Business Quests in the Information Age

Quote of the day

"In an era of hyper-competition and nonstop innovation, the most powerful ideas in business are the ones that set forth an agenda for reform and renewal—the ones that turn a company into a cause." _ Polly Labarre, co-author of Mavericks at Work

Is old-style advertising even an option?

There's an interesting quote of the founder of GeekSquad  here that more or less defines advertising as a tax paid by companies whose products are unremarkable. This is perhaps the shortest assessment of the true nature of a practice that needs to be reshaped in a major way.
With the web becoming a truly interactive space and consumers taking more initiative (and control) how can a product owner even beging to think that investing in advertising is a more profitable proposition that investing in design and in customer experience?
In this blog, the author discusses this "death" sentence pronounced against old-style advertising and highlights something my friends and BuzzParadise believe and keep repeating to their customers and to audiences they train: if the product ain't good, there is no point trying to push whether one does so using old-style advertising and promotion or with a marketing approach that does not rely on advertising but instead builds on successful customer experience and word-of-mouth.
A product that delivers good customer experience is the minimal bsaeline below which the cost of the tax is extremely high and no return will ever come out of it. So really investing in proper product design really seems to be a no-brainer!

Mission statement up for grabs

In the glorious tradition of such fine human activities as the Bull-Shit Bingo, here is a mission statement which is up for grabs if anyone would dare use it in real life (I have actually seen a few mission statements that looked considerably worse, so perhaps this one would be an improvement now that I think of it):

"The customer can count on us to authoritatively revolutionize innovative methods of empowerment to allow us to conveniently build competitive content." - source: Dilbert Mission Generator

Promoting digital media

Jamendo's CEO sent me a link on a class dealing with Promotion 2.0 (content in French) featuring Emmanuel Vivier for Culture-Buzz, the evangelist of what I call marketing x.0, i.e. new marketing like buzz, viral, word-of-mouth.... Culture-Buzz is part of a group of companies that I am most pleased to be serving these days. The class took place at CELSA, a highly respected school of marketing and communication in France, and it provided a good comparison between the old ways of promoting music and content and the methods that are taking shape under the impulse of innovators like Emmanuel.
While the class material (accessible here and also embedded at the end of this post for convenience) contains a lot of interesting points and recommendations, there are a few aspects that are particularly worth considering:

1. the role of the customer, who used to be a passive recipient of marketing communications organized as a top-down process in the hands of people Joel de Rosnay calls Infocapitalists in his book (the English version is well under way) and who becomes an active player in the process of promotion of digital content;
2. the sequence of marketing activities that used to place promotion as a last step right after physical distribution had occurred and before the buy decision was made by the consumer, whereas today promotion starts much earlier and is often preceded by a campaign of buzz marketing in which chosen "influencers" get a preview of the product and comment it (see the campaign on Bob Sutton's soon to be published book "No Asshole");
3. the nature of communication that used to be tightly controlled and carefully created at the top or at the center of a network where the means of broadcasting used to lie, and is now rapidly evolving towards a dynamic process of conversations produced by the consumers themselves with only very limited control by the owners of the product. In fact the trend is so powerful as to have led some scholars and thought leaders to claim that brands belong less and less to corporations and more and more to their consumers (although sadly for many of us that does not concern the profits of brands we use... which may actually be an interesting idea to explore). For example, in a post about the Art of Branding Guy Kawasaki argues that consumers actually influence a lot the communication of a brand and he gives pointer about how to "flow with the go" as he says;
4. the fact that transactions over the Internet grow very rapidly and the time consumers take before making a buy decision (at least for small-ticket items) is getting shorter (so we are in fact coming closer to impulse buys);
5. a shift in the balance of power between record companies, artists and the public. Here the author of the class argues that record companies will have to change the way they see and play their role and consider themselves "co-creators of a musical experience" rather than authorities "who know what the public needs and will push it on the market";
6. being a co-creator of a consumer experience is also something that implies some form of humility, something stressed by Polly Labarre in and interview she gave about Mavericks at work the book she co-authored with William Taylor.

