The Future of Advertising. WTF?
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Showing posts with label marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marketing. Show all posts
Friday, February 26, 2010
Friday, December 4, 2009
Social Media and Marketing: Evolution or Revolution?
Alex Wong
All request please fwd to Alex Wong.My LinkedIn is wah17@yahoo.com.A copy of the full research is here:
Social Media
View more presentations from Alex Wong.
All request please fwd to Alex Wong.My LinkedIn is wah17@yahoo.com.A copy of the full research is here:
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
This is a very good book. It provides structure, process, anecdotes and histories for the rapidly changing practice of using social technologies for marketing. It’s primarily written for consumer marketing, but some of the ideas can be used for B2B.
The authors use the term “groundswell” to mean a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other instead of from companies. The technologies they refer to are the social technologies that I like to put into the category of web 2.0. Web 2.0 technologies enable many to many communication and conversation.
The authors believe as I do that this groundswell effect, or by any other name, is real, here to stay for awhile and transformative or disruptive; that all attempts to thwart its spread will likely fail; and while all attempts to foster a groundswell will not succeed, not using the web 2.0 technologies for consumer marketing is a failing strategy.
There are a lot of barriers to the diffusion of this type of marketing, not the least of which is letting go of the illusion of message control. The marketing arms of companies passionately attempt to control the brand message. These techniques turn that concept over and returns the “control” of the message over to customers.
Why should you have to relearn all you know about marketing? The authors’ research clearly supports the trend. My research on the social impact of the web 2.0 technologies is inline with the conclusions of this book. Furthermore they assert, as examples, that:
“If you work for a media company, look out. Advertisers are shifting more and more of their money online. The groundswell is creating its own news sites (like Google News or Digg). The very idea of news is changing, as bloggers jostle with journalists for scoops. People take entertainment properties like TV shows and movies, rip them off the airwaves and DVDs, hack them, and repost new versions on YouTube or Dailymotion.
If you have a brand, you're under threat. Your customers have always had an idea about what your brand signifies, an idea that may vary from the image you are projecting. Now they're talking to each other about that idea. They are redefining for themselves the brand you spent millions of dollars, or hundreds of millions of dollars, creating.
If you are a retailer, your lock on distribution is over. People are not just buying online; they are buying from each other. They are comparing your prices with prices all over the Internet and telling each other where to get the best deal on sites like redflagdeals.com. As Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail has pointed out, shelf space creates far less power when there's nearly infinite selection online.
If you are a financial services company, you no longer dominate flows of capital. Trading happens online, and consumers get financial advice from message boards on Yahoo! Finance and the Motley Fool. Companies like Prosper allow consumers to get loans from each other, instead of from banks. PayPal makes credit cards unnecessary for many transactions.
Business-to-business companies are, if anything, more vulnerable to these trends. Their customers have every reason to band together and rate the companies' services, to join groups like ITtoolbox to share insights with each other, or to help each other out on LinkedIn Answers.
Even inside companies, your employees are connecting on social networks, building ideas with online collaboration tools, and discussing the pros and cons of your policies and priorities.
The groundswell has changed the balance of power. Anybody can put up a site that connects people with people. If it's designed well, people will use it. They'll tell their friends to use it. They'll conduct commerce, or read the news, or start a popular movement, or make loans to each other, or whatever the site is designed to facilitate. And the store, or media outlet, or government, or bank that used to fill that role will find itself far less relevant. If you own that institution, the groundswell will eat up your profit margins, cut down your market share, and marginalize your sources of strength.”
Web 2.0 technologies are being created at an incredible pace. What technologies will be part of a groundswell effect. As the authors point out, it’s not the technology but the relationships. The authors suggest the following questions when evaluating a new technology:
• Does it enable people to connect with each other in a new way?
• Is it effortless to sign up for?
• Does it shift power from institutions to people?
• Does the community generate enough content to sustain itself?
• Is it an open platform that invites partnerships?
The groundswell has two ingredients – technology and people. To understand what types of people would play what roles in the groundswell, the authors introduce the social technographics profile. It characterizes people by creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators and inactives. Once you know what the profile is for your customers, you can plan the appropriate social media approach.
If you’re not involved in any groundswell activities, you may wonder, “Why do people participate/” The authors give several reasons why:
• Keeping up friendships
• Making new friends
• Paying it forward
• The altruistic impulse
• The prurient impulse
• The creative impulse
• The validation impulse
• The affinity impulse
Not only is it important that you know your customers’ technographic profile, you have to have clear objectives before you start a program. The authors list five basic objectives for any groundswell program:
1. Listening
2. Talking
3. Energizing
4. Supporting
5. Embracing
The authors provide ample evidence and examples of how to employ web 2.0 marketing. And, as a result, I highly recommend this book.
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
Harvard Business Press, 2008, 269p
Groundswell
Social Technographics Explained
View more presentations from jbernoff.
The Social Technographics® Of Business Buyers
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Thursday, April 16, 2009
We Need Change
A look at the present status and future of market research.
More from Helge Tenno
We need change
View more presentations from Helge Tennø.
More from Helge Tenno
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Monday, March 16, 2009
Conversational Capital
This is a book about “word-of-mouth” marketing. In the introduction, the author’s assert: “Nothing is more powerful than when consumers make your story part of their story. This especially true today, in a fragmented media market that’s spilling over with branded communication efforts. Obviously, mass-market communications can be meaningful and memorable, but it’s getting harder than ever to break through the clutter. Even if a breakthrough happens, consumers who’ve grown up in the media age view ‘top-down’ communication with suspicion and skepticism. When a message does succeed in getting across, it carries little weight.
Highly charged consumer advocacy through word-of-mouth communication represents exactly the opposite. Unlike mass marketing, it’s carried ‘horizontally’ from peer to peer, so it has more power and authority. Consumers who believe in a certain brand experiences and are vocal about their belief are the carriers. Like a virus, it spreads on contact fast.”
To become something that is carried person to person, an experience has to be salient, produce resonance and have residual value. To be salient, and experience has to most noticeable or important. Resonant experiences are those that strike a deeper chord because they cause exploration, action, thought and interaction with others. Residual value results from an experience that remains in consciousness after the immediate encounter has ended.
The authors describe eight engines of conversational capital: rituals, exclusive product offering, myths, relevant sensory oddity, icons, tribalism, endorsement and continuity. “The presence of one or are all of them in a consumption experience helps to make that experience more resonant, richer in saliency, more relevant and more memorable. This in turn increases consumer satisfaction, which drives positive word-of-mouth consumer support.”
