Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.
I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.
Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.
I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.
I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.
Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.
I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.
I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.
Adobe Experimenting With Semantic Autogeneration of 3D Worlds – ReadWriteWeb – Adobe has come up with a great application that goes way further than Microsoft Photosynth “Infinite Images is that it can assemble a world out of any collection of photos, logically connecting them based on the semantics of their descriptive tags. So, for instance, you could take a diverse group of street scenes and stitch them into something resembling Google’s Street View, except that you might start navigating down a street in London and find your self standing on a street in New Delhi.” Very cool and Adobe is the creative defacto standard so this makes sense. – I was thinking about how multimedia used to be assigned to an ‘author’. The idea of language (be it tags or prose) being used to do semantic autogeneration offers the opportunity to tear down the wall between adaptations and a story’s author.
Design
A New Look for McDonald’s – McDonald’s is rolling out new designs for its food packaging to “create unique personalities for our menu items by telling a story about each one.” Storytelling through packaging design
James Earl Jones has one of the most distinctive voices in the entertainment industry as you can hear in this Sesame Street clip. You might recognise from his appearance in Conan the Barbarian film, but James Earl Jones has a surprising variety in his career across film, television and stage performance. James Earl Jones has done voiceover work for everything from Disney’s The Lion King to CNN station idents.
Hollow Spy Coins – talk about niche businesses, this is definitely on the long tail. You have to admire their dedication to engineering this.
Economics
Boomtown of Dubai feels effects of global crisis – International Herald Tribune – Until recently, credit in Dubai was growing by 49 percent a year, according to the Emirates’ Central Bank — a rate almost double that of bank deposits’ growth. That unnerved some bankers here, who felt it could lead to a collapse. “In the U.S., the challenge is about keeping the banks going,” said Marios Maratheftis, chief economist for Standard Chartered Bank. “Here, the economy has been overheated, a correction is needed, and it’s about making sure the slowdown happens in a smooth, orderly manner.”
Klein Verzet: Freaking doomed – the premise is that the demand for shipping of raw materials like coal, bauxite and iron ore have ground to a stand still and soon even the factories of China will be a lot quieter – so the economic outlook is nothing short of ammegeddon
P&G to launch washing gel that cleans at 15 degrees – Brand Republic News – Brand Republic – “According to P&G, Ariel’s Cool Clean campaign encouraged more than five times as many customers than normal to switch to low-energy washing programmes, with Ariel customers twice as likely as the average consumer to wash at a lower 30 degrees temperature (28% of Ariel customers in 2007 versus 13% of those using other brands). P&G has a partnership with the Energy Saving Trust, which encourages people to use energy efficiently and reduce their carbon footprints.”
I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Data Debasement | PBS – cloud computing versus DBMS, interesting reading, I need to go back and look at it a few more times to understand it fully. But initial take is that parallel computing as well as parallel processing changes how computing works and databases have to be adapted (like Oracle’s Grid database concept from the tail end of the dot com era and cloud computing. It’s the failings of Moore’s law rather than progress that is driving this change
Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman – while I have sympathy for some of what Mr Stallman says, his argument misses the point about the benefits of social software. Open formats and APIs allow you to move from one service to another as needs must.
I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Collateral Damage | PBS – interesting take on the mobile market, not one that I necessarily agree with, but interesting none the less. Cringely expect that Microsoft Windows Mobile software will fail and has some interesting ideas around the why. I think Microsoft has everything to play for with enterprise users and can leverage items like security authentication and Outlook email access – they might not be dominant but they could still be in with a shout
Beginning of end of megapixel marathon – Pixel count gives phones and cameras the ‘Dixons Factor’ – being able to be sold easily by some pimple-faced oik; but doesn’t mean you will have better quality pictures. I have a digital SLR which takes pictures at 5.1 megapixels and a phone camera that will do the same – no prize for which one takes the better pictures.
I saw this notice talking about 87000 possible combinations and was reminded of the car industry. Back in the 1990s, I remember being told that car maker Volvo had over 30,000 combinations of vehicles available as passenger cars. This included: body shell variants, diesel and petrol engines of different sizes and power, manual or automatic transmissions, interior design options, in car entertainment options, safety features, paint jobs, body accoutrements. Since then Volvo has hinted at electric vehicles and now has at least two models of SUVs.
While I don’t doubt the statistical capability of Starbucks marketing department, I was surprised to see that the coffee shop could serve up 87000 possible combinations of drinks based on relatively few options. This could be even larger in Starbucks other markets like Hong Kong or Japan, where there are more beverage varieties like Milk Tea or Matcha lattes, and more seasonal variation such as sakura season and mid-autumn festival alongside the usual Starbucks products.
