Archive for the ‘Required Reading’ Category

Seems like J&J have latched onto the “P meme” with Kimberley Kadlec (J&J) speaking to purpose, presence, proximity and partnership.

Here’s the mashup:

• Purpose: One the same page here but with a twist. It is so much more than emotional. This is the vital connection between marketing and the experience the customer has. Emotion is the outcome from focusing your brand on how it makes customers feel.
• Presence: For J&J this is social. For me it is mobile – I refer to it as Place. Meet the customer wherever they are. Mobile, digital displays, 3rd party digital, sensors, ATMs… the third screen is the new force in the media wars.
• Proximity: This is J&J’s mobile. Instead, here I have Publish – every brand will be defined by content. Content is the new wrapper. Without content, brands are souless. We need our customers to wrap context around our brands. Doing so turns them into magnets.
• Partnership: I like how J&J speak to this. Wisdom in the crowd. Good and right on. Here I speak to Participate. Brands must drive engagement to win. Brands that only have purchasers become weak and atrophy over time – great brands strengthen through the participation of their customers. They harness customer insights to innovate, grow and improve.
• Given I merge proximity and presence – and beleive everything is implicity social by design, I add in Play. In short, if it aint fun, they won’t do it. Gamefication is also about harnessing network effects. In short, getting your customers to market on your behalf by encouraging them to bring their friends and family into the fold.
• I have a fifth P – : We are well past mass customization and into the era of mass Personalization. Great brands win online by making the product and content hyper-personalized and hyper-relevant. They mine big data to do this. They use relevance engines to tune and adjust content.

So, different Ps, similar message. And one I will be speaking about at AdTech here in Sydney next week. Looking forward to that.

Interesting move by Facebook to acquire Microsoft’s Atlas capability. As Facebook continues to evolve its measurement tools and services this could be valuable as they revamp the core technology. By owning the ad server they should be able to better track ‘attribution’ (what we do after we see an ad), even if we don’t click on the ad. Better insight into conversions equals a bigger slice of the advertising pie.

You can read more over at Facebook.

Corporate blogs tend to pass from hand to hand – each new generation of owner takes on the success of the prior builders, writers and creators. Brian Lusk didn’t let that happen.

I remember meeting Brian when Rd2 and the rest of the gang created the Nuts About Southwest Airlines Blog. Eventually, I moved on to new projects. One day, out of the blue I got an email and call from Brian to tell me that Nuts had made into into the Blog Hall of Fame and to thank me for helping make it all possible – he was really excited. I think this was a couple of years after the project had launched. The fact he remembered reflected his love of history and telling the story – the fact that he made the call reflected the fact he was a decent guy. His first post makes me smile.

When Brian passed-away we lost one of the good guys. Social media is full of celebrity types – heat seeking publicity barons, thinkers not really doers. Brian wasn’t one of them. He breathed the SWA ehtos – decency, hard work, fun. I was lucky enough to work with him for a brief moment in time.

Wherever you’ve gone mate, safe flight.

Lets be clear. PCs are not iPads. iPads are not PCs. iPads are not TVs. TVs are not iPads. Smartphones are not iPads. iPads are not smartphones.

So why do people get them confused? Simply they assume one is canabilzing the other so they are the same. I’ve yet to meet a single person, A SINGLE PERSON, that doesn’t have a PC running somewhere. Many are planning to upgrade or change their PC. Truth is, I would expect to see PCs and iPads roughly equal in shipments.

Funny thing is, I’ve chatted to plenty of people that watch and read more on their iPad and as a result aren’t investing in new TVs, home phones, books etc. That seems too hard to analyze and talk about so the PC gets a good lod fashioned analyst bashing.

They are wrong. PC are sales aren’t suffering as a result of the iPad. They are suffering because of:

1. Lousy design innovation
2. Poor customer experience
3. Lousy connectivity and networking
4. The Microsoft / Intel duopoly funding the industry has come unstuck
5. Neither Microsoft or Intel have sufficiently innovated
6. Lack of new and compelling apps driving upgrades

Where this isn’t happening – PC gaming for instance — the market is vibrant. I’m banking on the PC industry waking up, throwing out a generation of product line management that got it wrong and blazing a new path. That might be asking too much.