• Rituals are an essential part of how human beings create and formalize meaning.
• Exclusive product offering implies that the consumer can purchase or experience something unique.
• Myths are the narratives that become part of the very fabric of a consumptive experience because they provide clues as to what the experience is supposed to men.
• Relevant sensory oddity results from providing a sensory experience that is special but reinforces the overall consumptive experience.
• Icons are signs and symbols that clearly demarcate a consumption experience from any other.
• Tribalism is created through making the consumer feel part of a special group.
• Endorsement happens when a trusted authority praises you in a spontaneous and genuine manner.
• Continuity results from integrity, when who you are, what you say you are and what others say you are are close together.
The authors devote a chapter to each of these engines. They also discuss how they all work together, and how to get started. They use examples of well known endeavors like Cirque du Soleil and IKEA.
The book is interesting to read, and laid out well for true learning. It would especially be valuable for team because each chapter has questions and other ideas for discussion. It has a web site and online discussion groups. And, it’s the first book I’ve read that has a way to use your mobile camera phone to access conversations online about the book.
Conversational Capital: How to Create Stuff People Want to Talk About
Bertrand Cesvet with Tony Babinski and Eric Alper
Pearson Education (2009) 170 pages
Highly charged consumer advocacy through word-of-mouth communication represents exactly the opposite. Unlike mass marketing, it’s carried ‘horizontally’ from peer to peer, so it has more power and authority. Consumers who believe in a certain brand experiences and are vocal about their belief are the carriers. Like a virus, it spreads on contact fast.”
To become something that is carried person to person, an experience has to be salient, produce resonance and have residual value. To be salient, and experience has to most noticeable or important. Resonant experiences are those that strike a deeper chord because they cause exploration, action, thought and interaction with others. Residual value results from an experience that remains in consciousness after the immediate encounter has ended.
The authors describe eight engines of conversational capital: rituals, exclusive product offering, myths, relevant sensory oddity, icons, tribalism, endorsement and continuity. “The presence of one or are all of them in a consumption experience helps to make that experience more resonant, richer in saliency, more relevant and more memorable. This in turn increases consumer satisfaction, which drives positive word-of-mouth consumer support.”
• Rituals are an essential part of how human beings create and formalize meaning.
• Exclusive product offering implies that the consumer can purchase or experience something unique.
• Myths are the narratives that become part of the very fabric of a consumptive experience because they provide clues as to what the experience is supposed to men.
• Relevant sensory oddity results from providing a sensory experience that is special but reinforces the overall consumptive experience.
• Icons are signs and symbols that clearly demarcate a consumption experience from any other.
• Tribalism is created through making the consumer feel part of a special group.
• Endorsement happens when a trusted authority praises you in a spontaneous and genuine manner.
• Continuity results from integrity, when who you are, what you say you are and what others say you are are close together.
The authors devote a chapter to each of these engines. They also discuss how they all work together, and how to get started. They use examples of well known endeavors like Cirque du Soleil and IKEA.
The book is interesting to read, and laid out well for true learning. It would especially be valuable for team because each chapter has questions and other ideas for discussion. It has a web site and online discussion groups. And, it’s the first book I’ve read that has a way to use your mobile camera phone to access conversations online about the book.
Conversational Capital: How to Create Stuff People Want to Talk About
Bertrand Cesvet with Tony Babinski and Eric Alper
Pearson Education (2009) 170 pages
Saturday, March 7, 2009
A Market Intelligence System
Intelligence
While there is considerable debate as to what constitutes intelligence in humans and about the various types of intelligence that have been discovered, there is little debate as to what constitutes intelligence in and for the systems humans build. Intelligence is any form of information that improves decision making. An intelligence system is an organized way to collect and create intelligence.
Information exists in a spectrum from noise to wisdom. How can noise be information? It’s just information that w
e don’t consider new or relevant to our current status. Intelligence generally increases as the quality of information is moved from noise to data to knowledge to wisdom. Data is information that is new and relevant to the purpose of the intelligence system. Data is identified in the sea of noise and extracted for analysis. Knowledge is understanding obtained by analysis of the data. And, wisdom, characterized by judgment, insight of the present or past, or foresight of the future, is created through synthesis of the knowledge.
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
T. S. Eliot, The Rock
Types of Intelligence
There are two times of intelligence:
Strategic: A strategy describes how the vision, mission and goals of an organization are to be reached. Strategic intelligence includes actionable information that affects the vision, mission and goals of the organization. The time horizon on strategic intelligence has to be at least as long as the time it takes to implement decisions reached from the strategic intelligence to achieve the desired outcome.
Tactical: A tactic describes the organization’s plan to utilize its resources. A tactic supports a strategy. Tactics often relate to small-scale actions serving a larger purpose that are made or carried out with only a limited or immediate end in view. Tactical intelligence therefore contains actionable information that affects the resource plans of the organization including its processes and procedures. The time horizon on tactical intelligence has to be at least as long as it will take to implement the decisions resulting. The tactical time horizon is shorter than the strategic time horizon.
Focus of Intelligence
The role of strategy is to obtain the optimum balance of four elements – market opportunities and threats, stakeholder desires, organizational capabilities and organizational capacities. Tactics focuses on the organization’s capabilities and capacities in order to mesh with the goals established by the strategy. This can provide a useful framework for intelligence systems.
Within the market there are driving forces, technology, competition and customers. There are six types of driving forces at work within a market: demographic, social, economic, political, environmental and technological. The impact of technology shows up twice in this description of a market. Technologies can be embedded, supportive or enabling of a product or a service to provide increased value for customers and comparative advantage. Technology as a driving force interacts with the other driving forces to create strategic shifts in the market.
The type and
focus of intelligence systems can be combined to create a table of actual and potential intelligence systems.
An organization has projects, resources and culture. And within resources there are categories: capital, people, facilities, knowledge, tools & equipment, and partners.
Descriptions of Intelligence
Customer Intelligence: Customer intelligence is the process of gathering, analyzing and exploiting information of a company’s customer base. It helps the company create a customer focused marketing process. Customer intelligence is core to the rapid innovation, promotion and distribution of new products. A company’s customer base and the information that the company has on its customers is a valuable asset that can give it a comparative advantage. When you have a high definition view of your customers, you can communicate more effectively and make smarter business decisions. Customer intelligence encompasses customer relation management (CRM) and quite often now involves the use of social networking and social media tools. Customer intelligence usually focuses on current customers, may include identified potential customers, but has no way to include unidentified potential customers.
