Category: bookmarks

"Consumers have always valued opinions expressed directly to them. Marketers may spend millions of dollars on elaborately conceived advertising campaigns, yet often what really makes up a consumer’s mind is not only simple but also free: a word-of-mouth recommendation from a trusted source and that trusted source time and time again is other consumers.
Word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20-50% of all purchasing decisions."

"More than ten years into the widespread business adoption of the Web, some managers still fail to grasp the economic implications of cheap and ubiquitous information on and about their business. Hal Varian, professor of information sciences, business, and economics at the University of California at Berkeley, says it’s imperative for managers to gain a keener understanding of the potential for technology to reconfigure their industries. Varian, currently serving as Google's chief economist, compares the current period to previous times of industrialization when new technologies combined to create ever more complex and valuable systems—and thus reshaped the economy."

FlowingData is the visualization and statistics site of Nathan Yau, highlighting how designers, programmers, and statisticians are putting data to good use. Has quite a lot of interesting visualizations.

Pretty nice visualization.

"The question facing every company today, every startup, every non-profit, every project site that wants to attract a community, is how to use data effectively — not just their own data, but all the data that's available and relevant. Using data effectively requires something different from traditional statistics, where actuaries in business suits perform arcane but fairly well-defined kinds of analysis. What differentiates data science from statistics is that data science is a holistic approach. We're increasingly finding data in the wild, and data scientists are involved with gathering data, massaging it into a tractable form, making it tell its story, and presenting that story to others."

Key point: "Social media is not an end in itself"

Includes tips on making effective presentations too – conciseness, visualisation, connection, confidence & passion

"..gaining a complete picture of how importance matters to customers and actually drives outcomes (not just satisfaction in the example above), could materially affect what you as an organization focus on to make improvements. We’ve observed repeatedly that incomplete representations of what customers deem important may yield a list of improvement priorities — and those priorities can be vastly different than those resulting from a more complete picture (as illustrated above). So, be sure you have the complete picture before taking action; otherwise you could be focusing on the wrong things!"

The white paper sets out to answer the following questions:
• What consumer needs can be identified and met using mobile phones in retail environments?
• How can mobile phones support richer, more enjoyable, more efficient and more relevant shopping experiences?
• What changes need to happen in retail stores to support this?

A handy 5 step guide

Note that this was just demonstrated as a correlation, nothing more. Nabbing someone as a Facebook fan hasn’t been proven to increase spending in this study. The study just demonstrates that people who become fans of brands are more likely to spend and evangelize. If they liked the brand enough to “Like” it on Facebook, they might have done those things anyway.

Interesting statistics, albeit from US users

References the book "The Invisible Gorilla":
"Meteorologists are in a unique position to consistently get feedback on their ideas and iteratively learn and improve. This is an extremely valuable position to be in. Marketers are also now in such a position – it’s a matter of whether they choose to take advantage of it or not."

"The Invisible Gorilla reveals the numerous ways that our intuitions can deceive us, but it's more than a catalog of human failings."

Feature proliferation is the name of the game in new product development. Most innovation in the market is composed of incremental improvements to what's been done before. Yet those new features often outpace what the consumers actually want. In the case of the Fusion, Gillette had to launch a marketing campaign specifically targeted to their own Mach3 consumers. Instead of campaigning to steal share from competitors, they had to practically beg their own consumers who were plenty happy with the earlier Mach3 to upgrade to the more expensive Fusion. They over-served the market.

As Clayton Christensen argues in the Innovator's Dilemma, the best move when the market is over-served is to innovate from below, not to join the new feature arms race. Less can be more. Simplicity is the killer app.

There is a lot of buzz and excitement related to social media. But remember that for social media to have any real lasting benefit to your brand, you’ve got to make sure it’s based on a solid strategic foundation. Otherwise, social media is just going to gloss over the fundamental strategic weaknesses that have been the demise of many a brand.

"…But angry high-maintenance people are rarely where sustainable profit margins come from (unless, of course, you are a divorce lawyer OR a PR firm who gets paid to give hotels bad advice)."

A good start to leveraging social media to connect better to the customers, but usage is pretty limited among hotels. Moreover, do hotels want to listen to just the nosiest of customers? How do they evaluate the cost-benefit of addressing such complaints?

Interesting points of views from Google employees

A house & a restaurant built in the shape of the iconic Beetle

A mix of free, freemium & paid services

Now you know how it's done. Could do with a few more options though.

Interesting set of parallels by Tamar Weinberg

A different way to look at the Apple & Steve Jobs: "I'm not so sure that Jobs thinks his Macintosh strategy failed. I think the way Jobs looks at it is this: he built a beautiful, revolutionary machine in the Macintosh, attracted incredible hype for it and passionate early adopters.
And then he got fired."

Quite a handy bunch of tricks collected from various sources

A video tutorial. I suppose it'll work with the iPod Touch\iPhone
via http://lifehacker.com/5550029/diy-touch+screen-stylus-new-and-improved

Pretty good for a company that was practically written off in the 90s. However the more interesting bit is about the business:
'By 2010, Apple had firmly established its dominance (in mindshare and innovation, if not in absolute numbers) in three areas: computers, MP3 players and smartphones; the company also controls an increasingly large marketplace for music, video and applications with iTunes, which counts its users in the hundreds of millions and has served more than 10 billion songs, 200 million TV shows, 2 million films and 3 billion apps. Apple’s now the largest distributor of music in the United States with 26.7 percent market share, according to a Billboard analysis.'

Pretty interesting thoughts: 'Although Google doesn't need to "win" the battle with Apple, Apple's hysteria, along with its insistence on fighting the wrong battles, means that Google has a decent chance of winning. HTML5 may be Apple's last chance to change their ways, and make decisions that aren't dictated by their desire to control the platform. If they don't, they will lose, and that would be tragic, both for Apple and for users.'

That's showing them…
'The binary comparison indicated that, if anything, adhering to the recommended vaccination schedule improved the children's cognitive development, as those kids outscored the least timely group on 12 of the 42 tests, whereas the converse didn't occur. Most of these differences vanished in the multivariate analysis, however, which suggests they weren't very robust. Still, it's anything but support for the contention that the vaccination schedule can be harmful.'

The ink used in the printers may be a technological marvel, but it remains really expensive. Wonder why they've not been able to figure out a cheaper way to produce it yet.