CRM and beyond, Nicolas Schriver's blog on Customer Relationship Management and Marketing

Facebook And Profitability: Interesting Video And Some Thoughts About Potential IPO

2012-01-09T13:29:00.000+01:00

Facebook keeps growing at a fast pace, and has matured as a strong marketing media, used by a large number of companies throughout the world.

I recently watched this video on Youtube, and wanted to share it with you.Unfortunately I am not able to upload it on my blog...

It is a CNN show where analysts discuss about the move of Godman Sachs to buy for $450 million of Facebook shares, evaluating it at $50 billions. It was on January 2011, a year ago.

At this time, Facebook was counting 600 million members, $2 billions in revenues. The analysts are discussing about the actual profitability Facebook may get. Indeed, it is very difficult, and it remains difficult now, to know exactly what kind of profitability Facebook is right now achieving. Also the fact that Facebook is not public, it does not need to give specific financial data, which could help us see how it works.

Facebook and social media company in overall is a brand new business modell. And as all new groundbreaking business modell, it is difficult to analyse the company's result and profitability in ten years from nom (which is what really matters).

Facebook has great ambition in 2012 to launch an IPO, and to enter stock exchange market. It will allow the company to raise massive money, and therefore give a lift to their effort of developping a leading advertizing hub, to attract advertizing budgets from companies and communication agencies.

This video has been published a year from now, and since then, very few information on the financial and business end of Facebook have been released. If Facebook actually really wants to enter the stock exchange market, they will have to publish some information about its profitability, and this is based on these information that the company will actually be rated.

The context is pretty tough for Facebook for a potential IPO:

The world is experiencing a major economical downturn, and it impacts most of the Index, including Nasdaq
The competition is getting tougher as Google is reaching more and more users with Google Plus.
A lot of regulation complains have come up with Facebook, and new laws restricting Facebook's terms of condition may hurt its will to master users' data for commercial purposes.

2012 will be a crucial year for Facebook, because even though the IPO does not happen this year, Facebook will have to prepare for it, and we will probably have more information about Facebook's actual results.

Some Thoughts About Tablets And The End Of Computers

2012-01-04T12:58:00.000+01:00

Tablets have been the biggest success in the high tech market in 2011. We have seen tablets blossoming and most of the computer manufacturers have launched their products. The two great leaders remain Apple with its Ipad, and Samsung with the Galaxy Tablet, empowered with the Android O.S.

I remember having read couple of Loic Lemeur's about Steve Jobs considering that computers were "trucks", and that ultimately they may disappear. But I am not really into that state of mind.

Here is a very interesting video I found on Youtube, where Bill Gates give his thoughts on the Ipad.

Obviously, as Bill Gates explain, his opinion is biased. But I must agree also with one of his point: there is a lack of ability to edit things with a tablet.

I personnaly own a tablet (an Ipad 1) and I truly love it. I use it all the time, read news, watching videos. It is a great device, which actually is in a lot of cases easier to use and better than PCs, even laptops.

However, a tablet is not enough, if you have to own only one computer device. Indeed, I find it very hard to write a blog post, or to use a worksheet, or edit a powerpoint presentation. A computer remain by far the easiest way to create or edit something.

So I do agree with Bill Gates when he says there is a lot of room for improvement for tablets.

The fact is that I don't believe we will have a sole "computer device" at our hand. The tablet is the perfect example of what is happening: We did not really need a tablet, but it just expands our connection with Internet.

And computers, the ones we use to edit and create which will exist at least for the next decade and beyond, will be a slight part of our interaction with computers and Internet.

Most of our "products", or "things" will be connected:

We will have our smartphone, connected to the Internet, with enough computing power to play, to watch videos and so on.
Our tablets, to relax and have access to Internet
Our computers to work, to edit, for "inputs" as Bill Gates say
Our car, where we get more and more options to access to social media, to GPS information (traffic, restaurant yellow pages, among other things).
And all the things we are not aware of, but that will eventually come.

Sort of like in the Minority report film, we will have access to computers and Internet every where, and therefore, tablets will have its place, but I believe not the central place, and computer also will have an important place in it.

I believe that what will remain the core, will be the smartphones, as they are always on people, so the easiest way to get in contact with the Internet.

What do you think about it?

2011: A Year To Remember

2011-12-31T22:20:00.000+01:00

In these times, it is a tradition to look back and go through all the main events which happened last year. 2011 has been a long year, full of important moments.

Here is a melting pot of the different events that marked the year:

The Japanese Tsunami
Fukushima's nuclear catastrophe
Usama Bin Laden's death
The rise of democratic protests in the arabic world
The Greek crisis
Then, the following Euro crisis
The death of Steve Jobs
The Dominique Strauss Kahn affair
The Lybian war

I don't remember another year which could have been so full of important events.

Some Facts About The Mobile Application Market

2011-12-28T21:45:00.000+01:00

Mobile application has been a gold mine for a lot of people. And it is indeed a category still growing at a fast pace. I found this very good article which gives us some data about how mobile applications work.

It is a very interesting information. That shows you want should be your target depending on the platform in order to consider your application productive. You can see that there great gaps between the different services. That shows that a lot of the different services may disappear soon. For example, Blackberry has unfortunately failed at developping an interesting app plaftorm. Google has clearly become the leader in the market.

Freemium is becoming a more and more important part of the business model of mobile applications. The bigger the audience will be become, the larger the advertizing opportunities will be, and the easier it will be to propose free applications.

This is an interesting one, because supposely it explains that mobile advertizements are more efficient than Internet once. However, I would like to know what they consider as mobile campaigns. It is more and more difficult to identify mobile campaigns, as now they are closely linked to the Internet. The consumption of email and social media thanks to mobile devices constantly grow, and it is important to consider these new usage to propose an accurate way to deliver commercial messages through those devices.

I remain skeptical about the methodology of this chart, as I do not know the data itcomes from, but I believe there is something to digg there.

The mobile aplication market is for sure a marketing with a great future ahead:

The penetration rate of smartphones, and other mobile devices allowing to download and use applications is growing at a very fast pace.
The market is becoming mature, and users are increasing the number of applications they download.

Insights About Marketing On Facebook

2011-12-27T21:40:00.001+01:00

I wanted to share with you a great article I found on a blog about the cost of marketing on Facebook. It has been a long time now that I have interested myself in social media marketing, and it is impressive how fast it grew.

You can check the figures, they talk for themselves. But I just wanted to underline some facts about it, that I believe are interesting to understand and notice:

It does cost money to communicate on social media. A common wisdom, especially at an early stage was that it was cheap and almost free to communicate on social media. Also, a lot of people thought it would be a great opportunity for small business to communicate, as it was a fast growing medium, and the freedom of speech would bother and limitate big corporations. However, it is the total opposite that happened, as the medium became pricy, and the efforts need to be high in order to bond with the community.
There is no cost scaling possibilities.Whatever your number of followers/fans is, it will cost you per user about the same price. It is very diffferent from the other "direct marketing" tools, where the bigger the data base, the cheaper the costs are.
There are big gaps for cost per clicks. Now it would be interesting to see the return on investment of the different categories. Indeed, cost per click is not really important. What does really matter is the conversion rate, and the way you may transform one lead into a customer.

Quand Google prend la plume

2011-12-23T13:33:00.000+01:00

Je souhaitais réagir à l’édito du numéro de décembre 2011 deMarketing Direct Magazine. En effet, cet édito est consacré à Google, etnotamment à la stratégie de recrutement du géant de l’Internet.

Le cœur du modèle économique de Google est le « référencementpayant », avec les fameux « keywords ». Google, et ce depuis denombreuses années, à recours à des campagnes de marketing direct pour démarcherles entreprises, petites ou grandes, en offrant des offres de tests avec desbons de xxx € d’achats.

La rédactrice, Dominique Fèvre, met l’accent sur le côtéincongru de cette société vivant sur la révolution du marketing direct vers lenumérique, qui utilise un support pour le moins traditionnel, qui plus est encrise (il suffit de voir l’état économique de la poste américaine).

Mais, comme elle le signale, ce n’est pas si abérrant :le média papier, et courrier reste un média très important dans la relationclient. En effet, parce qu’il se rarifie, il en prend encore plus de valeurs. Lemédia papier est beaucoup plus personnel que le média Internet. Il conserve parailleurs d’excellent taux de transformations.

J’ai toujours été partisant du mailing. Il est d’ailleurs,bien qu’ancien, l’un des médias qui permet le plus de laisser libre court à lacréativité (choix du papier, des couleurs, de la découpe etc…).

Google a bien raison d’utiliser un média papier, et depuisle temps qu’il le fait, je suis sûr que c’est pour une raison.

Et vous, qu’en pensez vous ?

Where Is Heading Twitter ?

2011-12-20T18:17:00.002+01:00

I havealways been a big user of Twitter, which is actually my favorite social media. Nevertheless,and for quite a while, I have been wondering about their business model andtheir ability to generate long term revenues.

One figurecomes up to my mind. Twitter has 100 million users. It is a pretty large base,and it makes it one of the most used social media in the market. But when youpay a close attention to this figure, Twitter is by far smaller than Facebook,and on an international scale, it remains small. Will it be enough to become anunquestionable media?

To me, thequestion is not solved yet. I have learned recently that Twitter is stillraising funds in order to develop their advertising platform. It is for sure avery important step they are taking. They now focus all their efforts on developingthis needed business model, and achieve profitability. But it has been severalmonths that they are working on it, and still, it is unclear if they havereally made any progress.

Twitter isa new medium. And most of the new medium, like television or radio, havestarted by providing great quality program before becoming profitable. Eventuallyit works. Twitter has no questioned change the way we consume information. Twitterit also changes the way we interact on the Internet. And it really brings addedvalue to the user.

Twittersuits well for:

¨ Accessinginformation fast on a mobile device thanks to its short text messages

¨ Beinginformed to the most recent news.

¨ Interactwith others who share the same interests.

But onceagain, Twitter really needs to find a way to monetize its service, otherwiseits system may have no future.

I thinkthey should have focused on this point right from the beginning, as it wouldhave been easier afterwards to adapt the platform to advertisements.

How To Bring Value Thanks To Customer Experience

2011-12-17T10:15:00.002+01:00

French newspaper "Le Nouvel Economiste" dedicated the headlines of its Leadership & Management section to customer experience. It is a vast topic which is very familliar of mine. Indeed, I am a true believer that top of the line customer experience can bring long term revenues to a company. You can take as an example Starbucks, Nespresso, or other popular ones.

But what is customer experience?

Customer experience encompasses all the emotions linked to a purchase, before and after it. Therefore we can consider two main components:

The shopper experience: Before the good or service has been purchased.
The customer experience: When the customer uses the good and after.

The goal is to propose more than a product, and being able to bring added value aside of the product's one. It becomes more and more difficult to bring "real" innovation through products as markets and technologies become more and more mature. Therefore, the best way to create something extra is to base it one something immaterial.

The key factor of success to create such an experience is to pay attention to all the different channels the customers use to get in contact with the brand. It goes from the packaging to the websites, and of course, there is a particular attention to pay to the point of sale.

There is also one trap not to get into: To create a customer experience which does not take into account the company's profitability. Indeed, creating a great customer experiences implies a lot of costs in terms of branding, design, communication and so on. But it is also very important to size the increase of profitability it leads to. This is a very difficult task, because as an intangible concept, customer experience takes into account a lot of different costs, from stores furniture to the sales people uniforms, and linking the increase of sales or of marketshares generated from it is most of the time a difficult task.

You may monitor your customer experience efficiency through your after sales/ feedback management service, where you will be able to identify what goes wrong and misses into the experience you propose.

Customer experience also does not imply bringing a high quality experience, based on what you may find in the luxury market. If you look at Ikea's customer experience, it is great because it also implies low cost and an easier way to purchase furniture.

Nevertheless, customer experience is something vital for companies, and it is important to look after what you offer to customers in terms of experience, in order to understand better their expectation.

LeWeb 2011 Starts Tomorrow

2011-12-06T20:55:00.001+01:00

As a lot of people may know, French event about the Internet and social media Leweb is starting tomorrow, December, 7th. Leweb has been created couple of years ago by French serial entrepreneur Loic Lemeur, who has been one of the trail blazers of blogging in the early 2000s. Since then, the conference did not stop growing at a fast pace, and has become now the leading event in Europe about the web economy.

I have never attended the event, because most of the time I was not available, and I must say the tickets are a bit pricy to me (even though it is very affordable for professionals, especially when compared with other events). Nevertheless, I always check what is going on on my Twitter account, and also, for some conferences, I watch the streaming videos (which are very helpful).

A lot of people has criticized the event, saying it got worse, but in my opinion, but I have two thoughts about that:

Social media events used to rock at the early stage, while every one was starting and enthousiast. The last couple of months we have seen a lot of services shutting down, due to the financial crisis of course, but also as a natural event, as markets and players starting to define their playground. This is the reason why it is less "spectacular".
It is still great to be able to access in Europe to such prestigious speakers, and simply for that, I want to warmly thank Loic.

I don't know if you will be there, but I hope you will enjoy Leweb this year.

Facing A Changing Business Model: How To React?

2011-11-11T22:53:00.000+01:00

I wanted to write about a blog post I found on Seth Godin's.

Seth Godin discusses about how business model changes when a ground breaking innovation show up:

"When the form changes, so does the underlying business model, which of course changes the function as well.

Mail ---> email

Books ---> ebooks

DVD ---> YouTube/Netflix

1040 ---> Online taxes

Visa ---> Paypal

Open outcry ---> Electronic trading

Voice call centers ---> forums and online chat

Direct mail ---> permission marketing

In each case, the original players in the legacy industry decided that the new form could be bolted onto their existing business model. And in each case they were wrong. Speed and marginal cost and ubiquity and a dozen other elements of digitalness changed the interaction itself, and so the function changes too.

The question that gets asked about technology, the one that is almost always precisely the wrong question is, "How does this advance help our business?"

The correct question is, "how does this advance undermine our business model and require us/enable us to build a new one?"

There are projects that are possible with ebooks or Kickstarter or email that could never have worked in an analog universe. Most of the money made in the stock market today is via trading approaches that didn't even exist thirty years ago.

When a change in form comes to your industry, the first thing to discover is how it will change the function."

I wanted to go further in Seth's point. Indeed, Seth points out that when such an innovation comes up, most of the time, it is not the leader of its market which benefits from it, but a new company mastering and understanding what the innovation will bring. This is what the famous phrase is about: "This is not carriage makers which became car manufacturers".

Most of the time, the large companies dominating one mature markets can not really compete with smaller actors, because their expertise, their business model, and their operating costs structure are going in limbo, and are not organized how they should to adopt the innovation.

But what should the company do? Indeed, if it will not be able to compete with the new business model, the company must find a new way to grow, and to keep its revenues up.

Kodak failed to adapt to the appearance of digital cameras: Kodak ruled the market of personal cameras. Its business model was based on the sales of films. But its business model was not possible anymore once digital cameras appeared, and therefore sales plumetted.

As a matter of fact, it is very difficult to make deep changes in one company in order to change one business model. Some companies succeeded though, like IBM, which shifted from building computers, to becoming more of a consulting firm.

The question remains open. But maybe the easier way to abord dramatical changes due to an innovation is probably to leverage the blue ocean strategy, and to find a new market where the company's ability and skills.

What do you think about it? Do you have examples to share?

How Will The Financial Crisis Impact Customer behavior

2011-11-08T22:24:00.000+01:00

Customer relationship management has rose in emerging market, as competition was getting tougher, and the aquisition of new customers more difficult and costly. The spring of CRM also marked the arrival of a new era, where customers where more alert, more sounded, and that they could take over the power companies used to have.

Now customers could switch easilly from one company to another, and they could actually realize that they really mattered for companies.

Customer relationship management evolved throughout the time, as customers and companies changed. New ways to interract between each others appeared, especially thanks to the Internet: First emails, then forums and since couple of years now social media. Companies had to change the way they handled CRM, as more communication channels had to be managed, bringing complexity, and their use were less mechanical than simply through some questionnaires to fill.

We are facing very difficult times. Since 2008, two main financial crisis hit the world, and the road to recovery seems long and tough. Most of the time, it is during these difficult times that we see the biggest change in customers' behaviors. They need to adapt to a changing world.

Most of households are hit by the crisis, which means there are strong chances their spendings will be cut down. And probably, the way they interract with companies will also changes.

How will it impact CRM? We have already seen that social media has emerged as one of the most important place of conversation between companies and customers. But it will probably go further. The concept of loyalty, which has been challenged those past few years, with the multiplication of companies using somehow the same kind of tools to secure one customer, will probably once more evolved.

This more an open conversation than a real answer I am trying to give. Because I don't exactly know how customers will change. But a lot of customer behavior component will evolve within the next few months and years, and we must be prepared.

How Strikes May Impact Customer Relationship Management: Air France Case Study

2011-11-07T21:53:00.000+01:00

Customer relationship management is a science which is at the crossroad of the different functions of one company. Of course, most of it is managed by the marketing staff, as it has a lot to do with researches, and communication with customers.

But it is also a focus which th whole company must take care of. This is the reason why a lot of the time we talk about "Customer centric companies", meaning that CRM takes a core part of how a company deal with its business. But most of the time, real 100% customer centric companies does not exist, and therefore it is sometimes hard to get all the pieces together.

Air France is one of the leading airline company in the world. It secured its position thanks to its image of a premium service company. This image has been built throughout the time, thanks to a lot of details, those small details which creates the big things... One of the very good example: A lot of my American friends know Air France because they serve Champagne on board.

Air France is taking customer relationship management seriously, and they have always been a trail blazer in terms of loyalty reward program. They also make their best to respond to customer complaints as fast as they can.

But sometimes, Air France's customer relationship management is experiencing damages, due to unusual circumstances.

For this November hollidays season, Air France personnel was on strike, protesting to job cuts speculations. Due to these protests, Air France's planes had to take off with 50% of their planes empty, due to lack of staff on board.

Air France knows how to deal with those kind of issues:

First, because they have a very competent risk management department, which has been used to deal with different kinds of problems (the Icelandish volcano crisis this year, other strikes, political issues in some countries)...

Secondly, because strikes are quite frequent at Air France. I could quote French show "Les Guignols", which mention that strikes for November hollidays season at Air France are sort of a "tradition"...

And this is a real issue: You could be as good as you can be analyzing customer data, providing high quality communication material, being responsive in crisis time, sometimes, those social events can impact big time the image of one company.

So what can Air France do?

To be honest, Air France is far from being the worst of the airlines company to work for. But the way they deal with their employees (which are by the way the first ambassador one brand can have) is very important in order to maintain a high customer service at all time.

