Data Grab

J and her friend B had a Build A Bear gift card each to redeem so us moms took them over to the store the first Saturday after the holiday season when the weather was nice. This was my first time at Build A Bear and I came away fascinated by the experience. The idea is customers will pay for the experience and the stage craft of the store and return for more. The hooks and inducements certainly seemed to be doing the trick. There are many repeat customers and first timers are certainly tempted to return.

You select the "bear" you want to build, take it to the stuffing station and have it stuffed to your liking (soft or firm or in-between) but the neatest trick is the heart you get to thrown into it for free with a cute wish making ceremony that appeared to be hit with the girls. You wash the bear, outfit it , get a birth certificate made and check out.

The birth certificate stage is the data collection point - a kid could virtually give all their demographic data away in less than ten clicks if the adult accompanying them is not mindful of what is going on. It just would not occur to a child that they don't need to provide the any of the information being requested or pretend to be an Albanian great grand-mother. The brilliance of the strategy is undeniable.

Again at the time of check out, the cashier will ask to verify physical and email address. Then there is a slew of slick brochure-ware to entice the customer to go on- line at and bring their creation to life, play games and such. It reminded me of lines from a poem we learned as kids 

"Will you walk into my parlour?"
Said the spider to the fly;
"'Tis the prettiest little parlour
That ever you did spy.
The way into my parlour
Is up a winding stair;
And I have many curious things
To show you when you're there."
"Oh, no, no," said the little fly;
"To ask me is in vain;
For who goes up your winding stair
Can ne'er come down again."

The bear workshop is the parlor and the marketing strategists are the spiders trapping their hapless child-fly victims in mind boggling numbers. No matter how hard and expensive it was to work up this recipe, it is certainly paying rich dividends. Having been on both the data acquisition and analysis side of things to help with behavior based marketing for several years now, I find it easy to see the huge value of the data that Build A Bear is collecting. What bothered me most was that the party giving up their information was not even informed enough of the consequences of what they were giving away.

Rent A CEO

Lately CEOs have become synonymous with over-compensation and insinuations of incompetence and worse. Reading this Silicon India article about renting CEOs for short durations made me pause for thought. This is the individual who is entrusted with the stewardship of the company and is responsible for its future and direction. How someone brought in for a six month stint can realistically deliver on all of that is hard to fathom.

If leadership at the top changes a couple of times each year, how does the rest of the organization possibly keep up ? Each individual will bring to bear their own management style and biases but by the time everyone else has settled into a good operating rhythm it becomes time to do things over - and in a different way. Even churn in middle management ranks can cause a havoc in the trenches. If indeed, a contract staff of CXOs are able to keep things humming along just fine and the organization on the whole does not miss a beat during transitions, it would bear testimony to their complete redundancy. The reason why this trend is catching on in explained thusly :

It is now becoming prevalent in India in senior and middle management level. At the top management level, it is not called temp staffing (or temping) but Interim Management. The money is fairly good and work is done on a milestone basis. It works for people who do not wish to be wedded to a company and are looking for flexibility," says E Balaji, CEO, Ma Foi Management Consultants.

Work one on a "milestone basis" indeed - how particularly convenient ! Sounds more like they want to make as much money as they can without responsibility or accountability and skip over to their next gig before shit hits the fan. This is scam artistry at its very best.

Aging Startup

A client I consulted with recently embarked on a large project with the primary aim of driving more customers to their on-line store and making the buy process easier. There were some social media features thrown in for good measure. The idea being everyone's doing the Twitter and Facebook thing so we should throw our hat in the ring and hope for the best.

A hundred thousand followers on Twitter in Week One seems about the right number (entirely without basis though) so let's target that. Turns out that reality falls far short of that and everyone is left wondering what they did "wrong". The idea of using reaching their customer on their mobile devices seems too far-fetched idea to the powers that be. In a sense they are trying to replicate an e-commerce success story from a decade ago at a time when the world has moved on to other things and will continue to do so. By when the project rolls out into production, the vision would have become out-dated and irrelevant.

This client is interesting in many ways. They were a start-up about fifteen years ago and a lot of their leadership team is from the pre-IPO days.The rest of the crew is young and collegiate - a bunch of bright, talented and energetic people. With management being from a different internet generation, they are no longer at the bleeding edge of technology or innovation. While they still have the cool start-up vibe and are fairly low on red-tape they are beginning to resemble any other traditional company of their size in every other way.

If this company is representative of it's demographic, an aging start-up is like a bottle of soda left open.Until the fizz dies out completely, it will have some giddy up to it - in this clien't example they continue to be the leader in their domain. But once the last bubble dies, they may just become another average corporation that moves at too slow a pace to keep with the the changing tides of technology.

