The purpose of research
The purpose of marketing research is to gain insight that is commercially informative and valuable; helping to identify issues, enhance business decision making and improve competitive performance.
Filed under: 2010, July | Leave a Comment
Tags: Quote, Quotes
Resize images free online
I’ve just used a useful image optimisation tool that allows you to upload and instantly download a resized and reformatted version of your image for free. As I didn’t have Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop to hand, it made a quick and useful alterntive.
Try Image Optimizer: HERE
Filed under: 2010, July | Leave a Comment
Tags: Image Optimizer, Tools
A review of the latest Skype app, which takes advantage of the new Apple iPhone 4′s multi-tasking feature, has appeared on CNET. The app provides free WiFi and 3G phone call connectivity.
Read the review on CNET: HERE
Filed under: 2010, July | Leave a Comment
Tags: Skype
Planning Triangle
Account Planners love triangles, they frequently appear in our presentations. This was a thought sparked by a conversation earlier today.
Filed under: 2010, July | Leave a Comment
Tags: Account Planning, Planning
Today is the 41st anniversary of the first moon landing. Apollo 11′s successful mission was carried to the moon via a Saturn V rocket, still believed to be the most complex item ever assembled in the world. The Saturn V was comprised of some 3 million individual parts.
The Apollo 11 mission was the first of six successful lunar landing missions.
Filed under: 2010, July | Leave a Comment
“You’ve got to explore everywhere. You’ve got to explore the sky too.”
Source: Mick Jagger, discussing his dissatisfaction in making Exile on Main St., arguably the greatest Rolling Stones album ever.
Filed under: 2010, July | Leave a Comment
Tags: Quotes
Faultless Pitching
I recently enjoyed working on a pitch for a Caribbean island tourism account.
Research provided some useful insights. The creative concepts produced were more differentiating and appealing to consumers when compared to the the existing campaign. The media plan was clearly very cost-effective, and the team genuinely worked and presented well together.
Coming second in a competition is of course never the result that one wishes for; just ask The Dutch football team. But, having come second, the extra source of frustration in the case of the pitch is the lack of feedback that might help next time.
The client’s comments were quite minimal and frustratingly positive. They said the pitch was so close they couldn’t fault us on any area!
I guess I’m left hoping that the pitch, which was part of a statutory review and included the existing incumbent agency, wasn’t simply a process to justify keeping the existing agency. I don’t yet know if this has been the case.
Sometimes it would be easier to learn your work had a fault somewhere, so there was a focus for improvement. But maybe that needn’t always be the case?
Filed under: 2010, July | Leave a Comment
Heard it all before
Filed under: 2010, July | Leave a Comment
Tags: Robbie Burton-Sanigar, Heard it all before
Pedestrian Power
Over the last few years several innovations have suggested light may be generated for buildings or streets through man-made power. The child’s see-saw designed to power schools in Africa, or the street lighting (mostly ambient or art installations) readily come to mind.
But another use for pedestrian power, where human movement is used to generate electricity, is illustrated more colourfully in the Toulouse nightclub shown below.
Read the story about the Sustainable Dance Club: HERE
Photo: Robin Utrecht
Filed under: 2010, June | Leave a Comment
Tags: Design, Pedestrian Power, Sustainable Energy
Jellio, the designers behind the Gummi Bear lamp and lots of fun home and office furnishings have added some more design work to their site.
Take a look: HERE
As well as selling designer furniture and household accessories to the public, they also take on bespoke design briefs for companies.
Take a look at some of their custom corporate work: HERE
Google asked for some lava lamps for their office. These lamps aren’t the most innovative pieces of Jellio’s design work, but they gives an indication of the sort of company Jellio keep.
Filed under: 2010, June | Leave a Comment
Tags: Design, Jellio
An interesting Jeff Bezos interview, courtesy of Fortune Magazine is: HERE
Given the recent sales levels achieved by the Apple iPad (3 million in under 3 months) and iPhone 4 (I forecast as 4 milion in under 4 weeks), and their inclusion of the iBooks app. I believe Kindle sales and Amazon profits may struggle to continue to enjoy the same level of growth they’ve recently enjoyed.
The Fortune article:
Jeff Bezos’s mission: Compelling small publishers to think big
Posted by JP Mangalindan
June 29, 2010
Jeff Bezos has been dismissed before. For most of the dot-com boom, he was assumed to be a one-shot wonder, inches away from having his bookstore, Amazon.com, (AMZN) extinguished by Wal-Mart (WMT). Now, with Apple’s (AAPL) mad rush into books and readers, people are starting to wonder again. But Bezos, judging by a sit down interview with Fortune last week, isn’t sweating.