In overall, strikes may be prevented by having strong relationship with unions, but sometimes, they are very difficult to avoid, especially in some specific industries.

But human resources management, and social crisis inside a company can have a large impact on one company CRM Strategy.

Let Your Customers Speak Out

2011-11-04T22:33:00.000+01:00

"Always Remember: If customer don't have effective way to voice complaint, they just quit doing biz w/ the co."
This sentence is a quote from @tedcoine I found out on Twitter. I believe it is a very interesting one in term of customer relationship management. Indeed, social media have changed the way companies interract with customers.

They can not anylonger avoid listening to angry customers, and they must now deal with it. This is the job of community managers, a new trade which is blossoming.

It is not a natural behavior for a company to let its customers to speak out its complaints and issues. A company sells products, and is seeking for efficiency, which implies standard processes in order to save time and costs.

But ultimately, customer satisfaction is the key factor which will bring success or not to one company.

A lot of companies have looked for ways to silence unhappy customers. They believed that by doing so, they will be able to keep the happy ones happy, and that eventually, unhappy ones would come back.

But it is no longer possible. And this is the reason why they must deal with it now.

This is the reason why it is important to have a strong feedback management system. A one which is able to deal with the large number of media one customer may use to get in contact with the company:

A call center if it is via telephone.
A customer service if it is by mail or email
A community manager if it is by a social media
A sales person if it is in a store
An after sales service if it is because of a broken product.

Those media are expensive to manage, and to keep active. But they are vital, because it will minimize the lost of clientele in case of problems.

Also, something very important to think about is how to manage and leverage the large amount of information you may get from all those different sources.

The infromation will come from various ways, but it is important to have a tool which will allow the analyse of all the dysfunction customers may experience.

Abercrombie & Fitch Growing Fast Thanks To Ecommerce

2011-11-03T22:16:00.000+01:00

Abercrombie & Fitch is growing fast those past few years. They have undertaken an ambitious online strategy, in order to grow the share of revenues coming from Internet sales. And the results are great:

Web sales increased 30.2% $207.9 million from $159.7 million in the first two quarters of 2010.
Total sales grew year over year 22.4% to $1.75 billion from $1.43 billion.
Net income increased 641.6% to $57.1 million from $7.7 million in the first two quarters of 2010.

Internet Retailer projects the web accounted for 11.9% of total sales compared with 11.2% in the first two quarters of 2010.

It is very interesting to see that Ecommerce is in the heart of Abercrombie success. We also knows that the company is seeking for international growth, as their recent launch in France shows.

This is the reason why I wonder: Could Abercrombie leverage its Ecommerce skills in order to grow fast? Creating a retail network is very long and pricy for a company which wants to land in another country, especially when it is a mature market, like France. And maybe leveraging Internet sales before a true store chains could be a new innovative strategy retailers should envision.

We see more and more Ecommerce companies developping links with the mortar industry, either by setting up partnership in order to provide new delivery possibilities to customers, or simply by undertaking a true strategy of creating actual stores.

This is probably the reason why Abercrombie's French website is actually an online shop. It will be interesting to follow, but I am sure that Internet sales will count for a large part of French revenues in the first couple of years.

It could be very interesting for large companies to master the Internet sales channel, in order to leverage it in other countries.

What do you think about it?

E Commerce Struggles To Spring Up In India

2011-11-01T21:59:00.000+01:00

India is a very interesting market to invest in. It has a high growth rate, a large population, and also a great population of computer engineers, which allows the country to be among the greatest country for high tech companies.

Nevertheless, India is not such a friendly country to approach for business men. Indian culture and infrastructures are far from being ready to welcome "western life style", unlike China or Brazil, the two other next to become super power countries. For example, in the retail business, it is hard for companies to settle in India, as roads are not that good, and it is therefore difficult to set up an efficient supply chain.

It is the same thing for telecom infrastructure. This is the reason why mobile phones have experienced such a great success: As the country is very large, it is faster and cheaper to organize a wireless network than an actual cabled one. This is also for that reasons that some experts think India will be one of the leaders of mobile Internet, skipping one technology (wired), and obliged to innovate.

I read not so long ago a very interesting article, detailing the different reasons why Ecommerce struggles to take off in India.

What is very interesting in this article, is that you may think it is because of the lack of Internet equipment that India's Internet commerce is growing slowly, but as a matter of fact, it is mainly due to the lack of credit card penetration. Hence, it is difficult to purchase online if you don't own a credit card. And because India has a low penetration rate for credit card, it is difficult for Indians to buy online.

This is a very interesting concept, because it shows how important the credit card penetration rate is important in order for a e-business to blossom.

What do you think about it?

Fight Opel Renault In France

2011-10-28T22:30:00.000+02:00

Opel has launched a new advertizing strategy this year. In order to build on the famous german car manufacturer's quality, Opel, which is owned by the US tycoon General Motor by the way, has decided to broadcast these TV commercials, where its car is introduced by a german host, subtitled in French.

I believe it is very smart of them, because even though german car companies are very famous and acknowledged for their quality, Opel is a little bit left behind.

But couple of days ago, new commercials of French car manufacturer Renault have shown up, mocking the Opel's ones.

It is a funny way to leverage the buzz around one competitor's commercial. Opel has responsed to this campaign with a press ad.

But there several questions I have about these campaigns:

Does Renault has the right to copy Opel's commercial. It is clearly a copycat, and I find weird the fact they have been able to do it.
It seems like Opel and Renault have played together to create the buzz around this campaign. Have they agreed on it? Was Opel aware of Renault's idea to take over the ad idea?
Renault's commercial is clearly funny, and mark people's mind. But does it really show well the car they want to sell? I mean, people are more into the fun and the fact they mock Opel than into listening to the arguments of the guy.

What do you think about it?

Hommage To Steve Jobs

2011-10-26T22:01:00.000+02:00

I have been so busy those past few days that I have not been able to blog about one of the trendest issue in the news: the death of Steve Jobs. I have been surprised by the large numer of media covering this topic. Indeed, it is very rare to see the death of a business man hitting so much the headlines. I actually don't remember such a fuzz around the death of a CEO like this one. Except maybe the sudden death of Michelin's president couple of years ago, in a plane crash.

Obviously, Steve Jobs was not anykind of business man. A lot of people have compared him to Thomas Edison or Graham Bell for his contribution to help humanity to reach another level of modernity. Steve jobs was not what we can call an inventor as Edison was. He was a visionaire, he was able to forecast what will be people use of technology, and more important, how to adapt technology to people usages.

I used my first computer at age 4 or 5. It was the famous Macintosh (my parents where among the first generation to own a personal computer), and I remember how much I loved it. My parents have always been fan of Apple, and now still own a Macbook and a power Mac. The first computer plugged to the Internet was actually the Imac (the original with the blue color). It still works fine, which shows how good those computers were.At this time, a lot of people were mocking us as Apple was going in limbo.

But since then, Apple has experienced nothing but success, thanks to Steve Jobs.

I wanted to share with you his famous inspirational speech at Stanford couple of years ago.

How I Deal With My Stress

2011-10-25T21:49:00.000+02:00

Stress is the hypest topic since the beginning of this fall. A new financial crisis is happening, a lot of companies have seen those past few months their shares collapsing, and facing this difficult time is causing a lot of stress. This is the reason why French magazine "Management" is dedicating its headline of its september issue to methods to fight against stress.

Also, the excellent Henri Kaufman has edited a video about how to deal with stress at work.

The goal of all these techniques is to avoid the "burn out": it is when a person has lost all its energy and is not able to perform anymore. The worst with the burn out is that it is very difficult to recover from it.

As I am dealing with a very stressful period of time, I wanted to share with you my techniques in order not to be stressed, or at least to master it:

1: Understanding what is stress
As David Allen explains it in Getting Things Done, stress comes from a situation you can not control. That means when you face a situation, you are stressed. That also means that you need to understand the situation in order to take the control over. That also means that there are also some situations you can not control. And those situation, you should forget about them, because there are nothing that you can do about it. Hence, it should not stress you, and you should not think about it.

2. Eating
It is very important, while you are experiencing work overload, to have proper eating habits. "You are what you eat", or "what you eat is the fuel of your engine" are actually right. Therefore, I try:

Not to eat to much, because digestion is requiring a lot of energy.
Drink a lot of water because it irrigates the brain and therefore avoids migrains
Eat a lot of fruits + take vitamin pills to have a lot of energy.
Take coffee as a stimulating products, but not more than three a day to avoid heart issues.

Also, when I eat, I don't eat at my desk: I need to rest and to enjoy my eating time to relax.

3. Workout
Sport is very important to be in shape. It releases dopamine which helps you to feel good about yourself. It also helps me to be awake and actually to avoid tireness.

Therefore I swim for 30-40 minutes at my lunch break almost everyday, and play basketball three times a week.

Also, I am used to walk a lot in my offices and the walking process helps to irrigate the brain...

4. Talk about the stressful situation
It is important to talk and speak out the stressful situation you may face. Because most of the time, by simply saying it out loud, you clear up your mind. Also, by discussing it and sharing your thoughts with others, new solutions may spring up, and the serendipity may work.

5. Sleep
Sleeping and resting is very important. You need to recover from all the work you have to do.

6. Keep on being organized.

A lot of the time, as work piles up, a lot of people give up with the organizing process they have, because it requires most of the time a lot of time, and because they feel it won't help them. I believe it is wrong. Even though it may implies you will not complete all the work you are supposed to do, keeping on organizing your work will help you to remain efficient, and even though you want do all the work, you will be able to choose the less important tasks to leave aside.

7. What I refuse to do:
I refuse to be stressed by things I have no control over (see 1 section). If it is an unachievable task, then I don't want to feel bad about failing to achieve it.

I also refuse to take any kind of drugs. I believe this is false solutions.

8. Set up a deadline
You can not be stressed and fear a burn out on a long period of time. You must be able to identify how long the situation will be. Most of the time, there will be a clear deadline (a project deadline). If there are none, then you should give up right away. No one is immuned to burn out, so you are almost sure to get the wall.

Hopefully it helps you.

Do you have any tips you would like to share?

Why I Go On Blogging

2011-10-23T21:28:00.000+02:00

I must be honest with you I enter a very busy time of my business life, and it is hard for me to keep on blogging at the same pace I used to. Nevertheless, as you may know, blogging is to me a very important thing. It is somehow what helps me to clear up my mind with some thoughts I may have with things I experience or learn.

Couple of days ago, I talked to one of my co worker who has actually bumped into my blog for the first time, thanks to LinkedIn (by the way I know you are a bunch of folks following my blog thanks to LinkedIn, thanks a lot). She was surprised of the work I put into this activity, and moreover she congratulated me for it.

I must say I am always happy when people congratulate me for the blog. It is nice to see that actually people like what you are doing. For the past year, I haven't interacted as much as I used to with people reading my blog and I regret it a little bit.

I feel a little bit as blogging is "old school": a lot of Internet expert have given up with their blog. I especially think about Loic Lemeur, who is not blogging as much as he used to. A lot of people have shifted from blogging to interracting thanks to Twitter and Facebook. It is somehow normal as it is where people are now.

But still, blogging is much different and I still believe it is important to keep on blogging. You will never be able to propose more added value than by blogging.

This is the reason why even though I am very busy right now, and I may not blog as often as before (my goal has always been able to right at least 5 posts a week), I will force myself to go on.

I want to thank this person (hopefully she will read this post, and recognize her), because she actually gave me the fuel to write this post after a two week pause.

Mobile Commerce Struggling: Tablet Sales Outcasts Smartphones'

2011-09-29T16:37:00.000+02:00

Mobile commerce is a hype issue. A lot of people foresee in the incredible growth of smartphone users the next trend in E-commerce. And they must be right: People now are able to buy any kind of goods in any situation. This is all the purpose of ubiquity: People can access information wherever and whenever they want, so why would they have to wait to be home or in front of a computer to buy what they want?

Nevertheless, I recently read a very interesting article on M-commerce.

martphones may be good for mobile shopping, but tablets are where buying gets done. That's the implication of new research from e-commerce software firm Ability Commerce, which shows the iPad has driven more revenues for retail clients than smartphones, even though handsets account for the bulk of their mobile traffic.
Data provided for the three m-commerce clients indicates that the majority of their traffic from mobile platforms comes from smartphones, and typically from the iPhone and Android devices. For each retailer, those two platforms accounted for between 69%, 71%, and 43% of their visits, respectively, over the last year.

The iPad typically had a smaller share of mobile traffic, reflecting the lower penetration of tablets compared to smartphones generally. About 5% of U.S. consumers surveyed by Nielsen in the first quarter had tablets, versus 36% that had smartphones.

The Apple tablet made up 17%, 15% and 49% of traffic for the three retail clients studied by Ability Commerce, respectively. In the last instance, the retailer had an iPad-specific app that helped boost its share of traffic.

When it came to generating revenue, however, the iPad accounted for a disproportionate amount of m-commerce activity. The retailer, with 17% traffic from the iPad, got 35% of its sales across mobile platforms from the Apple tablet. The one with 15% iPad traffic got 51.5% of revenues from that device, and the retailer with an iPad app got 91.5% of sales from the tablet.

"The trend we are seeing is that while there is a significant increase in Web site traffic due to mobile phones, there is still a much higher percentage of conversion rates on tablets," said Jennifer Tonisson, marketing manager at Ability Commerce.

Research has shown that people tend to use tablets more at home than when they are out. A first-quarter Nielsen survey found about 70% of tablet owners use the devices while watching TV. People used tablets least while shopping or running errands (21%), or commuting (20%). About the same proportion (68%) of smartphone owners use their handsets while watching TV. But 59% use their phones while shopping or running errands.

Taken together with the Ability Commerce data, that suggests people may browse or research retail purchases using their ubiquitous smartphones, but wait to make purchases at home using the iPad or another tablet model. The larger tablet screen naturally makes it easier to complete a transaction than on a smartphone.
"Shopping on a tablet isn't that much different from shopping on a laptop or a home computer," said Tonisson. "You see the same amount of information and product detail. Shopping on a mobile phone is different. Graphics are downsized, descriptions are shorter."
New research from Forrester indicates that among online shoppers who have tablets, most prefer tablets to smartphones when buying online. Most find their tablet as easy to use as their computer when doing so. Specifically, 72% of Gen Xers, 67% of boomers, and 65% of Gen Yers say they use their tablet more than their smartphone to shop online.

This article shows three main things:

1 - Tablets Are Well Designed For E commerce

Tablets, thanks to its tactile interface, allows the customer to easilly interact with the products they want to buy. This is good news for retailers, but that also means that to get the full potential of tablets, they will have to design specific interface and boutique for this new channel.

2 Mobile Commerce On Smartphone Requires Adaptation

I believe that this study shows out that buying on smartphones is something which still needs to be unfold. Some goods may be easy to be bought on smartphones, especially goods linked to smartphones (ringtones, music, videos, apps...), but maybe others are more difficult. Therefore, retailers need to innovate, and to find new ways to make the buying experience better on smartphones. I am sure there is a sky of opportunities for smartphone commerce, but yet, I haven't seen anything convincing so far.

3 We Should Not Mix Tablet Commerce and Mobile Commerce

As shown in the article, tablets are most of the time used at home. So should we consider tablet commerce as mobile? I don't think so. The use of tablets in a mobile condition will for sure grow, but yet, the two devices are very different, in terms of use and size. A retail strategy on tablets should for sure be different than on a smartphone. Also, I believe that the type of products shopped on both devices must be very different, which explains why we have so much difference in data analysis.

What do you think about it?

Discount/Low Cost And Customer Relationship Management: Ikea's Case Study

2011-09-27T16:11:00.000+02:00

Customer relationship management and low cost business seems to be unlikely to coexist. Nevertheless, I wanted to share with you a thought I had once I went to an Ikea store.

Indeed, Ikea sets its success on its low cost strategy. They have been able for years now to gain market shares by proposing furnitures at the lowest price. Most of the time people make fun of those furnitures which you have to assemble. But when Ikea has been funded, it invented this way to retail furnitures, and now, it became almost like the standard of the business.

How to approach customer relationship management in a low cost business is an uneasy task. Low cost implies you to look after any kind of unnecessary expenses, and by doing so, you are not supposed to have any kind of mergins which would allow one company to proposes vouchers. Therefore, the traditionnal approach of CRM which is to give discounts to loyal customers as a reward is not possible.

Rather than on focusing on giving rewards out, which is not really what assure customers' loyalty, low cost firms need to set up a partnership with its customers. This is what Ikea did, by explaining the whole philosophy behind its model.

The company agrees to keep its prices low by cutting all kinds of non necessary costs, and the customer remain loyal because it finds what it is looking for: affordable products.

Also, on the other hand, the customer agrees to have a limited service, to assemble by himself its furniture, and so on.

Most of the time companies in need of securing market shares are luring on customer relationship management strategies, and are looking for reward based strategies, which may not always be the best way, as it can become very expensive. Ikea focused on its philosophy, delivering what the customer is expecting them to deliver, and then secures customer loyalty.

Fermeture de Zlio: Mon opinion

2011-09-26T15:09:00.000+02:00

J'ai appris à la fin de cet été que le site de création d'e-boutique Zlio allait fermer ses portes. J'ai utilisé le service Zlio depuis pas mal de temps sur mon site Internet. Je trouvais le concept très intéressant: pouvoir ouvrir une boutique, très simplement, sans à avoir à gérer la partie technique (logistique - programmation - hébergement), demandant beaucoup de temps et de travail. Je n'ai pour être tout à fait honnête jamais considéré Zlio comme une réelle source de revenue, mais plutôt un moyen de partager avec les personnes faisant partie de ma communauté, et plus particulièrement les lecteurs de ce blog, mes lectures, mes sources d'inspiration, en leur proposant un moyen simple de pouvoir acquérir tout ces produits.

Déjà à l'époque Loic Lemeur avait émis quelques doutes sur le succès du site.

Sur le blog de zlio, la société estime que c'est sa baisse du classement dans Google qui a engendré la perte du système. Il est bien entendu très important pour Zlio de proposer un moyen efficace d'être vu sur les moteurs de recherche. Car avec le nombre exponentiel de boutiques existant sur le web, il est très difficile de survivre si on n'a pas un bon classement. Mais j'ai aussi l'impression qu'ils n'ont pas réussis à intéressé les e-marchants, qui ont décidé pour la plupart d'arrêter leur collaboration avec Zlio...

Je trouve cela bien dommage, et j'espère que les différents salariés et créateurs de Zlio réussiront à relever la tête et trouver de nouveaux challenges intéressants.