Competitor Intelligence: Competitor intelligence is the purposeful and coordinated monitoring of your competitors, wherever and whoever they may be, within a specific marketplace. Your competitors are those firms which you consider rivals in business, and with whom you compete for market share. The purpose is to find out who your competitors are and what your competitors are doing.
Competitive Intelligence: Competitive intelligence goes beyond competitor intelligence to determine what your competitors will do – to strategically gain foreknowledge of your competitor's plans and to plan your business strategy to countervail their plans. As you might expect, this will involve many methods at the tactical collection level, but it will also require integration into your existing information infrastructure, analysis and distribution of the information, and finally, the calculation of business decisions on the basis of that information and its analysis. Competitive intelligence should include direct, indirect and structural competitors, but most often focuses on direct competitors, leaving the organization blind to indirect and structural competition.
Sales Intelligence: Sales intelligence (SI) refers to technologies, applications and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of Sales information. The purpose of Sales intelligence is to support better business decision making by sales people. SI describes a set of concepts and methods to improve sales performance and decision making by using fact-based transaction information. SI is usually integrated or includes (CRM) Customer Relationship Management. Sales Intelligence systems are data-driven. Sales Intelligence is similar to Business Intelligence (BI) but is specifically designed for the use of sales people and sales managers. Sales intelligence solutions are predominantly designed for companies in the manufacturing, distribution and wholesale sectors. These are highly competitive markets, where volumes are high, margins are low. (SI) solutions provide unique insight into customer buying patterns. By automatically analyzing and evaluating these patterns, Sales Intelligence pro-actively identifies and delivers up-sell, cross-sell and switch-sell opportunities. Most good Sales Intelligence products will inform you if there's a potential customer drift issue, so you can address the situation before it becomes a problem. Unlike customer relationship management (CRM) and traditional business intelligence (BI) applications, Sales Intelligence analyses your existing sales data to pro-actively deliver actionable, relevant information.
Operational Intelligence: Operational Intelligence (OI) focuses on providing real-time monitoring of business processes and activities as they are executed within computer systems, and in assisting in optimizing these activities and processes by identifying and detecting situations that correspond to interruptions and bottlenecks. The purpose of OI is to monitor business activities and identify and detect situations relating to internal inefficiencies, opportunities, and threats. Some definitions define Operational Intelligence as an event-centric approach to delivering information that empowers people to make better decisions. OI helps quantify the efficiency of the business activities, how the IT (information technology) infrastructure and unexpected events affect the business activities (resource bottlenecks, system failures, events external to the company, etc.) and how the execution of the business activities contribute to revenue gains or losses. This is achieved by observing the progress of the business activities and computing several metrics in real-time using these progress events and publishing the metrics to one or more channels (e.g., a dashboard that can display the metrics as charts and graphs, autonomic software that can receive these updates and fine-tune the processes in real-time, email, mobile, and messaging systems that can notify users, and so on). Thresholds can also be placed on these metrics to create notifications or new events. In addition, these metrics act as the starting point for further analysis (drilling down into details, performing root cause analysis — tying anomalies to specific transactions and of the business activity). Sophisticated OI systems also provide the ability to associate metadata with metrics, process steps, channels, etc. With this, it becomes easy to get related information, e.g., retrieve the contact information of the person that manages the application that executed the step in the business transaction that took 60% more time than the norm, or view the acceptance/rejection trend for the customer who was denied approval in this transaction, or launch the application that this process step interacted with.
Marketing Intelligence: Marketing intelligence is the process of acquiring and analyzing information in order to understand the market (both existing and potential customers); to determine the current and future needs and preferences, attitudes and behavior of the market; and to assess changes in the business environment that may affect the size and nature of the market in the future. Social networks and social media are being used to assist in this endeavor.
Business Intelligence: Business intelligence (BI) refers to skills, technologies, applications and practices used to help a business acquire a better understanding of its commercial context. Business intelligence may also refer to the collected information itself and the knowledge developed from this information. BI applications provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Often these applications use data gathered into a data warehouse or a data mart. Occasionally the applications work from operational data. Common functions of business intelligence applications are reporting, OLAP, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarks, and predictive analysis. The major thrust of business intelligence theory looks at certain factors to make high quality decisions. These factors include customers, competitors, business partners, economic environment and internal operations. As businesses open up to interact with and leverage social networking environments and tools, users, customers, partners, and suppliers are taking up important roles, each day becoming more involved in the R&D of all commercial products and services. The role of BI has to change to accommodate the people-centric methodologies in the context of an open innovation paradigm. Business Intelligence 2.0 is a term referring to a new generation of Business Intelligence software that is more proactive than reactive (the latter merely analyzing data or reports produced after the fact). The first generation of Business Intelligence analyzed information involved in business oriented decisions while the next generation helps make decisions as or before events happen. Business intelligence 2.0 works on the semantic data model, not requiring knowledge of data structures or canonical forms, enabling more collaboration and supporting a people-centric, open innovation approach. While the business intelligence approach sometimes claims it assists in strategic decision making, it has a very short time horizon.
Human Capital Intelligence: Human capital intelligence provides strategic insights for better decision-making with reference to workforce investments. Embracing an enterprise-wide HCI analytics program offers a number of meaningful operational and strategic benefits: Operational reporting is more efficient and cost-effective because the data from individual applications is integrated and accessed through a single solution. Graphically-rich information is available to the people who need to make decisions and show metric-based results. Real-time analytics demonstrate the true relationship between workforce investments and the organization's bottom-line financial, customer and operational results. Human resource practices and investments can be optimized to meet enterprise performance goals. As the value drivers are getting more complex, there is greater need to generate meaningful intelligence about the effect of HR processes on business performance. Human capital intelligence is emerging as an effective channel for organizations to understand what impacts their business and how people make a difference, thus helping them to foster efficient behavior and create more value.
Market Intelligence: Market Intelligence (MI) is the information relevant to a company’s markets, gathered and analyzed specifically for the purpose of accurate and confident decision-making in determining market opportunity, market penetration strategy, and market development metrics. Market intelligence is the systematic process of gathering, analyzing, supplying and applying information (both qualitative and quantitative) about the external market environment. Traditionally, this covers only customers and competition in both strategic and tactical areas. However, it is generally weak in the strategic time frame. Market intelligence makes heavy use of social networks and social media.
Summary
As you can see in the above graphic, the standard intelligence systems are complex, overlapping and have numerous gaps. None of the existing systems cover technology or stakeholders. And, business intelligence only covers short term economic drivers. The organization intelligence systems mostly cover only information systems, or transactional events. And, none of the systems really cover strategic organizational intelligence. Competitive and competitor intelligence only covers direct competition. Market intelligence is primarily focused on strategic intelligence. Furthermore, the existing systems focus on structured data, not free form text, audio and video.
