Innovation, alongside disruption are two of the most overused words in business at the moment. Like obscenity, many people have their own idea of what innovation is.
Judy Estrin wrote one of the best books about the subject and describes it in terms of hard and soft innovation.
Hard innovation is companies like Intel or Qualcomm at the cutting edge of computer science, materials science and physics
Soft innovation would be companies like Facebook or Yahoo!. Companies that might create new software but didn’t really add to the corpus of innovation
Silicon Valley has moved from hard to soft innovation as it moved away from actually making things. Santa Clara country no longer deserves its Silicon Valley appellation any more than it deserved the previous ‘garden of delights’ as the apricot orchards turned into factories, office campus buildings and suburbs. It’s probably no coincidence that that expertise has moved east to Taiwan due to globalisation.
It can also be more process orientated shaking up an industry. Years ago I worked at an agency at the time of writing is now called WE Worldwide. At the time the client base was predominantly in business technology, consumer technology and pharmaceutical clients.
The company was looking to build a dedicated presence in consumer marketing. One of the business executives brings along a new business opportunity. The company made fancy crisps (chips in the American parlance). They did so using a virtual model. Having private label manufacturers make to the snacks to their recipe and specification. This went down badly with one of the agency’s founders saying ‘I don’t see what’s innovative about that’. She’d worked exclusively in the IT space and thought any software widget was an innovation. She couldn’t appreciate how this start-ups approach challenged the likes of P&G or Kraft Foods.
Luxury QRcodes give advertisers the opportunities to be creative in the ‘noise’. This happens in two ways.
Luxury QRcodes increase the brand footprint, allowing for more brand salience
Luxury QRcodes allow for less copy on page, increasing the size of a visual advert and tagline. This allows the brand to better use the space for generating brand salience. The body copy can be on a website linked by the QRcode together with a call to action. For instance, purchase online through the website or find and book an appointment with a boutique. Both of which fit in with the wider luxury brand move to go vertical into retail. This allows them to own the consumer relationship rather than a multi-brand boutique like Harrods or Lane Crawford.
Luxury QRcodes can personify the brands
The second aspect to this is less noticeable to the casual observer. But carefully done QRcodes can personify the brand itself. The first thing that needs to be done is minimising the data enclosed (for instance using a URL shortener) in the QRcode. Then there is careful positioning of the data within the QRcode square. There were some online tools that used to help with this. The code for tools designed to do this is freely available. QRCode Monkey provides a simple version of this kind of capability.
A classic example of this approach to luxury QRcodes is Swiss luxury watch brand Jaeger LeCoultre. JLC uses some carefully placed watch components in their QRcode and the complexity of QRcodes to human eyes (rather like the visual complexity of a watch movement). It was a subtle understated modification of a QRcode that fitted right in with the brand.
‘The Golden Age of Silicon Valley Is Over, and We’re Dancing on its Grave’ – Derek Thompson – Business – The Atlantic – the golden age of Silicon Valley is considered over because it is now chasing the easy money. In reality this decline from the golden age is an evolution rather than a radical change. The golden age started its end when anufacturing left the valley decades ago. A sign of the golden age being over is that no one owns a silicon fab anymore. The reality is that the knowledge of design is wrapped up in the knowledge of making. A bigger end of the golden age sign is that even coding is outsourced to India. The migration from the golden age, to funding cheap low-hanging innovation over hard innovation is long-term. But the decline of the golden age isn’t anything you can blame Zuckerberg for, he’s merely a beneficiary
Business
Panasonic loss balloons 10-fold ‹ Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion – betting on convergence (doing it badly) and forgetting about quality. They made the mistake of thinking that people buy their brand for being the company logo rather than a complex sum of ‘Made in Japan’ quality, product design that delighted and high performance. They also tried to go for blockbusters rather than niches
Goodbye, hardwired switches and circuits: we’ll miss you (maybe) – “But there’s a downside to the indisputable efficiency of the soft key and touch screen approaches: it’s a much longer path, functionally, from initiation to final action. Perhaps we feel more removed from the consequences of our actions and how they are implemented; that’s a psychological aspect which is hard to assess.” – interesting that EET is talking the man machine interface so seriously on this
Is the 1,9,90 Rule Outdated? – Only Dead Fish – models aren’t accurate predictors but ways that we get our heads around concepts, we take them too seriously. Despite this premise some interesting data here consumer behaviour
The Dishonored Sex: German Writer Pleads For Male Emancipation – Worldcrunch – Men’s greatest mistake was not claiming a place of their own. Three words sum up the male life story: career, competition, collapse.” This may sound subjective, perhaps a tad sniveling, but statistics back up what the author writes. On average, men in Germany die six years earlier than women. Interestingly, the author points out that where the lifestyle of both sexes is equivalent — among monks and nuns, for example, or those living in Israeli kibbutzim – there is no such difference in life expectancy. Interesting perspective.
