A History of Innovation: The Henry Ford Museum is launching a new series on the history of innovation. It says that it wants to connect all these innovation gurus with YOU to show that we all can be inspired, innovate, create, etc. However, there isn't a platform for anyone to submit their own stories or prove that the “common American citizen” can be the next creator of change…
Where Are My Leads? A new perspective on the old sales-marketing conundrum.
This latest, 50+ page thick report by Razorfish examines the ever more important role of social (influence) marketing:
"In a world that is increasingly empowered by social media, connected by screens, out of your control and enchanted by innovation, all that matters is the story your customer tells about your brand - your brand's value, in 140 characters or less. Is it a good story? A bad story? Or just no story at all?"
"We believe that we live in a world where brands can't simply push messages anymore. Brands must do. They must engage with their customers (and across every platform, channel and device). We also believe that Social Influence Marketing has a large role to play in this world where actions speak louder than advertising."
Download the report, which doesn't require registration, here.
The $10 billion market for baby and young children’s furnishings (cribs, other case goods, layette, nursery decor, and the like) and accessories (car seats, strollers, baby monitors, diaper bags, etc.) is a lucrative market, and the baby stroller is one of its most competitive sectors. Hundreds of models vie for the attention of parents-to-be, and the level of detailed research, due diligence, and individual preferences may come close to the decision making process by an airline for the purchase of a Boeing 787. There are only few things – at least that’s what the industry makes you believe – that are as personal and intimately important to consumers as a baby stroller. The stroller embodies the commitment, care, and love that a couple chooses to devote to their newborn. It is the most visible representation of good parenthood. And in the US, the baby stroller market combines three quintessential American traits into a mind-boggling mix of over-commercialism: an abundance of choices, an obsession about mobility, driving, and vehicles, and a profoundly whacked out paranoia about deficient baby care. All that turns the stroller into a status symbol, especially after the chic Bugaboo arrived on the scene (thanks to Sex and the City) and became the must-have stroller for every DINK (double income-no kids), oops, with kids now – from Los Angeles to New York.
All the more rewarding then is to see a baby and kids super store that defies this irrational exuberance by taking it even a step further, turning a farce into a comedy. Lullaby Lane in San Bruno, CA is a paradise for stroller shoppers precisely because it doesn’t try to be one. It runs three stores and a warehouse in the suburban town south of San Francisco, and surprisingly, the town isn’t named after the brand yet - as perhaps one of the biggest non-big-box baby gear suppliers in the world. The town of San Bruno is adjacent to the San Francisco International Airport (the noise of planes taking off may disrupt your shopping experience at Lullaby Lane every other minute, but my wife used it as an extra lever to lure me into the shop – “if you get bored, you can watch planes.” I love watching planes almost as much as I hate shopping).
But bored I was not. Lullaby Lane is a one-of-a-kind store, independent, grassroots, not slick and shiny – but having been in business for 57 years and family-run, it is the anti-Babies R Us. Almost like a garage sale with sales reps that are a charming mix of car mechanic, Formula One engineer, and precocious kindergartener. Adhering to an old-fashioned model of super-personal customer service, they master folding and unfolding hundreds of different strollers, and go to great lengths to thoroughly analyze each and every feature of the many brands of strollers that they carry – including a live comparison of the performance of the inflatable wheels of the Bugaboo Frog versus the non-inflatable wheels of the Uppa Baby Vista (the Bugaboo is the clear winner). The best thing about Lullaby Lane, however, is its product reviews on YouTube, enhanced by a delightfully ill-placed soundtrack (AC/DC’s “Hell’s Bells”) and astonishing, unexpected outbreaks of stroller stunts. You have to see them yourself; here's one example:
The videos are smart. They’re rough, low-budget, authentic, fun, and laden with just enough irony so they don’t turn off hardcore parents-to-be but also cater to the more enlightened shoppers who (wrongly) think that they aren’t succumbing to the baby industrial complex. The videos feature men and are designed to appeal to men, highlighting the strollers’ features and the competitive nature of their performance. You feel like they’re selling you a sports car. Once you’re in the store, however, the sales reps pay closer attention to the mothers-to-be, knowing they will ultimately make the purchasing decision. Even though I was the one asking more questions, our sales rep would always face my wife when answering them. When we left the store, we had bought two strollers (I learned that you need one for home and a lighter one for travel), and we swore we’d come back. There’s always more you need for your baby. Yes, we care. And then we watched planes.
By the way, you may think the Lullaby Lane videos are edgy, but they pale in comparison to the guerrilla marketing campaign conducted by UNICEF in Finland. Wanting to raise awareness for children rights, the “Be a Mom for a Moment” campaign placed fake blue strollers with a crying baby audio track in crowded places in 14 cities. If people looked in the strollers, they would find a note with the message: “Thank you for caring, we hope there are more people like you. UNICEF – Be a mom for a moment.” Apparently, the media and public reaction was overwhelming, with coverage in all the major TV, radio and web news. The estimated media reach was more than 80% of Finnish population after two days.
Lullaby Lane and UNICEF’s campaign share a commitment to meaningful marketing. They successfully connect with their audiences by applying what I call the "five principles of meaningful marketing (pdf):” be social, be personal, be dramatic, be disruptive, and be responsible. Lullaby Lane embraces the idea of generosity (“give more than you take”) and originality (the videos) to create long-term customer loyalty, and UNICEF’s campaign was a perfectly choreographed moment of “disruptive realism.” Both create meaning – events and experiences that you can relate to other events and experiences and that are at the same time so scarce and unexpected that they’re worth sharing.