"If you want to create an enduring, emotional bond with customers, create a sense of shared ownership and participation among customers themselves. The more you invite people in to shape your company’s personality and products and the more you enable them to share their ideas with one another, the greater their stake in what your company does. Shared ownership is much deeper than simply listening to the customer." - Polly Labarre in an interview by Guy Kawasaki

In fact, this excellent content confirms a lot of the analysis of the trends that I had the pleasure to facilitate for Jamendo. It was early 2006 and we summarized this radical change in the way music would be marketed in a diagram that I am posting here (click on the image for full-size view). I think it shows how sound and accurate a vision Jamendo has, something that is further confirmed by recent events in distribution of online music that is not protected by DRM systems (e.g. Thomson Link in France or La Médiathèque in Belgium).

In his slide-show Alban Martin also stresses the importance of psychology, something that I see as a confirmation that value creation in the economy is becoming more people-centric or at least that one needs to take full account of the human factor in generating value. And in fact that is also something acknowledged by a branch modern financial theory that tries to embed human psychology into market models and expert tools designed to support the work of traders and fund managers.

On facilitation

Guy Kawasaki posted some excellent points on moderating a panel. It's good read for anyone who is in a role of facilitation with any size of audience. I think a lot of what Guy says is useful to consider even though I believe we all have our own very personal style when moderating. I particularly enjoyed the way he focuses on the experience of the audience in his post. It is also great to keep in mind that the size of an event itself is not that relevant especially if the content is to be made available online for a larger audience, whether that is part of the process of an initiative of one of the participants (something that is less and less unlikely).
Given that I often run workshops for customers, I would add the following points to the post:

• before starting the facilitation work, make sure you are in a stable and positive state of mind that will allow you to concentrate and manage everything that can happen in a process that cannot be without surprises;
• be prepared to improvise because sometimes you are asking a question and the reply is not exactly within scope of the question but can be interesting for the process that you are facilitating. The facilitator should be able to seize opportunities even though that may change the pre-planned structure of the event. Of course, keeping a balance between the objectives of the event and the necessity for flexibility is not always easy;
• create an environment of trust by making participants feel that although some questions may be difficult to deal with, there is no risk of impact on their image or on their reputation. I think that is a critical aspect of facilitating or moderating. That's ecause when one cannot provide the incentive of a more or less public appearance with a celebrity, then all participants must know the facilitator will keep the process under control and make a clear distinction between what they contribute to the process and who they are or how good they are.

Anyway, that's my two dimes on facilitation, inspired by Guy Kawasaki's blog. Usually we achieve a hell of a lot of good work during workshops with my customers.

"Le Web 3" conference

I registered to participate to Le Web 3, a conference that will gather top notch speakers and the most active bloggers of Europe. The interest of corporate players is also quite obvious. I plan to report on the conference, events and presentations I attend. Dates are 11 and 12 December and I will be pleased to find a couple of my current (and future?) customers there.

Monitoring Word of Mouth

Mass adoption of infotech and always-on connectivity to the Net brought about major changes in the methods and tools used by marketers. As traditional tools become ill adapted to capture the reality of consumer behavior, new research methods are surfacing, some of which will almost certainly be considered as unwanted intrusions in private life by the public.

In their wildest dreams marketers of consumer brands would want to know exactly...

1. what goes on in our minds when we become exposed to a brand's communications,
2. how we decide to buy or not to buy,
3. what characterizes our experience with the brand and the products under that brand
4. what we actually say about their brands...

Fortunately, for the time being all they can monitor is what is going on outside of our heads, what we do and what we express verbally and non-verbally (to a certain extent).

If word of mouth and buzz monitoring are of interest to you, click on the link at the end of this post to access an interesting article published in the New York Times a couple of days ago. A PDF version of the article is available here: Download 20061124_NewYorkTimes_MonitoringWoM.pdf

While I do not agree with everything the article claims (e.g. I don't think it is that easy for marketers to extract meaning out of the blogs and online forums they may be visiting and I don't think they have time to visit a significant sample of those sites in every country), I believe its general direction to be correct. It's very interesting food for thought.

read more | digg story

Capitalism 3.0 - A New Way To Think About What We Own

That's a very interesting way of looking at the economy. I like the fact that it includes in the analysis items usually considered as given and non payable. The way we used to think about the global economy when natural resources seemed over-abundant is no longer valid. Now it seems absolutely fundamental to make sure countries, companies and individuals pay for their impact on the commons. It's actually a fascinating discussion that is central to the continued presence of our species on the planet, so in a way we owe it to future generations. So in my humble opinion it is the type of larger thinking that should be part of any present and future Business Quest... particularly when the quest has major dependencies on the quality of the natural environment.

