Marketing and Innovation Blogs to Follow in 2012

Contrary to popular opinion I don’t think that blogs are dead. I would argue that the time of crappy blogs about dogs and people’s everyday experiences is over and they are replaced by high-quality blogs where smart individuals share their thoughts and knowledge about a certain topic.

Some of these authors provide insights and share point of views that average tech journalist do not have because they have become nothing more than PR echo chambers. This is a collection of sites that might be relevant to you as well if you would like to get a better understanding what it means to create remarkable customer experiences.

Monday Note

Monday Note is written by Frédéric Filloux and Jean-Louis Gassée. Jean-Louis Gassée, the founder of Apple in France in 1981 and former head of product development at Apple (He was later ousted by Sculley and the Apple board) shares his views about Apple, media, technology and business models.

Asymco

Asymco is blog by Horace Dediu, a former business analyst at Nokia who became an independent analyst and who shares his insights into the mobile and computing industry. What makes his insights special? He has been the analyst that has several times predicted Apples quarterly results more precise than than many Wall Street analysts. Especially interesting is his analysis of Apple and the integration of different scientific concepts such as disruptive innovation, product lifecycles and his recent interest in yet to be disrupted industries like the movie industry and the financial industry.

Ceklog

Charlie Kindel was the former general manager for the Windows Phone Developer Ecosystem and has left Microsoft last year to do his own startups. While details are still unknown he shares his insights about the Windows Phone and the mobile industry on his personal blog Ceklog. Some of the hightlights are his thoughts on Android platform fragmentation and his opinion why Windows Phone has not taken off yet.

Launch

Jason Calacanis is a serial entrepreneur who became well-known for selling his startup Weblogs Inc. to AOL, cashing in on the first social media startup acquisition wave. He is currently working on several ventures which include his always-pivoting startup Mahalo and his startup conference called Launch. The conference also includes a blog and while his blog won’t win a price for excellence in editing, he shares some interesting perspectives. Of note are his thoughts about Amazon that I haven’t read somewhere else before. If you are working in retail, articles like Rumor: Amazon Retail Stores Coming & Predatory Pricing Channel Destruction and The Cult of Amazon Prime will certainly be of interest to you.

The Critical Path Podcast

While it is not a blog and comes from somebody that I have mentioned already, The Critical Path by Horace Dediu is one of the best podcasts I have come across. The Critical Path is described as “a talk show contemplating the causality of success and failure in mobile computing. Using Apple as a lens to look at both telecom and traditional computing markets, we try to understand what it means to be great.” Amazing description, amazing podcast and while the early episodes focus heavily on Apple and the mobile industry, the latest podcast dive into the movie industry and how the industry could be disrupted.

Do you have any recommended blogs or podcasts that are worth sharing? Let us know!

Innovating with the “jobs to be done” framework

If you would like to create a new chocolate bar – how would you approach this task? Depending on your skills and experience you would start with an analysis of existing chocolate bars in the market, track their prices and positioning to identify areas for differentiation of a new brand.

Bounty vs. Snickers and the behavior of milkshake buyers

It turns out that if you apply this framework to chocolate bars you discover that customers “hire” chocolate bars for completely different reasons . While Bounty is hired as a sweet delight that melts in your mouth, Snickers is hired by customers as a substitute for a real meal. Therefore the experience of eating a Snickers is different and consists of biting and chewing that gives you the impression you are eating something real.

Reframing the marketing positioning challenge

Virtual Assistants in a "hologram": A revolution for services?

Holograms are still a thing of the future but a British company has developed a smart approach to create a hologram illusion and is using it deliver a better customer experience at airports. Tensator has developed a technology called Virtual Assistant which projects the image of a person on a glass-wall to create the illusion of a person talking to you. At the first glance this might look like a cheap gimmick but one of their use-cases looks quite promising.

Educating travelers about security checks

Security checks at airports have become quite a hassle but for frequent travellers who know which items are prohibited and that you have to take out your laptop of your bag it is still a manageable process. The problem is usually with travellers who are not regulars at an airport and who slow down security checks. Even though there are signs that clearly tell you what you should do, for some reason they go mostly unnoticed.

At this critical moment the virtual assistants come in and educate travellers what to do. There are obvious benefits such as 24/7 availability and the ability to change the message in real-time depending on the situation at the airport.

In order to confirm my hypothesis I have reached out to the team at Tensator and they have shared some insights with me. Based on the trial at Luton airport  77% of passengers noticed the Virtual Assistants in the security area at LLA, two thirds of passengers at LLA said the Virtual Assistants clearly explained how to prepare for the security search and since the Virtual Assistants were introduced at LLA in February the number of searched bags has already been reduced by 4%.

