RK's Musings

Smart Marketing

An innovative company called BandMerch crafted a remarkable promotion for the rock group Linkin Park. Buy a CD, put it in your computer, go online, and you can buy one of three thousand pairs of collectible Linkin Park sneakers, made by hip shoe brand DC Shoes. This works at so many levels, it’s scary.

First, it makes it worth buying the CD instead of listening to a friend’s. Second, it takes a sonic idea and adds the visual (sneaker). Third, it pays for itself. Fourth, it’s limited in time and size, so people need to get in early. “Hey, where’d you get those sneakers?”  They sold out of almost every size before the sneakers even got to the warehouse.This, not suing your listeners, is the way to grow the music business.

One to One marketing Nirvana ?

Are we going to see the one to one marketing nirvana soon ?

Via NYT:

“If there’s a man and a woman watching television in two different houses and you are Procter & Gamble, it would be more efficient to show one of them an ad for a Gillette’s men’s razor and the other a woman’s ad,” said Mark Read, director of strategy at the WPP Group, an advertising holding company that has invested in Visible World and Spot Runner.To customize ads, the companies, to a varying degree, link ZIP codes with census and other third-party data to develop local demographic profiles, isolating viewers more finely than typical cable operators.

Visible World has an extensive system in place, running a national distribution network through media partners and using the partners’ routers to steer versions of ads to different parties. Visible World works at the household level by using information from cable set-top boxes.

Utubexplosion

With the buy out of youtube, internet is buzz with news/analysis/crystal gazing/ etc about the future..One question still pesters me ? Youtube has a lotttttt of content whihc include funny videos, porn, musicals, event videos. Keyword and tag based search are on the site. But if one looks at the psychology of a guy uploading a video, the intentions vary..Some of them do it for fun, Some want to advertise their personal brand, etc...If a person wants to be known on the online community not for fun, but for some serious stuff , it is not possible in the current youtube phenomenon because he gets ignored by video overload. ..
This leads to an interesting situation. Here is a site which is extremely popular and gets visits close to 4 million a day. It is so popular that it is the best shot you have got to display your skills, be it your music talent, singing talent, etc..However, once you upload your video, its so difficult to push your video as it is a perfect democratic world...How do you push your video ? Digg it ? Delicious it ? Furl it ? or just leave it like that and let the world notice your talent ?

Walmart goes online

Yes, the world's largest retail company has ventured in to online. It has created a myspace clone called school your way . Why should it work ? There's already myspace which has a pretty good community and customers comes back to the site because of music recommendations of each other. It would be interesting to see the strategies walmart would adopt to make this site popular.
What offline advantages would it leverage ? Food for thought !

Kotler in India

This week , the marketing guru - Philip Kotler dished out gyan to Indian corporates, salient points being

• R&D must be market-ready
• Numbercrunching is more than calculating market shares
• Co-creation is the mantra(Four seasons hotel chain - customer always gets the same room whenever he visits)
• Expand Market size - (quoted GE)
• Strategic Trajectory needs to be adopted by Indian Brands (quoted Haier - Chinese consumer durable company)

A year later : Little Miss Matched

Littlemismatched.com : I came across this PurpleCow a year back when they were in a beta stage. It was definitely an wacky edgy concept tht 4 people were trying to push. Forward it to July 2006, they have exploded the market with great success

A little about them :

The fledgling company sells socks that do not match, in a variety of colors and patterns. To ensure that every sock has its independence, they come exclusively in odd numbered packs of three and seven.

"The missing sock is never going to go away," said Arielle Eckstut, one of the company's founders. "This is a way to really have fun with a real-world problem: that people lose their socks ... Let's embrace the problem, and run with it."

Conceived of in 2003, LittleMissMatched has exploded in the past year. Today, more than 600,000 of its socks can be found in more than 600 stores, according to the company's three founders. One of them, Jonah Staw, has told National Public Radio that LittleMissMatched could soon be worth $100 million.

Monthly Dollar.com : Purple Cow

Purple cow : Another smart service where people might just be willing to pay 1 $ for little traffic to their sites

Reverse auction site in India ??

Indian airlines are seeing a lot of activity these days. One of the gaps that needs to be filled is that of reverse auction...Why is there no reverse auction site aka priceline version in India ? Hmmm..Is it an implementation issue or is it too early for service providers to get the airlines to listen to the customers's price point ?
Or is there one already ?? Its too hard to keep up with zillions of sites popping by,,,May be there is one, but certainly it has not created a buzz till now...