Has Groupon A Future ?

2011-09-25T19:22:00.000+02:00

Groupon has been the last couple of months the hypest story in the Internet business. Groupon has emerged as a new business model emerged from the web, and has experienced a great growth at a high pace.

In 2010, Groupon has generated $644 million, and the number of users has skyrocketed. What I have always been impressed by with Groupon, was there ability at a very early stage to generate revenues, whereas most of the Web 2.0 actors are focusing on growing their audience than finding an actual business model.

As an evidence of its success, Groupon has seen a lot of copycats blossoming in the different countries where it settled.

Groupon ambitions to go on the stock exchange market soon, but bad news came up, as its audience seems to be decreasing since June. http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=157597

Even worst, Forrester forecasts that by 2016 daily deal market will be miscellaneous.

"Standing out above the clutter [will become] harder for marketers as ad exposures grow," Forrester analyst Shar VanBoskirk explained in a report released last week."Consumers will grow so conditioned to micro-impulse offers they'll lose practice at considered decisions ... Facing a cultural descent into maladroit judgment, employers (and spouses) will blacklist impulse deals to keep people intentional," he noted.

Moreover, it seems that its operating costs are growing faster than its sales.

Here are some thoughts I have:
- In July and August, it is normal that the audience decrease as people go on vacations. Nevertheless, Groupon is still a start up, and despite a decrease in the pace, they should still grow.
- Groupon is probably hurt by its problems of executions. Countless of articles have been written because they oversell their deals. If execution is not there, even though the offer is good it can’t work.
- What is funny is that as a matter of fact, Groupon is not so much an innovation. There were already websites with coupons, they just added the possibility to get great coupons by the large number of people going on the website.

Does Groupon really have a future? I think it will, but its future may not be as bright as people expected. I believe they should focus on their operation and execution, in order to reach profitability. The good point about the story is that they are already able to generate comfortable revenues, whereas other websites of the web 2.0 sphere did not.

Customer Relationship Management And Serendipity?

2011-09-20T14:02:00.000+02:00

Have you ever heard about serendipity? This term has become very popular lately. I am sure that French Internet guru Henri Kaufman would surely agree, as he has recently published a book about serendipity, where he explains the concept, and how to leverage its wonderful potential.

Serendipity , as defined by Wikipedia: is the moment when someone finds something he was not expecting to find. More than that, serendipity implies finding most of the time the best ideas when it is not expected.

Two factors created the basements for serendipity to grow:
- The information age, where we are facing both information overload
- The new media allowing this information to spread fast.

Hence, one of the key challenges for people willing to create value is to help those moments to come, meaning, to be able to create such a momentum, where people, information and things can be brought together, in order to create something unique and valuable.

I read this very interesting article explaining clearly what kind of challenges companies will be facing to keep up with the innovation pace they must to face competition.

Because even though serendipity is by definition unexpected, and therefore can’t be found by a standard process, as you can force the chance so you can create space for it to grow.

What do you think about it?

Albertson Removes Its Self Service Cash desks

2011-09-19T13:37:00.000+02:00

Albertson is a large US grocery retailer, located especially in the Southern and Western part of the country. I actually visited quite a while these stores as I used to live nearby one of them when I was living in the US.

Albertson set up some self service checkout lanes in its stores as most of the chains in the US. The goal is simple: one of the largest expenses line of a retailer is its wages, and one of the activity which needs the most of one workforce time is the cash desk one.

Hence a lot of retailers, especially in France where the workforce cost a lot, decided to implement those kind of cashier, where customers deal by themselves with the check out.

Of course, it is difficult to explain the benefit to customers, as there are basically none (except by cutting the expenses, the retailer don’t have to increase its price to keep its profitability fine).

I learnt recently that the company decided to remove those vendors.

Probably Albertson found out that the total cost savings were not as expected + customers were not accepting this system.

It is interesting if we consider the customer relationship management side of it: To customers, the human touch is a key component of their satisfaction.

I also believe that the mistake of Albertson was not to think about customers benefits to use those cashiers:
- Was there a discount to get? (In order to share the cost)
- Was it faster, more convenient, or more fun?
- Was it compensated by something else (better prices, new service, new area in the store thanks to some space saving?)?
What do you think about it?

Will The Internet Kill Mass Media Marketing?

2011-09-18T09:55:00.000+02:00

The communication market is changing fast due to the rise of Internet usage, and more especially the spike of social media usage. For over 30 years, marketing and communication have been strong tools for companies like Mc Donald’s, Coca Cola, or other global companies to gain market shares and become tycoons. The boom of TV and radio equipment allowed those companies to reach a large number of customers nationwide, and to impact sales in a great way (even though it is difficult to measure accurately the link between a TV campaign and sales, every one agrees that TV campaigns have a great impact on sales growth).

But nowadays the communication landscape has evolved, due to the multiplication of communication tools, but also with the rise of Internet. Internet is by definition the opposite of a mass media, which pushes the content to the audience, whereas the audience decide which website they want to visit.

This change is happening right now. We can clearly see that TV audiences are decreasing while Internet usage is booming. Nevertheless, television advertising remains a must for most of those companies, especially when they are leaders or strong challengers of a market.

For decades, some communication gurus have ruled the world of communication, letting us known what to consume, but the new tools they will have to use for the next decade (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, blogs…) are not set up to become “mass media” tools. The whole idea is actually to segment the audience, in order to suit better their needs and points of interest.

Some brands have already experienced great successes by using social media for campaigns, but I believe that we are not done yet. And I believe that this decrease of power of mass media will not only change the way commercials will be designed, but also it will change the way companies will think their products, by focusing more on customization, and adaptation to customers’ needs.

What do you think about it?

Key Factors Of Success To Innovate

2011-09-17T09:49:00.002+02:00

Leonardo Da Vinci is probably the most gifted genius of all time. His genius was marked in different fields, from painting, to mechanics, to even entertainment (he was a firework masters). He was so creative that when you read his notepads, you see that from one page to another he could speak about botanics, mechanics or even philosophy.

I was classifying some of the articles I keep on my desk to review for my blogging activities and I found back this very interesting article of French business newspaper “Les Echos”.
It dedicated a special section to innovation.

Indeed, innovation is a common word, which can sound as a cliché, but companies which are really innovating are obviously successful but also a minority.

I wanted to share with you some of the key factors of success discussed in this article:

Information system
Innovating implies different departments and teams to connect together, to find new ideas and improve collaboration.
I watched once a TED video about how genius ideas show up, and how genius get to the point to find those. And the whole idea behind this video was that those ideas were the result of a connection between facts which did not have any link at first sight, but thanks to a specific situation seems to fit perfectly.
This is the same thing inside a company. It is important that people can connect easily together in order to get a project going fast

Human resources/management
It is very important to create connection on an information system point of view, but also people must be able to create and innovate easily. Most of the time large corporation struggle to innovate because of their size and the high level of procedure they have. Therefore it is important to create structures which allows individuals to create freely.

This is somehow the concept of intrapreneurs, which acts like “start ups” inside a company, in order to give the freedom necessary to develop a project fast. The idea is to combine the liberty of creation and innovation to the large capacity a company can offer (in terms of support like accounting or human resources).

Moreover, the innovation process can become a wonderful leverage of motivation for employees: People like to create and innovate and therefore, if you get them into the process, you will in the end create extra motivation.

Think Innovation And Not Growth Of Existing Process
Companies most of the time thinks about how to grow an existing business, by improving it. But once you innovate, you should avoid these thoughts, because your innovation may be totally different from the existing process. Horse trainers have not become car manufacturers, and this is the reason why it is important not to stick to the traditional processes.

Îndia To Rule The Mobile Internet Revolution

2011-09-16T18:43:00.001+02:00

India is one of the fastest growing company in the world. As China is doing right now, most of the time it is growing so fast that it skips some of the industrial steps we (North America and European ones) took for 30 years in order to establish our standards. By doing so it creates sometimes some problems, as China is struggling with democracy, but also great opportunities, to lead some of the new emerging markets.

One of the best examples is India and mobile Internet. I have already attended once a conference about mobile marketing held by Forrester France, which was explaining why they believed that mobile Internet will spread fast through India.

I received not so long ago a Newsletter from Mc Kinsey about the same topic.

India, actually don’t have much choice but to excel in mobile Internet. Its large population added to its large country makes it difficult and pricy to create a cable network for Internet.

Therefore, wireless Internet could become the only way to grow the number of Internet users in the country, which is very low (17%).

Now, India is for sure an interesting country for Internet companies, as they can find a large customer base to market. But even though it is important to have a large market, it is also important that local companies can benefit from it. And so far, I don’t know if Indian companies exist, and if they have what is needed in order to thrive in India.

The risk is that the market is dominated soon by foreign countries, which will leave few chances for local companies to settle in the market.

For sure, India has a large base of highly skilled engineers but will it be enough? They need founds and most importantly ideas, which will create successful business there, adapting to the local specificities.

What do you think about it?

Trujillo: The Master Of Brand Coaching

2011-09-12T19:14:00.000+02:00

Do you know about Bernardo Trujillo? Probably not. Nevertheless, I consider him as probably one of the most important person in the history of economy and business who ever lived.

Bernardo Trujillo was a sales representative of the NCR, a company manufacturing some cash registers back in the 50s. At this time cash registers was a highly technological gear. It was brand new and no one was actually using it.

The company and Trujillo then needed to educate its potential customers, retailers of all kind, to adopt this new tool. And from this simple idea, Bernardo Trujillo developped the whole theory of mass consumption and modern retailing.

It went beyond explaining what kind of costs and time it could save, he thought through the discount business which could emerge thanks to its invention and thanks to the new environment coming up.

He created some seminars which he was giving to explain how to develop a very lucrative business. And all of his teaching has been the based of the retails we know nowadays. Here are some of his most famous quotes:

No parking = No business. He was then understanding and explaining that the boom of car ownership will ultimately lead to high revenues if stores would have big enough parkings to welcome customers.

Pile products up and sell down: This is a way to explain how important the theatralisation is important in a store.

Billboards are the best sellers: you pay them once, and they don't go on vacations: He understood the importance of mass communication and the rising advertizing market ath this time.

And it worked! Most of the founders of retailers like Gérard Mulliez of Auchan, or Halley from Promodes, from all over the world went to these seminars and got the bases of their soon to become successful businesses.

I could talk to you for hours about how genious he was. Unfortunately, not a lot of documentation exists about his work.

But I wanted to talk to you about Trujillo to show you how to aboard the launch of a highly innovative product: you must educate your customers.

There are a lot of products which experienced tremendous success even though customers did not understand them at first:

Renault Espace, a large familly van in France, was shown to customer and all the metrics showed it would be a disaster. Nevertheless Renault launched it and it became one of their most profitable product.

The Ipad: A lot of people were wondering what was so new and great about it. No other competitors would have invested a dime in such an handheld. But after having seen the demonstrations, then people loved it.

It is very interesting to go beyond what customers first reaction may be. It is important to have a vision on what customers could do about it, and to show him how to use it. But also, it is very important to look at the bigger picture. This is exactly what Bernardo Trujillo did.

When I talk about brand coaching, most of the time, the brand develops some marketing materials which will help the customer to use more effectively its products. But I believe in this specific case, it goes beyond: The brand added value is given out of its core circle of expertise, which is the cash register usage, Bernardo Trujillo was a product by himself.

The Michelin Guide: The Beginning Of Brand Content

2011-09-10T19:00:00.000+02:00

A lot of marketing and communication consultants are luring to develop some brand contents for their client. In the information age which we are living right now, it is hence important for one brand to go beyond its ability to deliver good products or services in order to create a strong positionning strategy.

Indeed, now marketing is not only based on one company/product quality and differences to aquire a position as a leader, now marketing is mainly based on experience. And therefore, the prospective of building strong positionning is also evolving.

Now companies need to create added value for its customer by advising him the best as he can with the use of its products. The brand must be recognized as a reliable source of information, and a leader of thought in a specific field:

Nike set up some sport programs, for example by allowing customers to measure their performances and to compare them to others.

Special K proposes some materials (CDs mainly) in order to help its customers to lose weight.

French retailer Castorama is proposing some tutorials to help people to use its construction materials in order to achieve their projects.

But brand content has not borned with the Internet. It has actually been existing for a long time. One of the most remarkable example of brand content is the Michelin Guide. The first Michelin Guide edition has been edited back in 1900.

At first, the Michelin guide was released as a marketing material dedicated to Michelin's customers while buying some tires. The guide encountered a large success as it was giving to the small population of car owners (about 3000 in France at this time) the ability to find precious information about hotels and restaurants.

The guide has experienced such success that in 1920 it stopped to be given for free, but was commercialized to be sold in book stores.

This story shows you how Michelin has been able to create marketing materials which was in phase with its positionning and set it up as an expert of car cruising.

And as a matter of fact, it shows how well it did as this marketing material became actually a great source of revenue thanks to its quality.

The Magic Of Nespresso:Loyalty Does Not Come With Cards

2011-09-09T22:42:00.000+02:00

Nespresso is also known as one of the master of customer relationship management. The close attention it paid to customer experience is driving ultimately to customer loyalty.

Of course, some customer relationship management techniques have been used by Nespresso in order to generate customers loyalty:

The high exit barriers: Once you bought a Nespresso machine, you can not use any other kind of capsules with it but Nespresso's. If you paid for about 200 € your machine, you may think twice before willing to change your machines. Also, in a traditional household you may have one coffee machine. Once its a Nespresso, it is less likely you will use others.
You have a lot of channels to get in contact with the brand: The stores, the phone, the Internet. It creates bonds with customers which can get in contact easilly with Nespresso.
Nespresso uses customers metrics in order to create direct marketing campaigns. They also pay a close attention to conversion rate, in order to reach better customers.

But what is very interesting is that they have focused on an emotional kind of loyalty instead of a traditional transaction based one. Most of customer loyalty reward programs are based on a "card", which materializes the relationship between one company and its customers. These cards offer rewards, either discounts, free products, or extra services.

As a luxury brand, Nespresso prohibits himself to give any kind of discounts on its capsules. Therefore, none of the direct marketing campaign edited by Nespresso can rely on an attractive discount in order to generate higher volumes of orders.

Rather than that, the metrics are only used for quality purpose. And guess what, that works!

The Magic Of Nespresso: The Duality Between Mass Market Product And Luxury

2011-09-06T18:33:00.000+02:00

What is unique also with the case of Nespresso is its ability to turn a mass market product into a luxury one:

Coffee is by definition a mass market product, retailed in hypermarkets and supermarkets like Tesco or Walmart for years
It has adopted pricing, brand codes and a positioning of luxury brand.

It is fascinating to see how they got to this point:

It took a while: Nespresso has been founded in the early 70s, but really started off in 1987. Over the time, it build its luxury brand codes. Indeed, you may launch a brand like Tide, but you create a brand like Vuitton (quote of Kapferer, a French expert in branding). The goal is to create the conditions which will make the customers accept the high prices. And Nespresso managed to do it over the time.
Their communication is based on television advertizing, a mass market medium, which allowed to spread to the largest scale the "premium mindset" of the product.
Also, the machines are sold in traditional retails, but not the capsules, which once again may attract the mass market customer, but which will ultimately lead him to the luxury world of Nespresso.

This is also this duality between luxury and mass market product which makes it difficult to copy the Nespresso strategy. It has been innovating, but I believe it is hard for other businesses to do the same...

The Magic Of Nespresso: The Customer Experience

2011-09-05T18:17:00.001+02:00

Nespresso has created a business model based on customer experience. In order to create something new in the market, it changed the way to perceive the consumption of coffee into a brand new customer experience. Everything in the marketing mix has been reinvented to create something totally different from the existent:

The product: Exist filters and the old way of making coffee. Now, you have pre dosed coffee in capsules, which are instantly "brewed" and ready to be drunk. The product is not named out of the region it has been produced, but depending on its taste and strength.
The retailing process: You can't access the product in traditionnal hypermarkets or supermarkets. The only way to get it is through a direct marketing channel (Internet, phone, mobile phone) or through its own stores.

By proposing a unique customer experience, Nespresso must take a particular attention to all the different component of it. Every single link composing this experience must bring an added value to the customer.

Of course, CRM is a very important factor of success. It is the only coffee company which can interact directly with its end consumer, whereas others must go through a retailer.

This customer experience is underligned by Nespresso's store. They are a tangible way to show out to customers the way of life linked to Nespresso positionning.

The goal of this customer experience is to make the customer believe it is part of something unique, to make him think as he is part of an elite, and in the end to elevate it from the average.

The Magic Of Nespresso: The Blue Ocean Strategya

2011-09-04T18:08:00.000+02:00

What is interesting, is to see how Nespresso has been able to set apart of the existing competition. It entered a mature market, but thanks to a brand new approach, it has been able to create a new product which can't be compared with the competition.

This is the reason why I wanted to link this approach to the famous Blue Ocean strategy. The blue ocean strategy concept is to avoid the "bloody red competition" which is basically to confront your company to a competition which proposes somehow the same kind of product. The idea of blue ocean strategy is to change the landscape and to change the way customers perceive one product, bringing new added value, which will turns it into something without comparability.

This is exactly what Nespresso achieved: we don't talk about consumption but about tasting, not customers but club members, coffee types but grand crus...

The brand has no tried to create a premium product in an existing market, but to create a brand new category based on usage instead of product type.

Nespresso created a new way to consume coffee, at the crossroad of a mass market product (coffee) and a luxury product (about 6 times more expensive than a regular coffee).

The Magic Of Nespresso: The Business Model

2011-09-03T17:54:00.000+02:00

I believe that everything has been told about the phenomenal success of Nespresso. The topic is widely discussed, especially in the marketing world, as it is thanks to marketing that Nespresso has been able to create a more than profitable business model.

Le nouvel économiste, a newspaper I often read and that I must say I love, has dedicated in its issue of July, 7th 2011 a special article about Nespresso, which I would like to share with you, in a series of article.

Nespresso indeed has created 15 years ago a unique business model which has been along the route copied by a lot of competitors, but never really with the same kind of success: The coffee capsule market.

Coffee in capsule is now one of the hypest category in grocery shopping market. It is one of the fastest growing segment in hypermarkets or supermarkets. Even though Nespresso does not sell in those traditional retail channel, I believe it shows well how the competition surfed on the waves created by Nespresso's Ferry...

The goal was to provide to customers the same quality of coffee it could find in traditionnal cafés. But what has been great is that it created around of its basic product, a whole customer experience and a marketing concept which brought added value.