So far, the numbers show he doesn’t need to. Last quarter, the company reported a profit of $299 million, up 68% from a year ago. Its ebookstore, which started with some 60,000 titles, now offers upwards of 600,000. And though the company won’t disclose hard numbers about its Kindle user base — Bezos has said Kindle owners number somewhere in the millions — its visibility in the hands of executives, soccer moms and twenty-something professionals reinforces its high-profile status as a go-to device for voracious readers.
But last week, Amazon slashed the price on its second-generation Kindle from $259 to $189 to undercut Barnes & Noble (BKS), which dropped the price of its own eReader, the Nook, from $259 to $199, and announced a Wi-fi-only version for $149. Earlier this week, Barnes & Noble reported a larger-than-expected loss totaling 89 cents per share, eight cents more than what analysts had predicted. It significantly lowered its earnings forecast for 2011 but indicated it would shift more of its resources to the growing ebook market.
And while Bezos doesn’t view the iPad, and tablet devices overall, as a threat — “It’s really a different product category” — the iPad’s overnight success, along with Steve Jobs’ announcement that users had downloaded 1.5 million books in less than 30 days is a sign that the competition for eReaders’ dollars could be heating up – and soon.
One day after Amazon slashed the price on its Kindle, Fortune met with Bezos at Amazon’s new headquarters in downtown Seattle, a sprawling 10-building campus of glass, steel and concrete, to discuss the company he built from scratch and where it’s going from here.
Fortune: Obviously, the Kindle’s price drop was in response to Barnes & Noble’s price cut on the Nook. Did the iPad and its overnight success play a role, too?
Bezos: No. The iPad… I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices. It’s really a different product category. The Kindle is for readers.
Fortune: So far you’ve been capturing consumers. Amazon accounted for about 80% of all electronic book sales last year. How has it grown so fast, and can you keep it up?
Bezos: It’s hard even for us to remember internally that we only launched Kindle a little over 30 months ago.
Our strategy with the ebookstore is ‘buy once, read everywhere.’ If you want to read on your iPhone, if you want to read on your BlackBerry. We want people to be able to read their books anywhere they want to read them. That’s the PC, that’s the Macintosh. It’s the iPad, it’s the iPhone. It’s the Kindle. So you have this whole multitude of devices and whatever’s most convenient for you at the moment.
We think of it as a mission. I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it’s not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that’s not why you do it. You do it because you have something meaningful that motivates you.
Fortune: As the devices mature and the market grows, do you think the idea of what a “book” is will shift?
Bezos: I think the definition of a book is changing. It’s getting more convenient. Now you can get a book in less than 60 seconds.
But in some ways, books are also staying exactly the same. The whole narrative isn’t changing. The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.
There’s another way that it’s not changing, and that’s that the book — the physical book — is designed to disappear and get out of the way so you can enter the author’s world. So when you’re reading a physical paper book, you’re not thinking about the ink and the glue and the stitching. All of those things vanish so you can focus on the author’s words. The Kindle’s designed to be the same so when you’re reading, the whole device vanishes, so that you’re left with the author’s world.
Fortune: In the past, you’ve been a big proponent of lower prices for ebooks and an open opponent of the book publisher agency model, which allows the publisher to set the final retail price whether there’s an intermediary retailer or not. Now that you’ve switched to an agency model, will ebookstores like Amazon’s get hurt?
Bezos: No. First of all, there are a bunch of publishers of all sizes, and they don’t all have one opinion. There are as many opinions about what the right thing to do is as there are publishers. So you’re seeing that some of them are being very aggressive on prices, pricing their books well below $9.99.
Others are trying to do everything they can to make prices as high as possible. And what you’re going to see is a share shift from one group of publishers to this other group of publishers.
Fortune: Do you expect a significant share shift? When do you see that happening?
Bezos: It’s a significant shift and we’re seeing it already.
Fortune: What about your work continues to “rev you up”?
Bezos: When I wake up every morning, during my shower time, what I’m thinking about is new things that we can do.
We’ve got Amazon Prime. Customers love that. How can we make that program even better? What kind of inventions can we do to reduce our cost structures and our fulfillment centers so we can afford to sell products for even less? Those kinds of things are incredibly motivating for me, and I like the rate of change, I like the opportunity, the “canvas” upon which we can invent new things. And I am not alone in Amazon in that regard. We have a big team of people who are genetically predisposed to have fun while inventing new things. It’s sort of in our DNA.
Fortune: If you stopped someone on the street five years ago and asked them what Amazon was, they’d probably say it was an online bookstore. What do you expect people will say when asked about Amazon five years from now?