A few months after Barack Obama’s historic election, and a couple of weeks after the release of Barry Libert’s and Rick Faulk’s book Obama Inc. (and, of course, Obama's inauguration), the first start-ups are popping up that directly apply some of the widely heralded business lessons emerging from the innovative campaign. The fact that most of these lessons lie in the marketing domain supports the view I’ve expressed earlier and on numerous occasions: 1) Marketing will (again) become the number one change agent in business, 2) when it follows the new rules of “marketing with meaning,” that is, marketing which (simply put) consistently creates added social value – not as an afterthought but a sine qua non. While marketing has always been the art of turning friends into customers and customers into friends, it is now the art of finding, befriending, and “activating” the like-minded for a common cause, for the common good, for profit. Marketing, as the “voice” of business, is THE interface in a time when interface is everything. Marketing is the software. And software drives the value of products.
A recent example of this kind of Obama Inc. start-up, San Francisco-based firm Virgance, was featured in the Economist this week, and the article indicates that social impact in an activism 2.0 world is shifting from a welcome side benefit to an integral component in the business models of Internet entrepreneurs. The new kids on the web have internalized the lessons from the Obama campaign, and now they want to make a difference, too – and money. The Economist describes Virgance’s model as “for-profit-activism.” Named after a plot device in Star Wars, the company aims to support social causes through a multi-pronged campaign platform that resembles the way Obama for America mobilized its supporters, and it typically consists of four core elements: a web-empowered volunteer network, a presence on Facebook, a team of paid bloggers to promote the campaigns, and YouTube viral videos. Among the first Virgance-supported campaigns are 1BOG (“one block off the grid” – aiming to convince homeowners to switch to solar energy), Carrotmobs (public contests that incentivize retailers to become green), and Lend Me Some Sugar (based on the Facebook application that gives users virtual sugar cubes for donations to a cause of their choice).
Virgance is not the first for-profit-do-gooder of course; there have been plenty of others whose business model combines bottom line thinking with social value: the Economist, for example, puts Virgance in a line with Project RED. But Virgance is more like Facebook Causes. It adopts the forces of “Here Comes Everybody” and builds its entire business on a social web platform, embracing the principles of open-source, mass collaboration, and transparency: “If a for-profit company did the type of work that non-profits often do, but did it more efficiently, would people trust it the same way they trust non-profits?” the Virgance web site describes the company’s ambitious mission. ”What if everything the company did was completely transparent? What if it was open source? If we can create this kind of company, and succeed, how many other companies would follow our example? Along the way, could we change the face of the business world itself?”
Does that language sound familiar? The Obamapreneurs are adept at turning their campaigns into movements. Clearly, the Obamanization of business – both in terms of substance and style – has arrived in reality, and we will see more Obama Inc.’s in 2009.
On February 27-28, IESE Business School will gather entrepreneurs, scientists, foundations, and corporations at its annual student-run Doing Good and Doing Well conference in Barcelona. It’ll be interesting to see how the Obama gem will make its way into the more old-school world of CSR (corporate social responsibility).
People say that marketing's job is to create believers. The atheistic Anti-God ad campaign in the UK that has stirred attention at home and abroad does the opposite: it endorses the beliefs of non-believers (and maybe – stretch goal – tries to convert some believers into non-believers). "There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life," claim posters that appear on 800 buses in England, Scotland, and Wales, as well as on the London Underground. The campaign was initiated by the British Humanist Association and is supported by scientist and vocal atheist Richard Dawkins.
The organization Christian Voice has filed a complaint to the British Advertising Standards Authority accusing the campaign of breaking rules on substantiation and truthfulness, but not all Christians object to it. In fact, some even welcome public discussions about God. The Rev. Jenny Ellis, spirituality and discipleship officer for the Methodist Church, said: "This campaign will be a good thing if it gets people to engage with the deepest questions of life."
In any case, the posters and the subsequent public debate seem to have successfully resolved what French sociologist Émile Durkheim considered to be the central characteristic of religion: the dichotomy between the sacred and the profane. It is perhaps marketing's biggest strength that it can highlight the sacred in the profane and the profane in the sacred. The campaign may claim that there is (probably) no God, but it has proven the existence of "marketing with meaning": Provocative marketing that makes you think by challenging the most fundamental beliefs in the most mundane places.
Alright, now we're in 2009 so this may come a little late. But anyway, the year is still young, so here are the social media predictions for 2009 from the collective expertise of the Junta42 bloggers.
Excerpts:
Marketers will get cheap - Twitter will be officially mainstream - Twitter will suffer a backlash - marketers will lack control over content - combining traditional media with electronic media will increase - distributed eventing - news articles with images and video syndicated in RSS feeds - content will be more focused around conversation than messaging - innovative brands will start to provide engaging content that allows them to intertwine the brand rather than push it as the primary selling point - employees across the company will be content creators - more brands will develop a personality or a persona to represent the core values of the company - laid-off journalists will find a home as "content producers" and "content managers" on the corporate side - small business comes out to play - execution is the new strategy! - more "ombudsmen," fewer PR flacks - webinars & live or pre-recorded video events - the big challenge for brands is going to be reaching consumers without appearing to be selling anything - marketing messages will follow a less-advertising, more journalistic approach that offers relevant stories that show impact, offer counsel and demonstrate fairness.
In a nutshell: All are valid, none are too surprising. Brands will increasingly act like media companies. Content is king (again), if it's social, relevant, micro, meaningful, and fast.