And it was able to do so thanks to its ability to master every component of the business model:

The machines by providing appropriate licenses to premium machine manufacturers.
Providing premium coffee
Mastering the different retail channels: Phone at the beginning, then Internet, and Nespresso stores after a while, there is no way you may access to its product but to buy it to a Nespresso owned channel.

Quelques réactions sur l'application Ipad de la Caisse d'Epargne

2011-09-02T17:22:00.001+02:00

J'utilise depuis quelques temps régulièrement l'application pour Ipad de la Caisse d'Epargne. Depuis un an, la Caisse d'Epargne (qui est par ailleurs ma banque de référence) a beaucoup évolué afin de se rapprocher de ses clients:

Site mobile pour consulter ses comptes
Application Iphone, puis Android
Nouvelles campagnes de communication, avec une nouvelle charte, mais aussi l'abandon de la figure populaire de l'écurueil.
La possibilité d'avoir un numéro de téléphone non surtaxé pour accéder à son agence (oui cela parait irréel, mais ce n'était pas le cas avant).

Et donc depuis quelques temps une application Ipad. Ce que je trouve super sur cette application, c'est le module gestion de budget. Je suis très friand de ce type d'outil, car, il faut bien l'avouer, j'aime gérer mon budget de manière très précise.

Maintenant, tout n'est pas parfait avec cette application, mais on est sur la bonne voie. Voici quelques points vraiment intéressant:

Il est très facile de mettre des catégories aux différents achats. Par contre, j'ai l'impression que le nombre de catégories est limité, ce qui est dommage: Pourquoi devrait on limiter le nombre de catégories?
La partie analyse reste un point faible, mais le graphique sous forme de camembert est plutôt bien fait, et permet une lecture facile des postes de coûts.
Il est vrai que le fait que ce soit un écran tactile permet une interaction facile avec l'application.

Maintenant, je souhaitais quand même partager avec vous certains points d'améliorations.

Concernant les catégories: Ne pas limiter le nombres de catégories, laisser à l'utilisateur la liberté d'en créer autant qu'il en a besoin. Par ailleurs, il faudrait permettre de créer des familles au dessus des catégories, pour rendre plus facile la partie analyse.
Concernant l'analyse:
Au lieu de privilégier les graphiques sous formes de camembert, qui permet de voir une situation fixe, il vaut mieux y avoir des graphiques de types "courbes", qui permet d'identifier l'évolution dans le temps.
Il faudrait avoir aussi une partie analyse sous tableau, qui permet de voir les évolutions en % et en valeurs. Cela permet de voir si sur le mois on est dans les clous.

Bref, il y a vraiment du bon et un futur sympa pour cette application, mais encore pas mal de travail pour vraiment rendre l'application vraiment utile.

Groupon's Journey To Reach Profitability

2011-09-01T16:57:00.000+02:00

It has been a while I haven't read the great blog of Laurence Faguer, one of the best expert in customer relationship management and retailing I know in France.

Laurence has wrote a very interesting article about Groupon, trying to explain its business model and also the path remaining to become profitable. Groupon is for sure one of the hypest company in the Internet business right now. What I find fascinating about the company has been its ability to generate revenues at a very early stage of its development, on the contrary of companies like Twitter for example. Of course, Twitter and other Facebook are "social network" or web 2.0 companies. The business model is for sure not the same:

Social media needs audience (and therefore focus on having the largest number of users as possible) in order to get the interest of announcers and advertizing companies.
Groupon is actually a more conservative companies. It sells somehow some advertizing space, but its business modell, to me, is closer to Google.

Laurence in her French article explains some very important metrics :

2010 Annual Revenue = $713,365,000.
2010 Annual Loss = $413,386,000.

2011 Q1 Revenue = $644,728,000.
2011 Q1 Loss = $113,891,000.

83,000,000 members
28,100,000 coupons bought

15,800,000 customers (about 2 coupons/customers bought)

Average revenue/coupon bought: $25
Average revenue/buyer: $ 50.

Marketing investments in 2010 = $241,000,000
Marketing investments in Q1-2011 = $179,000,000

How Groupon Earns Money
Groupon sends about 1 coupon to all its members (65,000,000 members in Q1-2011), for 90 days.

28,094,000 Coupons are sold
Conversion rate = ( 28,094,000) / (65,000,000 * 90) = 0.48%

… 1 out of 208 members bought a coupon

En Q1-2011, Groupon invested $8 in marketing/coupon sold.

Marketing represents 32% of Groupon's investment in Q1-2011.
46% of the revenues comes from the Northern American market.

If the cost to get a customer remains around $6 to $9, to break the even pints Groupon will need to seel one extra coupons/customers.

Laurence's Analysis

The return on investment ratio remains in the average of a traditionnal e-commerce company.

The Pareto law (20/80) is true in that case: 20% of customers and 80 % of non buying members.

Groupon needs traditionnal advertizing media to get awareness and expand its members data base.

Groupon needs to adopt CRM strategies to trigger a second buy/customers in order to reach profitability.

I hope Laurence doesn't really mind I took her post to translate, but I highly value this insight.

My opinion

Groupon remains a very traditionnal company, as its main advertizing media remain emailing.

I totally agree with Laurence, I believe that Groupon needs to work on its customer relationship management strategy to gets loyalty from its members and to make each customers more profitable.

Some Thoughts About Steve Jobs Resignation

2011-08-25T07:18:00.003+02:00

Steve Jobs has been the main reasons of Apple's success right from the beginning of the company, as the founder of Apple. He decided this summer to resigned from his position as CEO of the company, explaining he was not anymore able to fulfil his duties, probably regarding a weak health which caused a lot of hype around him for about a year.

Steve Jobs has marked his time. He has always kept a pionneer mindset, which allowed him to constantly innovate. Apple is probably the most innovating company of all in the computing world, as it has been able to keep a high pace in innovation throughought the 80s, 90s, and the 2000s.

Steve Jobs is hence the designer of the mouse, of the modern computer as we all own one, but also lately mp3 players, Ipods, and Ipads.

What allowed Steve Jobs to remain one of the most prohiminent person in his industry is his vision. He has always been able to see beyond expectation and what is expected by the audience and the market.

I believe that one of the most remarkable moment was when he launched the Ipad, which was totally not expected and brought a lot of skepticism. Nevertheless, a little bit of time later, a lot of opinion leaders consider that tablets are the future of computing.

What also defines Steve Jobs and his legacy was his speaking/presentation skills. All of his keynotes were real shows, and he was always able to bring the enthusiasm of the audience thanks to its unique way of presenting. Copied a lot, his level has never been reached.

Steve Jobs will be missed, especially to Apple. Nevertheless, nothing is eternal, and it was clear that this day will happen. I wish Apple the same success they experienced with Steve Jobs after him.

Some Thoughts About Google Buying Motorolla

2011-08-16T12:45:00.004+02:00

I learned today that Google has just bought Motorolla for $12.5 billions. This new acquisition clearly marks the ambition of Google on the mobile phone market. Indeed, mobile Internet consumption has been spiking those past few years, and clearly represents the fastest growing trend in the Internet business.

Google has already a great experience in the mobile Internet world, thanks to its Android operating system, which has already passed Apple’s number of users. Thanks to Motorolla, Google will access a large number of patents which will help Google to innovate in the market.

Now we can not talk about Motorolla without remembering the company was going in limbo for quite a while. Motorolla has not been able first to battle against Nokia in the 2000s and then, has missed the smartphone hype at the beginning. Motorolla will for sure benefit from Google’s strong operating system, but will it be able to innovate in terms of handheld to face Blackberry, Samsung and Apple’s competition?

Google set up some partnership with some mobile phones manufacturers for quite a while, especially Samsung, empowering them with Android. Will this new acquisition alter those relationships? To be honest, I don't think so. Android remains one of the best operating system for mobile phones, and the community of people using Android is so big, that I don't see them leaving for that matters.

Google has now reached a level of maturity, which allows him to undertake this kind of acquisition in order to grow faster in some existing market. Moreover, Buying Motorolla will allow Google to diversify its activity, becoming a manufacturer of goods, and not only services.

What do you think about it?

My Impressions About Google+

2011-07-15T08:14:00.000+02:00

I heard a lot of buzz around Google's new try in social network. After Google Pulse and Google Wave, Google has never really been to catch up its delay on main social websites like Facebook or Twitter. It is quite surprising though as it seems that whatever Google is touching is turning to gold:

It remains the best search engine in the market by far (sorry Bing!)
Its Android operating system is great and equips some of the best smartphones right now.
Its Internet browser is really good, the Google Chrome, which I use everyday.
Gmail is to me still the best email service I know, and thanks to its new way to range emails (even though it needs some improvements), it is improving.

So, why wouldn't Google succeed in the competition of social network? I recently received an invitation to try Google +, the new version of Google's social network. And I must say I am quite impressed.

The "circle concept" works amazingly. I believe this is a great idea to range people in circles instead of having them in one single feed like Facebook for example, which creates a lot of noise around.
I can connect easilly to the different social network I am already part of to my profile (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Plaxo), which is cool because it is always great to get all the feed together. One is missing though... Foursquare, one of my favorite!
One of the huge advantage of Circles is that it connects you right away with people which owns a gmail account, meaning a vast majority of my contacts. That gives a great lift to the service, which already has a strong base of "prospects".
Also, a great point, even though now it is a bummer: They have created some mobile applications or the main smartphones service: Iphone, Android and Blackberry.
The tutorial is pretty good, it explains you well the different features of Google+. Also, I like the videos which are very clear about how it works.
The places lived feature is pretty cool: You just type in the name of the towns you lived, and it automatically locate them thanks to Google Maps.

Now here are some of the things I would have liked to see:

On peoples page, I would have liked to have been able to leave them an email. I can comment some of their activity, but yet I did not find how to send them an email (private).
Foursquare is missing in the social network I can add to my social network feed... It is deceiving as I really like this service.
It could have been cool If I would not have had to fill in my profile: Whenever you register to a new social media, you need to fill in your profile, whereas you have already done it several times. I would have liked a kind of blend between LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter profiles.

In overall, my first impression of Google+ is great. I believe that it brings up some real innovations, and I can't wait to see more people that I know using it to see what will be the real use of it, and how it may fit versus Facebook in the market.

Why I Go On With Blogging

2011-07-11T20:03:00.000+02:00

I had a very interesting discussion with the other day with an influencial blogger in Paris, which has basically abandonned its blogging duty due to his lack of time. As a matter of fact, it has been over a year now that I have seen many very interesting bloggers turning down their number of posts, or basically giving up their pages.

I have recently changed my job position and I am now a category manager in a retail company. Due to my new position, I have not a lot of connexion now with customer relationship management nor marketing or web 2.0. Nevertheless, I still keep the interest, and I remain a fan of those topics (and as a lot of my peers aknowledge, an expert). I could have easilly give up my activities, especially as I have been very busy for several months, not blogging at all as I was preparing my wedding.

But I have decided that I was going to keep blogging. Why?

Because even though I am not Robert Scoble or Seth Godin, I still have an audience, people I know, some that I don't know at all, who find reliable information on it. I feel like I still have an "obligation" to feed them with new content.

I still love the topic I am discussing of, and this blog is the perfect way to clear up my mind, and at the same time, to build my ideas and thoughts. I like this fact.

Because even though a lot of the audience is now on Facebook, and that blogs are not the center of an online presence, it remains to me a great trend, and a great medium of expression.

Now it is hard to get back on track, as I had a fast pace before, posting 5 times a week. And I don't know if I'll be able to get back to that level, but I am sure that for the next 2 or 3 years, I will for sure go on with my blog.

Twitter Acquires Blacktype To Propose Social Data To Advertizers

2011-07-09T20:02:00.000+02:00

Twitter remains in its early stage, trying to monetize its social network. As the business is new, and is struggling to become a “mass social media” a la Facebook, it needs some help to promote the advantages of advertising on Twitter.

Blacktype has developed a tool allowing brands and companies to monitor the number of people discussing about their brands online.

This is a good thing that Twitter is buying this company. That shows that Twitter is willing to propose to advertisers data about campaigns efficiency. What would be interesting though is to see how the service evolves to fit the most to a sales force oriented mindset.

What do you think about it?

Stores Shrinking To Seek More Profitability

2011-07-08T23:11:00.000+02:00

I have been working in the retail industry for about 3 years now, and I have learned a lot about it. It seems pretty simple, as execution is a key factor of success, in a world where every details have its importance.

One of the main lesson I learned while I was a manager at Auchan, was that one store sizes was a way to shrink distribution cost, by driving higher purchase amounts and hence. Nevertheless, this concept, the "hypermarket concept" I would say, is struggling right now, as main actors in French market are seeing its sales flattening those past couple of years.

I read this very interesting article in French "Marketing Magazine". The author, Nicolas Chomette (Interbrand), is discussing about the numerous flagship stores brand are setting up, in order to get brand awareness, and displaying the company's vision of its position in the market and innovation.

Nevertheless, the author believe that large flagship stores are not following the main trend. First of all, downtown commercial real estate prices are skyrocketing, and the larger the space, the harder it becomes to generate square meter profitability. Secondly, flagships haven't been thought as actual stores, but showrooms, and therefore, most of them are not that convenient to drive sales, which what should remain the ultimate goal of one company, even though its trying to get brand awareness thanks to glamorous store addresses and top of the line display/innovation.

Instead of appearing as arrogant with large choices, innovation, small stores appear to be closer to customers expectation, creating some more intimate space to get in contact with the brands.

As a final conclusion, I like the idea of the author: "the future retail business may look like the old fashion one, with the exception of looking closely to salespeople expertise and ability to respond to customer needs". I like this idea, as I believe that within the next few years, after having looked for all the ways to cut wedges by implementing automation of CRM tasks, the employees will have a stronger role in the overall customer relationship strategy.

What do you think about it?

Customer Loyalty By Tom Peters

2011-07-06T23:06:00.000+02:00

A quick blog post about a video I watched on Youtube on my main topic, customer relationship management. Tom Peters is a well known business guru, and it talks about his vision of customer loyalty.

I like his comment for many reasons:

It emphasizes that customer relationship management goes beyond a simple (or I should rather say a complex) CRM software. Data is great, but a customer is an actual person, and several other aspect will impact its decision making process...
It also emphasizes how important the human aspect of it is important. It focus on the sales person, which remains to me, in the center of the relationship one brand or one company has with its customer.
Customer relationship management is a mindset, which needs to be shared in the company.

What do you think about it?

What is MyYoutube?

2011-07-05T22:42:00.000+02:00

I was logging out on Youtube tonight while I saw a new large top banner showing up named "Myyoutube".

It seems this is a new service proposed by Youtube to its users, allowing them to gain points while subscribing to some specific Youtube channels, which, in the end, appear to lead to gifts offered by the service.

I wanted to share with you my thoughts about this new feature, as I am discovering it. First of all, I must say that I don't quite understand the service:

Is it a loyalty reward program, pushing users to come back and watch as many videos as possible, in order to boost the number of views, and as a consequence, the number of advertizing opportunities?
Is it a new feature which will be temporarily available?

It proposes me to subscribe to some people's channels, but it seems it is mainly artists. To be honnest with you, I haven't subscribe to any artist channel yet, and I am not likely to do so (even though I watch a lot of music videos on Youtube...).

There is a button "click on the channel", which links to a new page. It explains in some videos that you have artists, which have a contest, and you have to subscibe to their channels and to click on the videos they want you to click on to earn points.

Now there is really something that bugs me: How much the points are worth? It is said that I "may" (may and not will...) get gifts, but I have no idea how many points I need, and more important, no idea what kind of gift I can get... This is not clear and precise, and I have no interest clicking on videos I would not watch anyways, to get points which will lead nowhere...

Okay, I found out where to get a description of the gift... It is really not clear how it works seriously... Now I can click on the gift section, and each artist have its own gift, which is most of the time some CDs...

I am quite skeptical about the project:

The concept is not well explained, and therefore, I have no clue what the company (Youtube) expects of me.
The Myyoutube name is too strong for such a campaign... It has nothing to do with me, as it promotes videos I have no intention to watch, not linked to my own consumption ("My Youtube" is for sure my account, with the videos I posted, my favorites, the message people may have sent me...)
It really seems like the artist are not really into the contest, and it feels like it has been set up thanks to us, and not for them...
The reward system is very vague and not clear, and the actual rewards are not really interesting.

What do you think about it?

How To Improve Online Customer Satisfaction: A Forrester Study.

2011-07-05T16:07:00.000+02:00

I have read last week a quite interesting study by Forrester, which goal was to show out how a bad online experience could affect customer loyalty. Indeed, Internet has become the most important medium between one customer and one brand. If the customer does not find the information he wants while surfing on the Facebook page, Twitter account or website of a company, then he will without a doubt disappoint him.

Forrester brings up 5 key factors of success in order to secure customers’ satisfaction while seeking for information online:

Organize the company into specific silos:
The idea is to create small structures which will be faster to respond to any kind of questions. It will ease the process of finding information for the person in charge of responding to customers. One of the good idea I found in this part is to create a kind of “social network” inside of the company, which would allow people to identify clearly the people who will respond the best to their request.

Offer better web tools to customers
The goal is to ease the access to information online. The idea is for example to have a powerful search engine which could organize properly the information upon the request.

Allow customers to customize their online experience
I like this idea. Somehow like Netvibes is working: you should be able to have the information you want, where you want, in the form you want. This is somehow also the concept of ubiquity. You may be careful though not to make the website too complicated by becoming too complex or complete.

Provide to employees the appropriate tools to interact with customers.
Customers aim to have a quick answer, and sometimes, they don’t quite understand why it takes so long for companies to get back in touch with them. It comes to the fact that companies are complex organization, which implies several people to take part into the solution. Therefore it is important to faster the communication between departments and people. Likewise, it is also important for employees to have all the media available to get back with the customers: email, phone, chat, social networks… Depending on the request and the source of the question, it is important to use the appropriate medium for response.

Provide clear and extensive information to employees
Employees in call center or customer relationship management departments have loads of different information to give to customers: Billing information, information about the service, the products, the fares, the after sales service… It is difficult for them to know it all. A company should focus on educating its personnel and also to give them support to give appropriate response to its customers.

Moreover, I wanted to add a very important point, which has not been much discussed in the white paper I read: It is important to give back some freedom and decision making power to employees in customer relationship management center. Indeed, our society, and company’s offer has brought a lot of complexity into customers’ decision making process. And so did follow the response expected by them. Therefore, classic question and answers prepared are not enough, and employees must adapt the response and the offer depending on the customer’s expectation. It is also important to keep this aspect of the job, as it is most of the time stressful, and then allowing employees to bring some of their added values can only bring to them some satisfaction about their job.