How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet – its not dead but its not growing and its attached to a rotting corpse, a bit like Yahoo! Finance and Sports. Everything else outside Asia should be lit up and burnt
Worries mount as Nokia burns through cash | Reuters – bit of a non-story. If Nokia doesn’t turn things around in the next 24 months, it’s game over anyway whether they still have cash in the bank or not. Microsoft can’t wait that long
I am doing some part-time study at the moment and teamed up with some of my fellow students to look at gamification trends. We had a grand total of just over 2 1/2 hours to score sources for information about gamification and its use in marketing.
Gamification is only new in respect to the way one looks at the problem rather than a new, new idea. When one thinks back to the early days of the web and the way AOL chat room moderators where incentivised this employed gamification before the concept was discussed. In it’s present form however there hasn’t been that much research done about it.
Gamification the way we now understand it from a digital marketing perspective probably goes back to the work done at Carnegie Mellon University about Games With A Purpose.
The incentives that seem to work best are in order of priority:
Status
Access
Power
Stuff
Interested surged in the concept of gamification from the second half of 2010, but the body of literature about it is only a small fraction of that about digital marketing AND the bulk of the literature about gamification is focused at how it can be applied from a technological or business process point of view. From a mainstream media perspective the level of interest has surged since the beginning of the year.
In terms of research, Gartner seems to have led the way in terms of predictions about the growth of gamifying activities within enterprises, this is probably why it is getting so much attention around business processes rather than marketing.
Measurement of engagement according to M2 research revolves around four aspects:
Engagement: unique visits, time spent on site / page views
Loyalty: repeat visits, invite a friend
Virality: sharing, appearance on social channel communications
Monetisation: conversion rates, purchase of virtual goods, registration
Of these four categories the few successful case studies that we found focused on engagement and loyalty. Social networks were used as a conduit and a platform for gamification layers. For instance, allkpop.com used Badgeville to drive increased engagement and sharing of their site content.
Since this is a relatively young area of digital marketing we found some serious gaps in available information about gamifying campaigns including:
Project failure rates
B2B case studies
Examples of commerce / conversion
The critical factor in planning a programme based on gamifying an action seemed to be in the selection and fine tuning of the game mechanic and how it was applied.
The presentation is on Slideshare so may not be available to all readers. More related content here.
Pete Sigrist sent over a link to 33 Digital’s take on gamification, which I wasn’t able to reference at the time. But there you can read it over at Scribd.
When I started off having an interest in DJing I went around to a a friend’s house whose older brother was into audio engineering. As well as having one of the first set of Technics 1200s I had ever seen he had a Revox B77 tape recorder. He used to record tracks on to the tape reels and then splice the tape to make tracks longer by extending breaks, or extend the breakdown or vocal hook of a track into staccato repetitions; which sounded like Max Headroom-esque stutters of vocal hook or ‘machine gun’ drum breaks.
