Influential Marketing Blog

The Undiscovered Marketing Potential Of A USB Stick

My laptop doesn't have a CD-ROM drive. Like many owners of smaller notebooks, I don't see the value of having that piece built into my computer as I would rather save the space and have a lighter and smaller machine. As netbooks become more and more popular and the rumored tablet becomes a reality (either from Apple or other manufacturers), larger computers with built-in CD-ROM drives will be less and less common.

Despite this shift, most content you can purchase today is only offered in two forms of distribution. You can either download something off the web, or you can buy a physical disk of music or a dvd or a CD-ROM disc of software to run on your computer. With downloadable content in particular, you need to decide the night before if you want to download an entire movie to my portable media device or laptop, and also need to make sure you have enough hard drive capacity to store all the huge files you need to download. What if you cannot rely on a fast consistent web connection and you don't have a CD-ROM drive in your computer? This is the single biggest missed opportunity of the content distribution universe - selling content to a captive audience in a way that they are able to use.

Taking my own example, the moment when I have the most time to get content like this is at an airport. Getting ready for a 14 hour flight to Sydney last year was the first moment when I started thinking a potential solution to this problem - and landed on the one thing that all laptops have - a USB drive. What if I could buy content that I wanted to watch or listen to on a USB stick and simply plug it into my computer?

Rather than a disk, I would happily pay a bit extra to simply get a USB stick with the movie on it to watch. Or use an interface in a store to select a combination of music, videos, and any other kind of content to download onto a custom created stick that I could take with me. In fact, this could even be a kiosk. Choose your content, get it written to a stick and take it with you.

From a marketing point of view, this stick could be branded, the videos could include embedded advertising and the stick itself could also include marketing materials such as PDFs or product videos. These sticks could even include some form of copyright protection so that the content providers would not have a barrier to making their content available in this format. What do you think? Could a store that offered content to purchase on USB sticks ever work? As someone who will probably never again have a portable computer with a CD-ROM drive, I certainly hope so.

Social Media & The Axe Murderer: How Privacy Is Evolving Online

Everyone knows there are certain pieces of information that you just don't share online, right? What if you used Twitter or Foursquare to broadcast your location at a bar, and an axe murderer was reading your stream? You just signed your own death sentence. Or how about sharing details about where you live and or pictures of your family vacation, or even your innermost thoughts and emotions? All are things that are getting easier and easier to share online, both purposefully AND inadvertently. Combine this with a new generation used to a different standard of privacy and you have a recipe for a major cultural shift that may redefine what marketers can do to reach consumers.

A short time ago, a major concern holding back technology advances was the fear of being perceived as "cyber-stalking" your customers. If Amazon sent you an email with a discount for that book you put in your shopping cart a month ago but never purchased, that was weird. Getting a text message from store you were walking past at just that moment would be crossing the line. So companies avoided doing it. They HAD the ability to better target, to deliver more customized messages and to measure it efficiently ... but they choosing not to use it. And for good reason, as using those technologies would have alienated their customers.

Today, there are several signs that some of the long held beliefs about what constitutes private information are changing. With them are coming new opportunities for marketers to offer better experiences that are not intrusive to customers but rather fulfill a need in a new and unexpected way. Here are just a few of the reasons this shift is happening and how it may apply to your marketing:

1. The rewards are clear. As with any new behaviour, the incentive to adopt it must be clear. In the case of sharing seemingly private details online, the reward for most people who adopt this behaviour is twofold. Firstly they add their voice and experiences to the ambient awareness of their social network, but secondly and more importantly it allows for unexpected interactions, such as the chance meeting with a friend who also happens to be in the same coffee shop, or the comment from an old friend on a photo that you haven't heard from in a while.
2. Someone actually cares. Whereas before people may have been able technically to share their real time thoughts and whereabouts, there would not have been a critical mass of their social network who could see it. Today, the majority of your friends and family can connect with you online and this means that broadcasting your whereabouts actually matters because someone you care about will actually see it.
3. Updates are easy. Part of the reason people are sharing more frequently is that updating their social networks has become much easier. Now with an app, a touch of a button and a few words you can send an update. That makes it more likely people will do it more frequently. As frequency increases, sharing becomes an inherent part of your routine. So now you have people who will, as a matter of course, check into any restaurant they walk into on Foursquare without even thinking about it.
   