Micromanufacturing

Got caught up with Clive Thompson's blog recently and particularly enjoyed reading his thoughts on what he calls the Micromanufacturing Revolution. I have been reading Ellen Ruppel Shell's book Cheap The High Cost of Discount Culture where the author makes an impassioned case against the death spiral created when retailers out-discount each other to everyone's detriment - including that of the penny-pinching consumers'. 

Along with everything else that is nice about the burgeoning micromanfacturing trend, it is also relatively immune to the forces of discounting undress duress. If everything a seller makes is bespoke and the buyer has the both the discernment and the budget to chose it over the deeply discounted, mass-produced offerings of big box stores, chances are that the seller can ask and get what they believe their creation is worth. 

If more and more people become sellers, it might even be possible to trade using a barter system.Micro-financiers could step in to help those who have everything else it takes to get a micro manufacturing business going except for the seed money to begin their venture.

Ahead This Year

Sienna Farris looks at her Magic 8 Ball in this AdWeek column. The first three are already happening so more likely than not it will continue in the new year. The fourth requires having some social media marketing experience under the belt. Farris suggests : You'll see more companies using simulations and augmented reality to provide users branded text overlays and 3-D virtual demos on their phone viewfinder.

I would argue, that may be where companies need to reach but not a lot of them will able to go quite that far yet. Making that gaint leap in a year may not be feasible. I really like the last implication on the list : 
 
5. Crowd sourcing will turn social media into a direct sales channel. 

This could be the place where the interests of sales and marketing organizations can converge instead of being at odds with each other as they traditionally have been.

Conscientious Wealth Creation

Read an inspiring article about combining one's education and passion successfully.  This entrepreneur has been identified as one of  "35 women globally under the age of 35 who had "something special to offer the planet: wealth creation that’s not at others' expense."

Winnie So is in the luxury travel business and by her definition luxury does not always have to equal expensive.“Most people think ‘luxury’ equals expensive, but in my mind, luxury is just having freedom and being able to do what you want to do, what you want to see and experience what you want to experience.”

She is able to combine her love for travel along with her ability to listen to what the client is saying to come up with a travel plan that is luxurious because it is so unique.

Specially liked the part about wealth creation that’s not at others' expense. What a rarity that has become in today's world !

Happily Unmarried

When a couple of  talented desi guys come together and dream up an idea that is uniquely and authentically Indian, pair it with a great design sensibility, you have have something like Happily Unmarried. I follow the start-up activity in India and long to see desi ingenuity meet design and  technology in ways that have a distinctly Indian flavor.

All too often, the ideas I run across are borrowed from the West, with some vernacular thrown in to desi-fy it so to speak. Then ten other companies riff on the same cloned theme with minor variations. In the end, none of them stand apart from a crowd and or have any kind of Indian signature. Happily Unmarried is  very happy departure from the formula around a concept that is not "inspired" or "cloned" and could only come from India.

Recently, I had a chance to chat with Rajat Tuli, one of the duo behind Happily Unmarried.

Me :  What was the moment of Zen that prompted you guys to come up with Happily Unmarried ?
Rajat : It was more an idea which evolved over time, based on our own experiences we realized that in our family oriented country there is nothing which targets the young.This made us quit our dull jobs and start to identify things which we could sell to people like us.And we are still evolving, getting into more categories.Oh its a lot of fun. 

Me : Is your store and idea too cool for the aam junta or does everyone get it easily ?
Rajat : Sometimes it is a little tough to explain to people what happily unmarried really means( try doing it in Hindi)but that apart the products are all well designed, they have an Indian sensibility most importantly they are things you use everyday. So the web is increasing. Initially we were only in the big metros but now we are even selling in Agra, Jammu, Coimbatore and other cities which one thinks are outside the cool zone. 

Me:  What are your social media outreach efforts like ?
Rajat : We have not done anything to promote the brand, thankfully the products keep getting picked up by magazines, we have been featured a few times on television but our best publicity is through word of mouth.There is also a sizable presence on Facebook now.

Me : How do you come up with the design ideas for your very unique products ?
Rajat : We actually identify products of mass consumption and then we try to inject in them a dose of irreverence and fun, there is a team of designers and a lot of effort goes into each product. 

Me : Does buying the Happily Unmarried brand supposed to say something about the buyer ?
Rajat : Yes, that she has a sense of humour,has a good taste,is going to make her Boy friend/husband/ dad very happy.

Me: If you could choose three tags to describe what your brand is all about what would they be ?
Rajat : Fun,Indian,Quirky

Me : What are the next big plans for Happily Unmarried ?
Rajat : Many, but the one I can speak about is a pub.The first HU bar and kitchen is being build even as I write this. Everything from the chair to the napkin is being designed by us.

Me : Would you consider taking on a serious social issue in India and put your creative spin on it to create a product that becomes a conversation piece ?
Rajat : Yes, we do sometimes. But since our tag line and with a name like Happily Unmarried we are morally bound to not be committed to a product, idea or cause for long.

