Developments in smartphones have finally made mobile a viable revenue-generating channel for marketers. Phones are increasingly the gateway to the online world, now that consumers readily use them to download video clips, listen to music, network, play games and search the internet. This year, mobile internet users are predicted to eclipse 1 billion worldwide with mobile commerce expected to reach $2.4 billion in sales.

Yet, while most marketers understand and appreciate the emerging and accelerating opportunities for relevant, real-time, on-the-go engagement between their brands and their customers, mobile marketing remains a story of great, untapped potential, according to recent research.  Whether it is a $10 million budget or a $10,000 budget, having a mobile presence is a must to ensure that every opportunity is taken to engage with customers.  However,  a majority of the marketers have yet to launch either a dedicated mobile-friendly version of their website or mobile app.

Mobile marketing must be more than a me-too exercise.  Each brand must understand what it wants and needs its mobile marketing channel to deliver.  Just under 30 percent of marketers see mobile as a means of driving more web traffic, according to research, but a majority see increased audience interaction as the primary benefit of their mobile marketing strategy.  Just over 20 percent see mobile as a means of driving traffic to a store or other point of purchase, leveraging higher conversion rates through handheld devices.

Brands, however, should attempt to understand existing mobile activity on their websites before formulating a strategy.  In particular, they should move beyond simple session-based metrics to tools which enable them to study the behavior of visitors accessing their websites on mobile devices.  For example, it is important to understand which devices are being used to access your website. It is clear that at present iPhones and iPads are by far the dominant devices across all sectors, followed by Blackberry and Google and all other devices.  With the different operating systems on mobile devices, marketers should understand how their customers are distributed across the different platforms and then focus their mobile strategy accordingly.  For example, some operating systems do not support Flash on a web site and different application stores require separate development efforts.

Understanding visitor behavior, overlaid with knowledge of which devices they are using, will uncover areas of improvement and optimization, such as page design, navigation and loading times and opportunity, such as launching a mobile site or app aimed at certain devices or behavior types.  For example, do you know how many of your customers are using their mobile devices simply as a research tool?  And, how many are using them for transactions?  What are the search terms they are using? For example, customers who search for “discount” and “cheap” can and ought to be treated differently to those who type in “quality” and “luxury.”  How do Blackberry users navigate around your site compared with customers using an iPhone?

On average, the bounce rate for site visits from a mobile device is nearly 10 percent higher than online site visits. A user interface designed for smaller screens and easy navigation are necessary features to attract visitors and keep their attention.  Having the ability to track how mobile visitors interact with the site is the first step in understanding what areas may need improvement.  Too many brands still treat mobile marketing in isolation, when it ought to be considered as another channel alongside email, paid search, natural search and social media integrated into the Marketing Mix.

The time for “soft pedaling” on mobile is over and the smartest brands are already experimenting with location-based services (lbs), augmented reality and QR technologies to leap ahead to the next stage of mobile marketing and commerce.  The challenge to brands of adding yet another new marketing channel are numerous – in many organizations, marketing and IT departments are already overloaded and overspent – but marketers must understand and capitalize on the mobile environment or risk losing the race.

This month, I’m looking up and realizing that I’ve been running a marketing consulting (agency) business for 19 years.  When data suggests that only 5% of businesses make it to the 10-year mark, I’m quite satisfied with where I am and who I’ve become.

I was reminded of several lessons learned over the years when reading this month’s Advertising Age and the “Opinion” article by Peter Madden.  Peter is the founder of AgileCat in Philadelphia, a small creative agency, so I thought I should share “Madden’s Lessons in Small Agency Ownership.”  Peter’s words:

1. Realize what you’re great at and do it all the time.  Realize what you suck at and stop doing it completely (and put the right person in place to do it).
2. If you want to make a point that sticks, stop yelling.  Or, keep yelling and look ridiculous.
3. Work as hard on your presentations to your staff as you do on your presentations to prospects and clients. (Wendistry words:  i.e. your staff needs to be as in-the-know and up-to-speed on your firm’s capabilities as the outsiders you’re trying to impress are.)
4. Tell your clients when you screw up and how something could have been better.  They already know you blew it, but just want to hear it from you.
5. Trust your instincts.  You can interview a prospective employee or client 10 times, and they can say and do all the right things, but if your Spidey sense is tingling, something is amiss.
6. Read Keith Ferrazzi’s “Never Eat Alone” and stop handing out your business card like a Vegas dealer.
7. One out of every 10 consultants will actually be a help to you.  Finding that one is the toughest part.  The right one probably asks all the questions you hate.
8. Do pro bono work for nonprofit organizations that are trying hard to make the world a better place.  You’ll get more out of it.
9. Put your f***ing BlackBerry/iPhone down when you’re meeting with me.
10. Write personal notes thanking people you meet with and who are in your life.
    

Knowing a brand’s value enables the CEO, investors, and other stakeholders to make better, more informed decisions.  When an intangible asset like brand has a monetary value that can be tracked, the return on a new brand strategy or an investment in marketing initiatives can be more accurately understood.

The central role of brand value in business decision making indicates the importance of using the most sensitive and sophisticated brand-evaluation tools.  The BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands is the only ranking based on a brand valuation methodology that is grounded in both quantitative customer research and in-depth financial analysis:

• It is the only ranking to be based on data about the brands; it draws from BrandZ, the world’s largest brand database, while other rankings only estimate brand equity.
• It is built up from country-level analysis, brand by brand and market by market.  Other valuations do a simple global valuation.
• It is customer focused; it measures the strength of brands, not corporations.
• It is comprehensive, with more brands and countries researched than any other ranking.
• It is predictive; prospects for short-term growth are calculated that have been proven to predict changes in value and in market share.

Walk into almost any urban high school and look around at the kids.  Roughly half of them will drop out of school.  If you, as a generally concerned adult, knew which ones, you might be able to steer them toward a different path.  But, you can’t solve a problem until you spot it, so how do you identify future dropouts?

Some Johns Hopkins University researchers, frustrated by the high-school dropout rate went looking for early warning signs among students in Philadelphia.  Poring over eighth-grade attendance records, they found hundred of students who had missed more than one out of every five class days.  Of those frequent absentees, 78% eventually quit high school.  Similarly, of the eighth graders who had failed either English or Math, three out of four dropped out.  No other factor– gender, race, age, or standardized-test scores– had the predictive power of those two patterns.

The researchers concluded that the school district could identify more than half of the students who would be likely to drop out before they even set foot in high school.

So, what if YOU could identify the early-warning signs of a business problem in your company?  What if the red flags are right there now waving at you unheeded from information you’ve already collected?

Examples?  Credit card companies have learned that by charting the “normal” spending habits of their cardholders, they can quickly spot fraudulent use.  Google executives realized in November 2008 that flu outbreaks could be detected early by monitoring the number of times people searched for terms like “flu” and “influenza.”  Your source of data doesn’t need to be high tech.  In fact, it doesn’t even have to be numerical.

Consider Van Halen.  Yes, the PHENOMENAL 80′s hair/rock band.  In its heyday, the band became notorious for a clause in its touring contract that demanded a bowl of M&Ms backstage, but with all the brown ones removed.  The story is true… confirmed by lead singer David Lee Roth himself… and it became the perfect, appalling symbol of rock-star-diva behavior.

Get ready to change your mind.  Van Halen did dozens of shows every year, and at each venue, the band would show up with nine 18-wheelers full of gear.  Because of the technical complexity, the band’s standard contract with venues was thick and convoluted.  Roth said in his autobiography that it read “like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages.”  A typical “article” in the contract might say, “There will be 15 amperage voltage sockets at 20-foot spaces, evenly, providing 19 amperes.”

Van Halen buried a special clause in the middle of the contract.  It was Article 126, and it read, “There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”  So, when Roth arrived at the latest venue, he’d walk backstage and glance at the M&M bowl.  If he saw a brown M&M, he’d demand a line check of the entire production.  “Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error,” said Roth.  “They didn’t read the contract… Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show.”

