPad in the e-Reader market (or even survive), I think the idea of using their one advantage – brick & mortar stores – as a place to sample content is really smart.

Hyundai Equus iPad Manual.

On the surface this feels like a giveaway but buried deep in the article was this nugget:

“… owners will be able to use the iPad to schedule a service appointment online and arrange for a pickup to take the car in for maintenance.”

Because service is one of the best places for dealers to get additional revenue, it’s clear that the real goal of this was to create an on-going channel for dealer/brand to customer communications. Essentially this turns the owner’s manual into a revenue stream and takes advantage of the fact that big companies like Hyundai have diverse partners and revenue streams to spread costs over.

P&G Connect & Develop.

Through relying upon their partners to innovate for them, P&G reduced their R&D expenses by 30% and created over 100 new products. Big companies have more partners and they have more leverage.

The GreenXchange.

You probably know about this but I think that using IP around sustainable practices to generate marketing and revenue is brilliant.

Subaru Badge of Ownership.

Subaru has an owner base that is large and loyal; one that includes lots of repeat buyers. And one that is arguably more interesting and diverse than its product. This is a genius way to use it.

IBM World Community Grid.

Like Seti@home but for solving human problems. This is IBM using its reach and customer base to connect people together to do something amazing.

Walmart Sustainability Index.

Creating change by forcing vendors into transparency around their sustainable lifecycle. This is big bad business, but for good.

Hyatt Andaz.

While Andaz is a line of hotels, it’s also a real-time lab for customer service innovation for Hyatt. When you’re as big as they are you can do a lot of experimenting.

Cisco Emerging Technologies Group.

Large companies can also create startups inside themselves. Cisco did this in 2007 with the Emerging Technologies group that behaves like a startup but can tap into the resources of a behemoth.

What these examples how are the ability for large companies to use the strategies of disruptive upstarts against them:

• They have many assets in place that they can re-imagine.
• They can use their scale to increase the impact of their actions.
• They can leverage their many properties to create lab locations and test new programs.
• They can harness the power of a large work force to generate innovation internally
• They can tap into their large customer bases to help develop their marketing

How will small companies respond?

Adrian is a founding partner of Zeus Jones a branding company that believes actions speak louder than words and that modern brands are defined by what they do not what they say. He speaks (and writes) regularly about non-com-munications based models for marketing and branding. (twitter: @adrianho)

Agility: There Ain't No App for Content!

A follow up on my "Agility: The Medium is not the Content!":

Via craphammer.

Communication Agility: The Medium is not the Content!

Everybody is talking Facebook, twitter, Social Media sites, etc. Everybody is talking fans, friends, and followers, etc. But nobody is talking about how to gather those fans, about keeping them around, about inspiring and engaging them.

Everybody is talking strategy to win people, nobody is talking strategy to keep them, to convince them to stay, to let them come back because they'd love to.

Everybody is talking tools and media, nobody is talking content.

The medium itself won't change the (advertising) world. It is what we do with the medium, how we use it, how we add meaning and relevance to the medium. It is how we gap the void between medium and brand.
It is the content and value we create that changes the (advertising) world.

Addendum

17:52hrs > "Das Missverständnis Social Media", offtherecord.