Thursday, April 5, 2012
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Where tomorrow‘s customers will place their trust.
One thing is clear: mass marketing has had its day. For decades people have consumed what they learned about through the constant barrage of advertising – and what was available in the shops. Retailers stripped their shelves of everything that only sold occasionally, in order to free up valuable shelf space for the real top sellers.
That is all in the past. In the new online economy of the “long tail”, providers increasingly earn their money with niche products. Thanks to limited costs for storage and for the “showroom”, it is well worth their while to offer the unusual and the quirky as well.
Consumers like niches. They no longer want to be one of the masses; they want to own things that are rare and unusual. Small groups of aficionados grow up – “social networks”, which replace the mainstream as a peer group.
These networks take over the job of communication. Information about “cool” new offers travels round in no time. Providers who want to be noticed in increasingly fragmented markets must therefore make themselves visible in these circles.
The explosion of choice makes heavy demands on consumers. To reduce the flood of information, they go along with a calculated risk: they trust the recommendations and tips of others. They increasingly take decisions for emotional rather than objective, factual reasons.
Read the report here
The Story of Unstoring.
The enD of The ShoP AS We KnoW iT !
One of the first products to be sold on the Internet was a pizza. That was in 1994 and the provider was an international restaurant chain called Pizza Hut. One year later Jeff Bezos took up the idea of online retailing. He started by selling books online on amazon. com. The sales channel faced a wall of scepticism. Who in the world would order books online when they could buy them in a shop? Fifteen years later the answer is clear: lots of people, and more every day. A comparatively young trio of Apple, Google and Amazon are in the process of forcing 500 years of printing and its distribution channels to adopt new business models. This development is already in full swing in the music industry and has the potential to turn conventional retail upside down. The triumphal advance of the Internet and e-commerce is changing the way in which the world gets its information, exchanges views and ideas, and shops. There is no sign that this momentum is about to change. The launch of user-friendly Internet browsers in the mid-1990s triggered the race for ever cheaper and more powerful terminals; since then, the story of retailing has been an ongoing process of steady revision. Bypassing the shop.
Unstoring denotes a development that short-circuits the classic retailer. It is a future that could render shops superfluous – if they refuse to change. The reality is that digital technologies are increasingly part of the real world. The clear distinction between online and offline, between virtual and real, is blurring as the two universes merge. But what will happen to conventional shops when more people use the (virtual) pixel shopping cart than the conventional (real) wire cart? When sales migrate off the retail floor, it is time to reinvent the retail store.
Download the summary of the report here
Facebook Considers Adding The Hate Button.
Just imagine the impact on your brand's Facebook centered marketing strategy if you have more "hates" than "likes" on your brand's timeline.
When the original Like button was announced, Mark Zuckerberg made a bold prediction
there would be over 1 billion Likes across the web in just the first 24
hours. Sources at Facebook say Mark is estimating 2 billion Hates on
the first day. Facebook studies have shown the sad fact that people hate
things on the Internet more than they like things. There’s also an
internal debate on whether the new button should be called “Hate” or
“Dislike.”
Since the tiny Like button makes up such a huge part of Facebook’s
revenue, the introduction of the Hate button could raise Facebook’s
valuation further ahead of the IPO.
If FB decides to add the button, then personally I think "dislike" has a better ring to it than "hate".
Read more about the possibilities of hate button here
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Saving Abandoned Brand Mobile Apps.
There’s a graveyard of brand apps that were a little more than a
flash in the pan in terms of repeat usage from consumers. And the reason
for this is simple. The majority of brand apps serve little or no
utility at all to users.
The key, unsurprisingly, is making apps that are based more on
long-term utility rather than campaign
one-offs. The tradeoff is that true brand platforms require a mix of
departments while most brand apps originate from marketing departments
and are geared to specific campaigns.
“Utility apps have broken the path for the app world,” said Yvonne
Caravia, chief experience officer for Mobients, a mobile design and
strategy agency. “People who are on the go want to get stuff done
quickly, and having a branded app that provides some sort of utility is a
good way to get them coming back over and over again.
A study by Localytics found that just one in four mobile apps are never used again after being downloaded. The same study also found that 26 percent of apps aren’t used more than once.
Read more here
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