Capitalism 3.0 is about ways we can restructure our laws and rules of ownership to cover who should pay for polluting and other harmful things -- costs that our current system ignores and even encourages. The change is based on our realizing that we all own certain things in common.

read more | digg story

Reality check on start-up funding

As part of my work I often meet entrepreneurs at fairs and events dealing with entrepreneurship or related subjects. A fraction of the people I meet seem more focused on getting massive funding from VCs than on developing their business. While it is their right to do so, I feel one of the best piece of advice one can give them is to take a reality check.

The New York Times published an interesting article discussing start-ups like Meebo or JotSpot that used relatively modest amounts of money to show their offering could be a major success.
Download 200611009_NewYorkTimes_WebSuccessOnTheCheap.pdf

The trends discussed in the NYT article confirm statistics from Canada showing that the average amount of initial investment in successful start-ups is 75 000 CAD, which is more or less the average amount often quoted in the US and Europe, i.e. 50 000 €.

So it does seem that:

1. investors will agree to join forces with entrepreneurs only after the market relevance of their idea has been proven
2. there are far more investment opportunities than there is available capital to fund them
3. entrepreneurs are on the weak side of the negotiation as long as their ability to capture a sizeable market is not established
4. the pattern of risk aversion of institutional investors is such that the proof of concept will not be funded by other people than the entrepreneurs themselves and their relational network
5. the scarcity of financial and human resources that is so typical of start-ups makes it essential to focus all efforts on showing that an offering is desirable on the market by more than just early adopters, which means that entrepreneurs must also have a clear way of capturing a larger market (and in fact they cannot pursue several paths to achieve that goal as beautifully discussed in Crossing the Chasm - and I am taking the opportunity of this post to thank Philippe Back for convincing me to read that book)

On attention and my next frontier

It's been a while since I last wrote a post on this blog. That's because I was away on training and I make it a priority to devote adequate attention to trainings I attend. Actually I think devoting adequate attention and being conscious of what is happening is a good way of doing things in general... Not always easy, but most of the time extremely beneficial especially if one is prepared to take the feedback any experience represents. I think that's a good path to achieving more of the human potential we all have.

Anyhow, I am extremely pleased and proud because a fantastic trip came to an equally pleasant close with my certification as master practitioner in neurolinguistic programming. Over the past two years I spent over 60 days of work learning and experimenting with the approach and that's only part of my investment in training every year. Every single second has been extremely beneficial because I learned a lot about myself and about my limitations of today that are my opportunities for tomorrow. Crucially, I understood that tools are worthless if used without an involvement of our souls as much as of our minds and I think that's exactly true for most disciplines. For all the skills I learned, for a profound change in key attitudes, for helping me evolve my vision, for showing me my limitations, for being tough on issues and kind to myself and for teaching with heart and mind, I thank wholeheartedly the beautiful team of Institut Ressources as well as all of my classmates who dared to share a path that is not always comfortable.

To a certain extent robotized management is one of the issues we have in the business world, where there's been a lot of work done to automate processes, more or less rigidly define methodologies and structure organisational pyramids that are characterized as "flat" these days (at least in corporate communications)... There is one facet of business that is probably the next frontier: people. What would the net present value of an investment in truly happy employees be? I think innovative companies like Google or companie that heavily depend on people like Ideo must have some sort of positive assessment of the investment's return...

Those of us who make a commitment to work on putting people at the heart of business may have to reinvent methods and processes. That's probably one of the biggest challenges of the decades to come and my intention is to contribute to that. Actually, the end of this cycle of training is also giving me an opportunity to reshape my personal R&D, and that is very exciting.