Stratégie Cross Canal Videofutur (3): Ma vision des choses

2011-07-02T19:11:00.000+02:00

Pourtant, d’autres choix stratégiques auraient permis de mettre plus en avant cette offre tout en renforçant l’attractivité des points de vente. La vrai stratégie aurait été de réinventer le positionnement de Videofutur en élargissant le spectre de la marque.

Il ne faut plus penser uniquement en terme de « location de DVD », mais être plus ambitieux en devenant le leader du divertissement vidéo. Voici quelques propositions.

Se lancer dans la location de jeux vidéos
Videofutur aurait pu développer une offre de location de jeux vidéo, tels que cela existe aux Etats-Unis. Le marché des jeux vidéos explosent et est en train petit à petit de dépasser le marché du film. A cet égard, il aurait été opportun de saisir l’occasion pour développer un nouveau concept.

Renforcer ses points forts
Videofutur aurait aussi pu renforcer son image de spécialiste, en élargissant son catalogue de films, grâce à un système de « réserve déportée ». En effet, la taille des magasins est limitée, et le traffic ainsi qu’une part importante du chiffre d’affaires est réalisée par les nouveautés. C’est d’ailleurs la raison pour laquelle dans les magasins Videofutur une place prépondérante est prise par le mur des « nouveauté ». Mais afin de fidéliser les clients il serait intéressant d’avoir un catalogue élargit qui pourrait être disponible dans une réserve déportée, où chaque magasin pourrait puiser afin de proposer les films demandés par les consommateurs (bien souvent, les films qui ont plus de dix ans ne sont pas disponibles…)

Optimiser les périodes creuses
Optimiser la rentabilité du point de vente lors des période creuse. Mc Donald’s a lancé les « Mc Morning », puis les « Mc Café » afin de drainer du traffic lors de période creuse, Barnes & Noble a ouvert des Starbucks dans ses magasins afin de devenir un lieu de passage et surtout réussir a augmenté le temps de visite du consommateur, alors pourquoi ne pas penser à un systèle pareil pour Videofutur. Les magasins Videofutur, en centre-ville pour la plupart, devrait trouver une idée, en corrélation avec leur positionnement, afin d’attirer le client hors des périodes de boom. Cela peut passer par exemple par :
o Vente de journaux
o Vente de boissons chaudes à prix discount
o Promotion en milieu de journée

Renforcer le lien entre le site Internet et le magasin
Et je pense que c’est bien là où des efforts auraient pu être fait : Proposer de compléter les services du magasin par l’Internet et vice-versa. Voici quelques idées pêle mêle :

Renforcer la présence des magasins sur la toile : Une page par magasin dédiée, pourquoi pas une application Iphone pour pouvoir localiser le magasin le plus proche…

Permettre de rendre les films soit via courrier, soit en magasin.

Permettre de réserver sur Internet ces films.

Développer de nouveaux services innovant liés au positionnement.
Voici d’autres idées en lien avec le positionnement de l’enseigne, qui pourrait créer de la valeur auprès du consommateur :

Location de mini-lecteur DVD pour le train

Location de support tels que des vidéos projecteurs…

Je tenais à faire cette note (qui sera certainement découpé en plusieurs articles, car au final, cela fait très long…), car j’aime beaucoup le service et je vois un réel avenir à cette société, qui bien qu’en difficulté, pourrait avoir un bel avenir devant elle.

Stratégie Cross Canal Videofutur (2): Un nouveau service qui pose problème

2011-07-01T19:05:00.001+02:00

Mais le réel problème de cette nouveauté est que Videofutur a oublié un point déterminant : Le point de vente. Et c’est un problème capital, car le développement de la société a été basée sur le système de la franchise, qui permet de développer un réseau rapidement pour dominer un marché, mais qui représente l’inconvénient que la société possède de grands engagements envers ces franchisés.

Si l’on regarde les comptes de Videofutur (disponible sur Internet), on s’aperçoit que la société est en effet en difficulté. Perte de chiffre d’affaires, concurrences de la video on demand, les magasins souffrent, et la technologie « DVD », voire même « Bluray » au final n’a quand même pas beaucoup d’avenir face au « cloud » et à la virtualisation.

Ne surtout pas passer au dessus des magasins
Néanmoins, bien que l’offre a de forte chance de se développer et d’offrir une belle rentabilité sur l’Internet, il est pour moi totalement inconcevable de se passer des points de ventes. Pour 2 raisons principales :

La société étant un franchiseur, elle doit rendre des comptes auprès de ceux-ci et de s’assurer que les choix stratégiques de celle-ci permettent le développement de chacun des points de ventes franchisés.

Je crois toujours dans le « point de vente » classique. On le voit bien, dans les différents secteurs, le point de vente est en train de se réinventer, afin de répondre à de nouveaux besoins, qui ne sont plus uniquement l’accès à un produit.

Videofutur a construit une offre sur Internet dans son coin, sans se préoccuper des points de ventes :

Aucun relais de l’offre en magasin (bien sûr les franchisés n’auraient certainement pas acceptés de faire de la publicité pour une offre qui allait les concurrences directement !).

Encore plus grave, sur le site Internet de la société, aucune mention des points de ventes : Tout est tourné vers l’offre VOD… On a laissé tombé le client et les franchisés…

Stratégie Cross Canal Videofutur (1)

2011-06-30T18:57:00.002+02:00

Une fois n’est pas coutume, je vais écrire cette note en français. En effet, la société dont je vais parlé aujourd’hui est une société 100% française, Videofutur. J’ai la chance d’avoir à côté de chez moi le magasin Videofutur de Bourg la Reine, où j’aime bien prendre des DVDs (c’est pratique et permet de ne pas regarder la télévision).

Cette suite de note a pour objectif de mettre en évidence comment on peut :

Réussir une convergence entre le canal Internet et le canal magasin.

Trouver de nouvelles idées afin de créer un « produit unique/original », afin de retrouver la croissance.

Le profil de l’entreprise
Videofutur est une société qui s’est développée via le levier de la franchise, très intéressant car cela lui a permis de développer dans un temps très court un large réseau de distribution maillant la France, et de plus une belle notoriété.

Videofutur se définit comme un leader de la location de DVDs en France, et vient de lancer il y a très peu de temps, un nouveau service de Video On Demand, permettant à n’importe quel internaute de télécharger pour une durée limitée un film à regarder en location.

Un nouveau service
De plus, un nouveau système « à la Netflix », permet de s’abonner et de recevoir les DVDs à domicile, qui sont ensuite à renvoyer via courrier postal. Plus besoin de se déplacer + un catalogue plus large de DVDs . Ce système marche via un abonnement sans engagement de 14,99€ par mois.

Il faut bien avouer que le marché de la video on demand est porteur et plein d’avenir. En effet, de plus en plus d’acteurs se positionne sur ce créneaux, tels que les groupes de média TF1 ou Canal +, mais aussi les consoles de jeux vidéos comme la Xbox de Microsoft. Le système permet aussi d’être plus « high tech » que la location de DVD où le consommateur doit se rendre sur le point de vente pour prendre, puis rendre les films (là en quelques clicks, à la maison, on a accès au film et pas besoin de se déplacer pour rendre le film).

To be continued...

Ron Johnson Takes Over As CEO At JC Penney: Expecting Great Customer Experience

2011-06-22T22:15:00.002+02:00

Former chief of Apple's retailing activities Ron Johnson will soon become the new CEO of JC Penney. Ron Johnson's reputation has been built on the amazing job he has accomplished at Apple as he invented a new generation of stores which stood out by its innovations, including especially the genius bar, where customers could found technical help.

JC Penney has been multiplying innovations, and is already looking for new ways to improve its stores attractivity and foot traffic.

Now I believe that Ron Johnson's task will be tough. Of course, its experience at Apple's show well its ability to think through customer experience, and to be able to innovate. But I wonder (I have no information on that point) how profitable those stores are, and how do they contribute in overall to Apple's revenues. To me, Apple's store main goal is more to present its products as a show room, even more than to actually become one of the main retail channel of the brand.

Here is one of the section of the very interesting ar

ticle I read:

"That strategy has translated into packed stores. Apple said it attracted 71.1 million visitors to its stores in its latest quarter, more than the 60 million who flocked to Walt Disney Co.'s four biggest theme parks for the entire year, according to Themed Entertainment Association."

In this paragraph, you can see that they are comparing the number of people visiting a resort park with the number of people visiting a store. The term "visitor" shows well that the goal of those Apple stores may not be in the end to sell at the first place.

Indeed, JC Penney is a pure retailer, which needs to optimize its square meters. Now, this prerogative is not in contradiction with the search for better customer relationship and better customer experience. But Johnson will be working mainly with low tech and low innocation products (clohtings), while at Apple it was only top of the line highly innovative products.

Somehow, it is a good thing for JC Penney, which will be able to benefits its creative and new mindset, in order to reinvent their concepts.

What do you think about it?

Starting Back My Blogging Activities

2011-06-21T18:57:00.003+02:00

Hello everyone,

I know it has been a while you have not seen anything new, but I am getting back into the blogging business. The past few months have been very busy for me, between a new position as a category manager for DIA France, but also with my wedding which happened on June, 4th 2011.

Therefore I have not been writting, even though I have seen many information and things worth a post... I will get back with my routine of about 4-5 posts a week slowly.

I will probably let you know a little bit more about my job as a category manager, as I know a lot of you don't really know this position, which is specific to the retail business.

Foursquare Aiming To Influence The Next Step After The Check In: Customer Relationship Management potential

2011-04-26T18:55:00.000+02:00

I read this very interesting article about Foursquare. I have faith that Foursquare will become one of the mainstream topic of next year. It is still a young start up, but they found out a great niche, and deliver great service.

Foursquare allows people to check in places while they visit it, which gives them points in order to get some “badges”. Then eventually, it now proposes special deals for “mayors” (people which checks in the most in a specific place) and other users.

The service is doing pretty good and I have seen a lot of French retailers starting proposing vouchers to Foursquare’s users:
o Flunch, a fast food chain proposes free coffee to checkers.
o Virgin radio has had a commercial telling they were the first French radio to be on Foursquare.

Now Foursquare announces that they will be focusing in the future on what users will do after a check in (meaning their next steps). This will imply the creation of a new “recommendation” feature.

Hence they have launched Foursquare Explore tab, which allows user to determine what kind of recommendations they want, either bars, restaurants, movie theatres and so on.

I believe this feature will become key. As a marketing manager, I can clearly see the potential for brands and companies to leverage this system to generate foot visits in their retail/restaurants.

It will be interesting to see how sharp the recommendations will become, and how users will respond to them.

One of my main idea is that it will also help Foursquare to become more social, allowing the different users to connect more between each others, which will eventually lead to higher numbers of users.

What do you think about it?

Cloud Computing Questioned As Foursquare Experienced Problems

2011-04-22T18:43:00.001+02:00

On Thursday, April 21st, some of the hypest social media website like Foursquare and Quora were unavailable due to a failure of the Amazon’s cloud computing solution.
For those of you who have never heard about cloud computing (which I don’t think you may be a lot, as I discuss frequently about that topic on this blog), Cloud computing is a new way to approach Internet hosting: Instead of having one server hosting a website whatever its traffic is (depending on the season, on the day, and so on), cloud computing aim to propose a hosting solution which adapts itself upon the traffic of a specific website.

Thanks to cloud computing a website can:
o Adapt its bandwidth and hosting capacity depending on the traffic of its website at a specific time.
o Save money by lowering and rising its hosting needs upon the demand.

Even though cloud computing is seen by expert as the future of the Internet (which I surely agree), there are still some main disadvantage to the solution. Especially, your data is placed into a cloud which you don’t own nor are able to locate it either.

This is the issue that Foursquare experienced. The cloud system collapsed, resulting in the service not being available.

Now, these kind of issues remain rare, and now that the system is becoming popular and adopted by a lot of CTOs, then it is becoming more secured. Nevertheless, it is very important to back up these kind of initiatives as a failure is a possibility you can not ignore.

Soirée des anciens du master 206 distribution et relation client de Paris Dauphine

2011-04-14T23:31:00.002+02:00

Un nouveau poste au sujet de mon ancien master distribution et relation client de Paris Dauphine. Comme vous le savez certainement, je suis très attaché à ce master, et essaye au maximum d'aider à construire le réseau des anciens.

Cette année, un groupe d'étudiants s'est chargé de l'organisation d'une grande soirée pour réunir les différentes promotions du master. La soirée c'est très bien passée, et m'a permis de revoir quelques uns de mes amis de promotions. Pour être vraiment honnête, je suis pas mal resté en contact avec les autres personnes de mon master, mais il est toujours intéressant de le faire dans le cadre "officiel". Cela m'a aussi permis de retrouver des anciens d'autres promotions que je connaissais, mais aussi d'autres que je ne connaissais pas.

Cet évènement a été l'occasion aussi de mesurer l'évolution du master. Il a été crée au tout départ sous le nom de master "logistique, distribution et négociation", alors que maintenant, la logistique a une part très minime dans le master, et la partie relation client a pris une importance fondamentale.

J'ai eu le plaisir de voir aussi le dynamisme de ce master, notamment qui organise maintenant des voyages d'études à l'étranger, des "sémi-neiges" pour préparer la cérémonie des SCOPS.

Bien que n'ayant pas profité de ces nouveautés, je suis très content de voir que le master, qui a été élu n°1 SMBG de la catégorie "distribution" ne se repose pas sur sa position de leader, et continue à innover.

J'espère que cet évènement sera le premier de nombreux autres, permettant toujours plus d'échanges entre les différentes promotions.

SCOPS Paris Dauphine 2011

2011-04-12T18:16:00.002+02:00

Soirée SCOPS Dauphine Comme chaque année je me suis rendu la semaine dernière à la cérémonie de remise des trophées SCOPS à l’Université Paris Dauphine. Cette cérémonie est organisée par mon ancien master, le master 206 distribution et relation client de Dauphine, et vise à récompenser les plus belles innovations et les meilleurs nouveaux concepts de l’année.

Les notes sont attribuées aux projets pour moitié par un panel d’expert, notamment des directeurs de L’Oréal, ou du Printemps, mais aussi le rédacteur en chef de LSA, ou bien l’un des directeurs du Crédoc, et pour l’autre moitié, par l’ensemble de la salle, environ 200 personnes (voire plus, la salle Raymond Aron était pleine). Le travail de sélection et présentation est réalisé par les étudiants du master, qui ont d’ailleurs fait un excellent travail. Les Scops prouvent bien que malgré la crise il est toujours possible d’innover.

Et cette année, DIA, la société pour laquelle je travaille, était en compétition pour l’obtention de la meilleure innovation en terme de fidélisation. Malheureusement, bien que nous ayons été très bien représentés, nous n’avons pas gagné, et c’est Futuréo, une carte de crédit permettant de cumulez de l’argent sur un compte retraite, qui a gagné… Néanmoins, pour avoir discuté avec plusieurs personnes de l’assistances de la salle après la présentation, un grand nombre était très impressionné par les bons scores de notre carte.

L'un des intérêts de cette cérémonie est d'avoir une belle vision large de ce qui se passe en terme d'innovation marketing et relation client. Ainsi, pour les entreprises, on peut voir des innovations hors de son secteur d'activité et ainsi élargir le spectre de réflexion. Ce qui est sûr, c'est que les différents projets m'ont inspiré pour mon blog...

Une nouvelle fois, cela m’a aussi permis de voir des gens très intéressants tels que Laurent Bendavid du Groupe Carrefour, Serge Cogitore (s’il faut le rappeler, c’est le pionnier du category management en France)… J’y serai à coup sûr l’année prochaine. Et vous ?

En bonus, voici l’ensemble de mes tweets retraçant la soirée.

