lead/marke | ralf schwartz

Marketing Lacks the Start-Up Gene!

Our @wiwo-column just went online:

"Ein Marketing mit erdrückendem Korsett aus starren Strukturen, Prozessen und Ritualen passt nicht mehr in die heutige Zeit.

Das Marketing benötigt das 'Start-up-Gen', um zu neuem Leben zu erwachen."

Please read the full post at Wirtschaftswoche.

Got an Idea? Take it to Kickstarter!

Yes, you know Kickstarter. But did you imagine how potent it may be to 'kickstart' your ideas, innovation, start-up?

"This wristwatch for geeks project asked for 100k US$ in funding. They have passed 10 Million US$ now! And its still 8 days to go. Incredible!" - Via Markus Breuer.

Have a close look at the above Kickstarter project:
Pebble: E-Paper Watch for iPhone and Android.

Apple and Samsung: 99%(!) Share of Total Phone Market Profits

"Of the vendors tracked (public companies who report mobile phone divisional performance), Apple obtained 73% of operating profits, Samsung 26% and HTC 1%".

All quotes and jpg via asymco.

Again it is about disruption:

"So if the industry is booming but the majority of participants in the industry are loss making (and surprisingly so) then what is going on?

There are two answers: new market disruption and low end disruption".

"In about six months, the word 'tumblr' will eclipse the word 'Blog' in Google popularity."

Via john, tumblr's president.

More leadmarke posts about tumblr please find after the click.

To Disrupt Your Industry You Have to Disrupt Your Lunch

Let's innovate! - how often did I hear that in my consultancy. We all talk, we all brainstorm, we all are engaged, motivated, committed - till lunch.

- We talk about that after lunch.
- Lunch? Why have lunch? We want to change the world.
- Of course, but after lunch. No revolution with an empty tummy.

After lunch.

- I need a break. No revolution with a full tummy. Just have to check my eMails. Oh, a client called, I have to call her back. Let's meet tomorrow again. Maybe next week. Let us sleep on it.

- But ... we wanted to disrupt the industry.

- Yeah, we do that later. I have business to do. Daily business, y' know.

- Then let us meet during lunch time. You have to eat, or? We can talk.

- Yes, but my daily business tires me down, I have to relax, think about something nice, challenging, rewarding, the future, ...

- Yes, let's do innovation, disruption, breakthroughs!

- Lunch, is my comfort zone. That is sacred ground. I will call you on that innovation and disruption thing. It will be great, we will do it right after getting rid of that daily stuff ...

...

You want to disrupt industries, but you cannot disrupt lunch? You have a long way to go. You want to disrupt industries, but you do not want to disrupt your own comfort zone?

That industry is your comfort zone! Think about that.

Start Disrupting Industries

I had to quote Michael's entire post for you:

"You either build something that makes the world a better place or you don’t. There are complete industries built on creating arbitrary value for the world (investment banking). And there are complete industries built around innovation and creating value for the world (technology).

If you’re an entrepreneur where your success is built around the value you create for the world (e.g. Apple) , you have an opportunity to disrupt entire industries. The world doesn’t need another “Groupon for X”; we need more companies disrupting archaic institutions like healthcare, education, insurance, government, and banking. We need more companies like Uber that receive cease & desist letters from their city to shut down. And more companies like ProFounder, Votizen, BankSimple, Art.sy and Massive Health that utilize the power of the web to democratize entire industries.

So, the next time you think about starting or joining a company, think about your individual impact on the world. You have a real opportunity to make it better." - Michael Karnjanaprakorn

You may prolong Michael's list of industries by energy, automobile, telecoms, publishing houses, ... almost every industry coming to your mind.

Design as a Means of Business Improvement

"Design is shrinking the gap between what a product does and why it exists.

Designing is not just about picking the right font or gradient. Stop thinking about design in terms of wire frames or visual style; it is about the product as a whole.

Designing is figuring out the purpose of your product and how you orient everything else around it. And that means that everyone within a company plays a role in the design process.