This leaves a lot of room for future development and integration of systems.
There are numerous competitors for software systems in all of the current categories. Each offering is unique, and as a result, the mapping shown above is not inclusive.
A Market Intelligence System
We can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.
Michel de Montaigne
Characteristics
A new market intelligence system, as shown in the above graphic in dotted lines, is primarily a strategic intelligence system. It covers the driving forces, customers, competition and technology. The form of the data it deals with is primarily free form text, graphics, video and audio, but it can also handle free form numbers. The concept is supported by several driving forces:
• The free information movement
• The growth of information on the Internet
• Improving general search tools and growth of special search tools
• Growth of RSS tools
• The growing appreciation of the wisdom of crowds
• Movement to collaboration and open innovation systems
• Growth of web 2.0 technologies that are enabling and encouraging customer (or user) generated content, that can be used to manipulate and format information, and that can be used to facilitate collaboration in understanding data extracted from the Internet.
• Disintermediation
• Low cost and quick turn around pressures
• The need for insight and foresight in order to make better decisions (not just data)
• The inherent power of a collaborative team of involved and engaged human minds to analyze, synthesize and judge information
Benefits
The benefits of this type of market intelligence systems are:
• Is supported by and supports the driving forces affecting organizations
• Low barrier to entry: low initial cost and low or no barriers to use
• Flexibility: easy to change focus, add new features, and answer new questions
• Scalable: works for various sized groups
• Adaptable: easily adapted to a large variety of groups and purposes
• Value increases with use
Process
It is impossible to comprehend just how much information is actually floating around the globe, but it makes the odds of information you need existing very reasonable. Finding it is the real task. You need to know where to look and how to sift through the information, recognizing what you need and discarding that which lacks value to you.
Competitive Intelligence: Create an Intelligent Organization and Compete to Win
Michelle and Curtis Cook
The process that the market intelligence system follows is the noise to wisdom model described earlier. Data is identified and extracted from the sea of noise. These data are analyzed to provide knowledge and the knowledge is synthesized to create insight and foresight (wisdom). The data is gathered in the four categories: driving forces (economic, demographic, social, political, technological and environmental), customers (current, identified potential and unidentified potential), competition (direct, indirect and structural), and technology (embedded, supporting and enabling).
The sources of the data are many. They can include the Web at large, blogs, social networks, groups, news, press releases, individual web sites, reports, articles, financial sources, bookmarks & indices, and many more. Data in the form of text, tables, graphs, audio (podcasts) and video are brought into the collaborative workspace. Most of this happens automatically and is update nearly continuously. However, the members of the collaborative are encouraged to use their own sources and to bring those data into the systems as well. Consultant reports, books, journal articles and many other sources of pertinent information can be brought into the system through web browsing, RSS readers, searches, and reading can be brought in by members. The results of conversations, interviews, meetings and internal and external conferences can also be included.
The current state of readily available software is best for the identification and extraction of data. Analysis of numerical data is best done also with software tools. But, the analysis of free form text, video and audio is still best done with the human mind. In the graphics above and below (meant only to be examples), the blocks in white are done automatically and those blue are done by people.
Data, when organized, becomes information; information, when analyzed, becomes intelligence. Based on this model, intelligence professionals usually execute on a four-phased process, or cycle: 1) they identify the intelligence needs of key decision makers across the firm; 2) they collect information about events in a firm’s external business environment from print, electronic, and oral sources; 3) they analyze and synthesize the information; and 4) they disseminate the resulting intelligence to decision makers.
Millennium Intelligence: Understanding and Conducting Competitive Intelligence in the Digital Age
Jerry Miller
As the market intelligence system matures, it learns. The data base of free form text, audio and video can be searched via keywords. Or, it can be queried in free from questions that members can respond to and a discussion created. In essence it is a complex system with emergent properties.
Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of a lifelong attempt to acquire it.
Albert Einstein
The system is easily scaled. Probably 12 people is the minimum size, and there is no upper limit. With smaller groups the effort has to be included in the members work requirements. At some point, as the group grows larger, participation will have to be incented in some way. Although for large group if there is a high degree of participation, the benefits of involvement will be obvious. It will work like any successful collaborative. Individuals put X in and get some multiple of X from involvement. The role of management of the system shifts as the number of people using the system increases. The system manager is involved when the group is small and the task becomes more editorial and administrative as the group gets large.
While the system can be operated without paying for any of the information (it’s all available free on the Internet), it may be advantageous to include some paid information, or even include a consultant or analyst as a member of the team.
Depending on the purpose, vendors or customers could be included in the team. In addition, this system could be used for research panels.
Depending on the group’s comfort with using web 2.0 tools or in collaboration in general, education and training may be required.
The key to wisdom is knowing all the right questions.
John Simone
Management has to be involved in the system at least in leading discussions of important strategic issues.
Regardless of the tools you use, the single indispensable element to CI is the human factor: the smarts, experience, and instinct that can turn huge collections of dead facts into live intelligence that plays a central part in making business decisions. The best competitive intelligence team, experts agree, is one that is distributed, involving the company’s entire workforce.
Special Report: Competitive Intelligence Smart Business Magazine, March 2001
The same can be said for market intelligence.
Success for every business, whether it’s a one-person operation or a Fortune 500 corporation, increasingly depends on a timely awareness of the rapidly changing events impacting their organizations. Yet in most corporate settings, people consistently work with massive amounts of raw data, small amounts of value-added information derived from analysis, and very little intelligence. Market intelligence reverses this traditional trend toward data and information and redirects it toward actionable intelligence.
References (Connotea)
Paul Schumann
Glocal Vantage, Inc., PO Box 161475, Austin, TX 78716
512.632.6587
http://incollaboration.ning.com, http://www.glocalvantage.com
E-Mail
Twitter: innovant2003
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license. You may distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon this work, even commercially, as long as you credit me for the original creation as Paul Schumann, Glocal Vantage Inc, www.glocalvantage.com.
MarketIntelligenceSystem.pdf
While there is considerable debate as to what constitutes intelligence in humans and about the various types of intelligence that have been discovered, there is little debate as to what constitutes intelligence in and for the systems humans build. Intelligence is any form of information that improves decision making. An intelligence system is an organized way to collect and create intelligence.