1. C'est fini. jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:38:34 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 2. #o ra nge gagne le de jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:38:17 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 3. Vraiment interessant d'un point de vue communication notamment en utilisant un nouveau media pour toucher de nouvelles cibles jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:32:25 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 4. L'idee est de montrer le carre avec de nouvelles utilisations pour toucher de nouveaux publics jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:31:38 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 5. #hermes #scops mon carre hermes (flagship product) jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:30:51 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 6. Ce qui est interessant c'est que c'est fait via Facebook. Assez interessant. jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:29:11 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 7. #orange people project permet de vous aider a créer un projet exemple humanitaire. Via notamment une application Facebook. jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:28:18 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 8. #mr bricolage lance un nouveau concept permettant de mettre les evolutions en avant des projets jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:26:01 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 9. #mr bucikage jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:25:02 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 10. #groupama utilise la table de #microsoft comme outils d'aide a la vente c'est vrai que l'outil est particulierement bien pense jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:23:45 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 11. Du parfum mais le produit serait bien interessant pour le mettre dans d'autres endroits jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:22:21 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 12. Le seul truc c'est qu'ils devrait vendre directement le parfum. C'est place dans les cinema peut etre pas le meilleur endroit pour acheter jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:21:45 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 13. #ellipse vendor machine for perfumes #scops jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:20:49 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 14. #ellipse. Sun nouveau sys jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:20:00 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 15. Je n'utilise plus #seesmic pour #blackberry car ca bug tout le temps dommage j'aimais bien maintenant c'est #twitter pour #blackberry jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:18:45 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 16. #barilla concept store ephemere du 17 sept au 31 oct 2010 pour animer les pates sur une periode plutot non saisonniere. jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:17:27 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 17. #scops a ete gagne par futureo, tres bon concept jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:16:24 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 18. On a pas gagne avec la #carteclubdia sniff 10% jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:13:41 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 19. Fidelisation pour les grands clients. Assez interessant, service a valeur ajoutee propose. jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:09:55 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 20. #platinium #airfrance #americanexpress carte premium pour les grands voyageurs csp+ jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:09:21 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 21. Un tres bon cas de upselling jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:07:09 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 22. On met en avant de vrais economie mais sfr s'y retrouve car il augmente son panier moyen. Ingenieux jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:06:53 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 23. Offres #multipack de #sfr pour les #scops interessant on voit qu'on est moins dans un marche de conquete mais surtout un marche mature jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:05:57 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 24. #bricousine innovation vraiment interressante. Logique commerciale bien construite #scops jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:05:10 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 25. #bricousine innove avec un club jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:03:09 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 26. La fidelisation multi enseigne via carte de credit n'est pas encore assez developpee pour l'instant jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:02:00 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 27. #Futureo avec la fidelisation via carte de credit en offrant des points sur un compte epargne retraite. Entre 1 et 20% jeudi 7 avril 2011 20:00:13 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 28. C'est vrai on a pas parle de cross canal... Mais c'est une tendance lourde jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:58:55 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 29. Un concept qui va loin jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:57:33 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 30. #celio polo therapie #scops jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:56:57 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 31. La fille est exellente! jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:55:29 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 32. J'espere que vous pardonnerez les fautes d'orthograpje j'essaie de tweeter on the go. #clubdia is next! jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:51:41 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 33. On voit tous les fonctionements differents notamment la geolocalisation ou bien encore de voir le produit sur soit jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:51:08 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 34. Tres belle presentation de la realite augmentee. Beaucoup de progres ont ete faite depuis 1 an sur le sujet. jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:49:17 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 35. #chocapic gagne avec la realite augmentee jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:45:58 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 36. Est plutot business cela permet de fideliser la clientelle pour d'autres momment jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:45:38 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 37. #barbie au Plaza athene #scops qui propose des chambres au couleur de barbie, permettant de communiquer sur la famille alors que le luxe jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:43:53 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 38. #renault verygoodtrip jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:39:59 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 39. Plus de 100 000 visites, 400 000 pages vues. jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:37:56 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 40. Je trouve cela pas mal. Une cuisine neuve a gagner. jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:37:07 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 41. #igena ma cuisine est trop moche #scops campagne humoristique pour montrer des cuisines moches jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:36:33 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 42. #igenan #macuisine jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:35:37 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 43. Neanmoins la demarche est interessante. jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:34:40 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 44. #lcl social gaming #scops c'est pas mal, mais bon... C'est difficile pour la banque de faire des choses interessantes en terme marketing jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:33:57 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 45. #shopswap colette et kk outlet #scops permet de pouvoir transferer des produits entre pays jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:29:12 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 46. Technologiquement c'est super. jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:27:01 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 47. #chocapic fait un jeu en realite augmentee et en 3D jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:26:13 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 48. #smartstore a gagne le #scop concept store jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:25:05 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 49. L'idee est pas mal mais peut on recreer une nouvelle experience client en ligne en recreant une boutique traditionnelle? Suis pas sur jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:21:43 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 50. #marcjacobs créer une nouvelle facon d'apprehender le e commerce. Marc Jacons a créer comme une boutique virtuelle. jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:20:47 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 51. #peugeot city la concession citadie #scops l'idee est de proposer une concession citadine. jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:18:16 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 52. Citation de #raymon aron jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:16:48 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 53. La liberte politique contribue a rendre les hommes digne d'en fait des citoyens ni conformistes ni rebelles critiques et responsables jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:16:28 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 54. Livraison en 48h c'est plutot pas mal jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:14:16 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 55. #miliboo personnalisation de mobilier. jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:13:31 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 56. Cela permet de se mettre en situation dans le bien et donc d'aider a la vente. C'est tres bien jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:12:13 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 57. #moobz permet l'aide a la vente dans le secteur de l'immobilier #scops jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:11:09 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 58. T jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:10:33 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 59. Le concept de smart store est pas mal, mais je ne sais pas s'il y a une valeur ajoutee par rapport aux magasins tests classiques #scops jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:09:38 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 60. #smartstore je peux aller dans une boutique pour prendre gratuitement dans le magasin des echantillons. Ca permet d'avoir des tests conso jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:08:50 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 61. #carrefour planet, j'y suis alle a lyon et en espagne et l'espagne est bien mieux. Mieux fini. Mais belle initiative. interessant jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:08:01 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 62. #carrefour planet jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:05:04 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 63. Maintenant concept de vente #scops jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:04:31 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 64. #axa gagne avec son appli mobile #scops jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:03:35 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 65. Les 3 mots magiques: mobilite, communaute et realite augmentee jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:01:25 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 66. J'ai vote pour #decathlon car d'un point de vu marketing c'est bien joue jeudi 7 avril 2011 19:00:08 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 67. 650 000 internautes sont alle sur le site pour voir l'offre. +50% vente en ligne. #scops jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:58:15 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 68. #burburry propose d'acheter les vetements des la fin du defile, livre sous 6 a 8 semaines jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:56:57 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 69. @scops ils ont rajoute des fonctions voip et wifi. On a acces a des services du type commande de taxi. Interessant mais rentable pur #orange jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:55:22 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 70. #orange retravaille les cabines telephoniques notamment en proposant de nouveaux services jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:53:53 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 71. On peut même supprimer les meubles déjà present.. C'est bien fait jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:52:11 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 72. #but developpe une appli en realite augmentee qui permet de voir les meubles en situation jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:51:33 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 73. Pas mal de retombee presse, et surtout ils ont ete pionniers dans un secteur interessant du mobile service jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:50:36 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 74. C'est une application permettant de gérer les incidents type accident de voiture jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:49:51 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 75. #axa service mobile pour les #scops jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:48:40 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 76. 850 000 visites en 1 mois pour #restezenforme.com #scops jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:47:54 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 77. C'est plutot pas mal car c'est en lien avec le positionnement de l'enseigne et permet de mettre en valeurs les prod avec leurs utilites jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:47:22 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 78. #restezenforme.com de #decathlon pour les #scops donne des idees pour rester en forme jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:46:36 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 79. 70 a 100 utilisations par jour... #scops jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:45:09 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 80. L'idee est de pouvoir apporter du servie en grande distribution (prêt a vendre) jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:44:34 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 81. Max le sommelier de #vinoreco , aide les clients a bien choisir le vin jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:43:34 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 82. On va commencer les tests pour voir si les boitires de votes marches #scops jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:39:07 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 83. Panel pas mal grande distribution, on espere que ca va aider pour le vote de la #carteclubdia jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:36:02 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 84. #printemps a reussi a renove le concept de gands magasins notamment en allant cherche de la clientèle etrangere jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:33:42 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 85. Il y a un dg d'unibail aussi #scops jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:29:51 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 86. Il y a une personne de GS1 pour la mobilite #scops jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:29:10 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 87. 50% des votes viennent du public, 50 % du panel d'expert #scops jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:27:56 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 88. En 2 min les etudiants doivent presenter leur projet jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:26:41 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 89. 6 secteurs alimentation, equipement de la personne, equipement de la maison, banque finance, telecom et luxe jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:24:47 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 90. 5 categories: services, concept de vente, opes promos, fidelisation, strat relation client jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:23:46 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 91. Explaining the concept of #Scops jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:22:59 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 92. Not started yet jeudi 7 avril 2011 18:16:06 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 93. Tweeting live from @dauphine #Scops jeudi 7 avril 2011 17:58:12 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 94. The new #foursquare app on #Blackberry is awesome. Great job guys! http://4sq.com/gMvJO2 samedi 2 avril 2011 14:59:32 via foursquare 95. I'm at Truffaut http://4sq.com/eqKe6t samedi 2 avril 2011 14:58:34 via foursquare depuis Châtenay-Malabry, Hauts-de-Seine 96. I'm at L'art du papier (48 Rue vavin, Bvd raspail, Paris) http://4sq.com/hUyDuJ samedi 2 avril 2011 12:55:28 via foursquare depuis Paris, Paris 97. I'm at Université Paris Dauphine (Place du Maréchal de Lattre de Tassigny, Paris) http://4sq.com/hwlFSK jeudi 31 mars 2011 19:16:43 via foursquare depuis Paris-Dauphine University, Paris

Business to Business Companies Plebiscite Direct Marketing For Lead Generation

2011-03-15T13:47:00.001+01:00

Is direct marketing dead? Surely not. It remains a strong customer relationship management medium. Its role has evolved due to several factors:

The rise of social media and in overall Internet activities.
The rise of paper costs, impacted by ecological taxes, the high Chinese demand among other factors.
The lower costs to set up those campaigns due to technology, allowing fast and cheap routing, designing and so on… This aspect resulted in an increase of mailing sent, and then it diminished the return on investment rates of mailing as a medium.

I found this very interesting article. http://www.influencia.net/fr/archives/check-in/marketing-direct-web-combinaison-gagnante,77,1377.html

It discusses about the results of a recent study undertaken in the UK by Pitney & Bowes.

50% of respondents had experienced issues to generates lead due to the complexity of multichannel campaigns.
53% of European companies believe that cutting down their mailing budget to transfer it in emailing would have bad consequences on their business.
39% of respondents combine the mailing media with the Internet in order to generate leads, and this combination seems to be very effective.

Some thoughts about the article:

Multi channel is difficult to manage: This is true. It is difficult to analyze the results of a campaign as you need to see to which media one customer has been exposed. It is hence difficult to check return on investment… Moreover, it can become costly, as you constantly need to add some new media. This is the reason why social media can become costly at some point.
Nevertheless, some strong synergies can spring up once you have an appropriate mix to deal with it. Customer relationship management is all about finding the right mix between all media to create the best responsiveness from customers.
The mailing media is very appropriate for btob: It is high quality, you can target your customers efficiently, and actually you can be pretty creative with it. I loved to work on mailing campaign while I was a direct marketing manager at Ubifrance.

What do you think about it?

Social Commerce (2): Amazon’s Case Study

2011-03-12T19:02:00.002+01:00

I wanted to go a little bit deeper in the topic of social commerce, and discuss further the article I found on how Amazon uses Facebook as a social commerce tool.

Amazon has become the leading company in the Internet retailing business thanks to its ability to adapt its commercial offer to one customer profile. Customization is a key factor, and they have been able to master it thanks to customers’ data base: They are expert in data mining.

But thanks to social commerce and Facebook data analysis (via your network of relatives), it will be able to go even further, analyzing what products your network buy and that you don’t.

One of the concrete example shown in this article, is that Amazon may give you appropriate recommendations for your friends’ birthday, and hence, having a customized offer right on time for the event…

It will be interesting to see actually how Amazon is able to leverage this new tool, and to see how both customers data and Facebook data can be combined for more efficiency.

But maybe the future of CRM and data mining will actually be to master these two very different entries of information and provide accurate analysis.

What do you think about it?

Social Commerce

2011-03-11T18:57:00.000+01:00

A lot of initiatives have been undertaken in social commerce lately. Now that brands are more familiar with social media, they may gain an expertise in web 2.0, and therefore go beyond the simple conversation with customers to turn it into a retail channel. I read this very interesting article about it.

What makes it so interesting is that it gives you examples on how to use efficiently social commerce in an original way, not by simply plugging your e-commerce site into Facebook…

Why Social Commerce Can Be So Attractive?

I have been working in the real estate business in the United States, and one of the thing I learned and I actually loved in the customer relationship management field is the “by referral business” idea. The idea is to leverage your customers’ network of friend, family and co workers, in order to find new prospects.

I don't know if you are familliar with the concept of tribal marketing, but as humans are social creatures, they like to do things like their "social environment", and hence, if your friends buy something, you tend to buy somehow the same...

And when I see the new features developed in order to give social commerce a lift, I see a lot of the same component: Recommendation, being social and spread the word of mouth.

And I believe this is one of the key factors of success for social commerce: Being able to sell more, thanks to friends recommendations.

What Is The Purpose Of Facebook
Now there are still some unanswered questions about what would be the used of Facebook for brand management and customer relationship management. Indeed, we already know the use of Facebook for customer relationship management. A lot of companies are already using Facebook to converse with customers. This is what we can call an “emotional aspect” of the customer relationship management strategy.

But now, the goal of social commerce is to turn Facebook into a market place, and hence to have more a retail strategy, or “transactional”. Can be both accomplished? Yes, it can without any questions. We have seen that Facebook can become a very important retailing channel, and I have no doubts it may be very profitable. But can you do both?

One of the response may be that retailers could own several different accounts, in order to segment their stakeholders, and then have specific accounts for:

Chatting with customers

“VRM”: Having customers asking about specific products with a specific prices, and then the brand responding.

Customer service

Retailing

I believe this is probably what may happen, especially as a lot of the major actors in Facebook already have different Fan pages on it.

What do you think about it?

TV Ads Empowered With Tags : Going Beyond Mass Media

2011-03-10T12:55:00.001+01:00

The television advertising market is going to experience huge modifications within the next few years. Some of the main change will include:
The rise of video on demand: People need the
The rise of new hardwares: TV consumption will become more and more important on mobile and computers
The rise of conversion with Internet videos: As we see, Google TV will change the way we use television, by providing a better experience in program searching, but also with the possibility to seek through several different sources (TV, Youtube, Video on Demand websites and so on).

The TV advertising market has been suffering from the spring of Internet advertising. I found an interesting article about TF1, one of the leading media agency in France and n°1 TV channel, which is launching an innovation: In certain commercials, you will have 3 different tags available in order to go further with the brand:

Information about the products
Bonuses, which includes making off, or games
Coupons

TF1 conducted a survey where 77% of the respondents declared they would be to log on a specific website to get further information about a commercial they have just seen.

TF1 TAGS TV Vidéo TF1Pub sélectionnée dans Pub

Those three features are available on TF1's website. Here are some thoughts about the concept:

It provides added value to the brand which wants to use the media. It can now become more interactive with the audience, which remains the weakness of the medium.
It will generate traffic on the website of TF1, where TF1 will be able to sell more ads... This looks like a virtuous circle right?
It will provide valuable metrics to brands. So far, television was the perfect mass market medium. But audiences are plumetting, due mainly to the use of the Internet. Now, television is empowered with new metrics, and it may help marketing managers to determine the return on investment they may get with TV ads. Moreover, coupons is becoming one of the hottest trend in marketing.
Now I kind of regret the lack of technology inspiration... Couldn't we just access those information through the TV, or through a mobile phone. Indeed, logging on the website remains a hurdle. I would not leave my seat while watching TV just to get bonuses of a great app. However, if it is available at my hand, either on my TV or on my phone (via a mobile tag to flash), I believe I would do.
Television has never been a customer relationship management medium, because of the lack of interraction you may get. Of course, the brand equity you may built with the large exposition of TV will impact your customer relationship management value... But thanks to these new tools, TV would actually provide new ways to envision how to conceive TV commercials. I believe these new features will become very popular, and it may be adopted by some other channels.

What do you think about it?

My Impressions About The Ipad

2011-03-07T22:12:00.001+01:00

It has been a couple of months now that I own a wonderful Ipad, and I wanted to share with you my opinion with the device. While I got the Ipad, I did not expect much about the handheld. As a matter of fact, I was quite skeptical about the device, wondering what kind of benefits I could get from this new device. Nevertheless, I could clearly envision that the usage would be much different from a laptop or a smartphone.

Internet Surfing

On this part, I must say that the device is quite convenient. It is easy to surf and find information. Watching Youtube videos is just awesome, even thought the search engine of the Youtube application is not as good as the one of the Internet version.

Something which bugs me though is that you can't see flash applications. No Slidehare presentations can be seen. One of the thing I watch in the morning is the videos of the NBA.com website, to watch the highlights of the last night's game. But it is not possible on the Ipad! The website's player is in flash + the "Ipad lite version of the NBA application" only provides a 30 seconds sum up of highlights... This is a shame, because it is free on the Internet, but you need to pay to watch it on the Ipad...

Also, I must say it is quite difficult to write things on the Ipad. It is impossible to actually work on the Ipad. It must be used as a display hardware. For example, I used it to buy something on the fnac website, it was not quite a good experience, as it has been a hurdle to write a note on the package of the present I wanted to buy...

I love Flipboard. Flipboard allows me to read my Twitter feed in an awesome way. I can't replace it now, I can't see myslef not doing it every day. There are a lot of great applications of newspapers which gives a premium reading experience. You can see that we have not reached yet the full potential of the device in terms of reading experience though.

As a conclusion, I must say I love my Ipad, it is a great device, you can spend hours surfing on the Internet, but in no ways can replace a computer. And I do believe it will create a new way to enjoy news consumption, thanks to its great reading experience.

The Power Of Gifts In Customer Relationship Management

2011-03-06T21:58:00.001+01:00

CRM programs are most of the time based on offering promotions in order to boost sales. It could be either promotions to upgrade a product, or promotions to buy complementary products. Sometimes, those promotions are even automated, as it is in loyalty reward programs, and customers clearly know they access certain discounts for a certain amount of purchases.

These principles have shown they work. No questions about it. But I always like to discuss customer relationship management on two levels:

The transactional customer relationship management
The emotional customer relationship management

Both of them are important. But in CRM programs, the focus has been set on the transactional aspect, as it is easy to measure, whereas emotional relationship is based on brand equity and a certain marketing work, which is difficult to link with the final act of purchasing. There is one way to link both the transaction and the emotion: The gift.

Indeed, most of the time the value of a gift is far bigger than the value of money you may give for discount. Indeed, there is an emotional value which is linked to the gift, which is very important.

There are two ways to conceive a gift to a customer:

A clear gift, which is shown as a call-to-buy: You advertize you will give a specific gift based on a certain amount of money spent in a store. This kind of gift triggers immediate sale, and don't have much power on the next potential transactions you may get. But it may provide a high return on investment, based on the high value the customer will have of it.
A non-expected gift which concludes a transaction, in order to strengthen the relationship and secure loyalty to the brand.

Of course, the present must be meaningful, and in connection with your positioning and offer.

Those two strategies don't really have the same outcome, but they are for sure to be considered.

What do you think about it?

Je blogue donc je suis

2011-03-05T21:37:00.000+01:00

J'ai lu avec très grand intérêt l'article du 23 décembre 2010 du Nouvel économiste: "Je blogue donc je suis".

L'objectif de cet article est d'une part de démontrer l'intérêt du blog pour un usage professionel, et d'autre part, de démontrer que ce mode d'expression était loin d'être obsolète. Il est vrai qu'en cette période de "hype" autour des médias sociaux, notamment Facebook et Twitter, on ne parle plus guère de blogs. D'ailleurs, beaucoup de personnes ont arrêté de publier sur leurs blogs, et beaucoup se sont intérrogés sur l'intérêt de continuer l'activité de blogging.

J'ai commencé à blogger il y a près de 6 ans, au tout départ, pour avoir de la visibilité sur Internet. J'avais entendu que cela pourrait m'aider à trouver des stages lors de mes études, en démontrant mon expertise sur les sujets du marketing et de la relation client. A l'époque, je ne connaissais rien sur le blogging: C'était vraiment le début des blogs, et je n'avais jamais lu un blog avant. Puis, au fil du temps, j'ai pris goût à cette activité, et au fil des rencontres, j'ai commencé à comprendre le fonctionnement et l'intérêt du blog.

A l'heure actuelle, je vais être honnête, je ne publie plus sur ce blog pour avoir de la visibilité. J'ai déjà réussi à développer un certains réseaux autour de mes sujets, mais surtout j'ai pu démontrer mon expertise.