And that means that everyone in a company needs to learn design literacy. It’s a hard task. Everyone tells their MBA-wielding friends that they should learn to code: “Anyone can do it,” or “It’s going to be the new literacy.” People think code is the basis of a working product. But what about design? How often are people told that they should “learn to design”? 

While everyone involved should know how design works, they should also understand that it can be practiced on anything you make.

The design instinct, above all, is about viewing the world around you as a place filled with opportunities to add more thoughtfulness and care.

Thus, your organization deserves to be just as well-designed as your homepage, and your company’s tweets as crafted as your account confirmation emails.

Which is to say that design should be considered a facet of everything you do, as well as a means of improving your business. Imagine if your site were to slow down. What would you do? You’d try to make it faster, or find an engineer that could. You’d make a conscious design decision to make your site quicker to use, because you understand that doing so will make your offerings more accessible and user-friendly.

Apply that principle of improvement to everything else." - Sahil Lavingnia

Via collaborativefund.

The Ultimate Brand & Business Challenge: The Digital Dump

Via GOOD. Click for a larger view.

Mark Zuckerbergs Erfolgsregeln @wiwo

Ich habe in unserer Wiwo-Kolumne mal etwas zu Mark Zuckerberg, dem Netz und der Dringlichkeit des Wandels für alle anderen geschrieben: Mark Zuckerbergs Erfolgsregeln.

brandpoems(3): Dear Brand, "If Your Dreams Don't Scare You, They're not Big Enough"

Via ralfschwartz. Via workman.

[L/M NET] Helge Tenno > "The next 80% (manuscript to slideshare presentation)"

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

 

The next 80%

View more presentations from Helge Tennø

Intro / gap

- According to Microsoft people have moved on, they have explored and adopted online communication / connected technologies to such a degree that they’re online habits are almost unrecognizable compared to only five years ago.

- Think about that, five years ago most people didn’t know what either Facebook or smartphones were.

- We have to understand that people have an adoption mindset and culture – our history is a history of embracing technology, and then having the technology adapt to us. People have always been on the move, and will continue to do so.

- Contrast this to companies who calculate and protect. Businesses aren’t people, but they have to operate within the same world, they have to understand individuals and apply to their way of thinking and doing. This is where the gap begins, and especially these last five to ten years.

[L/M NET] Tim Kastelle > "Eight Business Models, and Why They’re Important"

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

 

The term Business Model is one that gets thrown around a lot these days. Even though it might sound like a buzzword to you, it’s important to understand what a business model is, and how they are useful.

One of the confusing things about the business model concept is that there are a wide variety of models of business models, and it seems as though everyone that talks about them makes up a new one. This can be frustrating if you are trying to figure out how to use the concept.

At their core, all business models address this questions: how do we sustainably deliver value to our customers? In this instance, the sustainable part refers to your organisation – how can you deliver value so that you’re still around in the future?

Apple's new patent: Fuel Cell System to Power a Portable Computing Device

Via jesuisperdu.

"[According to the Telegraph newspaper, tech giant Apple have just filed for patents which could result in some massive technological advances. From the looks of it, the patents will allow Apple devices to be powered by hydrogen, meaning they could go for weeks without charging. Named “Fuel Cell System to Power a Portable Computing Device” and “Fuel Cell System Coupled to a Portable Computing Device”, these patents are essentially the same technology used by satellites to remain charged and powered. Apple released the below statement with the filings:

“Our country’s continuing reliance on fossil fuels has forced our government to maintain complicated political and military relationships with unstable governments in the Middle East, and has also exposed our coastlines and our citizens to the associated hazards of offshore drilling.]

[via HUH.]"

Unendliche Dummheit - Geht Kopieren über Innovieren?

(Note: This is a post for The Third Club)

In 'Edge'*, meiner Lieblings-Publikation, las ich gerade folgendes Zitat. Ich möchte es hier als Gedankenanstoß wiedergeben, als Aufforderung, es kritisch zu hinterfragen, nicht zuletzt weil sich die Reflexionen des The Third Club auch um die Beobachtung immer seltener werdender Innovation drehen:

"A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we've seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely.