Bezos: I would hope people would say that Amazon is earth’s most customer-centric company, and that we work backwards from customers. Many companies sort of look at what their skills are and they work forward from their skills. They say this is what we’re good at, and this is what we’ll do. It’s a very different approach from saying here is what our customers need, and we will learn whatever skills we need.
Fortune: Speaking of picking up new skills to address consumer needs — you’ve addressed some customer needs by making substantial forays into cloud computing with S3, Elastic Compute Cloud, and the Relational Database Service. What’s next for cloud?
Bezos: One of the things you’re seeing is that companies without any legacy are no longer building any data centers. They’ve already stopped. So that’s a testament to how powerful this model is. That the only people still building these data centers are the people that are temporarily corralled into that model because of their legacy. That model is more expensive, less flexible. It’s not just more expensive, but it’s also capital expenditures instead of pay-as-you-go variable costs like it would be if you were using Amazon web services.
And what we’re starting to see now — and we’ve been seeing it for the last couple of years — is big enterprises starting to use Amazon web services. So that if you ask what’s coming over the next five years, you’re going to continue to see that transition where even companies with legacy are starting to use Amazon web services. I think it’s very exciting.
Fortune: Of course, you’re also starting to go head-to-head with big enterprise with this business, right? Companies like IBM (IBM) see themselves in this space.
Bezos: We started working on Amazon web services six years ago. People forget because it’s grown so much, it’s more on our radar screens now, we’re doing it an innovative way. It’s not a me-too product. It’s a leader in this new industry, and so we don’t think of it as we’re entering this industry with all these big companies. We look at it as we’re doing something completely new.
Fortune: It’s come a very long way in a very short period of time.
Bezos: The right analogy here is the electricity grid. A hundred years ago if you wanted to run your factory, and you needed electricity, you had to become an expert in power generation. You had to buy your own electric power generator. You had to maintain it. You had to make your own electricity. And today, because of Amazon web services, you don’t have to be in the power generation business.
It’s not a differentiator for companies. So if you’re going to build your own data center and buy your own server hardware and manage all your own networking gear, and all of the things that you have to do, it has to be done at an A-plus quality level. But it’s just the price of admission. It’s not your secret sauce. It doesn’t help you differentiate from your competitors.
Fortune: In the past, you’ve said that a company learns just as much as by its failures as it does by its successes. Do you still believe that?
Bezos: Well, the key is that the company has to experiment, and what you want to try and do is reduce the cost of experimentation so you can do as many experiments per unit time as possible so you can do as many experiments per week, per month, per year as you can –and they’re not experiments if you know they’re going to work.
So you want to do a lot of these experiments, and many of them will fail, and that’s okay. Because if you’re doing enough of them, there will be some winners. That’s the only mindset you can have if you want to invent. At Amazon, we’re very focused on invention. If you look at the things we focus on, we’re never trying to create a “me-too” product offering.
And by the way, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with “close following.” It’s a very common business strategy. You just say we’ll wait. Let all of our competitors do all the experiments. Most of them will fail, but we’ll watch very carefully, and as soon as something looks like a success, we’ll follow very closely. There’s nothing wrong with that, it just happens to not be our strategy.
Fortune: It’s certainly a safer route to take.
Bezos: It’s safer, but in a fast-moving arena like the Internet, it also can be difficult. It’s not easy to follow closely. It also can be a challenging strategy. I just happen to think the exploration and inventing strategy is more fun. It’s got its own strategies, but it’s way more fun.
Filed under: 2010, June | Leave a Comment
Tags: Amazon, Fortune, iBooks, iPad, iPhone 4, Jeff Bezos, Kindle
The BBC Trust has given the green light, with some parameters, for Project Canvas to proceed.
The project puts together a partnership of UK broadcasters, internet, teleco and entertainment businesses.
The project will create an open, internet-connected, television platform built on common standards by the United Kingdom’s terrestrial broadcasters BBC, Channel 4, ITV plc, Five and communications companies Arqiva, BT and TalkTalk.
While broadcasters and telco businesses have increasingly come to engage in consumer participation, user-generated content and moderation in their activities over the last decade. Project Canvas could be the most public example of commercial enterprise adopting these practices themselves, without creating a cartel.
But the question of introducing a new closed broadcast system in the UK needs to be considered. Open standard networks have been positioned as the consumer friendly face of commercialism in recent years. But where technology has such a high barrier to entry, and where the quality of design and user interface play such a strong part in the consumer purchase decision; a closed system may well prove the most viable and implementable approach to creating an internet-connected, television platform in the UK.
If the closed technology prowess demonstrated by the BBC (iPlayer), Microsoft (software), Apple (hardware and iTunes), Nokia (hardware) and Google (online advertising) are anything to go by; a closed system with clear commercial revenue opportunities, as well as high quality of service, is the right way forward.
