Everything should be service
Posted on | December 3, 2009 | 2 Comments
During the servicization-bound times we’re heading, the following presentation hits the right nerve. According to the thesis, marketers should look at all marketing as service marketing:
This reminds me about earlier work on service logic in marketing as written by Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch, who break down borders between marketing goods and services (and on whose work the above presentation is also based). One of the their most compact sets are e.g. the four myths – a quick summary below:
1) THE INTANGIBILITY-MYTH:
Services lack the tactile quality of goods.
The Truth:
Services ofen have tangible results and products are bought for their intangible benefits. In the end people always buy services –be it produced with or without physical products.
Implication for marketers:
If tangibility doesn’t bring any significant benefits, it should be diminished or eliminated. An example of this is iTunes or Spotify: who needs physical records anymore (no, not even the DJ’s)?
2) THE HETEROGENEITY-MYTH:
Unlike goods, services can not be standardized.
The Truth:
Also physical goods are often heterogeneic and all the more as personalization and customization become more common. Many services are also already very standardized. In the end the customer always experiences even the standardized products in a unique way every time.
Implications for marketers:
Marketers should focus on personalization and customization, not standardization. As an example, there are over 20 elements on any Amazon page that vary according to who’s on the page. In other words, almost the only element that doesn’t change is the Amazon logo.
3) THE INSEPARABILITY-MYTH:
Unlike goods, products are produced and consumed simultaneously.
The Truth:
The customer is always involved in the value creation process.
Implications for marketers:
Marketing should maximize customer involvement in value creation and support and leverage on this.. An example is the Finnish Demi magazine, whose customers produce 95% of the content on the web site and also supervise on the content themselves.
4) THE PERISHABILITY-MYTH:
Unlike goods, services can’t be produced beforehand and inventoried.
The Truth:
Also goods perish and services often create very long-term benefits. Nowadays also intangible capabilities can be inventoried. In the end value is never created in the ware house but during consumption.
Implications for marketers:
Marketing should focus on minimizing inventories and maximizing service flows between the marketer and the customers, but also amongst customers and the marketers’ partners. An example is the iPhone, which comes in one version at a time, but whose value is largely based on countless and cheap software applications, which can be used to personalize any handset in infinite ways.
To think: how do the abovementioned myths and truths affect your business? How deep are you on the way to servicizing your business? What more could you do?
How healthy is your community?
Posted on | November 30, 2009 | 1 Comment
With Lithium’s latest paper this question becomes a no-brainer: the health of the community equals
where CHI, the community health index is determined by five prime factors:
- Members
- Content
- Traffic
- Interaction
- Liveliness
Let us remember though, that social media is a human business, and success in it can never be simplified to one mathematical formula – however tempting that might be.
What to do with campaigns that are too successful?
Posted on | November 29, 2009 | No Comments
You didn’t think you’d ever have to consider this right? We’ve never quite had to face a situation where people get mad at you for discontinuing a successful marketing campaign. With communities taking over brands however, this can indeed become a relevant issue, as campaigns themselves become social phenomena. Batman: The Dark Knight campaign was, as most of us already know, a thrilling campaign of unparalleled success. The game gathered millions of enthusiasts around their screens (computer, not tv) and also thousands on the street to play, interact with and collaborate around the world’s most extensive online-offline alternate reality game (read more here). The extent and depth of the game leaves me to think: it must have left the fans feeling a little empty after a one year plus of gaming, when eventually the stream of promotion material from Harvey Dent’s office ceased and the Joker stopped sending them vandalized versions of the Gotham Times with embedded secret messages anymore.
While the Batman campaign gathered mostly praise, Disney had it a bit more rough, as they decided (on schedule and according to initial plan) to close Virtual Magic Kingdom, their 18-month campaign. During this time, the community had gathered over a million users, who in addition were also the best possible candidates to be Mickey Mouse’s own brand ambassadors. Closing down the community understandably inspired some grumbles, as people suddenly lost a place they had built with significant invested time and passion. Even protest sites and petitions were created.