Information exists in a spectrum from noise to wisdom. How can noise be information? It’s just information that w
e don’t consider new or relevant to our current status. Intelligence generally increases as the quality of information is moved from noise to data to knowledge to wisdom. Data is information that is new and relevant to the purpose of the intelligence system. Data is identified in the sea of noise and extracted for analysis. Knowledge is understanding obtained by analysis of the data. And, wisdom, characterized by judgment, insight of the present or past, or foresight of the future, is created through synthesis of the knowledge.Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
T. S. Eliot, The Rock
Types of Intelligence
There are two times of intelligence:
Strategic: A strategy describes how the vision, mission and goals of an organization are to be reached. Strategic intelligence includes actionable information that affects the vision, mission and goals of the organization. The time horizon on strategic intelligence has to be at least as long as the time it takes to implement decisions reached from the strategic intelligence to achieve the desired outcome.
Tactical: A tactic describes the organization’s plan to utilize its resources. A tactic supports a strategy. Tactics often relate to small-scale actions serving a larger purpose that are made or carried out with only a limited or immediate end in view. Tactical intelligence therefore contains actionable information that affects the resource plans of the organization including its processes and procedures. The time horizon on tactical intelligence has to be at least as long as it will take to implement the decisions resulting. The tactical time horizon is shorter than the strategic time horizon.
Focus of Intelligence
The role of strategy is to obtain the optimum balance of four elements – market opportunities and threats, stakeholder desires, organizational capabilities and organizational capacities. Tactics focuses on the organization’s capabilities and capacities in order to mesh with the goals established by the strategy. This can provide a useful framework for intelligence systems.
Within the market there are driving forces, technology, competition and customers. There are six types of driving forces at work within a market: demographic, social, economic, political, environmental and technological. The impact of technology shows up twice in this description of a market. Technologies can be embedded, supportive or enabling of a product or a service to provide increased value for customers and comparative advantage. Technology as a driving force interacts with the other driving forces to create strategic shifts in the market.
The type and
focus of intelligence systems can be combined to create a table of actual and potential intelligence systems.An organization has projects, resources and culture. And within resources there are categories: capital, people, facilities, knowledge, tools & equipment, and partners.
Descriptions of Intelligence
Customer Intelligence: Customer intelligence is the process of gathering, analyzing and exploiting information of a company’s customer base. It helps the company create a customer focused marketing process. Customer intelligence is core to the rapid innovation, promotion and distribution of new products. A company’s customer base and the information that the company has on its customers is a valuable asset that can give it a comparative advantage. When you have a high definition view of your customers, you can communicate more effectively and make smarter business decisions. Customer intelligence encompasses customer relation management (CRM) and quite often now involves the use of social networking and social media tools. Customer intelligence usually focuses on current customers, may include identified potential customers, but has no way to include unidentified potential customers.
Competitor Intelligence: Competitor intelligence is the purposeful and coordinated monitoring of your competitors, wherever and whoever they may be, within a specific marketplace. Your competitors are those firms which you consider rivals in business, and with whom you compete for market share. The purpose is to find out who your competitors are and what your competitors are doing.
Competitive Intelligence: Competitive intelligence goes beyond competitor intelligence to determine what your competitors will do – to strategically gain foreknowledge of your competitor's plans and to plan your business strategy to countervail their plans. As you might expect, this will involve many methods at the tactical collection level, but it will also require integration into your existing information infrastructure, analysis and distribution of the information, and finally, the calculation of business decisions on the basis of that information and its analysis. Competitive intelligence should include direct, indirect and structural competitors, but most often focuses on direct competitors, leaving the organization blind to indirect and structural competition.
Sales Intelligence: Sales intelligence (SI) refers to technologies, applications and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of Sales information. The purpose of Sales intelligence is to support better business decision making by sales people. SI describes a set of concepts and methods to improve sales performance and decision making by using fact-based transaction information. SI is usually integrated or includes (CRM) Customer Relationship Management. Sales Intelligence systems are data-driven. Sales Intelligence is similar to Business Intelligence (BI) but is specifically designed for the use of sales people and sales managers. Sales intelligence solutions are predominantly designed for companies in the manufacturing, distribution and wholesale sectors. These are highly competitive markets, where volumes are high, margins are low. (SI) solutions provide unique insight into customer buying patterns. By automatically analyzing and evaluating these patterns, Sales Intelligence pro-actively identifies and delivers up-sell, cross-sell and switch-sell opportunities. Most good Sales Intelligence products will inform you if there's a potential customer drift issue, so you can address the situation before it becomes a problem. Unlike customer relationship management (CRM) and traditional business intelligence (BI) applications, Sales Intelligence analyses your existing sales data to pro-actively deliver actionable, relevant information.
Operational Intelligence: Operational Intelligence (OI) focuses on providing real-time monitoring of business processes and activities as they are executed within computer systems, and in assisting in optimizing these activities and processes by identifying and detecting situations that correspond to interruptions and bottlenecks. The purpose of OI is to monitor business activities and identify and detect situations relating to internal inefficiencies, opportunities, and threats. Some definitions define Operational Intelligence as an event-centric approach to delivering information that empowers people to make better decisions. OI helps quantify the efficiency of the business activities, how the IT (information technology) infrastructure and unexpected events affect the business activities (resource bottlenecks, system failures, events external to the company, etc.) and how the execution of the business activities contribute to revenue gains or losses. This is achieved by observing the progress of the business activities and computing several metrics in real-time using these progress events and publishing the metrics to one or more channels (e.g., a dashboard that can display the metrics as charts and graphs, autonomic software that can receive these updates and fine-tune the processes in real-time, email, mobile, and messaging systems that can notify users, and so on). Thresholds can also be placed on these metrics to create notifications or new events. In addition, these metrics act as the starting point for further analysis (drilling down into details, performing root cause analysis — tying anomalies to specific transactions and of the business activity). Sophisticated OI systems also provide the ability to associate metadata with metrics, process steps, channels, etc. With this, it becomes easy to get related information, e.g., retrieve the contact information of the person that manages the application that executed the step in the business transaction that took 60% more time than the norm, or view the acceptance/rejection trend for the customer who was denied approval in this transaction, or launch the application that this process step interacted with.
Marketing Intelligence: Marketing intelligence is the process of acquiring and analyzing information in order to understand the market (both existing and potential customers); to determine the current and future needs and preferences, attitudes and behavior of the market; and to assess changes in the business environment that may affect the size and nature of the market in the future. Social networks and social media are being used to assist in this endeavor.