Additional use cases could be shopping malls, retail stores or other critical touch points where this technology could substitute traditional signage and combine it with a human touch to increase awareness. It would be interesting to see if this approach is able to substitute a real human interaction and if consumers perceive it as an authentic interaction or just as an eye-catching marketing tool. I think there is the potential, maybe we get to see more use cases with real-life business metrics in the future.

Trendwatching reports on the 12 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2012

Trendwatching, one of the premier sources for trend research has just published the trend report for 2012 and identifies 12 mega trends that might influence consumers and brands next year.

The trends that are predicted to become relevant in 2012 are:

1. Red Carpet
2. DIY Health
3. Dealer-Chic
4. Eco-Cycology
5. Cash-Less
6. Bottom of the Urban Pyramid
7. Idle Sourcing
8. Flawsome
9. Screen Culture
10. Recommerce
11. Emerging Maturialism
12. Point & Know
13. Bonus: More-Ism

You can download the complete report as a PDF or view the report online.

The upside of the financial crisis: The emergence of banking innovations

The financial crisis has at the end of 2011 become a global concern again and the outrage about certain corporate behavior has lead to “occupy movements” globally. A significant drop in consumer confidence in financial institutions is the result that drives citizens to the streets to voice their anger and frustrations. Even though a certain bank might not have been actively involved in the high-risk trades of recent years, the image of the industry as a whole is damaged.

From Zurich, Switzerland to Charlotte, NC: consumers lose confidence

Certainly consumer confidence is different in each market and for each brand. Looking at the situation in Switzerland it turns out that a bank like UBS has experiences several shocks (20 billion USD loss in 2008, 50 billion USD have been written down, US tax evasion scandals and rouge trading scandals that required Oswald Grübel, one of the most prolific bankers in Switzerland to resign as CEO) and customers react and move move their money to other banks. Swiss cantonal banks have seen their business mostly unaffected and instead experienced a significant inflow of new customers. Similar situations have played out in Germany, United Kingdom and the United States even though each market has its unique characteristics.

What is common in each market is that the customers perception is that a large degree of these problems are caused by banks that have focused too much on making profits instead of providing services and caring about their customers.

Bank of America has experienced significant losses since 2008 and in order to offset these losses the company tried to introduce different measures, one of them was additional fees for debit cards. After customers protested and threatened to close their bank accounts, Bank of America stepped back and removed the fee again. But the damage has already been done and the result is that more customers have lost their trust in the financial system.

As always there are two sides to these developments: The dissatisfaction with banks and the financial service industry is also the breeding ground for financial service innovations. Several new services are emerging, that directly address the needs of these unsatisfied customers and they are receiving a lot of attention.

Removing merchant accounts

If a merchant wants to accept credit cards it usually requires to open a merchant account which is a complex process, especially for small and medium sized businesses. Startups like Square and Stripe make accepting credit card payments for merchants a lot easier and they don’t require merchant accounts anymore. Merchants can simply accept payments through their platform and the money is transferred directly into the merchants bank account.

Simple: a new bank for customers

Bank Simple has the goal to become a bank for customers because retail banks have forgotten who their customers are. The company is by itself not a bank but it provides innovative front-end services that use latest technologies while in the back-end the company partners with FDIC-insured banks to ensure the customers money is safe. It is a completely digital bank and therefore also the economics allow the removal of fees. No more surprise fees — nor monthly maintenance fees, overdraft fees, low balance fees, and absolutely no hidden fees. The interest is high as customers get ready to leave their bank.

Virgin Banking

Northern Rock, the British bank, was nationalized in 2008 and three years later in November 2011 Richard Branson has bought the bank to rebrand it under the Virgin brand. The focus is on customers again with the goal to bring bank the most important experience of banking: safety and trust between a bank and its customers. It would not be Virgin if they wouldn’t put fun back into banking with Richard Branson discussing whether the bank should be called Virgin Vault, Virgin Rocks or Virgin Money.

Customer Experience in the Financial Industry in 2012 and beyond

The financial industry has develop ideas that address the fears and current emotions of their customers. The times when focus was solely on technical innovations, retail experiences and mobile banking are gone and it is necessary to go back to the basics and restore the essential experiences that customers expect from a bank: safety, trust, fairness and responsibility.

At the same time it will be interesting to observe how established banks will react to the newly emerging players in the market. Virgin and Bank Simple will certainly experience a lot of interest and established banks will still be required to innovate and compete against these new incumbents once they have established their reputation again. In the end customers will benefit with better services and that will make this industry an exciting playing field in the coming years.