Me : Did you face any unique challenges getting your business going ?
Rajat : Yes, lots when we started we would tell people we want to design funny products with Indian sensibilities, people said we would run out of ideas after 10. We have over a 100 now and ideas for may be 200 more. Ofcourse there were also minor issues like having no money to start the business with etc etc 

Me : Are the morality police (Ram Sena et al) keeping close tabs on you ?
Rajat : No, they have no reason to and even if they do we do not care.

Understanding And Listening

If management lessons from a super-prime, niche restaurant are transferable to more mainstream businesses, this HBS case study might make a compelling case for allowing some operational inefficiencies to persist for the business to thrive. Even it were not possible, there is much to ponder over the elBulli success story. Per chef Ferran Adrià's "Creativity comes first; then comes the customer". Not exactly the same thought, but a riff in similar vein is Seth Godin's advise on choosing the right customer and knowing who to turn down.

Very often vendors will bend over backwards, meet patently absurd demands from the client, over-commit and under-deliver and everything else that goes with an engagement (and later a relationship) from hell. The problem is exactly as Godin puts it : Marketers rarely think about choosing customers... like a sailor on shore leave, we're not so picky. Huge mistake.

Adrià has probably taken Godin's idea of being selective about customers to an extreme and has been able to do so because of the business he is in. Clearly it is no recipe for universal sucess but there is much to be said for "the distinction between understanding and listening to customers" - something most business can profit from learning to do well.

Friends With Benefits - A Social Media Marketing Handbook

Traditional businesses are still trying to grasp what the expanding universe of social media means for them, their marketing and PR efforts. While there is consensus around the imperative to be a part of it, decision makers in these organizations find themselves struggling for guidance when they try to put a social media strategy together. If they do end up trying the "social media thing" the results are often either underwhelming or unmeasurable stymieing the way forward to trying a different, more informed approach to it.

The single biggest question for marketing organizations is what is the risk of getting it wrong. What if their campaign fails to generate the positive buzz and turns to a marketeers worst nightmare - the social networks get control of the story in an unfavorable way and decide to digg and stumble it right into the Hall Of Shame. There is a sense that the social media can be cruel, unforgiving and even somewhat whimsical. Unless your recipe is exactly right, you could be in trouble. No one wants to become a case study for what not to do with social media.

With all that, there is a pressing need for a guidebook on navigating through the vast and confusing social media space. Friends With Benefits - A Social Media Marketing Handbook is just such a book and it does an outstanding job of being the expert voice without miring the reader in the minutiae of geek-speak. The authors Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo, cover a lot of ground in 300 pages. The book is a comprehensive compendium on the tools of the trade, implementing an effective social media campaign, excellent case studies of both successes and failures, what the future holds for this medium and of course lessons learned.

For those who have up to now remained on the fringes of social networking, reading this book is their chance to come up speed quickly and regain lost ground. Yet, there is a lot someone who is conversant with social media can learn from it as well. Having consulted with marketing organizations of large companies for a few years now, I see the value of Friends With Benefits from an education and awareness standpoint - the essential first step to utilizing the medium effectively.

This is great addition to bookshelves of foot soldiers in marketing organizations (specially in large companies) but distilling the learnings from it into a business case to pitch to senior management would still pose a challenge if the audience is not particularly web technology savvy and social media aware (as is often the case). I would love to see a book by the authors that addresses this need.

Incentives For Loyalty

Love the idea of Sprize. While many stores offer to match their own prices (if lowered in within a certain window of time of after the purchase) or against their competitors, the idea of crediting the difference to your account automatically is an enhancement that would be a hit with customers. It eliminates the hassle of keeping an eye for price reductions - often people will forget all about their purchase the minute they hit the submit button on the web or step out of the store. Sprize levels the playingfield by giving the non-savvy shopper the same incentives as the adept bargain hunter. This is great news for those of us who are never able to take advantage of Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the like

It would be nice if other stores took a cue from Gap and went one step further. Instead of inundating a customer's physical and electronic mail boxes with largely irrelevant and time insensitive rewards, discounts and coupons they could have everything applied to the account automatically. So if you are eligible for that 25% off coupon, the next time you are at the store the cashier would automatically take the deduction for you - or borrowing from the Sprize idea give you the option to credit your account with the amount of deduction you chose not to take.

Loyalty programs designed to make a customer's life easier while saving them money would likely garner much better response than one that takes a lot of work from a customer before it saves them some money.

Fearless Flyer

I love flipping through (and even reading) Trader Joe's Fearless Flyers. There is no other piece of unsolicited mail that I even bother with. When you consider the cost of acquiring mailing lists, scrubbing them, segmenting the consumer population, matching the names back to internal databases, setting up a marketing campaign, glossy print, postage and all - the numbers add up quickly.