Hasbro now is facing the same situation with their Monopoly brand. In order to promote Monopoly City, the new edition of the board game, Tribal DDB created a campaign called Monopoly City Streets, where the player can buy virtually any street in the world and start building an empire. The mash-up utilizes Google Maps and overlays the buildings and street ownership information on top of Google’s street maps. I also bought my own street and noticed to my surprise that almost every street on my neighbourhood had already been bought. The game has an issue in that it’s growing too big to be stopped now that Hasbro has gotten the message through. There are over 1,5 million players online and pageviews amount to a whopping 15 billion per month. Closing down that amount of activity poses a huge image risk to a company that is all about inspiring to play with its products. The last I heard, Hasbro is now considering expanding the online campaign to a stand-alone product, a wise move and something that can in fact become one of their biggest successes by any measure.
Looking at this in the perspective of modern marketing creates an interesting paradox. On the other hand there is the argument that we no longer can plan our campaigns the way we used to, locking messages, budgets and media types into place a year beforehand. We’re supposed to be able to react more nimbly to what’s happening around us. On the other hand anyway, there is a faction that insists on long term view (as e.g. Anders Gustafsson of Crispin Porter Bogusky Europe recently did) – that we need to create things that inspire our customers for years, not weeks or months. Or is there a paradox at all? Are we really talking about the same thing?
How to attract 250.000 weekly visitors to your blog
Posted on | November 23, 2009 | 6 Comments
A very cool week for an occasional blogger: during the last six days close to 250.000 people have visited my blog to see my 8 ways to kill an idea post. As you’re one of them, I’d like to take the opportunity to say thanks – nothing cheers you up in the middle of Finnish winter than an unprecedented spike of audience on your personal blog. Although the content isn’t originally mine (thanks again to the amazing artist Scott Campbell) this is a big event, for the content is in line with what I usually rave & rant about (marketing, creativity, technology), so some of you might actually stick around (for example, the same can’t be really be said about another of my ‘hits’, the now infamous kebab animal). A few key learnings for fellow bloggers:
- We don’t know what sticks. It’s true. We live in the age of chaos and randomness. That’s why it pays to write often and on a broad scale – while naturally keeping focus. Of course when something does stick, randomness moves aside as the network and herd effects takes charge.
- Speed counts. And I don’t mean blogging about stuff faster than the others. I mean blogging about stuff before your defenses set in. At the age of speed too much of a reflection kills you. React fast to topics that occur to you so you don’t overanalyze and suffocate your stream of thought. If I would’ve started to pin the drawing to a philosophical framework the post would at best have been delayed and at worst dropped altogether.
- Re-use with generosity. We live in the age of the remix. Everything you publish doesn’t have to be your own. The ‘8 ways’ pic was sent to me via email by a colleague. He found it from a discussion forum. Attribution and credit are always required, of course.
- Titles make a difference. The age of juxtapositioning is not over. It’s rather ironic that the most spread idea ever on my blog is about killing ideas. Provocation and turning things upside down surprisingly often helps.
- Show, don’t tell. The very core of contemporary culture is visual. Except for the picture, there were three sentences on my blog: a reference to the mail that I got the picture from; a reference to the original artist’s site; my own assessment of the piece (Brilliant.) A picture simply tells more.
The mentioned points fit well to other forms of web marketing as well. How would you apply this to e.g. the marketing efforts of a big corporation?
Dreams are worth fighting for
Posted on | November 21, 2009 | No Comments
A light one for the weekend: one of my favorite short animated films of all time:
And because this is a blog on mass participation, a remixed version:
We can’t help you if you…
Posted on | November 19, 2009 | No Comments
Want to make your brand more human – but won’t commit any human resources to the task
Want to achieve something outstanding and out of this world – but require us to fit it into traditional formats
Want creative media usage – but cast media budgets and types in stone a year earlier
Want to create discussion and interest – but abandon anything emotionally charged
Want to get people participating – but prohibit participation that might ‘harm’ your brand
-
Of course, in reality there are always many ways to help you. It’s just that tackling the aforementioned will get us to better results.
Sometimes a great execution is already a reason to share
Posted on | November 18, 2009 | No Comments
I wish I made this (tackfilm):
Waste isn’t good – it’s non-existent
Posted on | November 17, 2009 | No Comments
Watched a video of Chris Anderson talk about free and the future of television this morning. That reminded me that he wrote recently on Wired that in the digital world, waste is not only good, it’s mandatory (the video doesn’t really add anything to the article in case you’re wondering).