The idea of a closed system does however raise concerns in some quarters. The UK’s Intellect Technology Association, in a submission to the BBC Trust, said that Project Canvas risks isolating the UK as a “technological island” in a global market by trying to create a standard IPTV set-top box for just the UK.
From my point of view, TV platforms have always been islands. Sometimes they’ve been divided geographically (UK terrestrial), sometimes technologically (Sky). So where is the new news in this? What has of course happened is a significant shift in the power of production companies in recent years (when they have a hit series that is syndicated), while TV channels have been weakened (if they were only funded by advertising and cut back on programme making themselves – sometimes due to UK remit constraints).
So the thought of this mix of public service broadcasters, commercial networks and subscription service companies is a heady mix. It’s something that could put in place a new platform for TV, home comms and entertainment services in the UK.
It’s still a closed system future for UK TV. But possibly a more profitable, sustainable and high quality one; designed to benefit the consumer. Let’s hope so anyway.
Now I just need to figure out where I am going to be able to fit yet another entertainment box around my TV, so I can receive YouView.
Filed under: 2010, June | 1 Comment
Tags: FIVE, ITV, Channel 4, Project Canvas, YouView, BBC
There was a distinctive, if expensive, piece of advertising from HSBC today. They chose to make a final call for entries in their Business Thinking 2010 Programme, by placing a tracing paper style wrap over the front and back pages of The Daily Telegraph.
I wonder is this ran on all copies, or regionally? I picked up this copy in central London. The last full cover wrap-around take over of a national paper that I recall was for Microsoft. But that was on ordinary printed news stock with The Times some years ago. Wrap-arounds are a very regular feature in the Metro freesheet; which has some interesting case studies on this media usage I believe. but I’ve never seen one implemented on transparent stock before.
Filed under: 2010, June | Leave a Comment
Tags: Daily Telegraph, HSBC
Microsoft created something right with Bing; a search engine that finds what you search for and does look great, because of its background images. The launch of Bing was quite a coup for Microsoft, because they hadn’t performed well in the search engine space, but started to gain some traction with a clearly differentiated product.
Google on the other hand have launched more products than you can shake a stick at in the last few years, certainly more than anyone can name or have the time to use. Some tech blogs put the launch list at over 250 google prodcuts. But the product that fuels this appetite for innovation is the search engine that pays the bills. Google search is still king. It may have a hard time in China or wobble in India. But Google search simply dominates most western markets (where advertising revenues are most valuable).
It’s also fair to say that Google haven’t been slow at introducing new features, toolbars, algorithm improvements and a dash of fun to their core product; as last month’s celebration of the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man showed us. Google moved from using a doodle (the pictorial versions of the Google logo made to celebrate a theme), to creating a videogame version.
So no-one can say Google have been idle in innovating with their core search engine product. But today Google blinked. They introduced the option of featuring glorious photos as backgrounds to your search start page; plagiarising a core feature found in Bing. Only they’ve not just stolen an idea, as with every competitive move in technology, they’ve enhanced the feature. They’ve given the consumer choice of image.
It will be interesting to see what happens next; but one thing is for certain, the view will be prettier.
Filed under: 2010, June | Leave a Comment
Tags: Background Images, Bing, Google, Microsoft, Search Engine
I was asked yesterday about the frantic pace of change within marketing and the need to identify the next big thing through forecasting.
I’m more concerned with trying to make the next big thing happen for my clients, rather than speculating where change might occur elsewhere. But trend-hunting is always an interesting diversion and sometimes a source of inspiration or aid to competitive innovation.
Today the opportunity is for agencies to develop unique and ownable platforms, digital or analogue, that become a vital everyday part of how your client works, sells to, or services their customers. Distinctive platforms that lock each client in for the long term benefit of their profits, brand and their customers, have to be a priority for any agency. Otherwise agencies are only providing temporary or tactical aid to their clients; and this is very easy to replace.
Filed under: 2010, June | Leave a Comment
Tags: Kevin Sugrue, Account Planning, Strategy, Planning, Trends, Platforms
Refreshing honesty from Firefox
We all know the internet has foibles and things sometimes go wrong. Here is an example of honesty from the web browser Firefox.
Filed under: 2010, June | Leave a Comment
Tags: Firefox
Recent Entries
- The purpose of research
- Resize images free online
- Skype launch updated app for the new iPhone 4
- Planning Triangle
- 41st anniversary of the first moon landing
- You’ve got to explore everywhere. You’ve got to explore the sky too
- Faultless Pitching
- Heard it all before
- Stimulated by diversity; planning in a round-about way
- Pedestrian Power
- Jellio: Fun By Design – more new work posted
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