Splicing tape took patience, practice and a modicum of skill to achieve. At the time however it was the Revox B77 tape machine itself that I fell in love with. These machines were made in Switzerland and felt like they were hewn from aluminum. Even the buttons were solid, giving positive feedback through a satisfying clunk when pushed and the VU meters glowed with a warm light and needles danced as the sound levels went up and down. As interfaces went, the analogue controls of the tape machine have yet to be beaten by anything that Apple has come up with. All of this belied the complex engineering that happened inside. All of this engineering expertise turned out machines that were about the best recorded sound that money could buy. Many artists today record digitally, transfer on to an analogue tape machine like the B77 and then master back to digital for CD manufacture and iTunes reproduction because of the way analogue treats sound.
Revox was a consumer facing brand of Swiss professional audio manufacturer Studer (now part of Harman International) and much of that professional engineering went into the Revox products. The Revox tape machines were professional ‘wolves’ in consumer electronics ‘sheep’s’ branding.
The B77 series of machines came out in 1979 and sported full logic controls (which made things smoother) and direct drive motors (which meant that everything got up to speed faster), but otherwise improved on the A77 of the late 1960s. The machine used 10 1/2 tape spools to make its recordings on with a tape throughput of 15 inches per second on most models which was the professional master recording standard and one could vary the speed up to over 20 inches per second if you wanted to – this operated a bit like pitch control on a Technics SL-1200 turntable.
The B77 series came in a number of guises:
The LS ran at low speeds for radio stations and call centres that needed to log everything that happened
The basic model which ran only at consumer speeds
The HS which ran at professional tape recording speeds
The PR99 (Mk I, II and III) which were designed to be more edit friendly and had less knob controls which could get in the way of the manual tape splicing process
All of this engineering came at a cost and the Revox B77 weighed a proverbial ton (actually closer to 20Kg for the machine itself plus whatever you carted it around in, like a studio rack or a flight case)
Quarter inch tape recording isn’t dead, the tape is still made around the world by Quantegy, RMGI, ATR Magnetics and Jai Electronic Industries. Otari Inc still makes an analogue studio master machine and Denon still sells a similar machine for broadcast purposes in Asia.
In addition, high end studios still use multi-track digital reel-to-reel machines when you want to record to 48 tracks as the time code technology and audio encoding technology used in them is superior to more modern computer-based solutions. More related content can be found here.
Ferdinand A. Porsche, 76, Dies – Designed Celebrated 911 – NYTimes.com – Butzi Porsche dead. Butzi Porsche came from a family of engineers. His grandfather led the original team behind the Volkswagen Beetle. His father had been part of that engineering team and went on to found what we now know as Porsche. However, Butzi Porsche wasn’t engineer but a designer with technical chops. After an infamous meeting of the Porsche family, no members were allowed to work at Porsche. Butzi Porsche didn’t get to do more after he designed the 911. Instead Butzi Porsche started Porsche Design. Butzi Porsche did product design for other companies. Porsche Design also came out with its own products with Butzi Porsche designing watches, glasses and more. Butzi Porsche resigned from Porsche Design in 2005 due to ill health.
Why Are So Many Americans Single? : The New Yorker – single living was not a social aberration but an inevitable outgrowth of mainstream liberal values. Supported by modern communications platforms and urban living infrastructure: coffee shops, laundrettes
Kraft break-up yields marketing shift: Warc.com – the break-up is ironic when you look at the trouble they went to, in order to buy Cadburys and then break their business down broadly into Cadburys + Jacobs Suchard vs Kraft US.
HK’s rich hesitate to have babies | SCMP.com – interesting takeaways: didn’t want the emotional commitment, time poverty, financial stability / too small a living space and concerned about the local environment not being suitable for children. It was interesting that the education system was given such a hard time, given that it’s better than the UK system (paywall)
agnès b. | VICE – great interview with French fashion designer agnés b
Marketing
Fueling the hunger for The Hunger Games – The New York Times – really interesting comment: …during the 1980s you bought the poster and once a year went to a convention and met your people for something like Star Trek (and Star Wars). It misses out the fact that you are likely to have had real-world friends that you would have talked about it with as well – marketers now seem blindsided to the real-world