In other words, Roth was no diva.  He was an operations expert.  He couldn’t spend hours every night checking the amperage of each socket.  He needed a way to assess quickly whether the stagehands at each venue were paying attention and whether they had read every word of the contract and taken it seriously.  In Roth’s world, a brown M&M was the canary in the coal mine.

Surely, you won’t be outwitted by the guy who sang “Hot for Teacher.”  Where’s the brown M&M in your business?

excerpted from Dan Heath and Chip Heath in an article for March 2010 edition of FastCompany magazine.

Keeping a close eye on the competition is often thought to be a “big boys” game.  Many Fortune 500 companies have entire departments devoted to competitive intelligence (CI), and there’s a whole sub-industry of CI-focused management consultants to serve those departments.  Small companies, on the other hand, are thought to be too busy minding the store to mind others’.

In fact, competitive intelligence may be more important to small companies than to large ones, because small businesses feel the impact of competition more immediately and more deeply.  At successful companies, competitive intelligence is part of the day-to-day operation… part of the fabric of the enterprise.  However, before you can begin to understand the competition, you have to be able to articulate your own business’s goals and strategy… knowing both where you currently stand in the marketplace and where you would like to be.

Determine who matters.  Keeping tabs on your rivals, formally or informally, usually occurs one of two ways.  Either you are monitoring them regularly, updating your store of information as circumstances warrant, or you are suddenly faced with a surprise (in the form of a new challenger, say) that requires a prompt response.  Though most business owners can identify their current top direct competitors, they assume what exists today is going to be true tomorrow.  However, don’t try to watch more than five companies at any one time or you may find yourself overwhelmed.  Spending too much time on competitive analysis is spending too little time on being truly competitive.

Focus on what matters.  Analyze four aspects of a competitor’s behavior:

1. its goals (or “drivers,” often expressed in terms of revenues or profits)
2. management’s assumptions about the market
3. its strategies and tactics to achieve those goals
4. its capabilities for meeting the goals

And, for the most part, tracking strategies, tactics, and capabilities only requires collecting information on your competitors’ products, marketing, and operations.

Formalize the process.  Start by designating someone to oversee the CI effort.  It doesn’t have to be you the owner/founder, but your employees must know that you back the effort.  Establish a repository of competitive information that is accessible to anyone on staff who could contribute to or benefit from it.  Finally, senior management should periodically review and analyze the data that is collected.  Competitive intelligence in and of itself has no intrinsic value.  The value accrues when you use it to make better decisions.

Gather intelligence in the news.  Sign up for email alerts about the search terms of your choice from Google News which tracks hundreds of news sources.  CI experts say the best sources are very often small-town newspapers or local business papers (like Dallas Business Journal) that avidly cover hometown companies, particularly when they are the big fish in a little pond.

A competitor’s web site is an obvious place to begin.  After you study the site itself, deconstruct it by using Fagan Finder, a bare-bones but very useful research site.  Plug in the competitor’s URL into the search box at the top of the page and you’ll be able to learn other site that link to it, which can possibly reveal alliances, networks, suppliers, and customers.  Business data aggregators such as Dun & Bradstreet and InfoUSA provide detailed company information, including financials, although the services are not cheap.  Often, however, local academic and public libraries have subscriptions (in libraries, InfoUSA is rebranded ReferenceUSA) and are willing to share the resources with local small businesses.

Finally, your company should engage in a management-wide SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) every 6 months.  Requiring your team to be somewhat dispassionate about strengths and weaknesses, allows for the potential reveal of possible opportunities and threats and illuminates the strategic space that remains open from competition.

“If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster.” ~Clint Eastwood

Kierkegaard once said, “Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.”  In my opinion, this is especially vital when your company is looking to be innovative.

Everyone agrees that innovation is a good idea.  Nearly everyone also agrees that innovation is the best (if not sometimes the ONLY) path to growth, profit and market leadership.

So, if innovation’s such an amazingly awesome thing, why is it so difficult for companies to actually do it?  Are there hidden obstacles?  Preconceived notions?  Cultural roadblocks?  Yes, yes, and yes.  In a nutshell, people generally don’t like change.  To really be innovative requires a whole bunch of change, flexibility, and willingness to take on the unknown.  All three of which can be career (and company) makers or BIG-time breakers.