This however brought to my mind a discussion I had with Colleen DeCourcy on the subject last week. I made a point how it is necessary to convince advertisers today to waste some resources in order to see what works – put five things out there, see which two work, harvest their success, and fail fast (and cheap) with the rest. Colleen however made a good point in arguing against my waste point: in the digital world, you can measure everything – both the successes and the failures. And anything you can measure and learn from the experience can’t really be considered waste (unless of course you continue to fail time after time – in which case you’re not learning). In addition, in the digital world you also have an opportunity to recycle much of the stuff you produce (if you’re in that mode to begin with), which further diminishes waste.
Which leads me to my conclusion that in digital, waste isn’t good after all – it doesn’t exist. What do you think?
Acid testing your digital campaign
Posted on | November 16, 2009 | No Comments
In traditional one-way communications, there are many ways to acid test your campaign idea (quickly see if it’s ‘fit for business’). One way of doing this could be:
- Is it relevant enough to the target group?
- Is it unexpected enough to stand out from the clutter?
- Is it memorable enough to inspire purchase behavior?
While all these questions are still very relevant (even more so than in the past), in the social media age the crowd is also the communicator, so we need to add a few more questions to acid test our campaigns. After reading McKinsey’s insightful article on contemporary consumer decision journey, I crafted my take:
- Would they want to share it? (to build additional awareness)
- Would they want to explore it in-depth? (to enable active evaluation)
- Would they want to actively contribute to it? (to gather content and enrich meaning)
- Would they want to return to it? (or to other parts of the marketing continuum – to build engagement)
Do you think this will suffice? What would you add?
Volvo leaps into Facebook age
Posted on | November 15, 2009 | No Comments
At a time when Facebook is already a favorite hangaround for the young and influential, Volvo has discovered a nifty way to gain attention for its recently updated S60, which will be unveiled next year in Geneva. The company hired a known artist to paint the car and recently published the piece. The interesting thing is that the artist, Esref Armagan had never seen the car as he’s been blind since birth.
On a well-made video on Volvo’s Facebook page we see Esref working with the car, showing small details of the car in numerous close-ups as the painters hands glide on the surface. The campaign has also a participatory perspective in accord with the times: Volvophiles could ask the painter to paint specific parts of the car, which were made into their own videos. The end result is a compilation of small parts of the whole that are quite good at rising expectations and inspiring your imagination. At least my interest got aroused.
Of course Volvo also relies on more traditional PR, taking the story to editors of magazines to build awareness (I read about this from Wired). However, the story wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting without a very creative approach that inspires a discussion (the blind artist) and a modern approach to utilizing the communications system (Facebook and people’s requests of which details they want to see) that preceded the magazine articles. On the age of speed and networks PR and marketing are ever more frequently leaping into each others’ territories and we as marketers and communicators need to appreciate this convergence.
My colleague Riku recently argued that in the future there are only two forms of marketing, on the other hand there are cool extravagant events, and on the other a rigorous system run and maintained by robots. I kinda agree but would like to make a further note. In more and more of effective marketing, we constantly need both: First we need creative ideas that are compelling and don’t fit into any of the boxes we so often like to draw around them. Second, we need a network, a system that we use to communicate our idea. And although there are communicators of our idea external from us in this system, it doesn’t mean that we couldn’t proactively plan and manage this participation – it just needs some scenario planning and reactive processes alongside one-way communications design. This creates the ability for us to react in timely and effective way to all developments, planned or unplanned, as they unfold.
Now ask yourself: do you still do press releases or are you already an active member of the network?
UPDATE: seems the S60 can now already be seen in full as well.
keep looking »
What's up right now
- looking at this: http://bit.ly/b0QJYV 1 week ago
- http://bit.ly/5iWGUc Company vs. Republic. Who's gonna win? 2 weeks ago
- http://bit.ly/5i5oOi it is so 2009-12-23
- More updates...
Powered by Twitter Tools
Latest Posts
- Everything should be service December 3, 2009 Sami
- How healthy is your community? November 30, 2009 Sami
- What to do with campaigns that are too successful? November 29, 2009 Sami