Business Intelligence: Business intelligence (BI) refers to skills, technologies, applications and practices used to help a business acquire a better understanding of its commercial context. Business intelligence may also refer to the collected information itself and the knowledge developed from this information. BI applications provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Often these applications use data gathered into a data warehouse or a data mart. Occasionally the applications work from operational data. Common functions of business intelligence applications are reporting, OLAP, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarks, and predictive analysis. The major thrust of business intelligence theory looks at certain factors to make high quality decisions. These factors include customers, competitors, business partners, economic environment and internal operations. As businesses open up to interact with and leverage social networking environments and tools, users, customers, partners, and suppliers are taking up important roles, each day becoming more involved in the R&D of all commercial products and services. The role of BI has to change to accommodate the people-centric methodologies in the context of an open innovation paradigm. Business Intelligence 2.0 is a term referring to a new generation of Business Intelligence software that is more proactive than reactive (the latter merely analyzing data or reports produced after the fact). The first generation of Business Intelligence analyzed information involved in business oriented decisions while the next generation helps make decisions as or before events happen. Business intelligence 2.0 works on the semantic data model, not requiring knowledge of data structures or canonical forms, enabling more collaboration and supporting a people-centric, open innovation approach. While the business intelligence approach sometimes claims it assists in strategic decision making, it has a very short time horizon.
Human Capital Intelligence: Human capital intelligence provides strategic insights for better decision-making with reference to workforce investments. Embracing an enterprise-wide HCI analytics program offers a number of meaningful operational and strategic benefits: Operational reporting is more efficient and cost-effective because the data from individual applications is integrated and accessed through a single solution. Graphically-rich information is available to the people who need to make decisions and show metric-based results. Real-time analytics demonstrate the true relationship between workforce investments and the organization's bottom-line financial, customer and operational results. Human resource practices and investments can be optimized to meet enterprise performance goals. As the value drivers are getting more complex, there is greater need to generate meaningful intelligence about the effect of HR processes on business performance. Human capital intelligence is emerging as an effective channel for organizations to understand what impacts their business and how people make a difference, thus helping them to foster efficient behavior and create more value.
Market Intelligence: Market Intelligence (MI) is the information relevant to a company’s markets, gathered and analyzed specifically for the purpose of accurate and confident decision-making in determining market opportunity, market penetration strategy, and market development metrics. Market intelligence is the systematic process of gathering, analyzing, supplying and applying information (both qualitative and quantitative) about the external market environment. Traditionally, this covers only customers and competition in both strategic and tactical areas. However, it is generally weak in the strategic time frame. Market intelligence makes heavy use of social networks and social media.
Summary
As you can see in the above graphic, the standard intelligence systems are complex, overlapping and have numerous gaps. None of the existing systems cover technology or stakeholders. And, business intelligence only covers short term economic drivers. The organization intelligence systems mostly cover only information systems, or transactional events. And, none of the systems really cover strategic organizational intelligence. Competitive and competitor intelligence only covers direct competition. Market intelligence is primarily focused on strategic intelligence. Furthermore, the existing systems focus on structured data, not free form text, audio and video.
This leaves a lot of room for future development and integration of systems.
There are numerous competitors for software systems in all of the current categories. Each offering is unique, and as a result, the mapping shown above is not inclusive.
A Market Intelligence System
We can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.
Michel de Montaigne
Characteristics
A new market intelligence system, as shown in the above graphic in dotted lines, is primarily a strategic intelligence system. It covers the driving forces, customers, competition and technology. The form of the data it deals with is primarily free form text, graphics, video and audio, but it can also handle free form numbers. The concept is supported by several driving forces:
• The free information movement
• The growth of information on the Internet
• Improving general search tools and growth of special search tools
• Growth of RSS tools
• The growing appreciation of the wisdom of crowds
• Movement to collaboration and open innovation systems
• Growth of web 2.0 technologies that are enabling and encouraging customer (or user) generated content, that can be used to manipulate and format information, and that can be used to facilitate collaboration in understanding data extracted from the Internet.
• Disintermediation
• Low cost and quick turn around pressures
• The need for insight and foresight in order to make better decisions (not just data)
• The inherent power of a collaborative team of involved and engaged human minds to analyze, synthesize and judge information
Benefits
The benefits of this type of market intelligence systems are:
• Is supported by and supports the driving forces affecting organizations
• Low barrier to entry: low initial cost and low or no barriers to use
• Flexibility: easy to change focus, add new features, and answer new questions
• Scalable: works for various sized groups
• Adaptable: easily adapted to a large variety of groups and purposes
• Value increases with use
Process
It is impossible to comprehend just how much information is actually floating around the globe, but it makes the odds of information you need existing very reasonable. Finding it is the real task. You need to know where to look and how to sift through the information, recognizing what you need and discarding that which lacks value to you.
Competitive Intelligence: Create an Intelligent Organization and Compete to Win
Michelle and Curtis Cook
The process that the market intelligence system follows is the noise to wisdom model described earlier. Data is identified and extracted from the sea of noise. These data are analyzed to provide knowledge and the knowledge is synthesized to create insight and foresight (wisdom). The data is gathered in the four categories: driving forces (economic, demographic, social, political, technological and environmental), customers (current, identified potential and unidentified potential), competition (direct, indirect and structural), and technology (embedded, supporting and enabling).
The sources of the data are many. They can include the Web at large, blogs, social networks, groups, news, press releases, individual web sites, reports, articles, financial sources, bookmarks & indices, and many more. Data in the form of text, tables, graphs, audio (podcasts) and video are brought into the collaborative workspace. Most of this happens automatically and is update nearly continuously. However, the members of the collaborative are encouraged to use their own sources and to bring those data into the systems as well. Consultant reports, books, journal articles and many other sources of pertinent information can be brought into the system through web browsing, RSS readers, searches, and reading can be brought in by members. The results of conversations, interviews, meetings and internal and external conferences can also be included.
The current state of readily available software is best for the identification and extraction of data. Analysis of numerical data is best done also with software tools. But, the analysis of free form text, video and audio is still best done with the human mind. In the graphics above and below (meant only to be examples), the blocks in white are done automatically and those blue are done by people.
Data, when organized, becomes information; information, when analyzed, becomes intelligence. Based on this model, intelligence professionals usually execute on a four-phased process, or cycle: 1) they identify the intelligence needs of key decision makers across the firm; 2) they collect information about events in a firm’s external business environment from print, electronic, and oral sources; 3) they analyze and synthesize the information; and 4) they disseminate the resulting intelligence to decision makers.