Mon blog reste pour moi le meilleur moyen de continuer à m'informer sur mon sujet de prédilection, et de continuer à mener des réflexions et à construire au jour le jour mon savoir faire.

Je pense que l'activité de blog reste une activité plus que saine, et je la recommande à tout ceux qui auraient une passion, et qui souhaite la développer.

J'ai par ailleurs décourt le blog de Françoise Gri, PDG de Manpower France, grâce à cet article. Il est toujours intéressant de voir des dirigeants utiliser ce média, car ces blogs restent des sources d'informations de fortes qualités.

Noël 2010 marque l'ère du multiformat pour le Ecommerce

2011-03-03T21:16:00.000+01:00

La FEVAD a publié fin janvier les résultats du E-commerce en France durant la période de Noël. Une nouvelle fois, comme aux Etats-Unis, l'Ecommerce a connu un fort succès, puisque les français ont dépensés plus de 6 milliards € sur Internet. Mais l'un des points vraiment intéressant de ces résultats, c'est l'émergence attendue et inévitable des nouveaux formats de l'Internet. Ainsi:

16% des achats de Noël sur Internet se sont faits via mobiles.
6% des achats de Noël sur Internet se sont faits via des tablettes.

Ces chiffres montrent bien l'importances de ces nouveaux médias. Il va devenir donc important de développer des outils E-commerce qui correspondent à la consommation de ces nouveaux canaux. Il faudra ainsi prendre en compte:

Les attributs de ces canaux: Pour le mobile, l'obligation de faire simple, et de proposer un système de check out rapide. Pour les tablettes, permettre une visualisation améliorée des produits.
Les usages des consommateurs: certainement que ces terminaux seront utilisés à des moments spécifiques du processus d'achat, et ainsi, cela impactera la manière dont les consommateurs vont les utiliser.

Il est important de prendre ces questions sérieusement, car nul doute que la part du chiffre d'affaires réalisé sur ces formats va s'accroître très rapidement ces prochaines années, voire mois.

Facebook Launches Facebook Deals: Foursquare In Trouble?

2011-03-02T19:22:00.001+01:00

Geolocation market is one of the hottest topic in marketing right now. The benefits you may get from it are very promising. This is the reason why Facebook has been keen to launch its service named “Facebook Place”, in order to counterattack Foursquare.

Facebook has recently released its Facebook Deals feature in Europe, which will allow companies to propose coupons and discounts when a user check in a venue. The strength of Facebook is of course its community: Facebook is far bigger than Foursquare, which remains a young start up. Also, one of the advantage of Facebook upon Foursquare is that they already generate high revenues from strong partners. Hence it will be easy for them to promote this new feature.

Now is Foursquare in trouble? I like Foursquare, and I really believe in them. Now, about geolocation, it is exactly the same than Twitter to me: I am not really bonding with the service, and I may use it from another provider if a great occasion shows up.

Foursquare now needs to innovate and fast, to keep its competitive advantage.

What do you think about it?

Promising Start Up To Take Advantage To The M-Payment hype

2011-03-01T19:18:00.000+01:00

A lot of hope is based on m-payment in Western countries. Even though in Asia (both Japan and South Korea) mobile payment has been a reality for years, in Europe and the US, it is struggling to settle. Why? Because a lot of actors are eager to benefit from this new business:

Mobile network companies, which provides the network needed to permit mobile transactions.
Banks, which are experts in finance transaction and dealing with large amount of transactions.
Mobile devices manufacturer. The next Iphone is expected to have a technology which will enable mobile payment. Also, we all know that Google is working also on M payment with Android.
Retailers, which have strong interests in the level of commissions they may have to pay.
Credit card company like Visa, which business model would go in limbo in case they don’t enter the market.
Start ups, which are more flexible and that own the technology.

This is the case of a start up called Jumio. Jumio might be a young company, but its staff has very impressive resumes. Former executives of Google and Amazon are running the operations.

I believe Jumio needs to set partnerships with financial institutions to make m payment real.

It remains unknown which of these actors will win the market, but there is one main question which needs to be asked if we want to see m payment blossoming: What is the advantage for customers? A lot needs to be done to educate customers.

Jumio from Jumio Inc. on Vimeo.

What do you think about it?

Global Companies Thrive On Social Media

2011-03-01T16:16:00.001+01:00

Social media is becoming mainstream, and global companies thrive on it. At the beginning, when the whole web 2.0 started, a lot of experts, including myself were wondering how global companies, which are control freak most of the times, could adapt to start conversing with customers thanks to these media. But it seems that actually they quite understood how to leverage those tools.

This is what is explained in a very interesting report I found, about how Fortune 100 companies use the four main social media platforms which are Facebook Twitter, Youtube and blogs, as a marketing tool.

Burson-Marsteller 2011 Global Social Media Check-up

View more presentations from Burson-Marsteller

And the results are quite impressive:

An increase of 25% of the number of companies who are using all four social media tools versus last year.
25% of Fortune 100 companies combines the 4 social media in their strategies.
67% of companies using Twitter use the “@replies” feature to converse with users.
An impressive 84% of those companies use at least one of the platform
80% of Fortune 100 companies are talked about on Twitter.This is the main reason why it is important to look after what is going on Twitter…

Nevertheless, there is still room for improvement:

In Twitter, the average followers per account figure is 5 076: This is very few compare to the millions of customers those company have over the world, and compared to the millions of people using Twitter. Nevertheless, the number of followers grown in average of +241% last year.
84% of Facebook pages are posts in last week. It may seem a lot, but I believe that a good fan page should at least be posted 5 times a week…

Also, I liked in this report a very interesting point: Having multiple accounts allow one company to reach different stakeholder groups. I believe this is a very interesting point, because as a global company, you may have very different customer groups, but also very different products.

This is one of the basics of customer relationship management: Being able to adapt to your audience. And if you are really planning on discussing with your customers, it is way much easier to have accounts related to a specific topic.

For example, if I take as an example Microsoft:

They have business to business activities, with their CRM products, Microsoft offices licenses, maybe we may even add in this category the Surface products.
They are in the video game market with the Xbox
They are in the cell phone market
Of course they have softwares and operating systems for PC
They are all over the world, and you may not interact the same way with US customers and Asian ones.

Therefore this is a great advice you should consider: Think glocal: You need to have a strong global brand, to use in the social media, but also several accounts allowing to adapt upon the typology of stakeholders you have.

How to Bond With Customers Thanks To Digital Marketing: Pepsi’s Case Study

2011-02-28T12:42:00.002+01:00

It might not be the newest social media marketing campaign, but it is working, and it is still on. But let’s face it: Pepsi with its Pepsi Refresh Project has made a great job.
Pepsi, thanks to its website http://www.refresheverything.com/ is offering the opportunity to visitors to submit on idea. Then the community votes for the ideas it prefers, and every month, the best ones are financed by Pepsi.

The concept has two great advantages:
It boosts Pepsi’s presence in social media. It helps the company to bond with its customers. Pepsi now counts 3 millions Fans on Facebook and 60 000 followers on Twitter.
Brand equity: Pepsi acts as a responsible brand, which helps the community. I am sure that it has been very powerful.

What do you think about it?

Foursquare For Retailers: Managing The Last Mile

2011-02-25T12:40:00.001+01:00

I am a Foursquare evangelist. I love the service and I can clearly envision what kind of usage people might have, and what interest companies might have.
I read a very interesting article about Foursquare, and how it could potentially influence shoppers.

The idea is that Foursquare is the best tool to trigger the decision of a shopper to come into a store. Foursquare has a lot of feature which helps customers making a decision:

Of course discounts
Tips and to-dos

Mobile is the only device that has ever been empowered to do so. This is the reason why it is very interesting to see the rise of Foursquare, and to see how it will work. Also, what would be very interesting would be to get data from Foursquare. I don’t know if the company has a lot of them, but it would be very interesting for a company to know how the check in process happen, and also the search approach of customers while checking in.

What do you think about it?

Ebay Loyalty Reward Program: Bucks

2011-02-24T12:38:00.001+01:00

Summer 2010 Ebay launched its loyalty reward program named bucks. The concept is simple, but has an interesting feature: You earn 2% of your purchases in dollars which you can use for your next purchase.

What is new is that you have 3 weeks to spend it. And this is what is interesting in terms of CRM. Indeed, it aims customers to come back, and to buy more often. Hence it is totally completing its customer relationship management goal.

Now it is not sure it will work: If customers tend to buy a product in more than three months on average, maybe they would be reluctant to actually pay attention to their money. I don’t actually now what is the average frequency of purchase on Eay.

What do you think about it?

Social Media vs Email: Ben & Jerry’s Case Study

2011-02-22T12:34:00.002+01:00

Couple of weeks ago I visited the Foum E-Marking in Paris. As I have said in a previous post, I have been pretty deceived about the fair, as I did not see much innovation whereas the market is constantly evolving, toward more social media. @joelbirch said on Twitter it was both funny and scary, and I must agree.

I found this very interesting article on social media.

It is very interesting for 2 reasons:

It explains the reasons why Ben & Jerry’s shifted from email to social media strategy.

It is an example of a food company using social media, which remains rare.

Ben & Jerry’s decided to stop their emailing program, and to switch its effort onto social media.

Now Ben & Jerry’s count 1,3 million fans on Facebook. Nevertheless, some customers are not happy as they would rather receive offers via email than logging in Facebook.

In terms of customer relationship management, social media offers a great opportunity to bond with customers. But in this specific case, it is bad the fact that Ben & Jerry’s is ignoring a large part of its customers.

On the company’s side, there is one thing which needs to be seen: Emailing are pushed marketing campaign, while social media is pull: That means it does not exactly respond to the same problematic…

Now, does it mean that emailing is dead?
Some people are really thinking it might. In a rea with other media of communication like Facebook, Twitter, Instant messaging, it is difficult to picture the future of emailing. Now, of course, I know that a lot of people will say that over time no communication media disappeared, they tend to add up. But emailing might be considered as a part of microblogging activities (this is just a thought).

Emailing, on the company’s side has great strengths: It is easy to get data and measure the return on investment it might get.

Social media may also be a “push marketing” tool, as updates are getting inside fan’s data feed.

I believe that Ben & Jerry’s decision might be a little bit extreme, and emailing still has a bright future ahead of him, for at least couple of things. But it is very interesting to see how Ben & Jerry’s are using this new medium.

La Caisse D’Epargne: Nouveau positionnement, nouvelle identité

2011-02-22T12:20:00.002+01:00

La Caisse d’Epargne vient récemment de lancer une nouvelle campagne de communication. J’ai d’ailleurs été invité à l’événement, il y a quelques semaines de cela, mais je n’ai malheureusement pas eu le temps de poster quelque chose à ce sujet (sniff).

C’est la raison pour laquelle j’ai décidé, une fois n’est pas coutume, de faire une série de trois articles afin d’exposer les grandes nouveautés que nous avons pu voir lors de cette événement.

Et l’événement est de taille. En effet, la Caisse d’Epargne avait basé depuis plusieurs dizaines d’années sa communication sur l’effigie de l’Ecureuil, animal attachant et symbolisant la mission d’épargne qu’avait la société. D’ailleurs, les différentes campagnes de la Caisse d’Epargne ont reçu de nombreux prix de publicité pour leur qualité.

Mais alors, pourquoi changer ?

Parque qu’après plus de 10 ans de saga animalière, le temps du changement était venu. Il fallait retrouver du sang neuf alors qu’on avait fait le tour du sujet.
La Caisse d’Epargne a changé : De nouvelles activités ont été rajoutées, notamment dans le btob, et ainsi, le discours de la saga animalière était devenu trop loin des attentes de ces nouveaux publics.

Objectif:

Regarder avec un oeil neuf la Caisse d'Epargne
Pouvoir segmenter la nouvelle identité en fonction des typologies de clients: Grands groupes, pros, particuliers, etc...
Créer du silence du calme et de la sereinite pour faire passer le message.

De plus, la Caisse d'Epargne va aussi revoir sa stratégie dans le hors média, en s'impliquant dans le mécénat culturel, en misant plus sur la musique que sur le sport (domaine où elle était très présente).

Be Careful About Facebook Terms of Use For Your Marketing Campaigns

2011-02-20T12:28:00.002+01:00

Setting Up marketing campaigns on Facebook is becoming more and more popular. The obvious advantage of the solution is that you can bond with your customers thanks to Facebook like never before. In terms of customer relationship management, that implies conversing with them, but also benefit from the fast spread potential of the platform.

But this medium remains for a lot of marketing departments a land to explore, and misuse is common. I was reading the great blog of Mickael Guillois, French expert in digital marketing, which was writing about the issues French retailer Kiabi experienced with its Fanpage.

Kiabi owned at this time 130 000 fans on its fan pages. Due to a marketing campaign based on a game which did not respect the terms of use of Facebook, Kiabi saw its page shut down by Facebook. Kiabi probably spent a lot of effort building this community, and losing all its followers due to a bad campaign is pretty disappointing.

Hence, Mickael, in order to avoid these kinds of trouble, gave us 3 great advices to prevent it to happen:

Don’t use your wall to create a campaign/game. You should rather create a specific tab to display it.

Specify clearly on this page that Facebook is not participating in the game.

Respect the country’s legislation.

Hope it will help you…

SEO Strategies In 2011

2011-02-18T19:59:00.000+01:00

I have attended a conference about the new trends of SEO in 2011 during the E marketing Forum in Paris in January. Unfortunately I have not written the name of the speaker, but it was very interesting to see those trends. Indeed, even tough social media gets more and more important in search, Google still rules the Internet world, and its influence is constantly getting bigger by adding new features, like Google shop, or Android for mobile devices (both tablets and phones).

Here are the main ones I have got:

SEO benchmarking: One of the main trend in managing SEO will be to look after your competition. Now that the market is getting mature, strategy will have a key role. Some companies may hence focus on flushing the keywords, in order to get a lot of traffic and drive sales, but some others are focusing on having a high return on investment. Depending on your competition’s strategy, you should adapt yours in order to be more efficient.
Google Speedy: I did not know much about Google Speedy prior to the conference. Speedy aims to run faster search for Google. And it will change the way Google approach web pages, and therefore, it will have an impact on the way you will conceive your codes, to be well ranked. Speedy is at an early stage, but like always with Google, it should move fast.
Google Preview: Google preview is a new feature of Google, which I actually use a lot, especially on my chrome navigator. It allows you type a keyword and instantly you can see propositions of keywords. It speeds up the way you search. And hence, it influences how searchers are looking for information. Therefore, the value of keywords will change, because it will be influenced by the new results Google Preview is going to provide.
Google Products: Google products aim to ease the searching process of e-buyers, by providing a large outlook of which e-merchant propose what product.
Devices: A lot of devices are now equipped with the Internet. Of course, the mobile Internet is going to rocket within the next few years, but also TVs and tablets are empowered with the Internet. And those new devices, and the way we interact with them is going to change the way we are surfing the Internet. And hence, we may see new results showing up, different from the ones we have right now. It may also change the query, with the need of more local information than right now. Maybe Google is going to integrate Foursquare results in its results, as it did with Twitter?

What is sure is that SEO remains an art, and 2011 will see a lot of new things showing up.

What do you think about it?

The Future of Advertizing Companies

2011-02-16T18:33:00.002+01:00

I had a very interesting chat with the director of a French advertizing company, especially about all the new technologies which allow one company to create its own communication tools. Hence, anybody can create a website, an emailing campaign or even a brochure by its own, without asking for any advices to those companies.

Moreover, the results are most of the time high quality and low costs. Actually, it is this CEO which came to the conclusion that soon companies will no longer need advertising and/or communication companies.

I found couple of months ago this very funny movie which tells the story of the last advertising company, as if it was an en danger specie.

As a blogger, added to my entrepreneur mentality, I like to create things by my own, and I master all those tools which allows you, for free or for cheap, to design great communication tools. But I must disagree with this person. I don’t think that we will see the end of those agencies soon. Sure that those of them which are not able to manage the great shift which is occurring to the Internet sphere, on mobile phones, social networks, geolocalization, augmented reality, they will disappear without any question. But our world is ruled by communication. And more and more we’ll need to have experts to advice us on how to do.

I remember Henri Kaufman in one of his class used to say that it was important to have external advices instead of inside expertise, because those people which works on several different clients and different industries, may provide you with open minds, and new ways to see your business. It is very important sometimes to step aside, and seek for outside insights and advices, to move forward.

Hence, one of the key added values of those companies is the department of media planning, which helps define the new consumption trends, identify the strategy of competitions and so on. This department will become more and more important as the communication will become difficult as the number of communication channel is multiplying.

Therefore I don’t think advertising companies will die, if they succeed in thriving on social media and new communication tools. They should focus their expertise on communication in overall.

Also, one of the thing they should change, is the way their pricing method: They should be more focus oriented, now that communication channels metrics are getting sharper and sharper.

What do you think about it?

Apparition de cyvercollèges dans le Val de Marne

2011-02-15T23:01:00.000+01:00

A partir de 2013, les 12 500 élèves du Val de Marne entrant en 6ème se verront remettre un ordinateur portable afin de pouvoir étudier. L'idée est d'utiliser l'ordinateur comme support essentiel et central de l'éducation de ces élèves. En effet, l'utilisation de l'ordinateur prend une place de plus en plus importante dans notre vie. Il est important de ne pas creuser la "fracture numérique", celle qui sépare les gens ayant un accès à l'informatique et ceux qui n'en ont pas.

Je trouve la démarche remarquable, car elle va aider les collégiens à utiliser au mieux l'ordinateur, qui reste le plus incroyable outil de connaissance que nous n'ayons jamais connu.

Et vous qu'en penses vous?

M-Commerce: Domino’s Pizza Iphone App Generates $1.3 million In Sales

2011-02-11T23:55:00.000+01:00

M commerce remains a land that needs to be conquered. Now that smartphone sales are rocketing and the usage of mobile Internet is adopted by the mass market, now people are seeking for new ways to take advantage of this new main business trend. And one of the most promising one is the payment potential of mobile.

Not a lot of cases studies exist in mobile commerce sites which are actually profitable. But couple of days ago, I found this very interesting article. Domino's Pizza Iphone application generated $1.3 millions in sales!

The application, which was launched in September 2010 for the UK market, has been promoted on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and reached 400 000 downloads.

“The challenge was to create an app which made it easy and fast to order a pizza, but at the same time offered something more to engage users and reinforce the personality and key attributes of the Domino’s brand,” said James Millett, multimedia manager at Domino’s Pizza.