After all that is done, the average recipient of these materials tosses them into trash without a second thought. The Fearless Flyer on the other hand, is printed on really cheap paper, it is anything but flashy and is takes no trouble to target messaging by way personalization.

Yet there is something about the Flyer that makes me want to read about products I have not considered buying before. Even if I don't buy, I am at least aware of what is available - a good enough engagement metric by most counts. Occassionally, the reading has translated into an actual purchase - which is exactly the kind of conversion marketeers want to see happen.

Being that the fans of the Fearless Flyer abound, I am not a demographic anomaly. Obviously they are doing something right with it. You have to wonder what makes the Flyer (and by extension Trader Joe's) tick at a time when the consumer is innundated by slick narrowly targeted ads online and offline.

Snake Oil

Nothing can get a bunch of geeks venting like a post titled IT Snake Oil or the story of the marketing pitches that totally failed to deliver what was promised. Some of the criticism is probably too harsh. AI has delivered a good deal even if not to the extent imagined. ERP systems have not always been bad news. It is possible to get a decent implementation in a small, mid-sized company where management is invested in doing things the right way instead of taking short cuts and employing band-aid instead of real solutions. Snake oil also comes in other forms in the IT business.

Pricey consultants will be brought in to study process and system inefficiencies and come up with a proposal that fix everything that is wrong or broke. It looks great on paper but no one knows how to give the thing some legs so it can actually walk the talk. The client gets a bunch of colorful documentation for their money, with competitor analysis and measurements against industry benchmarks thrown in for good measure.

Management has some numbers it can bandy about with confidence. The consultants leave, their proposal gathers dust after a few attempts to implement their suggestions fail. The old timers in the company say they would have told management the exact same things and for free but no one bothers to ask them. They also know that the problems are such that they cannot be solved unless you do over everything which is virtually impossible. Often they turn out to be right.

Ploys In Love

Product placements are often often as intrusive and annoying as a buzzing fly in the kitchen. You cannot ignore it, often cannot get rid of it until it leaves of its own accord. Annoyance and intrusion reach new heights when love is used as a ploy to place a product - a valedictorian professes her secret passion for a classmate which turns out to be plug for a product. Used to be that certain aspects of our lives and social interactions were completely off-limits to the outside world.

The reality show business changed that premise quite fundamentally and now the cow is clearly out of the barn and now there is no limit to how far she can stray. For cash strapped teens, having a corporate sponsor for an important date would seem like a good idea. Everyone wins - boy gets to impress girl, they both have a great time and the marketing whizzes get a bang for their buck as well. There is no reason why this cannot become the logical next step from the valedictorian event.

Putting Twitter To Work

For any brick and mortar business wondering how Twitter can do for them, Naked Pizza may have the answer. Wonder how long it will take before a Twitter handle becomes a standard part of a billboard, appearing before web-site and phone information. After a while their combined promotional tweets will become tweet-spam and it will create a market for anti-spam tools for Twitter. Also, there are only so many companies anyone would care to follow. When the tweet-noise decibel is high enough, folks will probably find another quieter place to hang out.

I dream about a time when marketing departments in corporations will try to come up will better ideas than trying to grab their prospects and leads by the eyeball. Maybe they could become the mystery benefactors to the communities where they are located and thereby pique everyone's curiosity. Towns, cities and villages almost everywhere in the world could use a helping hand. Instead of emblazoning every inch of open space with their marketing and promotional materials when they sponsor something, they may try a lighter, subtler touch for a change.

Failed Innovation

Micheal Mandel blames where America is today on the failed promise of innovation in this Business Week article. Among the several indicators he cites that point to the lack of innovation is this really telling one :

The final piece of evidence is the financial crisis itself. After the 2001 tech bust, trillions of dollars flowed into the U.S.—but most of it went into government bonds and housing rather than into innovative sectors of the economy. While subprime mortgages boomed, venture capital investments have more or less stagnated since 2001, with few tech startups going public.

A lot of readers blame the paucity in innovation on the intellectual property litigation. While it's contribution cannot be denied, many would argue it is important to have the checks and balances in place so IP gets the protection it deserves. It does not help that that countries with lax or unenforced IP laws have not been the hotbed of innovation because it weakens the litigation argument somewhat.

Having experienced the dot-com bust and some of the euphoria preceding, it appeared that public appetite for all innovation had vanished once the house of ill-conceived e-commerce venture cards came tumbling down. The malaise of the IT sector seemed to have tainted things that had nothing to do with it. Instead of finding the next cool thing to bet on, people simply stopped placing bets altogether. If anything, the average person learned to be wary of investing in technology and products that they did not quite understand or found too intangible to be comfortable with. In that sense the dot-com bubble preempted innovation in other sectors that may have otherwise happened.