Avenue A | Razorfish recently published the “2008 digital outlook report“. On 164 pages they present what happened in 2007 and what they think will happen in 2008 in the digital media landscape.

For many consumers, an engaging advertisement still powerfully influences their decisionmaking. But even more powerful, are the opinions they share with each other through trusted blogs and social networks. A mother in Topeka, Kansas, or a teen in a London flat can become trusted authorities, influencing more decisions than the best formulated professional branding campaign that an advertising agency can offer. Consumers are turning to a seemingly endless source of specialized media – so much so that commonly accepted best digital best practices have very short shelf lives. Yesterday’s solutions simply aren’t adequate to solve today’s problems. Is it any wonder that most businesses are coming to the hard realization that they aren’t organized effectively to respond to change?

Avenue A | Razorfish’s 2008 Digital Outlook Report examines where that digital spend is going. We provide direction on how marketers can align their organization to respond to the new digital environment, as well as a framework for effectively managing emerging channels and social media. And we give you some interesting new insights into consumer behavior.

The chapter “ten digital media issues to watch in 2008″ is especially interesting, so watch out for:

1. The move beyond media buying
2. The impact of a recession on online advertising
3. The redefinition of online media measurement
4. A limited increase in average CPMs
5. The fallacy of the “digital upfront”
6. The slowing of ad network acquisitions
7. A breakout year for mobile—but not for mobile advertising
8. Nokia’s emergence as a key player in the digital marketing industry
9. The continuing lack of video ad standards
10. The Internet’s impact on the 2008 presidential election

For me personally issue 8 “Nokia’s emergence as a key player in the digital marketing industry” provided new insights.

Nokia made two important moves in 2007 that will impact digital marketing in the coming year. It acquired both Enpocket, a leading mobile advertising and marketing services firm, and Navteq, a leader in navigation data and systems software. While there have been no formal announcements from Nokia about how its assets will fit together, it is clearly going to be a company to watch in the coming year. Nokia appears to be vying to expand its own business outside of consumer mobile devices and into the software and services that consumers are able to use on those devices.

Nokia now has assets that may accelerate the use of smart devices that use location-based services that know where we are. The potential benefit for marketers is the ability to deliver relevant, geographically contextual advertising opportunities to customers. Accomplishing this feat in the U.S. today, while not impossible, often involves orchestrating a small army of carriers, devices, marketing services providers, and agencies whose interests are not always aligned.

Download the full report.

Posted in customer insight, strategy, trends | Permalink | No Comments »

Customer Insight is the first step when designing interactions with customers that create remarkable experiences. The challenge is not to capture the explicit customer requirements but to understand the implicit requirements and latent needs of your customers.

The article “Deeper customer insights - Understanding today’s complex shoppers” published by IBM Business Consulting Services provides some valuable insights into customers in the retail industry.

Here are some excerpts of the report:

Five “megatrends” for 2010
[…] we identified five deep-seated trends that are reshaping the business environment […] :

• Customer value drivers fragment
• Gatekeepers become more guarded
• Information exposes all
• Megaretailers break the boundaries
• Partnering becomes pervasive

These megatrends are driving the industry to a “world of extremes” where customer diversity and individualism are pervasive, and traditional segmentation is rendered inadequate. Customers demand low prices for basic goods, but pay premiums for products that matter more to them personally. Consequently, those best positioned to grow and succeed will be huge megaretailers on one end of the spectrum and targeted retailers on the other, while undifferentiated companies, lost in the middle,
risk fading into irrelevance.

Corporate thinking thus needs to switch from “bell curves,” where firms try to serve a generic mass market but do not meet anyone’s needs particularly well, to “well curves,” where companies drive growth by applying distinct models in each part of their business to deliver the greatest value to explicitly defined groups of customers.

A customer value cube is used to describe the value expectations of retail shoppers.

Another interesting chart are very/extremely important shopping services and features.

Groceries

Apparel

Download the full report.

Posted in customer insight, strategy | Permalink | No Comments »

Nick Leon doesn’t like the term “design thinking”. The former business development director for IBM’s Global Services Division in Europe who is the new director of Design London, a multidisciplinary educational initiative launched recently by the Royal College of Art and Imperial College in London, prefers a term that is more serious and in his opinion better suited for boardrooms. He suggest the use of the phrase “design method”.

You have to talk about something with more rigor. ‘Design method’ is how you organize multidisciplinary teams, how you exploit technology or what processes and practices you might apply. These are all things that are as natural as breathing to a designer—but which aren’t regularly used in a business sense. To start talking about ‘design thinking’ in the boardroom or in the business school doesn’t seem strong enough. It seems a little conceptual—I want to get deeper than that.