Millennium Intelligence: Understanding and Conducting Competitive Intelligence in the Digital Age
Jerry Miller
As the market intelligence system matures, it learns. The data base of free form text, audio and video can be searched via keywords. Or, it can be queried in free from questions that members can respond to and a discussion created. In essence it is a complex system with emergent properties.
Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of a lifelong attempt to acquire it.
Albert Einstein
The system is easily scaled. Probably 12 people is the minimum size, and there is no upper limit. With smaller groups the effort has to be included in the members work requirements. At some point, as the group grows larger, participation will have to be incented in some way. Although for large group if there is a high degree of participation, the benefits of involvement will be obvious. It will work like any successful collaborative. Individuals put X in and get some multiple of X from involvement. The role of management of the system shifts as the number of people using the system increases. The system manager is involved when the group is small and the task becomes more editorial and administrative as the group gets large.
While the system can be operated without paying for any of the information (it’s all available free on the Internet), it may be advantageous to include some paid information, or even include a consultant or analyst as a member of the team.
Depending on the purpose, vendors or customers could be included in the team. In addition, this system could be used for research panels.
Depending on the group’s comfort with using web 2.0 tools or in collaboration in general, education and training may be required.
The key to wisdom is knowing all the right questions.
John Simone
Management has to be involved in the system at least in leading discussions of important strategic issues.
Regardless of the tools you use, the single indispensable element to CI is the human factor: the smarts, experience, and instinct that can turn huge collections of dead facts into live intelligence that plays a central part in making business decisions. The best competitive intelligence team, experts agree, is one that is distributed, involving the company’s entire workforce.
Special Report: Competitive Intelligence Smart Business Magazine, March 2001
The same can be said for market intelligence.
Success for every business, whether it’s a one-person operation or a Fortune 500 corporation, increasingly depends on a timely awareness of the rapidly changing events impacting their organizations. Yet in most corporate settings, people consistently work with massive amounts of raw data, small amounts of value-added information derived from analysis, and very little intelligence. Market intelligence reverses this traditional trend toward data and information and redirects it toward actionable intelligence.
References (Connotea)
Paul Schumann
Glocal Vantage, Inc., PO Box 161475, Austin, TX 78716
512.632.6587
http://incollaboration.ning.com, http://www.glocalvantage.com
Twitter: innovant2003
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license. You may distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon this work, even commercially, as long as you credit me for the original creation as Paul Schumann, Glocal Vantage Inc, www.glocalvantage.com.
MarketIntelligenceSystem.pdf
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Discovering Opportunities and Threats in a Market
A market is composed of three major elements: customers, competition, and technology. Customer needs are anticipated and filled through the use of technology by the enterprise and its competitors. A market must have, in addition to customers, competition, and technology, a time frame, geographical reference, scale, and scope. In a market, money, goods, services, and/or information are exchanged.
Markets have evolved over time. In its earliest use, market referred to a place, usually a juncture between roads where people were likely to meet. In time, markets became more specific places for exchange within towns and villages. However, in today's environment markets are no longer always tied to a concrete locale; instead the term has come more to represent a set of conditions. These conditions generally are descriptions for each of the elements mentioned above. Defining a market is not a linear process.
The methodology described in this article assumes that the enterprise has at least a vague sense of direction. It assumes that there is an ongoing purpose and that the enterprise is attempting to make decisions about whether to:
• Stay where they are
• Develop new markets
• Develop new products or services
• Diversify
• Integrate their operations either forward or backward in the supplier-customer value chain
More
Markets have evolved over time. In its earliest use, market referred to a place, usually a juncture between roads where people were likely to meet. In time, markets became more specific places for exchange within towns and villages. However, in today's environment markets are no longer always tied to a concrete locale; instead the term has come more to represent a set of conditions. These conditions generally are descriptions for each of the elements mentioned above. Defining a market is not a linear process.
The methodology described in this article assumes that the enterprise has at least a vague sense of direction. It assumes that there is an ongoing purpose and that the enterprise is attempting to make decisions about whether to:
• Stay where they are
• Develop new markets
• Develop new products or services
• Diversify
• Integrate their operations either forward or backward in the supplier-customer value chain
More
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Technological Substitution In Market/Marketing Research
Substitution analysis is a well accepted method of technological forecasting in use for 36 years. In these analyses, the Fisher-Pry model was used. The Fisher-Pry model predicts characteristics loosely analogous to those of biological system growth. It results in an S-curve (more formally, sigmoidal curve) familiar to many because the curve is in the shape of an S. These natural growth processes share the properties of relatively slow early change, followed by steep growth, then a turnover as size asymptotically approaches a limit. The relationship between the fraction of total market taken by the new technology, f, is often given as:
f = 1 /(1 + c exp(-bt))
where t is time, and c and b are empirically determined coefficients.
Read report
f = 1 /(1 + c exp(-bt))
where t is time, and c and b are empirically determined coefficients.
Read report
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
The Evolution of Market, Marketing and Customer Research
According to IDC, the digital universe in 2007 was 2.25 x 10^21 bits (281 exabytes or 281 billion gigabytes). By 2011, the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006. The enterprise share of the digital universe is widely skewed by industry, having little relationship to GDP or IT spending. The finance industry, for instance, accounts for almost 20% of worldwide IT spending but only 6% of the digital universe. Meanwhile, media, entertainment, and communications industries will account for 10 times their share of the digital universe in 2011 as their share of worldwide gross economic output.
One area driving this exponential growth of information is content creation. Content is increasing created originally in digital format. In addition we are rapidly converting analog content into digital information. Moreover, a phenomena called “mashup” is becoming widespread. Wikipedia defines a digital mashup as “a digital media file containing any or all of text, graphics, audio, video, and animation, which recombines and modifies existing digital works to create a derivative work.” This has always been going on in a wide range of fields from science to art, but in digital form, it is exploding, creating even more digital information.
Tidwit describes digital content as “quite simply any form of data or information in digital form (i.e. an electronic file) rather than physical form. Examples of digital content can be anything from a simple poem to photos, graphic art, research papers, articles, reports, statistical databases, business plans, engineering designs, e-books, multimedia (music and movies), etc. In other words, digital content is any type of content that happens to be in bits and bytes.” And, in my diagram below, content include the development of platforms, environments and other tools that enable users to create more content.
Content is created by an enterprise. The enterprise can be an individual or a multinational corporation. In the past, the enterprise created content and interacted with the content in order to improve it. The content was developed for a medium, when completed it was published. It was then distributed and delivered via a device to multiple people. In order to determine the number of potential users, user needs for the content or how best to market it, market or marketing research was conducted. Or, if you wished to know how the content was being used, what people thought about it, or what improvements were needed, customer research was performed. However, that research was conducted outside the development - distribution system.