4. The risks seem lower. Everywhere you turn there is a new service promising to protect you if you ever get into trouble with identity theft. Credit cards will refund you any disputed amount, covering you in case someone tries to use your accounts illegally. Though it may not be true, the risks of sharing more information about yourself online certainly SEEM lower than ever before. You may debate whether this is true, but the perception is certainly influencing behaviour.

There are likely other reasons why people are adopting new behaviours of sharing their lives online, but there is no disputing that this trend is on the rise, and it may very well open up the doors on a style of marketing that we all used to shy away from ... but may now be able to embrace.

Can Domino's Turn Around Their Cardboard Reputation?

What would you do if you surveyed your customers and they all said you suck? It may seem like a worst case scenario, but companies are faced with this challenge more often than you would think. It is not easy to hear, and in part it is the reason many companies simply don't survey their customers that often. It is easier to look just at metrics like sales or growth and use those to measure success. After all, why bother to ask customers what they really think if you are making money? The problem with this logic is that it doesn't help you to spot threats to your business and plan for the future. Making money is a temporary state ... and one that can be more fragile than you realize.

For Domino's, their business has been built not on the quality of their food but on the promise of their service. Anywhere in America (and many other parts of the world), you can pick up the phone, order food and you will get it delivered to your house in 30 minutes or less. This convenience spurred a growth rate for the brand that made it (at one point) the fastest growing franchise in the world. The only problem was, people thought the pizza tasted like cardboard. This was one of only a few revelations that were revealed through some customer surveys and testing the brand completed.

Usually, the only way I would have known about something like that is by working on the brand or having been part of the surveys. In this case, I know the same way that you might ... because Domino's has been featuring these testimonials as part of their new "Pizza Turnaround" advertising campaign:



As someone who has written often about authenticity and personality in business, I love this campaign. It uses real Domino's employees as spokespeople, talks about how much they care about their product (and how hurt they were to hear criticism such as their sauce tasting "like ketchup.") More importantly, it offers a backstory on how the brand is trying to be different and delivers it in a believable way. The microsite they created even features a live Twitter stream of conversations mentioning their new Pizza, including both good AND bad reviews right on their homepage.

While the reviews, which are pulled directly from Twitter, are mixed - the message from Domino's is clear: we listened to our customers, improved our product and now we stand behind it. One recent tweet they featured (unedited) on their homepage said "tried new dominos pizza with the cheesy base, it sucks, too much cheese means a change of shirt and way too sickly."

Whether or not you like their new pizza, you have to appreciate a brand that is willing to stand behind their new product so much that they can allow direct criticism on their own site without feeling the need to shut it down. Despite having some negative reviews, if you look at the conversation both on their Facebook site and on Twitter - the majority of conversations either share a positive review, or an intent to try the new pizza. There are, as usual, a small minority who are pleading to have the old pizza back (which have been met with the mocking suggestion to spread ketchup on the box to recreate the old pizza) - but the new pizza is clearly winning many fans online.

The real lesson to watch for anyone in marketing, though, will be how Domino's weathers the negativity in a campaign like this where they put their customer's thoughts and opinions front and center. It's a bold experiment in actually standing behind your product and letting people have their own opinions about it.  If it works, perhaps we'll see more brands willing to take this approach.

3 Non-Tech Business Trends From CES That Matter For All Of Us

The end of last week was the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) which attracts more than 120,000 people from all parts of the technology industry together to Las Vegas to share their latest innovations and visions for the future. NBC was reporting live from the tradeshow floor, all the big tech publications were there and anyone who works in the technology industry spent the weekend either talking about all the things they were doing, or wishing they were in Vegas to be part of it.

The hype this year was definitely around the promise of 3-D TV technology, with ebooks following as a close second. But what about if you are not in the technology industry at all? Can a show like CES still offer some lessons worth paying attention to about the future of business as a whole? That was one of the questions I entered the show wondering, and this post is based on what I learned. The short story is, CES is much more than a technology show about gadgets and gizmos. It is a lens on the year to come in business as a whole, and from its annual spot in the first week of January - it comes at a time when the business world is hungry for lessons in the new year. Here are 5 that stood out for me:

1. Fostering Content Creation: At the Sony booth, there was a tower with an open platform that bloggers could do interviews on (coinciding with the launch of their aptly titled new video camera, the Bloggie). Intel had an Upload Lounge with a live DJ and free wireless.* At the NBC booth, they once again did their blogger lounge are with chairs, lap cooling fans and a live plasma screen above each chair with a blogger's name and affiliation. Lenovo, too, recreated their extended Blogger Lounge at the Aquaknox restaurant in The Venetian hotel. What these companies were already figuring out is that if they can create a venue for content creation, they can likely encourage creators to share more branded content about them and their efforts.

