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April 30, 2006
Foresight 2020 - likely changes to the global economy in the next 15 years
Foresight 2020 - a new research study from the Economist Intelligence Unit (download pdf here) looks at the likely changes in the global economy over the next 15 years (via Accelerating Innovation).
While reminding us that 15 years ago the Soviet Union still existed and that China was still largely a planned economy - making a 15 year global economic outlook look like hubris to some - the Economist lists 5 trends that will bring massive changes to the global economy between now and 2020. They include:
- Globalization - there will be a redistribution of economic power - with China and India taking a much larger slice of the world economy, and with labor-intensive production processes continuing to shift to lower cost economies.
- Demographics - populations shifts will impact economies significantly. Some economies with favorable demographics will enjoy continued growth, while others with ageing populations will see their growth stunned.
- Atomization - with increased globalization and continued improvements in networking technologies, firms will be able to use the world as their supply base for talent and materials. The boundaries between different functions, organizations and even industries will be increasingly blurred - finally delivering the atomic enterprise that some have been predicting for awhile.
- Personalization - while price and quality will continue to matter, personalization will increasingly play a role in how people buy products and services.
- Knowledge Management - focus of management attention will shift to innovation and customer service, where personal chemistry or creative insight matter more than rules and processes. Improving the productivity of knowledge workers through technology, training and organizational change will be top of mind in most boardrooms during the next 15 years
Of the 1,650 executives that were interviewed, 45% think that knowledge management will offer the greatest potential for productivity gains in the next 15 years. 35% believe that customer service and support will offer the greatest potential, while 29% think that strategy and business development will be the key. And 28% think that marketing and sales activity will offer that potential. A majority of the respondents think that "knowledge workers will be their most valuable source of competitive advantage!"
Another promising foresight is that "executives expect organizations to become flatter and employees to have more autonomy to make substantive decisions." That should make for a much happier workforce! The report has a whole chapter dedicated to the future of the company over the next 15 years.
Besides providing overall global economic predictions and the outlook for companies, the report also takes a closer look at specific changes that might occur in eight specific industries.
Surprisingly the study does not deal with the radicalization of religion (i.e., the religious right standing in the way of stem cell research in the US, or the radicalization of Islam - and its impact on innovation), nor does it really deal with education as a major driver of future economic activity (i.e., the impact of the number of graduating science PhD's on those economies).
[Technorati Tags: economic forecast future of company customer support knowledge management atomic corporation]
Posted by francois at 2:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
April 28, 2006
The dumbest trade show marketing tchotcke?
This must qualify as one of the dumbest trade-show tchotckes I have seen - or maybe I am just missing something. An army of people at Ad:Tech were distributing these money clips filled with two $1 bills. When I got it, I could not find the booth in the immediate vicinity and a few minutes later I realized they did not even have a URL on the clip for me to look them up.
...oh well...must be some "new" marketing technique...
[Technorati Tags: tchotchke trade show marketing]
Posted by francois at 12:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
April 27, 2006
Groups perform better than individuals in solving complex problems
According to a recent study by the American Psychological Association, "collective efforts of groups may be useful in boosting problem-solving skills." (via business pundit).
Apparently "groups of three, four, or five perform better on complex problem solving than the best of an equivalent number of individuals". The study also found that "groups of two performed at the same level as the best of two individuals."
One of the apparent limitations of the study is that it analyzed only "logical conceptual systems" - or the solution to "letters-to-numbers coding problem" - prompting Rob over at BusinessPundit to question whether "individual cryptographers would outperform these groups."
[Technorati Tags: group intelligence problem solving]
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April 26, 2006
Frequent flier miles just another discount program
Reveries Magazine has an article on how a once promising marketing program - the frequent flier mileage program - turned into a mere commodity discount program.
The main reasons for this switch is that companies have come up with "clever" ways to prohibit employees from paying more to fly their preferred airline, and also because of the increasing shortage of excess seat capacity that can be used to accommodate free upgrades and mileage based trips.
Unfortunately, it is always a bad thing when companies and buyers get addicted to discounts.
[Technorati Tags: frequent flier programs discount programs]
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April 25, 2006
Boston Blogger Meet-up on Saturday
Susan Getgood from Marketing Roadmaps is organizing a Boston Blogger Meet-up this Saturday on the occasion of Elizabeth Albrycht's visit from Europe. If you can make it, join us and leave a comment on her blog.
[Technorati Tags: meet-up boston]
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April 24, 2006
Extreme Product Placement
While being out West last week it took us a few days to figure out that what looked like a bunch of Buddhist monks were in fact people promoting the AXE deodorant. After we figured it out and felt comfortable approaching them, we got a small bottle of snake peel shower scrub with absolutely no directions, causing my 11 year old son to ask me whether he should just put it under his arms or over his whole body.
My first reaction was that of a failed marketing campaign - nobody really wants to deal with religious monks when on vacation, and if you did figure it out, you ended up with a product which the target audience did not know how to use.
But then I read in Business Week (requires subscription) that this is in fact part of an "extreme" product placement campaign - one that includes product vendors like Unilever to produce original content for cable TV. In this case Unilever "put together two specials built around its AXE Shower body wash: The Gamekillers on MTV and Exposing the Order of the Serpentine on SpikeTV."
As it turns out, and according to Business Week, "sometimes producing a show gives advertisers more bang for the buck." The cost of producing and placing a 30 second spot vs. producing a half hour show can be be in the same ballpark. And networks like advertiser-generated content as the advertisers "foot the entire production cost of the show or pay for a portion and agree to buy big blocks of advertising on other shows in return."
I am still not sure about the monks being a success...
[Technorati Tags: branding product placement]
Posted by francois at 1:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
April 14, 2006
Enterpreneurial aspirations
A new Yahoo survey (via Just an Online Minute) finds that two thirds (66%) of American adults say they've considered starting their own business. That was down from 72% in a similar survey conducted last year.
It would be interesting to see how that compares to other countries or world regions.
Other interesting tidbits include - 70% of respondents who were between 45 and 54 and 72% of respondents that were 55 and older said that "I will never be too old to start my own business," which is an increase from last year when the numbers were 54% and 58% respectively.
One has to wonder what the underlying reasons for these shifts are.
[Technorati Tags: entrepreneurship startup]
Posted by francois at 2:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
links for 2006-04-14
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Great post on customer service
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Great follow up post on customer service - its the little things that count
Posted by delicious at 4:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
April 13, 2006
What to do when you have excessive customer churn
According to a recent Forrester report (via Center for Media Research). mobile phone subscriber churn amongst US mobile subscribers is 24% a year. That's right - they loose one out of 4 customers annually.
The main reasons why people switch are price and service - with handset selection, customer service, data services and original content as secondary reasons.
The study suggests ways providers can differentiate themselves to maintain their base and attract switchers, including giving customers the ability to store pictures, IM, and other stuff on the network, be an objective advisor to customers, delivery of audio and video, up-sell the biggest spenders to the hottest handsets, and multiservice bundles.
It is surprising and possibly blinding to see that customer service comes out as a secondary reason for switching. While it may be a secondary reason that people gave in the survey for "leaving" the company, it may also be the one area where cell phone providers could differentiate themselves and "keep" those same customers longer. If instead of spending tons of money on aggressive new customer acquisition campaigns, they would spend more money on proactive customer service calls, they might find their churn rate going down dramatically. Would you switch as quickly if every so often a friendly service rep would leave you a message to explain a new service feature, or to tell you that you might benefit from being on a newer or different plan, or to let you know that there are existing features which you are not using yet that might benefit you and perhaps offer some help in getting you acquainted with its usage, or if they simply were to send you a text message wishing you happy birthday, or a message welcoming you to a new town with some simple factoid about the place when you travel, and the ability to get more information about the place if you want to.
If they could make their customers feel good about being their customers, churn would go down more so than if they were to try to "lock them up" into multi-service contracts or if they were to just continue adding bells and whistles to the service.
[Technorati Tags: customer retention customer service customer churn]
Posted by francois at 1:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
April 12, 2006
links for 2006-04-12
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How a gene sequence's quest for survival may result in human brains being different
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April 11, 2006
What do you do when your brand becomes the target of xenophobic rumors?
The Sunday New York Times had a great story on how Lenovo has gotten under fire by a bunch of xenophobes including Lou Dobbs, a couple of people from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, an advisory body to Congress, and other politicians.
The gist of the story is that Lou Dobbs and a few others, including some members of congress, are "suggesting" - based on mostly unfounded insinuations and allegations - that Lenovo computers currently being sold to the State Department as part of a competitive contract won by Lenovo "could provide shadowy spooks in the Chinese government with an ideal means of conducting espionage."
Being framed in the context of "buy American" and also in the context of "national security," the story inevitably took on a life of its own. It does not matter that it is virtually impossible to "buy American" when it comes to PCs, as most PCs are manufactured and assembled, at least in part, overseas. Nor does it matter that it is extremely unlikely that the Chinese could put "spook" software in the Lenovo PCs as they are assembled in North Carolina and as the PCs have to pass the State Department's two computer security groups, which oversee the administration of their own test suites and install firewalls and other security software. It also does not matter that the company has historically been a meritocracy - now run by Americans. The fact that the story is framed in the context of cultural anxieties will ensure its rapid spread.
Regardless of whether you believe that xenophobia like this is bad or really bad for the economy as a whole (there are some good lessons to be learned from some European economies on that front), it goes without question that it is damaging the Lenovo brand. And while articles like the one in the New York Times, exposing the fact that there is no substance to the points being raised, and undermining the legitimacy of the claims being made, are necessary - from a brand perspective they only add fuel to the fire. In the long run they could potentially cause more harm than good to the Lenovo brand.
So what is a company to do when faced with rumors that either appeal to fundamental cultural anxieties or that are framed in popular worldviews? Rebutting while staying on the same playing field is a losing proposition - a fact proven over and over in the world of politics. Could there be an opportunity to reframe the debate or start a new one on a playing field that is more advantageous to the company? Or should they just paint themselves in green and lay on the grass 'till it all blows over?
Other blog post on the subject:
Brad Feld at Feld Thoughts - "Maybe Penn and Teller should do an episode on Bullshit! on Dobbs and the current “security issues” "
[Technorati Tags: Lenovo xenophobia crisis management lou dobbs public relations PR]
Posted by francois at 5:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
April 10, 2006
Founder CEO's drive higher returns than "professional" managers
Fortune Magazine's latest issue has an article on how Fortune 500 companies that are still run by the founders are tearing up the market.
While the Fortune 500 sample is small, there is other evidence based on research of an Ohio State University finance professor named Radiger Fahlenbrach that companies run by founder-CEOs outperform the broader stock market by 8 %. One of the reasons being put forth for this finding is that founders care more. The study further uncovered other interesting facts - namely that "founder-run companies have bigger capital budgets and invest considerably more in research and development than nonfounder-run firms."
Unfortunately, this is not a widely held belief amongst typical startup backers, who are too often rushing towards pushing founders to the side and replacing them with "professional management"- types to "babysit" their investment. There is no question that some founders are not CEO material, but before taking out founders from the executive team line-up, investors and board members should really look at complementing the weaknesses of the founders in other ways.
[Technorati Tags: startups founder VC]
Posted by francois at 6:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
April 9, 2006
Mercedes Benz - poor customer service ROI
Mary Schmidt makes a great point in the comments of a previous post where I outline Mercedes' mangled response to a catastrophic engine failure that happened with our E320 while my wife was driving my son to his birthday party.
In it she asks the basic question that any marketer should ask themselves when faced with irate customers who warn their friends about the bad customer experience they had with a company: "Hmmm. Would be interesting to tally up: 1. How many people read your blog; 2. How many comment here; 3. How many link to this post (and then comment). And so on. Seems to me Mercedes is losing some business out of this, ya think? Perhaps you should do a conservative example cost benefit analysis and send it along to the CEO. Say, "Lost 5 customer at $60K each" versus repair of existing customers' engine, and so on....You can count me among the "lost" I'll certainly never think of buying a Mercedes (new, used or classic) after reading this horror story."
This is so true. Close to 4,000 people read the story so far - and that is just on my site, it does not include all the readers of stories that were picked up by many other sites (one of which made it into Yahoo news for over a day). Everyday multiple people find my stories from googling some Mercedes related search terms. And it even came with some unintended consequences, like having some people who are mentioned in the stories (and who never had the courtesy to get back to me) have my story show up first when you Google them.
For a blogger it is an ethical dilemma as to whether or not to write up a bad experiences like this. For this story I gave Mercedes ample time to respond to me first, and whenever I had a new rant or gripe, I sent it to them first. But the whole situation was ludicrous enough to justify my going public with the story. A 5 year old $60K products that fails after 100K of mostly highway miles should result in an answer that is different than "it's your fault and we can give you $6,000 for the car in a trade-in."
For a company which started losing money hand over fist, and which tumbled to 21st place in customer satisfaction, and which lost its title of world's best selling premium brand to BMW for the first time in since 1993, you would expect a different response. It would have been easy, and relativelly low cost, for them to continue to keep me as a believer in their brand promise. And at my age, I might have bought 2 or 3 more of their cars in my lifetime. That will clearly not happen now, and there is at least one other confirmed person who will never buy their products again because of this story. The ROI on their way of handling the situation is clearly not in their favor when you look at it this way.
[Technorati Tags: Mercedes Mercedes customer satisfaction mercedes benz e class e-320 customer service]
Posted by francois at 8:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (20) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
April 5, 2006
Mercedes says that cars fail in the first 50K miles - after that it's the fault of the driver
In the continuing saga of dealing with Mercedes Benz and their dealers following the recent incident where a loose engine part blew a quarter-sized hole in the engine block of our Mercedes E320 while my wife was driving my son to his birthday party, Mercedes finally got back to us (story described here, and follow up here) .
Someone in their customer service department cleared up all possible confusion by telling us in an email that "It is our experience that manufacturing defects occur early in the life of a vehicle (typically during the warranty of 4 years/50,000 miles, whichever occurs first) and not 50,000 miles after it's expiration. After reviewing the matter, Mercedes-Benz USA continues to stand behind this decision."
Get it?
But wait...what are they really saying???? Oh now I get it - it's the stupid customer's fault! That's it!
...while maintaining the car flawlessly according to the E 320 manual, and always with Mercedes dealerships, and with all the receipts to prove it, I must have still done something wrong to cause that. It cannot possibly be the product's fault, or an error on the part of the dealer who serviced the car 2 1/2 weeks prior to this catastrophic failure. It must have been a dumb user error! That's what they are telling me...
I guess it's time to move on, get rid of this piece of junk called Mercedes "Bang," and look back East to some good quality Asian cars. Thankfully, citizen marketers around the world are not letting this story die. Hopefully we will save a few souls from wasting their money on buying this german junk.
[Technorati Tags: Mercedes Mercedes customer satisfaction mercedes benz e class e-320 customer service]
Posted by francois at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
Learning how to thrive while being out of control
Do you feel like you are losing control? Are your customers taking over your marketing? Are your customers and suppliers getting involved in designing your products? Do you feel like you cannot control your team anymore?
Welcome to the age of control-less management. One way or the other you will have to learn to thrive in a control-less environment or you will commit yourself to obsolescence.
Co-creation of products without being in control can lead to wonderful innovations. In speaking with Johnnie Moore last week, he mentioned the use of some fun improv-based exercises with groups of people that do not know one another where they co-create things in a totally control-less environments. You can read up on some of those exercises in a published paper on the More Space Project.
The same is true for consumer-generated marketing, or for what the Church of the Customer folks call "citizen marketers." You can chose to ignore them and find your next unfavorable ad on YouTube, or you can decide to harness this form of self-organization and turn it into a real powerful competitive weapon.
Now if you accept that control has shifted out of your hands, a recent article published in Point (AdAge's CMO Publication - requires subscription) warns that there are still two dangers in not treating the phenomenon of consumer control with the respect it demands. The first is to interact with consumers without following up, while another is to try to prevent criticism or influence the conversation. Do either one of those and the citizen marketing backlash will be worse than any bad press you've ever had in the old marketing days.
The only thing you can perhaps try to control is yourself. Anything else will require you to learn to function "out of control."
[Technorati Tags: control citizen marketing consumer generated marketing]
Posted by francois at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
April 4, 2006
links for 2006-04-04
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See what happens when you have male dominated culture :)
Posted by delicious at 4:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
April 3, 2006
Mercedes Benz does not care about its customers
Adding insult to injury following the recent incident where a loose engine part blew a quarter-sized hole in the engine block of our Mercedes E320 while my wife was driving my son to his birthday party, the Mercedes dealership launched into a "blame the customer" and "insult their intelligence" routine.
During the conversation where he relayed the news that neither Mercedes nor his dealership would help us the dealer service rep started off by “blaming” us – saying “we (meaning him and the Mercedes factory rep) think it could have been caused by two things. The car overheated because it had no cooling or perhaps “you” did not put oil in it. We can also find no record of changing the oil in the last 20K miles.” As it turns out, we have religiously serviced the car according to the E 320 manual, and always did it with Mercedes dealers. We have the receipts to prove that. But more importantly, we have a receipt dated Feb 28th, 2006, 2 ½ weeks before the car blew up, that specifically states that his dealership did change the oil and the oil filter on that day. So not only did he do the “blame the customer” routine, he actually launched into false accusations!
When my wife rebutted, saying that the reason there was neither oil nor cooling fluid in the engine was because there was a quarter-sized hole in the engine block, he said that he would have to check on that. Check on that?! The other dealer, where we originally had the car towed told us that this is what happened. Would you call this Mercedes-like behavior? Coming out and accusing someone and then “having to check” when asked a pertinent question?
He then told her that this was all just bad luck – and neither the fault of the dealership nor the product. “Everything “looked” good when we serviced the car”, he said. He then proceeded to further insult her intelligence by saying that cars are like people – “some people are healthy and live a long time and some people get sick a lot and die young. You never know!” What is this supposed to mean?
Being flabbergasted at this (hopefully) un-Mercedes-like behavior, I decided to send one more email to register my outrage with their VP of Marketing, their GM for the customer assistance center and a few other folks in their marketing and customer service department. I also decided to copy someone who labels herself as "I am responsible for generating positive press and mitigating negative press on Mercedes-Benz vehicles in the USA" on LinkedIn.
Do you think I got a response? Nope...not a peep from Mercedes land!
For those of you who know me, I am a consummate marketer, and I do know something about marketing, product quality and customer service. I also realize that sometimes things break down, and I was not expecting a call from the CEO or a free upgrade. But this being a $60K consumer product from a company with a reputable brand, and with a proven track-record that we maintained the product according to their specifications, I was also not expecting them to “blame” the customer or to insult the customer's intelligence in the face a of a premature and catastrophic failure of their product.
That is just unacceptable!
For a follow up - click here
[Technorati Tags: Mercedes Mercedes customer satisfaction mercedes benz e class e-320 customer service]
Posted by francois at 9:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
Avoid having your workers become dumb and fat
Quoting the National Sleep Foundation, the Boston Sunday Globe yesterday reported that people who do not sleep enough have a chance to become fat and dumb.
"Those who get fewer than six hours of sleep a night might as well be drunk," says the reporter, citing that people who stay up for 18 hours straight function in similar ways to those people with an 0.08 percent blood alcohol level - the state's legal limit. And according to a researcher at the University of Chicago, not getting enough sleep results in the brain starting to think that it needs to store food.
So companies should make sure that their workers are not up all night from work-related stress, as they could end up with a dumb and fat workforce :)
[Technorati Tags: hr sleep disorder]
Posted by francois at 9:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