I am able to relate that it might be difficult to convice executives to “think about design” when they would rather prefer to apply some “design method” to solve their problems. A “design method” also has the benefit that you can suddenly become really busy with planning projects, calculating business cases and setting milestones which is all very complicated when you are talking about something conceptual as “design thinking”.

Nevertheless it is essential to differentiate between actual design methods and the philosophy behind these methods: the way of identifying problems, seeing potential solutions and the focus on fulfilling customer needs. These are just some areas within design thinking and they can’t be substituted with design methods.

If the use of “design method” instead of “design thinking” is what it takes to spread the word, then this is what we should use. Yet we should not forget, that we have to “design think” as well and not just apply “design methods”.

Posted in design thinking, strategy | Permalink | No Comments »

The major obstacle when putting forward initiatives to improve the Customer Experience around your products and services is very often missing confidence by employees that these initiatives are supported by top management. Employees and managers see themselves stuck in a situation when they try to set-up such initiatives from the bottom-up. So what you can you do about it? From my point of view: not a lot.

The main determinant for successful projects is always top management support. I don’t know how many papers, surveys and interviews I have seen where the final conclusion is that the most important key success factor is top management support. This factor becomes even more important when talking about designing and delivering customer experiences.

Two basic patterns of strategic direction can be present within an organization. It is either inside-out oriented, focusing on their organizational performance (i.e. cost structure, production network) or it is outside-in oriented, focusing on markets and customers and deducing organizational requirements from this. In the field of strategic management this has been discussed in detail with the two concepts of “the resource based view” of an organization and market orientation. The decision what concept is dominant within an organization is naturally given by the direction that is defined within an organizations strategy which is ultimately defined by the CEO.

Convincing the CEO to focus on Customer Experiences or even just on customer focus when he is busy with controlling and production strategies is a difficult thing. The discussion whether leaders are born or made is an old one. What I am asking myself is this: Are customer oriented CEOs born or made? And if you are not customer oriented (enough), can you still change yourself as a CEO? (Or can you become more customer oriented through you employees?).

It is possible to become more customer oriented as a CEO. If people are able to climb Mount Everest or cross the Sahara it is possible for a manager to become costumer focused. What does it need for that? Determination to become a CEO that feels the pulse of the customer.

A few examples?

We have the usual suspects here, Steve Jobs of Apple or Tim Brown of IDEO. Another interesting person is Ron Dennis, the leader of the McLaren Formula 1 team. Here is an article about the McLaren technology center and as they say in the article: “a man’s obsession”. (found via metacool)

Bruce Nussbaum at the Businessweek talks about the challenge that “CEOs must be designers, not just hire them”. Here is one great excerpt from his article:

In the US, CEOs and top managers hate the word “design.” Just believe me. No matter what they tell you, they believe that “design” only has something to do with curtains, wallpaper and maybe their suits. These guys, and they’re still mostly guys, prefer the term “innovation” because it has a masculine, military, engineering, tone to it. Think Six Sigma and you want to salute, right? I’ve tried and tried to explain that design goes way beyond aesthetics. It can have process, metrics all the good hard stuff managers love. But no, I can’t budge this bunch. So I have given up. Innovation, design, technology—I just call it all a banana.

Posted in customer experience, innovation, strategy | Permalink | No Comments »

Many reasons exist for someone to start his own business or for a company to market new products. Even if you are not starting something new you are still in the situation where you are offering something to someone.

This could be an independent software developer producing some customized software application, a biotechnology entrepreneur trying to sell his potential blockbuster medicine or a musician playing music on the street.

The problem is that most of us are very focused on ourselves. What we have, what we do, what we can offer and what we want to get form that. When you catch yourself thinking “What can I do? What can I offer? How can I sell what I already have?” you should step back and take a look at the big picture again.

Here are some questions that should help you in this process:

1. What exactly is it that I am offering?

2. Who could be interested in that (a.k.a. Who are my customers)?

3. Why should anyone care about my offering?

4. Does my product or service increase anyone’s overall performance?

5. Does my product or service decrease anyone’s costs?

6. Are you really sure that your answers for 4 & 5 are realistic?

7. Why exactly should anyone choose you or your product and not someone else?

8. What could you do to improve the performance or decrease costs for someone?

Don’t get me wrong here. With these questions I don’t want to be overly pessimistic. All I want to do is to think about your business not from the point of “What’s in it for me?” but from the point “What’s in it for them?”. Because at the end of the day, everyone is thinking more about himself than they are thinking about you - so you better give them a good reason to do business with you!

Posted in checklist, strategy | Permalink | No Comments »