2. The Necessity Of Accessories: There was a time when an "accessory" was considered insignificant. It was the chain that went on your glasses or the keychain you used to keep your keys together. With the number of gadgets and technology that we all carry around, one interesting lesson to be learned from CES was just how important these accessories are becoming - and they can be almost anything. From jeweled covers for earphone buds to anti-surge TV power adaptors we now live in a world where the "accessory" could cost more than the item it is meant to accessorize. The iMac, in its day was little more than an overprized accessory for your first iPod. In 2010, accessories are no longer optional. This trend is only going to increase - with innovative products like the FlipCam and Kindle giving rise to a range of secondary markets making all kinds of accessories to complete your experience.

3. Facilitated Sharing: There is a lot of talk in the business world about the promise of "augmented reality" - the idea that you can enhance your day to day life with rich interactive content and information that adds more context to your real life experience. Whether or not you see promise in this concept, one of the founding principles that makes it work is the idea of  facilitated sharing or making it easy for people to share content and opinions with one another. Copia was one such tool, allowing people to read ebooks with one another and share notes. As the year goes on, I suspect we will see much more of this.

See the rest of my images from CES on Flickr here ... http://www.flickr.com/photos/rohitbhargava/sets/72157623081814859/

The Colorful Secret Women Don't Want Us To Know

This is just a short post about a brilliant viral marketing campaign that is happening right now which you might have already seen. Women around the world are just posting a color in their Facebook status updates and sharing it with their girlfriends only. The whole thing is designed to raise awareness about breast cancer and (presumably) to remind women to get examined. the colors are meant to be what color bra you are wearing at that particular moment. There are at least three reasons this is turning into a highly viral thing:

1. It is a secret. Keeping this limited to women only helps make it something women are more likely to pass along.
2. It needs explanation. Unlike many other things that you get right away, seeing just a color and nothing else in a status update is cryptic. It invites you to ask why ... and therefore gets you talking about it.
3. It isn't branded or monetized. The marketer in me immediately looks for the brand or organization behind this, but it seems that no one knows - and therefore this is already managing to spread to a level that perhaps would have been impossible if it was claimed by any one organization.

As a man, I don't know much about this campaign, never saw one of the status updates, and have no way to participate ... but here I am writing about the marketing lesson it offers anyway. If the goal was to raise awareness about breast cancer, I'd say it's working like a charm.

What Vegas Can Teach You About Marketing

In a place best known for accidental weddings, expensive hangovers and overly plasticized lounge singers it may seem that there isn't much to learn when it comes to marketing. In fact, to amend a Vegas cliche, it may seem that what works in Vegas (for marketing), only works in Vegas. That's not entirely true, though. Looking at some stalwarts of Vegas culture, there are actually many unexpected lessons that you can learn which may help you in your own marketing challenges. Here are just a few:

1. Only reward behaviour you care about. What do Casinos in Vegas care most about? You probably managed to answer that without too much hesitation ... they want you to gamble and gamble frequently. That's why all casinos have no windows or clocks inside. Day could fade into night, and you might never realize it. A core part of their ability to keep you gambling hinges on a so-called loyalty program that most casino's call their "player's card." A players card works mostly like a frequent flier card, except unlike those frequent flyer cards where you can earn points for dining, or buying gas, or paying your water bill - a player's card rewards only one thing: the money you spend on gambling. This single minded focus on the behaviour they really want to encourage may strike you as misguided, but there is no denying its marketing logic.
2. Know what you can afford to give away. In Vegas, the term "comps" refers to activities that are complimentary. Comps may include room nights, food and show tickets. The interesting thing about Vegas, however, is not that comps exist - but that they are so prevalent that ticket holders with comp tickets have their own lines. If you look at hotel room nightly charges, on average, they are significantly lower than any other major city in America. What marketers in Vegas know is that they can afford to give away quite a few things in order to make it back based on the time that you spend in their property. While your economic model may be less profitable than gambling, the lesson is an important one. Too often marketers worry about making sure to make some amount of money on everything they have rather than understanding what they could give away without problems.
3. Create lots of entry points. The one thing that is immediately obvious about Las Vegas is just how many entrances most places have. You can go in through the front, the side, the back, underneath, above and (it seems) any way in between as well. Parking is usually free, and escalators always lead into a casino and only go the opposite direction in some places. The end result is that no place has only one front door. Whether you are talking about a physical location, or an online destination, the lesson in this is clear: invite people into your experience in as many places as you can.

