"Made like a gun, goes like a bullet"

There is something about bikes. In my case, there is something about old bikes. I have a fascination for Harley-Davidson motorbikes since I was a kid and listened to that unique roaring. My fascination is probably deeper for a brand I got to know when I lived in India: Royal Enfield.


Originally manufactured in the UK, Enfield of India bought the rights to use the name in 1995. Interestingly enough, according to wikipedia, from 1955 to 1970, Royal Enfields were marketed in the US as Indian Motorcycles by a company who had acquired the rights to the Indian name.

"Made like a gun, goes like a bullet". There is no take away for this post. I just love the bike.

KIWOKO tiendas de animales

Me comunica mi amigo Javier Osa, uno de los fundadores de la cadena de tiendas de animales KIWOKO, que acaban de lanzar su sitio web. KIWOKO cuenta ya con 17 tiendas en España (Madrid y Galicia, por ahora).
No soy un experto en el sector pero en un panorama muy atomizado, con pequeñas tiendas de barrio, me parece muy rompedora su imagen de marca unificada, atractiva y desenfadada, con un toque de comic que, como imagináis, me encanta. La aplicación en el punto de venta me ha gustado mucho.


Aunque la web es principalmente transaccional, vamos, que está totalmente orientada a la venta de producto, me ha gustado la declaración de los derechos de los animales y el espíritu de profesionalismo y dedicación que se respira en la presentación. Como decía el Sr. Rato en su charla del otro día, las ideas, los principios, son importantes.

More targeted marketing on Pandora

Listening to Eric Clapton on Pandora, Best Buy offers me a Fender guitar. The model, of course, is Eric Clapton's legendary Stratocaster.



This is what you get when you click on the link. Not quite flashy as the add, but they offer free shipping...

Great comic strip by Erlich in El Pais

It reads:

"Yes, the rent is more expensive"

"But take into account the design"

Stop motion: the PEN story by OLIMPUS

When things are done with such an amount of love there are no words...behold and enjoy

Worn out. Play on

ReUSE A SHOE is Nike's initiative to recycle used shoes into surfaces to play. Old shoes are turned into grind that can be used in running tracks, playgrounds, soccer fields and basketball courts.

your old shoes...

...reincarnate as a basketball court

According to the site it takes 50,000-75,000 pairs to resurface a full field or soccer pitch but only 2,500 pairs for an outdoor basketball court.

Google Book Search offline campaign on Campus?

Found this week at Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. The poster has good printing quality and the paper is thicker than normal.

offline marketing...

Is Google Book Search launching a student-driven, ambassador-like promotion campaign at universities? Anyone knows? I will try to find out more about it... By the way, this is what you find when "googling" (or "googleing"?) the term "Search Books"

...complementing AdWords and organic search positioning
Click to enlarge or just google "book search"

Google Book Search owns the main sponsored link and ranks first, third and fifth in the organic search results.

The Most Innovative Companies 2009

I have been flipping through Businessweek's Most Innovative Companies top 50 for 2009. Apart from the expected technology-related companies (Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Intel...) there are retailers (Target, WalMart), several telephone carriers (AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone) and surprisingly auto and financial services companies.

Well, regarding the two latter categories, if they have not been innovative they'd better get their innovation mojo working. The main problem for me is that they have so much at stake that it would be complicated for them to reinvent (=destroy) themselves.

• They could potentially do it from the product side if they think wildly enough. In one of my first posts I mentioned a lecture by Mr. Tetsuya Kaida from Toyota Motor Corporation. One of his aspirational principles was being able to produce cars that not only do not pollute but also have a positive impact in the environment.
• Ditching their current business models is a very different thing. This is probably the critical issue. I cannot think of companies "disrupting" their own business models before they are in dire need. Any examples?

In the top 50 list there is another interesting finding, particularly for me as a Spaniard.

España is in the Businessweek Innovation Top 50!

There are three Spanish companies in the top 50:

• #28 Telefonica, the leading telecommunications operator in the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking world.
  
• #39 Iberdrola, the world's biggest wind-power company.
• #42 Banco Santander, pioneer in applying consumer-marketing techniques to the financial services industry in Spain, worldwide top 3 bank in terms of profits.
  

All three are large companies that have been around for a long while. In fact most of the companies in the list are large and relatively old firms. It can be a bias in the methodology employed to select the candidates, but why aren't there smaller, crazier companies? The study is based on a research by a major management consulting firm, does that play a role in the final selection of companies?