Today’s process is similar to the past except that now content is often created for multiple media and devices. For example, a song is performed for live audiences, recorded on a CD, performed in a DVD, and downloaded online as an mp3. For companies like Disney you can include movies, Broadway shows and then park rides. Devices range from movie theaters to telephones.
Yesterday’s process was developed before digital media. Today’s process includes the capabilities of web 1.0. Yesterday’s and today’s process is enterprise centric. However, with the development of web 2.0, the process begins to shift from enterprise centric to content centric. (See Web 2.0 & Social Media for More information on web 1.0 & web 2.0 )
With web 2.0, the process of creating and distributing content can be much more interactive. Market, marketing and customer research is embedded in the process because the users can feedback information (actively or passively through sensors) at any part of the process and the enterprise can query, or collect data, at all stages of the process (with proper user knowledge and concurrence). However, the process is still enterprise centric.
In the future, as web 2.0 tools are developed and diffused, another significant shift occurs, as the process becomes content centric. Multiple enterprises and users collaborate through multiple devices and media to create content. This step short circuits the enter concept of market, marketing and customer research as users are partners, and integrated into the entire process.
The latter stages of the development of the process accelerates innovation by closing the loop between needs and implementation. It also fosters additional innovation as content becomes more easily “mashable”. Innovation diffusion accelerates.
This process is applicable to digital content where digital media and devices exist broadly. It is most applicable to incremental and distinct innovation. It is probably not useful for breakthrough innovation. At least in the past using the enterprise centric model, a lot of dat exists indicating that users can’t easily define the needs for breakthrough innovations. However, we have no data on the content centric process for breakthrough innovations. (See Innovate! for more information on incremental, distinctive and breakthough innovation. )
One area driving this exponential growth of information is content creation. Content is increasing created originally in digital format. In addition we are rapidly converting analog content into digital information. Moreover, a phenomena called “mashup” is becoming widespread. Wikipedia defines a digital mashup as “a digital media file containing any or all of text, graphics, audio, video, and animation, which recombines and modifies existing digital works to create a derivative work.” This has always been going on in a wide range of fields from science to art, but in digital form, it is exploding, creating even more digital information.
Tidwit describes digital content as “quite simply any form of data or information in digital form (i.e. an electronic file) rather than physical form. Examples of digital content can be anything from a simple poem to photos, graphic art, research papers, articles, reports, statistical databases, business plans, engineering designs, e-books, multimedia (music and movies), etc. In other words, digital content is any type of content that happens to be in bits and bytes.” And, in my diagram below, content include the development of platforms, environments and other tools that enable users to create more content.
Content is created by an enterprise. The enterprise can be an individual or a multinational corporation. In the past, the enterprise created content and interacted with the content in order to improve it. The content was developed for a medium, when completed it was published. It was then distributed and delivered via a device to multiple people. In order to determine the number of potential users, user needs for the content or how best to market it, market or marketing research was conducted. Or, if you wished to know how the content was being used, what people thought about it, or what improvements were needed, customer research was performed. However, that research was conducted outside the development - distribution system.
Today’s process is similar to the past except that now content is often created for multiple media and devices. For example, a song is performed for live audiences, recorded on a CD, performed in a DVD, and downloaded online as an mp3. For companies like Disney you can include movies, Broadway shows and then park rides. Devices range from movie theaters to telephones.
Yesterday’s process was developed before digital media. Today’s process includes the capabilities of web 1.0. Yesterday’s and today’s process is enterprise centric. However, with the development of web 2.0, the process begins to shift from enterprise centric to content centric. (See Web 2.0 & Social Media for More information on web 1.0 & web 2.0 )
With web 2.0, the process of creating and distributing content can be much more interactive. Market, marketing and customer research is embedded in the process because the users can feedback information (actively or passively through sensors) at any part of the process and the enterprise can query, or collect data, at all stages of the process (with proper user knowledge and concurrence). However, the process is still enterprise centric.
In the future, as web 2.0 tools are developed and diffused, another significant shift occurs, as the process becomes content centric. Multiple enterprises and users collaborate through multiple devices and media to create content. This step short circuits the enter concept of market, marketing and customer research as users are partners, and integrated into the entire process.
The latter stages of the development of the process accelerates innovation by closing the loop between needs and implementation. It also fosters additional innovation as content becomes more easily “mashable”. Innovation diffusion accelerates.
This process is applicable to digital content where digital media and devices exist broadly. It is most applicable to incremental and distinct innovation. It is probably not useful for breakthrough innovation. At least in the past using the enterprise centric model, a lot of dat exists indicating that users can’t easily define the needs for breakthrough innovations. However, we have no data on the content centric process for breakthrough innovations. (See Innovate! for more information on incremental, distinctive and breakthough innovation. )
Saturday, November 1, 2008
It's your Move
A review of the past and present of market research, and a look into its future. The market research profession is undergoing disruptive innovation.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Conversational Capital
The business world is abuzz about the power of word-of-mouth. And yet the discussion swirls around how talk is transmitted, not how it's created. This is a book about turning the tables - a set of ideas that teach marketers how to create the ingredients necessary for word-of-mouth.
The promise of this philosophy is a means by which to:
* Create products and services that consumers find truly significant
* Enhance consumption experiences to transform your brands into market leaders
* Manage and control word-of-mouth around your brand
Drawing on their extensive experience in fostering leading brands, the authors reveal the triggers of word-of-mouth and outline a process for embedding them into your products, helping you create stuff people love to talk about. From Bertrand Cesvet, Tony Babinski and Eric Alper, members of SID LEE, a leading purveyor of experiential design and communications service for breakthrough brands including Cirque du Soleil, adidas and Red Bull.
More
The promise of this philosophy is a means by which to:
* Create products and services that consumers find truly significant
* Enhance consumption experiences to transform your brands into market leaders
* Manage and control word-of-mouth around your brand
Drawing on their extensive experience in fostering leading brands, the authors reveal the triggers of word-of-mouth and outline a process for embedding them into your products, helping you create stuff people love to talk about. From Bertrand Cesvet, Tony Babinski and Eric Alper, members of SID LEE, a leading purveyor of experiential design and communications service for breakthrough brands including Cirque du Soleil, adidas and Red Bull.
More
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
The Past and Future of Marketing Research
A video describing the past and a potential future scenario for the development of marketing research. This was created as an experiment in the use of video tools available on the desktop to create a plausible scenario of the future for discussion.
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