Google moves to China

Google in China:
Whatever the intentions and consequences of the move be, in the end content sharing is much better than content policing. Hope the chinese realize this and become a super economy much faster than the current pace

Innovation

One can vastly innovate marketing if one is keen on observng customer behavior very deeply. Here is a small story of 4 young lads who innovated their soft drink stand so that they could sell more drinks.There were 4 young lads who were running a stand in the warsaw train station. They observed the crowds, they noticed a recurring pattern: In the minutes before trains arrived, people would stand on the
platform, look over their shoulder at the drink kiosk, glance at their watch, and then scan the platform for the incoming train. A casual observer might have missed the clue. But these budding Anthropologists realized that passengers were torn between wanting something to drink and not wanting to miss their train.

So what did they do? They created prototype soft-drink displays boasting clocks so large that passengers could simultaneously watch the clock "and" the drink display. The result? Sales shot up in Warsaw train stations. The clocks reass ured customers that they had time to buy a cold refreshment. That simple success made believers of these Poles.

field observations and quick prototyping for a does bring out breakthroughs.  A simple telling observation--like the train passengers glancing from their watches to the soda kiosks--can make all the difference.

Moral of the story :
Make patient observation and quick prototyping part of your recipe for innovation. You might be surprised by the results.

Google moves to China

Google in China:
Whatever the intentions and consequences of the move be, in the end content sharing is much better than content policing. Hope the chinese realize this and become a super economy much faster than the current pace

Innovation

One can vastly innovate marketing if one is keen on observng customer behavior very deeply. Here is a small story of 4 young lads who innovated their soft drink stand so that they could sell more drinks.There were 4 young lads who were running a stand in the warsaw train station. They observed the crowds, they noticed a recurring pattern: In the minutes before trains arrived, people would stand on the
platform, look over their shoulder at the drink kiosk, glance at their watch, and then scan the platform for the incoming train. A casual observer might have missed the clue. But these budding Anthropologists realized that passengers were torn between wanting something to drink and not wanting to miss their train.

So what did they do? They created prototype soft-drink displays boasting clocks so large that passengers could simultaneously watch the clock "and" the drink display. The result? Sales shot up in Warsaw train stations. The clocks reass ured customers that they had time to buy a cold refreshment. That simple success made believers of these Poles.

field observations and quick prototyping for a does bring out breakthroughs.  A simple telling observation--like the train passengers glancing from their watches to the soda kiosks--can make all the difference.

Moral of the story :
Make patient observation and quick prototyping part of your recipe for innovation. You might be surprised by the results.

Presentation

Some powerful presentation techniques :

 Lessig, Kawasaki, Jobs, Atkinson, Tufte, Sierra, Takahashi

Presentation

Some powerful presentation techniques :

 Lessig, Kawasaki, Jobs, Atkinson, Tufte, Sierra, Takahashi

Marketing eYe

Definitely found some nuggets of marketing wisdom at : Marketing eYe Blog

Retail store with a diff story

Woot.com  is a modern Internet success story, with tens of thousands of subscribers and millions of dollars in annual sales. And yet woot doesn’t advertise and has just a few dedicated employees. How did it do it? Woot sells only one item a day.

It is not trying to out-Amazon Amazon. Instead, it tells a very compelling story, and that story is easy to believe and easy to spread. Every day, starting at midnight, it offers exactly one product at a great discount. When it’s gone, that’s it. Come back tomorrow and see what’s new. On a recent Thursday, for example, the company offered a set of Dell computer speakers for $14.99. The item was sold out by mid-morning. Woot is a business with a story that’s easy to tell. And because the story is its and its alone, it has plenty of room to grow

New Story

Same Company, Same Product, Different Story thr new packaging -- Hopefully leading to different customers

Makers of popular snacks like Oreos and Pringles have found a new way to appeal to consumers who are trying to lose weight: selling small-portion snacks by their calorie count.

New Story

Same Company, Same Product, Different Story thr new packaging -- Hopefully leading to different customers

Makers of popular snacks like Oreos and Pringles have found a new way to appeal to consumers who are trying to lose weight: selling small-portion snacks by their calorie count.

Cow # 7: Software from Vending Machines

A vending machine that beams software to Palm organizers is a Purple Cow. It never runs out of inventory, it appeals to people with credit cards and with time and money to spare, and the profit margins are pretty good. 

EZ ZAP sells both commercial software and advertiser-supported freeware. You can find one at a local airport if you’re lucky. The freeware is a great way to get someone to try the machine in the first place, don’t you think?

Link: PalmInfocenter.com: Tests Begin for Handheld Software Vending Machine.

Cow # 6 : Yoga for Toddlers

If one can start a service which involves yoga for TODDLERS! , yes Toddlers, it definitely classifies for a purple cow.
Link :Itsy Bitsy Yoga .

Successful Site in 36 Months

Stuntdubl:
SEO Strategy to make a site popular - a 2 year road map

• Buy a new (better be extremely brandable) domain.
• Build between 10 - 100 pages of good unique content
• Get one high quality on theme link to the site after site is built
• Site gets spidered
• Spend a few days each month getting about a dozen links
• Focus on getting some direct traffic
• Go out and enjoy life so you’re not checking serps constantly
• Wait
• Wait some more
• Consider buying a site now
• Continue tapered growth of links and content ad infinitum

Cow # 5: Holy Cow

Cow # 5 : Holy Cow

In this world where we see a lot of conformist behavior , is it not obvious that wierd stuff sells ?

That’s what Mike Dillon at Dillon Works does. He used to work for Disney as an Imagineer, and he started his company about seventeen years ago. He now has more than fifty employees in their own 30,000 sq. ft. building. Obviously, the key to succeeding in a business where you make anything is to really make anything. If it’s completely impossible, it’s likely someone will tell you that Mike can do it.
There are tons of people with the talent to make a running clam out of fiberglass. But only Mike, apparently, had the brains to see how unrisky it was

Link : Dillon Works

Future of Music

Gerd Leonhard :
If one looks at the media business, there is certainly a great amount of change that is happening. It is expected to only increase further in the next decade.
Key directions as mentioned by Gerd Leonhard:

Exposure and Discovery leads to revenues: In this age of DIY music , there is a need for effectively bridging the consumers and media content providers. In this aspect,the grokster case will have a significant impact on the future direction

Access will replace Ownership:Music providers will become commodities in a sense, and hence the owner needs to leverage all the power from his network and the viral effect of the digital channels. This also means making the content available to mobile phones, pda's and all sorts of devices.

Use technology to re-ignite your music business:Technology has always driven the music business, and it will drive it this time too. Think back to the birth of amplification, the advent of radio, the invention of the player-piano, the gramophone, the Walkman, the CD....Put your entire catalogs and all related information online (no, that does not mean giving it all away for free!), both for internal and for external purposes. In the future, "content" assets will only be truly meaningful if they are available as 1s and 0s.

Transparency: Put your music online and build a brand around it.Brand creates awareness in the niche that a particular media content appeals

Up-sell, cross-sell and re-sell:Let's unchain the music we already have. This means a solid "yes" to free music services, feels-like-free online radio and even free media products -- make it free if it has to be, and charge for it when, where and how you can. The new game here is UP-SELL (i.e. sell more and more stuff to your ever-loyal customers) CROSS-SELL (i.e. sell more stuff to someone else's loyal customers that were referred to you), and RE-SELL (i.e. sell the same stuff in a different package or bundle) -- already common practice in the software world.

Cow # 4: Its the only thing

Cow # 4: Its the only thing

An example of the importance of incorporating the marketing element in the service itself

"Coachville isn’t a product, it’s a movement. Thirty-two thousand people have joined over the past two years,making it one of the fastest-growing professional organizations . Founded by Thomas Leonard, a charismatic personal coach who recently passed away, Coachville is a group of people focused on helping each other make a living as coaches.
What’s remarkable? Coaching is an entire vocabulary. It’s a profession, a dogma, and it’s viral. Coaches spend a great deal of time selling strangers on the benefits of this new experience, which spreads the word. And many of the coached decide it would be fun to be a coach, so the word continues to spread. By building a central location for the movement, Leonard made it easy for coaches to talk to each other. By facilitating conversations (as opposed to just selling a product), Coachville was able to grow at precisely the time when most dot-coms shriveled. Do you see what’s going on here? The product is the marketing. If it weren’t, there wouldn’t be any coaches. The very act of creating the profession also created the marketing engine."