What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet.

We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by.

And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard.

My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers." - Mark Pagel, Edge

> Dass Facebook und Google dumm machen sollen, hat man ja schon öfter gehört. Verallgemeinerungen, die einem wenig helfen. Was aber ist mit dem Netz als Ganzem? Erzieht es zur Kopie? Verleitet es zur Kopie?

... bitte bei The Third Club weiterlesen ...

 

* Edge: "To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves." Eigendefinition Edge

 

Ross Dawson: "2012: 12 Themes - What to expect in the year ahead"

2012: 12 Themes - What to expect in the year ahead

View more presentations from Ross Dawsn

Never Trade Innovation for Transformation

Of course - and especially during these darker days - it is very tempting to become more streamlined than ever to save your resources for later ...

But what 'later' if you stop innovating now. There will be no 'later'. There will be even more lay-offs, more restructuring, more consolidation.

More than once you transformed your product into a range, transformed the range by adding even more taste flankers, transformed the flankers into oh so different target groups. Weakened your product's quality by replacing the more expensive ingredients, calling it a major upgrade.

And you paid the price. Diluted your product's benefit(s), diluted your brand's image, destroyed your price advantage, literally killed your premium positioning within your traditional target group and beyond.

You still call that innovation. It ain't.

Wake up. You cannot trade innovation for transformation. And - in case you never innovated in your career - you cannot stay with transformation for your brand's life. This will end it soon.

Start breaking the Rules now!
Innovate!
Become a Spark!
Change the Game!
Leave a Mark!

Or your brand will die!

Addendum

Suggesting (to Lyss in the comments below) to read a closely related post reminded me to add it directly here: Why do we stop Living at the Age of 5?.

Steve Jobs' 10 Commandments to Manage his Creative Process

Via hitenshah.

By Leander Kahney. Click for a larger image.

See also Dieter Rams: "We Design Nature" - Video and his 10 Principles of Good Design.

Entrepreneurship: The Present Order is an Unreliable and Cowardly Indicator of the Possible

"There are businesses that succeed by doing traditional things slightly better than the competition.

And there are businesses that redraw the landscape entirely, creating needs we never knew we had and remoulding our sense of what we have to have in order to be happy …

Entrepreneurship depends on a sense that the present order is an unreliable and cowardly indicator of the possible.

The absence of certain practices and products is deemed by entrepreneurs to be neither right nor inevitable, merely evidence of conformity and lack of imagination…" - Alain de Botton, WIRED

Via wearethedigitalkids.

@TheThirdClub - or: To All the Brave Entrepreneurial Wo/Men: Creativity & Innovation Desperately Need You!

(Note: This is a cross post with my distinctive leadership blog)

We just founded The Third Club!
Get to know more about it here (ya, it's German).

(Polaroid by Douglas Wilson > available here) 

At the moment we are 12 brave wo/men - but want to allure all brave wo/men out there! Just to give you a very small hint on what we are talking about please inhale the following list.

(Yeah, I know, some 20.000+ great people are not on that list.
But you do know: there is no definitive list of great people.)

This is not about names. The personalities beyond them will give you a pretty good picture what I am talking about. They are the wild-card characters of entrepreneurial personalities and spirit, of motivation, engagement, and dedication I would love to see @TheThirdClub:

[L/M NET] Helge Tenno > The Game Changer: Presence & Proof

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

 

What we have done up till now is limit our thinking of what online can do based on a narrow view of what marketing can do. But what happens when marketing changes?

Traditional advertising and design has one goal: to deliver a promise, either based on what the consumer wants to become, or what the brand wants to become. All traditional marketing, advertising and design is built around this core idea: the transmission of an idea from a sender to a receiver. Inside this mindset digital offers some abilities that are new, and speeds up some abilities that are old. But in essence digital is nothing more than a technological option – a choice between newspaper, billboard, TV, radio or internet ++.