Webinars Now! - Best Practice

What's your take on webinars? Do you use this 1 to many medium to increase sales?

Another older article I want to address as I clear things off my desk... Worthwhile? You decide, I only blog to add value...

Some facts from B2B magazine, 10/08:

• Webcast market 2014 - 3.4Billion - reach "more people for less"
• If you can't go face to face...webcasting is an excellent way to reach your audience...
• Webinars "allow you to engage in a conversation at a deeper level with customers."
• And you can track participation extensively!

Best Practices:

• Identify targets and create content just for them.
• Send invitations well in advance.
• Engage & monitor your audience.
• Don't make a sales pitch. "Don't make someone come hear you talk about you, you have to make it about them."

Wow, this last point - is there a clearer way to say it? Maybe I'm being hypocritical as a blogger, but these concepts aren't mine -- I'm just bringing them to my humble reader's attention...

• Last one, which I consider "numero uno" -- Follow Up - Give this some context. But within reason, what else really matters... If you have something to say, why not say it? Don't make someone do all the work on their own. This is known as The Close...

Amazon's Bezos on Innovation

From the most recent Business Week ranking on innovative companies comes this brief interview with Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon (ranked #11 on BW's list): http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_17/b4081064880218.htm?chan=magazine+channel_special+report

There are some really worthwhile gems in Jeff's comments --- specifically his insistence on customer focus, his belief in commitment to ideas, and his insight into why organization's innovations fall short. These points provided here...

On perceptual risk:

"I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate. That's actually a serious point. If you're going to do something that's never been done before—which is basically what innovation is—people are going to misunderstand it just because it's new."

If your considering a real innovation, have you built in this expectation into your mindset? Is your group committed enough to an idea to weather this period of uncertainty?

On organizations' failure to focus on the customer:

"Companies get skills-focused, instead of customer-needs focused. When [companies] think about extending their business into some new area, the first question is "why should we do that—we don't have any skills in that area." That approach puts a finite lifetime on a company, because the world changes, and what used to be cutting-edge skills have turned into something your customers may not need anymore. A much more stable strategy is to start with "what do my customers need?" Then do an inventory of the gaps in your skills."

How instructive! We all know intuitively that the need to evolve is critical in today's environment, but have organizations internalized that? Up to this point, can we really blame them? What a massive cultural shift and commitment to learning that entails!

This last comment really alludes to the importance of the connection between successful innovation and true strategic alignment within an organization. If a company is not philosophically committed to evolving in fundamental ways, there is a considerable risk that the most relevant ideas may be dismissed because they don't align with current skill sets.

Ultimately, sustainable competitive advantage is derived from a firm's ability to truly identify customer needs, align their innovations with those needs, and ultimately undertake those innovations by developing the skills they need to effectively execute them. A very tall order...

Cisco's John Chambers on Collaboration

Great interview via FT.com with John Chambers of Cisco: http://www.ft.com/cms/8a38c684-2a26-11dc-9208-000b5df10621.html.

Some insights from John:

• On the role of the CEO: to communicate externally, and accurately represent the culture and direction of their organization; most CEOs today are "command and control" and the future will require moving beyond that..., successful leadership requires the ability to effectively change.
• On the importance of collaboration: it is critically important to future productivity growth - we are really doing it "1to1" today, we need to move beyond empowerment to true group decision-making and "collaboration enabling different business models"
• Enabling collaboration: new networking tools will truly enable better collaboration - video conferencing, telepresence, blogging, wikis, social networking, etc. - John provides a great example of using video coupled with wikis and bookmarks to internally disseminate information

Two primary thoughts on this interview.

1. On collaboration: Although John doesn't deeply articulate how this will evolve, he does talk about using a variety of tools that Cisco uses (and sells) and then speaks about the importance of adding discipline and process. Since collaboration really represents another opportunity for sustainable competitive advantage, digging deeper to understand successful collaboration methods is a worthwhile exercise...
2. On communication: As an important enabler of collaboration, John does a great job of illustrating the use of video mail in conjunction with other tools (at 9:04 of the interview) - worth a listen).