Walkin' and a-Talkin'. ATT&T true colors?

This is what I received together with my AT&T monthly bill. A total of 8 pieces of paper of different shapes and colors. In one of them, the green one, I was encouraged to save resources and "go paperless"

Honda case: more fun than a barrel of monkeys

The story of Honda's entry in the US motorcycle market in the 60s is one of the most popular case studies at business schools. Case studies, apart from a cookie-cut narrative structure, tend to include a fair amount of exhibits with graphs and tables. Very rarely they indulge in including light notes or fun facts. The Honda case is extremely appealing by itself but the following document adds some extra color to it:

The Beach Boys composed the song "Little Honda". Since they already had two hits aligned for radio release they put together the Hondels to launch the song. I guess that the song was commissioned as part of the communications campaign of the Honda Super Cub but I have not found any information about it.

Here you have the Beach Boys' tribute to the "groovy little motorbike" that is "more fun that a barrel of monkeys". No product placement in this clip though.

Hang on tight while you listen and enjoy!

Dear facebook user: do it for me. Once again

After complaints over their new Terms of Use, Facebook wants its users to write the new ones. This is how it goes: OK dear users, we got it wrong [ or you didn't let us get away with it ], now tell us how you would like it to be.

Two comments about it:

• Facebook is built on the premise of profuse user generated content on top of the platform the company provides. But, hey, how cool it is when users actually help you develop your product infrastructure!. It is not the first time facebook relies on its users for developing core components of its product. They did an awesome job outsourcing to users the site translation to other languages.

• Facebook can make a mistake and still have the brand power to tell its users to work for them. It looks like it can get away with anything: the product is so relevant to its users, they are so locked-in - due to a massive network effect-, that people would provide feedback and try to change things for lack of any other better alternative.
  

Share of stomach / tank

A couple of days ago driving along highway 80 I noticed something, I guess, quite familiar all over the US. Chevron's and McDonald's logos shared a sign at a rest area. I couldn't take a picture of the actual site but it was something quite like this.

.................

What grabbed my attention was that both brands were sharing the same status up above in that sign. Equivalence of stomachs and gas tanks!. For me, gas is a completely undifferentiated product which unique function is to "feed" the car. In a sense, it looked like McDonald's hamburgers were performing for human-beings the same function that gas provides for a car.

The golden arches' brand doesn't come out nicely from the matching. Both brands belong to very different experiences. As a consumer I felt a subconscious disconnect. Well, some may say that at the end of the day it is all about chemistry - organic and inorganic-, isn't it?

Lululemon and customer nakedness

Last week I was shocked to see real customers' pictures in the shop windows of the Lululemon shop close to where I live. When I say real customers I mean people that I know. Apart from a fair and bare amount of their skin, they revealed their dreams too. Over the black and white pictures of their semi-naked bodies all those people had written a concrete personal goal: "I want to become a lawyer by 2016". "I want to be more compasionate"...

Lululemon is a retailer of yoga-inspired athletic apparel. I had the chance to study their business model as part of one of my classes project. They have a powerful mission statement: "Creating components for people to live a longer, healthier, more fun life". Something that sets them apart from other retailers is their strong focus on grass-roots relationships. Their shops try to become rooted in the community they cater to by holding community events and offering free yoga demonstrations and classes. They appoint ambassadors and offer product discounts to athletic instructors.

There is a couple of things that struck me from the "customer nakedness" campaign in the shop windows:

• Lululemon's brand power and connection with their customers. It takes a whole deal of familiarity and credibility as a brand to convince your customers not only to take off their clothes but also to expose, yes, to publicize, their most personal challenges. This would not happen without an authentic personal, one-on-one relationship between the brand representatives (shop owner, sales associates) and the customers. What a credible and consistent-with-brand-values testimonial campaign.

• The participants behavior is the reflection of an interesting sociological trend. Obviously there can be a myriad of personal motivations when volunteering for the pictures. My personal take on it: we need to have our own voice and we need everybody to know. We need to feel beautiful and worthy of praise, admiration - or desire -. Part of the popularity of blogging may have to do with this too. Not many brands are able to provide this unique benefit, and this is an open question for my readers: what brands do you think are giving their customers the possibility of feeling different, unique...you name it?