Out of the gate, you and your company have several innovation issues to overcome… Complexity, Giving Up, and Negativism.  Complexity, or what I like to call “scope creep,” happens because people usually succumb to the thinking that “if we’re going to be innovative, we have to do things radically differently than the ways we’ve been doing them.“  Which is true, but it doesn’t mean making a mountain out of a molehill.  Complexity expands the work required for innovation.  And then, it drowns your organization by draining it of the strength, vitality, and clarity of vision required for true innovation.  Expose it; measure it; and, remove it to refocus your team on new and better products/services, new and better customer service, and new and better marketing to get that innovative message out.

Giving up… the “I can’t” and “We won’t” syndrome.  If you try something innovative in your company and it works the first time, you really didn’t innovate.  Let me say that again… relentless persistence in overcoming real challenges is at the core of innovation.  The innovative company must be committed to a goal that is a “stretch goal.”  It must move the organization beyond where it currently sits.  Just like the pain endured by the contestants on The Biggest Loser, it’s gonna hurt.  Your people are going to want to quit.  You have to be committed to making your company known for innovative thinking and results to attract and retain top people and to continuously produce relevant products and services.  The days of the “cash cow” company are over.  (Note the risks of the “cash cow” company… complacency, turf wars, and no control over spending… yikes!)

Finally, negativism can be wrapped up in two predominant thoughts:  “We’ve tried that before and it didn’t work” (so, we’re still using the horse & buggy) or “We don’t want to try that because we don’t think it will work” (we’re scared because we don’t have a guarantee).  Millions of ideas have been tried before the technology to make them work was sufficiently developed.  Today’s smart phones were imagined decades ago when TV series Star Trek used a flip-open hand-held communicator.  Technology and human imagination advances rapidly, making possible what didn’t work before.

The change required for innovation is the only constant and the rate of change is accelerating.  To be a successful company, embrace change and see it as an enormous opportunity because while there is no guarantee, innovation marches on.

Came across an interesting post by Suzanne Vara, Managing Partner at Kherize5, titled “Is Vanity Killing Your Blog?“  It’s good… go read it.  I’ll wait.

The point about the pressure to constantly strive for more, create fresh new content, put forth more “conversation and connecting” into the WWW is incredibly timely.  Essentially, with all this talking, who is listening?

We all have been taught that the way to be the most interesting person at the party is to be the most interested (in others, the host, the food, etc.), which means asking questions and enabling the next logical and engaging comments from the other person (in other words, basic etiquette).  Gut check:  Does this type of etiquette happen on your blog?  On your Facebook fan page?  In your Twitter stream?  Hmmmm…

With a tagline live young, the Evian web site continues to reflect its brand of fresh snowy French Alps mountain water.  “Water is essential to life.  It’s a fundamental element to your health and well-being,” says Evian, and to me, the pictures of beautiful mountains and beautiful people reinforce this message.  Cool, soothing, blue, and icy whites just scream health and freshness.

Which is why I’m also surprised by the “Fun Stuff” tab on their site.  Here you can use your cursor as a finger to draw on an icy, fogged over window, to create your specially designed snowflake storms, or to drag-and-drop a “skier” on the slopes and watch him ski down.  Is this video (or any of these tactics for that matter) ON BRAND?   Let me know what you think…

Happiness is contagious, and that “contagious” quality is where marketing meets the market.  Not only does the Coca-Cola brand have a “lock” on happiness (after all, what other beverage can claim branding rights to Christmas?), Coca-Cola’s latest video, The Happiness Machine, is a perfect example of how viral happiness can be.

The brand’s first viral venture captures what happened when they placed a very special vending machine on a college campus.  The video launched on January 12 and topped a million views yesterday based solely on people sharing the video through Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and word-of-mouth.  The people in the video and people spreading the video will forever share a memory that cements the association of happiness with Coca-Cola.