Some critical questions:

• How does an organization reach the appropriate communication level internally and externally - to enable collaboration (internally), differentiate effectively (externally), etc.?
• How does an organization best utilize technology to enable that communication?
• Assuming the communication is in place, how does a firm move beyond that to build and institutionalize true collaboration?

"Brands listen more than they talk"

Ran across a white paper that Visa's new CMO Antonio Lucio created while he was head of PepsiCo's insights and innovation group, view it here:
http://nevereatalone.typepad.com/blog/files/antoniolucio_thusspaketheconsumer.pdf

In the paper Antonio discusses the role of brand and insights within marketing, and he makes some good points that I'd like to repeat below. For me, the central themes ring true --- the importance of appreciating emotion, insight, and complexity.

Marketers must learn to manage complexity...
...on behalf of their customers, by becoming trusted filtering resources:

Consumers are looking for "...brands and services that can edit and interpret the overwhelming amount of information into a format which can be digested and absolved according to consumers' points of view and/or biases..."

...and within their own organizations, by balancing facts with "emotional motivations":

We need to avoid "analysis-paralysis" and spend more time with the consumer face-to-face. "In this new world, we need to commit to transcend the obvious numbers and words, understand consumers' total brand experience, and dig much deeper into emotional territory."

"Lighthouse Brands" need to be developed - "brands that not only deeply understand consumers' lives but have a true differentiated and non-apologetic point of view on life."

The four key elements to a "lighthouse brand", the result of something he calls "seduction marketing" are:

• "aspirational ego-centrism" - life as consumers would like it to be
• about building emotion vs. reason
• a thorough understanding of the consumer's total brand experience
• intrusive and seductive exhibitionism

The marketing function needs to be brand-centric vs. activity-centric

"...brands have become more complex concepts to understand and to manage....that provide consumers safe grounding and the reassurance of known experiences. The challenge for the Marketer is therefore exponential, as successful mega brands need to be tightly orchestrated to maintain their core essence while building new benefits that will end up reinforcing at the same time as expanding and rejuvenating the Brand."

Consumer insight is the key

"Insight has to firmly guide and audit all decisions on brand and customers.... If we are changing structures and streamlining processes, the one thing that needs to be elevated above all is the voice of the customer."

Book Review: Richard Florida's Who's Your City

I completed Who's Your City a couple of weeks ago, and wanted to summarize key points from it here. For those of you who are not familiar with Richard, he's the professor and author that originated the idea of the "creative class". He has discussed the role of the "creative economy" --- one which values creativity and new ideas --- and his new book focuses on the role of place. This is a great book, and I wanted to extend my thanks to the publisher for providing an advance copy for this review.

Richard's thoughts center on three key ideas:
1) "...place is actually more important to the global economy than ever before."
2) "Places are now more diverse and specialized -- from their economic makeup and job market to the quality of life they provide and the kinds of people that live in them."
3) "We live in a highly mobile society, giving most of us more say over where we live" -- take advantage of that mobility.


The Importance of Place
Richard's contention is that "...in today's creative economy, the real source of economic growth comes from the clustering and concentration of talented and productive people". In contrast to another great book, Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat, Florida indicates that now --- more than ever --- where you live is as important as what you do. Although globalization has levelled the playing field for workers in some respects, an individual's location is critical to their well-being, the quality of their lives, and their ability to capture synergies and economies of scale from those within their industry. Richard:

"The reality is that globalization has two sides. The first and more obvious one isthe geographic spread of routine economic functions such as simple manufacturing or service work....the second, less obvious side....is the tendency for higher-level economic activities such as innovation, design, finance, and media to cluster in a relatively small number of locations."

This is what Michael Porter calls the "location paradox" --- "Location still matters. The more things are mobile, the more decisive location becomes." Finally, as Florida illustrates in the first part of the book, "The key to our new global reality lies in understanding that the world is flat and spiky at the same time."