Communications in the Time of Crisis

As part of their communication strategy in the auto bail out controversy, General Motors has a website - GM Facts and Fiction - addressing facts and myths about the company.


The home page starts laying out plain facts: "General Motors is the best-selling automaker in the U.S., "M’s brands [...] are ranked above industry average as measured by 2008 J.D. Power Initial Quality", etc.

Then, another section of the site follows the scheme myth - fact. Myths about GM are grouped into 5 categories and for each of them there is a response, backed up with data ("GM doesn’t make cars that people want to buy", "General Motors has far too many people working for it","GM designs are uninspiring", etc.). The site even allows visitors to submit myths they might have heard.

It is not available anymore but some weeks ago there were messages addressed to different audiences. I might not remember it perfectly but I think there were specific sections with answers for auto workers, consumers and suppliers. I am a big fan of profiling users in order to increase relevance in the message, so i do not understand why this technique disappeared from the site.

To complete the picture, there are FAQs, latest news and general information on the auto industry.

There are twenty seven (27!) myths. Obviously they are all highly detrimental. Given that the firm refutes them, it would be interesting to know what triggers such amount of bad perception amongst the general public. My point is, what is the role that this fact - widespread negative consumer perception- plays in GM having to recur to a bail out. Twenty seven (at least) false and extremely harmful beliefs have been lurking who knows for how long before the firm started giving facts to counter attack them...

Dreamforce and Salesforce.com's secret potion

There are many factors that help explain salesforce.com's success. For the sake of clarity let's explain that in a world where expensive proprietary software solutions with low customer adoption were the norm, salesforce.com turned the tables by delivering easy-to-use enterprise software on the web under a pay-as-you-go subscription model. The end of software.
Marc Benioff, salesforce.com's CEO, is an absolute genius pitching the big picture and building the "No software" story against the dark, old software "evil" guys. The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market would not be the same without this Star Wars-like communication strategy. No wonder salesforce.com's software development platform is called force.com. Yes, may the "force" be with you.

salesforce.com and...the evil guys

From a marketing perspective I think one of salesforce.com's most differential features is its customer-centricity. Let me approach it this time from the point of view of communication: corporate software companies sell to...eh...corporations. Duh!. Here are a couple of random snapshots about how SAP and Oracle "sell" their CRM through their websites.

"SAP maintains status as leader in CRM solutions"

"Differentiate for strategic advantage with the latest release of Siebel CRM 8.1.1"

Well, salesforce.com sells to corporations too, but they talk to people. Whether you are the CEO or the CIO, messaging is clear and straight-forward. Especially they are really good at talking to the people who are going to use their product 8 hours a day. Customer success stories play a key role in salesforce.com's communication strategy. Testimonials are pervasive all through their website. They are prominently displayed at events such as Dreamforce or Tour de Force. The "CRM Success Heroes" campaign is not on anymore, but the following screenshots can still give a you a bit of a taste of the difference in communication styles.

"Join the crowd. The trusted choice of 47,700 companies"

"Now Force.com can run my corporate website? Wow... Mike Wolverton. Cathedral Partners"

Dreamforce is a perfect example of the importance that the end user has for the company. I was there last Monday and I could witness the amount of resources dedicated to make this annual reunion with customers a blast. Impressive keynotes, sessions and workshops, training, demos... And on top of it, they throw a party with the Foo Fighters.

Dot #1: The power of the moment

Last Oct 1st I attended a lecture by Mr. Tetsuya Kaida, General Manager of the Business Revolution Corporate Value Project Department of Toyota Motor Corporation, where, by the way, I met IDEO's Tom Kelley.
Amongst other many enlightening insights about Japanese culture, I learned how one infinitesimal moment can define the impact that an event has upon us. Translated to business terms, successful products are able to create a personal dialog with the customer through a consciously designed point of interaction, one intense moment that captures the essence of the product. Mr. Kaida's example was the Pocky cookies.



First you open the packaging. This process is elegant and seamless. The outer carton remains intact. Then you pull out the cookie which is covered in chocolate except for a tiny portion at its very tip. Result: you can hold in your fingers without getting all messed up. That delicate moment defines an excellent product that is likely to remain in your memory as a gratifying experience.


The power of the moment explains other successful "product moments": the fresh scent coming out of a detergent bottle or starting up a MacBook for the first time, just to name a couple.