I know I have great memories of Coca-Cola from when I was a kid at my grandparents’ house… it was all they every drank (Sorry, Pepsi).  I remember so clearly the hot Texas summers, and then, in the midst of the sweaty afternoon, there was a silver tray with ice-cold bottles of Coke and silver mint julep cups.  My mouth still waters as I evoke the memory.

How can marketers create these special moments… this magic?  And not just “viral video” magic, but that everyday life magic of the emotional connection that bonds people with your brand.  Can we conceive of the complete story and lead people down a path of creating smiles?  When you strategize on the reach of your marketing campaigns, do you think about the object, service, or experience in a way that creates an effect well over the horizon?  As marketers, that is our challenge and mission.

Coca-Cola’s new video…  The Happiness Machine

Vanity Fair magazine couldn’t have predicted how their February 2010 cover would fly off the shelves… due to a shirtless photo of Tiger Woods by Annie Leibovitz.  So, the question for today is how deeply do Personal Brands affect Corporate Brands?

To quote Vanity Fair’s Buzz Binnsinger, “In an age of constant gotcha and exposure, Tiger had always been the bionic man in terms of personality, controlling to a fault and controlled to a fault, smiling with humility and showing those pearly white teeth in victory or defeat.  In the world of pro golf, even fellow pros and other insiders didn’t really know him, because he didn’t want anybody to know him.”

“Some pro golfers, such as Phil Mickelson, wear their hearts on their sleeves during press conferences.  Mickelson could talk candidly about his game and the impact of his wife’s having breast cancer.  He could also be snarky and pissy.  Never Tiger.”

“Tiger learned very well to talk forever and say nothing,” says Joe Logan, a co-founder of a web site called MyPhillyGolf.com, which covers the game both nationally and in the Philadelphia region.  For Woods, Logan remembers, an emotional response to a flawless round was “I had a pretty good day.”  He never got rude or rattled.  He never got irritated with a stupid question, in large part because he knew that the camera was always on him.

So, if he was unknowable to the writers who covered him, he was equally unknowable to virtually all the other golfers on the tour.  Early on, he had learned that one of the rules of pro golf is to conform, a commandment only heightened in his case by his being black in a white man’s game.  What is clear now, however, is that he lived a very abnormal life all his life in a sport in which guys are very conventional, and if you are not conventional you get ostracized right away.  Whatever demons lurked within, he kept them well hidden.  I think too well hidden.

So, once Tiger returns to golf, which most think he will, he’ll simply be another player trying to win a tournament… Not the $100 million a year super-endorser.  What about Nike and their “wait and see” approach?  Nike took this approach when Kobe Bryant endured consequences for his extramarital affair in 2003-04. Kobe Bryant’s situation was more severe, as criminal charges were filed. Eventually, charges were dropped. At that point, Nike and Kobe Bryant resumed their relationship.

However, in the case of basketball, Nike has plenty of other celebrity endorsers.  And, for some reason, the general public seems to accept (and sometimes even assume) that basketball players will not be monogamous… almost like it’s a part of the “street cred.”  However, Nike Golf has been built around Tiger Woods.  There is no other since Jack Nicklaus that has been the clear golf brand leader like Tiger.  Even though Nike Golf’s branding activities with Tiger have been focused on Tiger’s golfing abilities, not his personal life, my question is:  Will his actions tarnish the brand?

What do you think?

Original post January 20, 2010 @ 13:54pm

January 23, 08:50am, LATEST UPDATE:

So, by now those of us who travel for business in and out of Dallas/Ft. Worth International airport have seen the latest and greatest Accenture… elephants and frogs??!!??!!  Who in the world thought this was a brilliant creative idea?  Doesn’t jungle animals just scream “High Performance. Delivered.” to you?

Yeah, I understand all Tiger’s crap came out hard and fast, so I can just imagine the scene of dozens of Creative Directors in a room desperately scribbling on notepads.  Suddenly one of them shouts, “I’ve got it!… Everybody loves animals!”

So now when you now rush past these innovative displayed of marketing creativity in airports nationally by February 1st, let me know if they make you stop, stare, and think, “Man, I really need some consulting!”