The Continued Specialization of Place
Here, Florida works from findings of others to illustrate the cities continue to "cluster" into specialities. Schumpeter and Solow, illustrate the importance of "creative destruction" (i.e. innovation and entrepreneurship) to economic growth and wealth, and discovered the startling fact that ... about 4/5ths of the US economy's growth per worker was attributed to technological progress."

Jacobs and Lucas illutrate the importance of cities to this process, and identified the importance of "talent clustering", which lead to a "multiplier effect" that is the "primary determinant of economic growth." Ultimately, they noted that "...a doubling of population resulted in more than two times the creative and economic output." --- synergy. "According to UN predictions, by 2030, more than 2/3rds of the world's population (4.4B people) will be urbanites."

In the end:

"What matters most today isn't where most people settle, but where the greatest number of the most skilled people locate. Because the returns from colocation among the ablest is so high, and because high-end incomes are rising so fast, it make sense for these workers to continue to bid up the price of real estate..."

Using this Knowledge to Your Advantage
The final part of the book helps the reader identify characteristics that are important to them and the cities that they may ultimately choose to reside in. This can serve as an excellent resource for those that want to understand regional dynamics, and the "personality" of their respective city.

Although this probably serves as the most directly useful core of the book, Richard has a wonderful website developed as a supplement, and so I will direct you there for additional information: http://creativeclass.com/whos_your_city/


In summary, this is a great book that does a great job of helping to illustrate the global changes that are taking place, and provide them in a context that allows the reader to make some informed decisions about where and why they make decisions on where they live. Given the critical importance of place to well-being and economic security, a visit to the website would be an enlightening first step.

"Innovation is not a Strategy"

Forgive the posting delay --- too much going on. I wanted to start back by highlighting an article from Al Ries today (in Advertising Age: http://adage.com/print?article_id=125470 ) on innovation.

His take is that --- "A business enterprise has only one basic function: build a brand that can dominate a category" (a la Jack Welch's be #1, #2, or get out...). Innovation can help get you there, but as a method, not the goal.

Some really good thoughts on this:

• "Most brands don't need innovation, they need focus. They need to figure out what they stand for (or what they could stand for) and then what they need to sacrifice to get there."
• "Innovations outside of a brand's core position can undermine the brand."

How do you feel about innovation? I recognize its importance as a business concept, but still think that success is still a function of how well that innovation meets a user need - which is usually tied to a fundamental insight .

It's not innovation, in and of itself, that is important. It's a particular product's ability (through "innovation") to adequately meet a critical need that ultimately determines its success.

So riddle on that one. Thanks Al!

Customer Co-Design

This article from the August issue of CFO talks about the role of customer input, and it's likely future: http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/9539646?f=search.

This article helps to emphasize the critical point that the future of innovation and product success really hinge with your customers; and not just customer "insight", but actually getting customers engaged early so that they can react to your product before it launches.

Patricia Seybold is quoted that "at least 50% of a company's innovation should be coming from customer input and designs"... More importantly and historically, P&G's CEO (Alan Lafley) almost two years ago publicly communicated an innovation goal that stated over 50% of new products need to originate from outside the walls of P&G. (Their phenomenally successful automatic toothbrushes are one example of an outside idea they bought and scaled.)

The successes that result from strong customer collaboration are not lip service. The article cites some additional examples that I'll just list here, but there are numerous other examples in the business community today.

Examples:
- Volvo N. America C30 launch - Volvo offers a build-your-own tool on its website prior to launching the C30. It receives over 10,000 hits. Results help them determine the production demand for the product and they also change the features offered as a result.

- Threadless.com - You may have heard of this one. Some Chicago guys get together and launch a website of custom imaged t-shirts where visitors rate designs, and then they are produced based on those ratings. High revenues result - check it out at http://www.threadless.com/.

- Kraft - Achieves 100MM+ in sales as a result of the 100-calorie pack rollouts for various products. Packaging developed in response to concerns from their customers about their difficulties around portion control.

This is just the beginning folks. If you are involved in marketing, and specifically responsible for product management or development, customer interaction is even more critical than it has been in the past. Involve them in proof of concept and pre-launch. If you don't, your doing yourself --- and more importantly them --- a dis-service.