All of which brings home the impact of mass-customisation to a business. How would the Starbucks EPOS (electronic point of sales) system handle 87000 possible combinations? How does this impact the training of their baristas? Is there an operational model like a decision tree for these coffee options?
I wonder is there a Starbucks long tail? What is the split between cold coffee drinks and hot drinks? Has this long tail altered itself over time, as the popularity of flat white drinks have taken off due to the influence of Australian coffee culture? How does the long tail affect the relative prioritisation that Starbucks might put on the different ingredients that go into their drinks? Mass customisation has gone mainstream. What does this degree of customisation mean for other service and retail businesses? How does this compare to what is seen in personalised products like NikeID or MyAdidas?
Stephen Davies posted a thoughtful update on how he sees online PR in terms of its challenges and opportunities. Stephen feels that online PR is poorly defined amongst marketers and argues that techniques involving the creation of backlinks and traffic (via search) ‘involve large numbers and eyeballs, and less about changing attitudes and enhancing reputation.’
I agree with Stephen that online PR and by extension PR itself has a problem in terms of definition. For many people that I used to meet PR meant ‘free advertising’. In fact, my former boss David Pincott used to use those very words. By extension, looking initially at the measurement of eyeballs and backlinks, one could assume that online PR was considered to be ‘free SEM’ and for many marketers I think that may be the case.
This position is supported by public relations thinkers in some quarters, for example Grunig, James E. and Hunt, Todd. Managing Public Relations defined public relations as ‘the practice of managing the flow of information between an organization and its publics’.
Which ties into traffic and back links as a measure in the most literal sense. However, many smart marketers who understand what a brand is, and appreciate that there is more to marketing than the transactional cause-and-effect of direct mail or pay-per-click still look at back-links and traffic numbers.
The reason why is that backlinks and traffic numbers are surrogate measurements that you can use to infer some sort of value for attitudinal change and reputation. Don’t think of Google as a search engine but a reputation engine (which is the way many consumers treat it anyway). This reputation is based on the votes cast by webmasters (more accurately anybody who creates content on a site like this). We cast our votes by posting backlinks. This is very similar to the concept of whuffie that Cory Doctorow came up with in his book Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom which talked of a society purely based on the currency of reputation, whuffie is that currency.
Traffic numbers derived from search are also a measure of popularity and ‘resonance’ of a company’s brand with the audience. Now these are crude measures, but:
The data is relatively easily derived from analytics tools
Very easy to represent in PowerPoint
Is provided in an easily understood lexicon for the marketers peers in other business functions such as sales, operations and finance
PR people have been slow to adopt a customer-centred tool: Net Promoter as a measure despite the fact it provides a measure of attitudinal change and reputation because so much of the customer experience is outside the PR manager’s control and the cost of measurement would consume a substantial part of their meager PR budgets.
Let’s think about another PR definition this time from the UK’s professional body for PR professionals: The Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR). The CIPR defines PR as:
Public relations is about reputation – the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you.
Public relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.
The problem with this definition is that an organisation’s actions play an important part in defining reputation from product design, sourcing and supplier behaviour, customer service, packaging, marketing, sales and channel partnerships.
Public relations becomes nebulous because it becomes the whole business. PR by definition then becomes too important to be left to PR people.
I disagree with Stephen that online PR is ill-defined by marketers, instead I believe that PR is ill-defined by PR thinkers. Further, that the PR industry hasn’t managed to fully grasp and resolve its identity crisis by coming up with an effective alternative.
That’s also the reason why you never see PR as a descriptor on this blog, instead you see me alluding to marketing and social engineering in the sub headline at the top of this page. More related posts here.
While reading The Three Tensions I was reminded of a plaque that I used to have. It was one of them demotivational poster designs.
When I was leaving a previous agency I was given the plaque as a leaving present. On the plaque is the message ‘If you can’t solve a problem, there is good money to be made in prolonging it‘.
Consultants and management thinking yo-yo from one area to another. For instance, from the 1960s to the 1980s conglomerates were the fashionable way to go, for instance ITT, Xerox (who had an insurance business to balance their cash flow) and Coca-Cola who owned a film studio. Now there is a focus on the companies core competences, in fact organisations often outsource so much of their infrastructure that they scarcely have any physical existence.
An extreme example of this was Enron, who was advised by management consultants to move away from being a natural resources infrastructure company to a more asset light structure. Throw in some corruption and the rest is history.
Dominic Dodd and Ken Favaro in their book The Three Tensions aim for a more balanced approach to moving a business forward. The three tensions of the title are:
Profitablity vs. growth
Short term vs. long term
Whole vs. parts
The authors relied on long term research of a number of companies. The balance that the book advises businesses to obtain is not easy. The book also makes it easier to diagnose the faults within an organisation. More on the book here. More business related posts here.
aim for a more balanced approach to moving a business forward. The three tensions of the title are: