Year: 2012

Market leadership: the -out and the -est

By Mark Di Somma

Two thoughts that I really like, brought together. The first was one introduced to me by Rob Smith, CEO, Paper Plus back in August 2008. It’s called –est. It goes like this: There are a very small number of fully competitive positions in a sector and you need to own, and align yourself, to one: Quickest Biggest Cheapest Coolest Specialist. Anything else is the middle ground. Everyone I raise this with debates the number and raises other possibilities. But you get the idea. It’s superlative and competitive and combative. To me, this is the –est test in brand positioning. Who are you going to be? And are you sure, are you really sure, you want to be that? Second thought, introduced recently by Seth Godin in this post.  Out-. You win when you: Outsmart Outlead Outcare Outlisten Outconnect He gives others. They’re fabulous of course. To me, they are the market leading opportunities. They signal how you intend to win. I think this question brings the two together: Who are you going to out-______ in …

Handpicked – the wider opportunity of curation

By Mark Di Somma

The first time I really thought about the role of an astute retailer was while watching Mary Portas. Her point: any retailer can stock. Smart and profitable retailers, by contrast, handpick items that their shoppers will crave – and that is where they add value. In a great shop, she was saying, you don’t just come to buy, you come to discover things you wouldn’t normally find housed together. Fine point, well made. These days, curation is all the rage. As Trendwatching so rightly observed in an article aptly titled “Everyone’s a curator now”, what used to pass for selecting, choosing or finding (Didn’t we once call that editing?) has been transformed into the more scholarly-sounding art of curating. That’s hardly surprising, Trendwatching observes, given the massive levels of choice that consumers now face, nor it is actually that new. In fact, the idea morphed out of the art galleries more than a decade ago, and really picked up pace with the arrival of Facebook, iPod playlists and Flickr. To Steve Rosenbaum, author of Curation …

Not a problem: success pivots on what you solve, not just what you know

By Mark Di Somma

If you’re not a fan yet of the Scattershot blog, then I’d like to suggest you should be. In a post published earlier this week, Rajant discusses the concept of “ground truth”. Ground truth, as its name suggests, is the view on the ground that verifies and informs the satellite view. It’s a great way to separate a problem from a truth. What’s interesting about this is that the perspective that brands have of situations gained from afar can be very different from the reality closer to home. In fact, those on the ground may not see that they have an issue at all. That’s a significant hurdle when your cue for action is something your audience doesn’t recognise. Rajant gives the telling example of P&G’s launch of Febreze, which initially failed. The reason? You only need an air freshener if you understand that you are surrounded by bad smells. The problem with that: “even the strongest odours fade with continual exposure … And Febreze’s reward (an odourless home) was meaningless to someone who couldn’t …

Affirmation: how to make a brand experience really count

By Mark Di Somma

Everybody wants to feel they got value for money. Sure – but when exactly does something feel like it was “worth it”? For example, Lady Gaga’s just wound up a three concert stint in Auckland. When does a concert experience feel like it’s worth it? Is it when you finally see the star in person as they step onstage days, weeks, months after you bought the tickets? Is it at the end of the opening number as the crowd erupts? Is it at the end of the show as you fight your way home through the traffic, images of the last couple of hours running through your head? Is it during your favourite song? Or is the value for money moment when you’re telling friends your “I was there” story via Facebook or, days or months later, over dinner? When does a film feel worth it? How about the experience of buying a dress? When do you think the keynote speaker at a conference has delivered or is delivering value for money? At what points …

Retail brands: price always has a context

By Mark Di Somma

Marianne Bickle takes JC Penney’s to task over their pricing strategy in this pithy and thought-provoking post in Forbes. In it, she argues that the retailing icon misread the market in key ways and compromised its value proposition when it replaced its famous coupon and discounts pricing strategy with a policy that stressed continuity, consistency and predictability. People buy emotionally, argues Bickle, and that emotion extends beyond the shop doors. It reaches all the way to the macro-environment that influences their wallets. It’s critical therefore that brands understand how their consumers feel about the economy. If things feel uncertain – and nearly two-thirds of JC Penney customers were saying they didn’t feel the economy was strong – don’t change what they know. It not only makes a new pricing strategy undesirable, it’s also destabilising. And people are much less prone to buy when things don’t feel as they have. It’s also vital, Bickle points out, that brands understand how people buy, not just what they buy. In the case of JC Penney, over 60% of …

Is the digital economy actually an economy (yet)?

By Mark Di Somma

Some years ago, I wrote a post that took Chris Anderson’s “freemium” model to task. In it I argued that once you had provided services and information freely, the conversion to payment was going to be a lot tougher. Free, I suggested, would become an implicit entitlement. Last week, in a withering attack in the New York Times, Ross Douthat lashed out at what he called “The Facebook Illusion”. Comparing Web 2.0 to the home ownership bubble, he took particular aim at the world’s biggest social networking site. The relative disappointment of its IPO should be read, he maintains, not as an indication that Facebook doesn’t make money, but rather that “it doesn’t make that much money, and doesn’t have an obvious way to make that much more of it, because … it hasn’t figured out how to effectively monetize its million upon millions of users … This “huge reach, limited profitability” problem is characteristic of the digital economy as a whole.” It’s probably a little early to call Facebook. Whether the IPO misfired or …

The portfolio approach to strategy

The portfolio approach to strategy

By Mark Di Somma

How do you drive home a strategy to fulfil your future, when everything around you is changing?  The secret, according to McKinsey & Co senior advisor, Eric D. Beinhocker, is to radically review what we mean by strategy. In his 2006 book, The Origin of Wealth, Beinhocker argues that rather than thinking of strategy as a single plan built on predictions of the future, we should think of it as a portfolio of experiments, a population of competing business plans that exist within the decision making process but evolve over time.

Brand dynamics: the shapeshifting of brand likeability

By Mark Di Somma

Our traditional view of product preference has for many years mirrored our view of markets. A bell curve, where products rise in popularity over time, sustain leadership through a period of maturity and then decline or are overtaken by another bell-curve driven by product development that supersedes the declining model and looks to take it to new heights. That model’s driving dynamic is demand. Its chief metric is volume. And its key pressure is time. The longer you can draw out that curve, and the more you can slow down the roll at the peak of the curve the more likely you are to make money. Recently, two separate pieces of thinking have caused me to believe that this likeability model is now as good as dead. Firstly, two thoughts from a really fantastic guest post by J Walker Smith at the ever-inspiring Brand Strategy Insider: “With social engagement more prevalent and more powerful, every marketing message is now subject to vetting by a crowd. No message finds its way to consumers absent the influence …

Is your brand ready for the experience war?

By Mark Di Somma

Thanks to Cato who once again this year kindly invited me to the Wellington simulcast of the AG Ideas Business Breakfast held in Melbourne yesterday. The theme for the AG Ideas 2012 Business Breakfast was how companies could use design and innovation to compete effectively in high-cost economies. Technical issues prevented those of us on this side of the Tasman getting the video feed, but there was plenty to listen to, as Dana Arnett, Dale Herigstad, Mauro Porcini and MC Göran Roos steered us through the morning. Today, I want to touch on a couple of points raised by Göran Roos in his opening statements and one or two takes on an interesting, point-packed address from Mauro Porcini, Chief Design Officer, 3M. Porcini pitched a new social scenario; one where consumers are not just savvy, expert and demanding, but also difficult to categorise and understand because of four overlapping generations (boomers, X, Y and Z) and different geographies and cultures (which themselves were in different states of market maturity). The emergence of this social scenario, …

Is behavioural change in a corporate culture all about timing?

By Mark Di Somma

“Is this the right time to change?” may not be the delaying question I often dismiss it as. To see why, read Caroline’s post at the Optimal Usability blog (subscribed to, not surprisingly, by the ever vigilant Alex). Caroline quotes from this very astute man – BJ Fogg – who runs the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University. Behavioural change, Fogg says, is what happens when Trigger, Ability and Motivation align. When there is a trigger for change, when people can change and when they are motivated to do so, then changes in behaviour can and will occur. Otherwise, pretty much, forget it. But each element must be of sufficient strength for the proposed change to succeed. In order for a trigger to be powerful enough to overcome existing habit or inertia, Fogg believes it must be noticeable, associated directly with the required behavioural shift and timely (it must occur whilst we are motivated and at a time when we can still change). Ability requires both capability and capacity to make the change required at …