5 Non-Obvious Marketing Trends To Watch In 2010

In these last few weeks of 2009, one of the things that nearly everyone is doing is getting ready for what is to come in 2010. Like many bloggers, I have already started reading some "predictions" for 2010 - which often take lessons learned for 2009 and project them into the next year. For my own part, I have done these sorts of blog posts before and the tough thing is to highlight things which will be relevant not just on the first of the year, but throughout. It's not about observations of things that are hot right now - but about what people can and should be thinking about throughout the year.

To that end, here are five trends that I haven't yet seen discussed elsewhere, but which I believe will be top of mind for marketers in 2010 if they aren't already. As with any "predictions" like these - I would love to hear your thoughts about the five I have chosen, or any others I might have missed. I'll add the best to this post as additions ...

1. The Importance Of When. The popularity of Twitter has helped marketers to focus on one element of social media communications that might have been easy to otherwise forget - the importance of when. In a flood of communications and messages, sometimes what you say matters less than when you say it. Consider the significance of this for a moment. So much of our focus as marketers tends to be on the messaging, but how much attention do you pay to things like time of day that your messages run, or concepts like dayparting for any paid media spends? As real time communications begin to happen on many more platforms than just Twitter through tools like status updates on Facebook and LinkedIn and mobile messaging - the question of when is one that marketers will finally start devoting more time and energy towards. This will help marketers to be more relevant to the moment, create new opportunities for publishers to sell media space at premiums based on time, and adversely affect media which has no understanding of time.
2. Rebirth Of Usability. There was a time in web development near the end of the nineties and early 2000s when usability was hot. Jakob Nielsen was on every marketer's must read list and usability testing was something marketers paid a lot of attention to. Then somehow usability started taking a backseat to many other hot trends online, from interactivity online, to widgets, to social media. Usability became "old school." The real business benefits of usability, however, are undeniable and in 2010 I believe many brands will start to rediscover this fact and add usability back onto their list of priorities for online efforts. More broadly, I think this will signal resurgence in the attention marketers are paying to their entire interface and mean that in addition to adding the latest social features to a site (which will continue to be popular), they will also focus on how the interface is actually used.  
3. Marketing With Customer Service. Some of the biggest social media success stories for brands in 2009 are those where social media has been completely linked with customer service (Dell, Comcast and Zappos are all examples of this). So much so, in fact, that the transformative power of social media within an enterpise may not even be a marketing function at all. That's a big admission for a marketer to make, but sometimes the best marketing you can have is great customer service that delights your customers and gets them sharing their experience with everyone they know. That's critical to word of mouth marketing, and requires coordination from within an organization beyond just the marketing people. In 2010, I expect to see the walls between these two continue to break down, as marketers realize that the moment when their messages either come to life or fall flat hinges directly on the quality of the customer experience.
4. The Rise Of Voluntary Ambassadors. Marketers today are throwing around terms like "brand ambassadors" all the time, with many marketing budgets for 2010 including a line item to foster these ambassadors. The problem is, in 2009 this term was often another way of referring to the practice of getting bloggers to write about your product or service. Amazon Top Reviewers and Power Twitter users are just two examples of big influencers who are not bloggers. A true ambassador program is about unlocking the passion of people who actually have some affinity for your product or service. These ambassadors may not be bloggers - but they do have a passion for your product or service and more importantly, they want to share their opinions. These voluntary hand-raisers are your real ambassadors, and the brands that can find and unlock these voices are going to be the ones who are truly successful with their ambassador programs.
5. More Businesses Find Their Personality. Clearly this is a passion point for me - talking about how companies need to have a personality. After all, I wrote an entire book on it. But as self serving as this fifth trend may seem, the reason why I include it here (and have in previous years as well) is that each month that passes I see new companies uncovering this importance for themselves. In 2009, I saw three large brand RFPs all asking for counsel on (among other things) how to have a stronger personality. Brands like Ally Bank in the financial sector and Intel* in the technology sector demonstrate the real power of personality in terms of making your brand more human and believable ... and at industry events the topic of personality (or authenticity or humanity or some related concept) is still a frequently discussed topic. The longevity of this trend is the reason I wrote my book, and also the reason why I keep it on my list of trends to watch for 2010 even though many of you have heard it from me before.

* Disclosure - Intel is a client of Ogilvy PR and a current client I work with.