“Our Web site is already optimized for mobiles but we wanted to make it even quicker and easier for customers to get a piping hot pizza, wherever they are,” he said.

The applications lets users find the closest Domino’s locations and pizzas can be customized by pinching to resize the size of the pie and choosing from a variety of toppings.

Additionally, iPhone users can enter to win money off of their next order by popping their pizza in the oven and swiping or blowing away the steam to reveal a code.

While Domino’s is preparing the actual pizza, customers can keep tabs on its progress with the real-time pizza tracker (OK, in my opinion, this part might be a little bit too much...).

The application also includes a pizza slot machine that lets customers shake their phone and randomly choose from Domino’s 75 million combinations of base, sauce and toppings (it is a cool feature, but wouldn't it be awesome also if you could check what people are ordering at the same time on Twitter? Could turn the app a little bit more social!).

Here is a video showing you how the application actually works.

It is actually pretty new that Pizza makers are using the Internet to take orders. But Domino's Pizza went one step further with this new tool. And indeed, let's think about it, most of the time you order a pizza on your phone, and it would be pretty convenient to be able to pay the pizza right away, as you won't need to get crazy by seeking for money to give tips to the pizza guy...

It is also great for the company, which may now improve staff productivity as it does not need to deal with payments any longer, combined with the fact that the order is also automatically typed into the system.

Now this shows well how a m commerce website may work: It is improving the customer experience by improving the payment process. And what gives also value to the m commerce platform is that you may customize your product thanks to the same application. It reinforce my opinion that mobile marketing will help generate foot visits in store, and hence generate more business to traditional retail.

What do you think about it?

Ipad Success Story : Disney Delivered 1 Million Book Apps

2011-02-09T23:49:00.000+01:00

A lot of hope is based on the Ipad format, in order to give a lift to newspapers and books
sales. The Ipad has all the features required to improve a lot reader experience.

And some companies already seem to take advantage of it. Disney recently announced it
sold 1 million book apps on Ipad, Iphone and Ipod Touch. Disney have 9 book applications
available on the Apple’s App Store, and all of them have been in the top 10 of paid book apps
since the Ipad was released in April 2010.

You may click here to get further information.

It isinteresting to see success on the Ipad. It seems that what brought success to Disney’s
book is that it fully used the potential of Ipad: "This app was such a delightful surprise, full
of color, audio, songs and movie clips! It's easy to follow with a great voice that reads to you,
easy to flip pages, and a true delight that really engages the reader and keeps you entertained.
There are lots of little extras, including coloring pages and songs with lyrics to read-a-long,
and you can touch some of the pictures on the page to get an audio clip from the movie.”

What do you think about it?

Quelques réactions sur l'application Ipad de la Caisse d'Epargne

2011-02-09T17:22:00.000+01:00

Site mobile pour consulter ses comptes
Application Iphone, puis Android
Nouvelles campagnes de communication, avec une nouvelle charte, mais aussi l'abandon de la figure populaire de l'écurueil.
La possibilité d'avoir un numéro de téléphone non surtaxé pour accéder à son agence (oui cela parait irréel, mais ce n'était pas le cas avant).

Maintenant, tout n'est pas parfait avec cette application, mais on est sur la bonne voie. Voici quelques points vraiment intéressant:

Il est très facile de mettre des catégories aux différents achats. Par contre, j'ai l'impression que le nombre de catégories est limité, ce qui est dommage: Pourquoi devrait on limiter le nombre de catégories?
La partie analyse reste un point faible, mais le graphique sous forme de camembert est plutôt bien fait, et permet une lecture facile des postes de coûts.
Il est vrai que le fait que ce soit un écran tactile permet une interaction facile avec l'application.

Maintenant, je souhaitais quand même partager avec vous certains points d'améliorations.

Concernant les catégories: Ne pas limiter le nombres de catégories, laisser à l'utilisateur la liberté d'en créer autant qu'il en a besoin. Par ailleurs, il faudrait permettre de créer des familles au dessus des catégories, pour rendre plus facile la partie analyse.
Concernant l'analyse:
Au lieu de privilégier les graphiques sous formes de camembert, qui permet de voir une situation fixe, il vaut mieux y avoir des graphiques de types "courbes", qui permet d'identifier l'évolution dans le temps.
Il faudrait avoir aussi une partie analyse sous tableau, qui permet de voir les évolutions en % et en valeurs. Cela permet de voir si sur le mois on est dans les clous.

Bref, il y a vraiment du bon et un futur sympa pour cette application, mais encore pas mal de travail pour vraiment rendre l'application vraiment utile.

Foursquare Educates Brands

2011-02-07T18:48:00.002+01:00

When you have such an innovating product as Foursquare, it is obvious that you will need a strong evangelist effort to make in order to convince brands to use it. Personnaly, I can clearly see the interest of Foursquare, especially to boost in store foot traffic. But for marketing and customer relationship managers who might not be as much into new technologies, Foursquare’s success may remain an unanswered question.

Foursquare has released a new business section on its website. Its goal is to explain how Foursquare uses and how brands may use it, with detailed examples.

I invite you to visit it here.

From registering your point of sales, to creating badges and following people, everything is explained.

I find the section very interesting, clearly understandable. The only thing I regret is that they could have added up a forum for people to ask questions.

What do you think about it?

Google's BigQuery: Promising

2011-02-06T23:48:00.001+01:00

I have recently been introduced to Bigquery. It is a service proposed by Google, which allows companies to process large amount of data thanks to Google's wonderful skills. Google indeed is used on a daily basis to scan through an incredibly huge amount of data, in order to propose the best search results to its users. Hence, they are now using this expertise to the corporate world.

Here is a good video showing how it works, and the strengths of Bigquery:

Now there is something that bugs me about it: It is the privacy issue. How Google may assure the privacy of the data it will process?

Also there is another correlated question: How is Google making money out of it? It doesn't seem clear if the service is free or not. But Google is used to propose free services in order to get from users' data to propose keywords.

What do you think about it?

Cars Empowered With Social Media: The Future Is Near

2011-02-05T23:19:00.000+01:00

I think I found what my next car will be. It is called the Mini Cooper Connected and it seems very promising. You will find here a video showing you out why.

The Mini Copper has a social media feed from Facebook, check your Twitter account, you may connect to Google maps to find places to visit... We may imagine a Foursquare feature which would propose you to check in in a glance.

This is a very cool way to think how the car will be in the future. Actually, it has been years that car manufacturers are thinking about bringing the Internet inside the car. But nobody has really brought those projects to life. It is actually interesting to watch this new concept. Indeed CEO of Renault Carlos Ghosn was at Leweb this year, and was discussing with Loic Lemeur about how to incorporate Internet in cars. And as you will see in this video, is why quite pessimistic about setting up a car empowered with Internet. In his opinion, for security reasons, car manufacturers should not equip cars with Internet because it could distract drivers. Of course I understand that security must be the top priority for a car...

I believe that in the end, we will all have the Internet in our cars, and this will be great. As Mini Cooper is part of the BMW group, I can't wait to see what these "connected features" will be in premium BMW models.

What do you think about it?

Netvibes Is Missing The Ipad Revolution

2011-02-03T23:03:00.000+01:00

I am the happy owner of an Ipad since this christmas. To be honest with you, I am very happy about it. I did not quite expect such a great experience navigating online with this new device. I am especially enjoying reading online newspapers, either on their websites or on applications they have set. I read mainly Le Figaro (French), and El Pais (Spanish). But there was one application that I was really eager to check: Flipboard.

When Flipboard was released, it made a lot of buzz on the Internet. It was a really cool way to use Twitter, and as I use Twitter as one of my primary source of information for my blog, I expected a lot about it. And to be honest with you, I really like it. It is really cool, and really look like an actual newspaper. It is easy to check interesting articles, and to read them thanks to it. Actually, Flipboard became one of my main tool to read news. I use it every morning.

Here is a video showing out the strengths of Flipboard.

Now there was another service that I used to check daily to get information for my blog, and overal information: Netvibes. Netvibes has been around for years now, and has been one of the leader in the Internet technology for quite a while. There RSS reader and organizer was a great product. You may get all the information you want, and organize it the way you wanted it.

But lately, especially as Twitter has become so huge, I have left my Netvibes on the side. So now that I am checking out all these new applications newspapers have released and Flipboard. I was wondering if Netvibes has created an application. Therefore I asked the question on my Twitter account, and CEO of Netvibes Freddy Mini responded to me that they did not, but instead, had a netvibes HTML5 version which was cool to use on Ipad.

But as I checked it, I did not find anything interesting. This is a pitty, because I have tons of RSS feeds on my Netvibes, and as I have checked Paper.li creating a lot of buzz, as they try to recreate a Newspaper from who you follow on Twitter (I believe it is very poor right now), Netvibes would be the best placed to do so. Netvibes has tons of informations about the things you read, and they even know how you have ranged it, in which sections.

I imagine clearly what a Netvibes Ipad version inspired by both Paper.li and Flipboard would be.

I really hope something is going to show up, because so far I have no intention to visit my Netvibes page.

What do you think about it?

Do You Really Believe In Mobile Commerce?

2011-02-02T14:11:00.001+01:00

Mobile handhelds are becoming the center of a new hype. Smartphones sales are skyrocketing, new technologies allow the mass market to use the Internet at a high speed, and no one can possibly doubt mobile will be the next trend to watch.

Now what we have learned with the Iphone success, is that people like to interact with their smartphone for three main activities:

To be informed: Read articles on the web, download some newspapers applications
Useful applications: Find a restaurant nearby, consult a bank account, prepare a shopping list.
To have Fun: all the video games which exist now.

What about paying with their mobile phones? A lot of companies have already invented new ways to use mobile as a payment terminal for in store purchases.

I read not so long ago (it was before Christmas time), that 44% of British people were ready to buy Christmas gifts via their mobile phones.

"A new study by UK-based smart buying clubGlamoo suggests that 44% of Brits will use their mobile phone to buy and send gifts this Christmas.

Sampling 4000 people, the survey found that a third of respondents would use their daily commute to complete a shop for goods and services on their mobile, whilst 42% said they would take advantage of being a passenger in the car to complete their shop."

What is interesting to see is the advantage mobile commerce would deliver: Being able to order in any situation, which is not yet the case of the Internet. But I believe that the main challenge for mobile commerce will be to provide a nice interface which will help the customer to find the products he wants with ease.

What do you think about it?

Employees Play A Key Role In Customer Relationship Management

2011-02-01T12:22:00.002+01:00

Customer relationship management is a complex art which encompasses several different activities, and several different media. And most of the time there is a fundamental part which is left on the side, whereas in my opinion it is probably the most important one: employees.

There are a lot of cases where CRM is approached by CEOs as a way to improve salary costs, by replacing human experience by a "robot". But it doesn't seem in my opinion a proper way.

Hence, I wanted to quote two very interesting quotes said by CEOs of companies which excel in customer relationship management:

"You can't expect your employees to exceed the expectations of your customers if you don't exceed the employees' expectations of Management" Howard Schultz, Starbucks
"Businesses often forget about the culture, and ultimately, they suffer for it because you can't deliver good service from unhappy employees". Tony Hsieh, Zappos.

These two statements place human resources and employees at the core of customer relationship management. Not database. Not top of the line direct marketing campaign. They believe that customer relationship management is about corporate culture and employees happiness. You can't pretend to feel for your customers while you don't even feel for the people you manage on a daily basis.

In the retail industry, whatever the company it is, employee turnover is very high. People switch from job very easily, which drives high cost for hiring new people and train them, but also inefficiency for the whole staffs, as they are often undermanned.

This is the reason why it is very important while creating a CRM strategy to take into consideration the human factor. CRM is not about taking the place of people, but actually being able to optimize employees time and knowledge to improve customer service, and in the end, customer satisfaction.

What do you think about it?

Le Master Distribution et Relation Client de Paris Dauphine gagne le concours Carrefour

2011-01-28T18:38:00.000+01:00

Un petit peu de publicité pour mon ancien master. En effet, une équipe des étudiants de cette année ont remporté un concours organisé par Carrefour. De plus, faisant parti de cette équipe, Marie Cholet, va représenter les couleurs de la Carte Club DIA lors des trophées SCOPS cet avril.
Carrefour a invité les 30 étudiants du "Master Distribution et Relation Client" de l’Université Paris-Dauphine à la finale du « Match ». Les étudiants organisés en 6 équipes en compétition ont relevé le défi en proposant de réelles solutions autour de deux problématiques : l’une portant sur le marché des séniors, l’autre sur les produits du rayon surgelés.

L’objectif pour Carrefour est triple :
- Confronter les étudiants à la réalité professionnelle en les mettant face à un enjeu réel
- Travailler la marque employeur de Carrefour auprès de ce Mastère très spécialisé de l’université Paris Dauphine
- Identifier les talents qui se sont exprimés pour les recruter

Sur les produits surgelés, une équipe sur les 3 en compétition a été désignée vainqueur du « Match » par Carrefour.
Il s’agit de : Chloé Douville, Mélanie Le Parquic, Charles Falque-Pierrotin, Céline Maheu et Marine Lehobey

Sur le marché séniors l'équipe vainqueur du match : Flavie Barthel, Charlotte Ciboit, Elena Boric, Rathsamy Thirakul et Marie Cholet.

UK Study Puts Mobile Coupons Usage On Hold

2011-01-25T23:52:00.003+01:00

Geolocalization will be for the next few years one of the main discussion of marketing and

customer relationship management managers. The idea to influence shoppers’ behaviors

thanks to appropriate promotions while in the point of sale is for sure interesting.

Nevertheless, Mobile marketing is a very touchy issue. For sure, pull mobile marketing

strategies have shown their efficiency, as the Iphone app store shows. When companies

propose some applications to download with interesting features, it is ok as long as the user

decide to get it. But push mobile marketing actions are quite difficult.

Hence, a recent study (UK) shown that. Only 8% of grocery shoppers wanted to receive

location based coupons. Indeed, privacy issues are key for this kind of usage. Therefore, it is

very disruptive for customers to get advertising on its mobile while shopping.

More information here.

It is important to not transform mobile advertizing into an intrusive medium. Push mobile marketing campaigns are very difficult to design, and to me, it should really not be consider, because of how disruptive it is.

What do you think about it?

Débrief du salon e-marketing 2011

2011-01-25T22:51:00.003+01:00

Comme chaque année, je me suis rendu, bien que très rapidement cette année au salon du E-marketing, au palais des congrès.

Et cette année, mon sentiment reste mitigé... En effet, le monde du marketing en ligne a connu ces 2 dernières années de profonds changements. Notamment, pour ne citer qu'eux:

Les réseaux sociaux: Twitter et Facebook en tête
La mobilité, avec Foursquare, mais tout un arsenal de possibilité de communications sur mobile.
La géolocalisation
La réalité augmentée

Or, sur la plupart des sujets, je n'ai pas vu de société vraiment innovante, hormis certainement la réalité augmentée, où Total Immersion nous a fait une superbe présentation. La France est pourtant un pays qui maîtrise ces nouvelles tendances, et je trouve dommage de ne pas avoir eu de pôle pour ces starts ups, afin d'avoir plus de nouveauté.

Il faut aussi dire qu'il y a eu énormément, comme chaque année, de sociétés spécialisées dans l'emailing, alors que l'activité a profondément évolué, due aux réseaux sociaux et à la croissance de la consommation de l'Internet mobile. Il est bien dommage de voir que ces sociétés, qui sont maintenant bien développées, et qui pourraient investir dans des innovations liées aux réseaux sociaux, n'ont pas bougé...

Les conférences par contre sont toujours de très bonne qualité.

Et vous, qu'en avez vous pensé?

Mall Of America Excelling In Social Media Usage To Boost Traffic

2011-01-25T18:37:00.001+01:00

Mall of America has set up several social media campaigns to boost in store traffic:

Access for Twitter followers to special parking places on the busiest shopping day of the year: “OnDecember 18, tomorrow, the Mall of America will close its north surface parking lot, just steps away from the north entrance to the mall, reserving 96 spaces for its Twitter followers. To snag one of the coveted spots, Twitter followers needed to register on Eventbrite.”
Special promotions for Foursquare and Facebook Places users: “the Mall of America will offer a $25 gift card to the first five people who check in on Foursquare each day from December 20 through December 23. And on Facebook Places, the Mall of America Youth Foundation will donate $1 for each check-in through December 24, up to $500 each to VEAP, or Volunteers Enlisted to Assist People, and One Heartland, which operates camps for children impacted by HIV/AIDS.”

The mall business is wondering right now how they may become more attractive to counter attack the Internet offensive. I actually attended last year a conference in France with most of the main mall business people on how to use new technologies to lead traffic in store. It was quite interesting; even though I saw that these people were far from understanding the new customer trends (those people are more real estate managers than marketing/customer relationship management experts).

I hope it will give some ideas to some mall managers in France, to incorporate technologies and/or social media to boost foot traffic in malls.

What do you think about it?

L’audience de Twitter stagnerait en France ?

2011-01-24T18:31:00.000+01:00

Twitter reste pour moi l’un des services mobiles qui va exploser en cette année 2011, avec certainement Foursquare (même si je pense que Foursquare explosera plus en 2012, vu que le service est plus jeune). Twitter a eu une croissance impressionnante en 2010, et la société commence tout juste à générer ses premiers revenus.

Néanmoins, j’ai lu le mois dernier que l’audience de Twitter commencerait à stagner en France :
http://blog.lefigaro.fr/technotes/2010/12/laudience-de-twitter-stagne-en-france.html

« Le nombre de visiteurs uniques était passé de 78.000 en octobre 2008 à 1,5 million en octobre 2009.

En 2010, l'audience de Twitter a continué d'augmenter, mais pas dans les mêmes proportions, puisque l'on observe cette fois une hausse de 21%. Plus intéressant, un pic a été atteint au mois de mars. Depuis, le nombre de visiteurs uniques s'est stabilisé autour de 2 millions, et ne progresse plus vraiment. »

Pour moi, ces chiffres ne peuvent pas être pris sérieusement : les clients Twitter représente une source importante de traffic. Etant donné que Twitter est très utilisé en mobilité, il est logique qu’une grosse partie de l’utilisation ce fait via des applications comme Seesmic, ou encore le client Twitter. D’ailleurs, la baisse de l’utilisation de Twitter semblerait intervenir en juin, lorsque Twitter a commencé à créer ses propres clients sur les différentes plateformes mobiles.

Mais cet article soulève un autre point : La mesure des sites Internet. En effet, avec l’avènement de l’Internet mobile et surtout des applications mobiles, il va être de plus en plus difficile de suivre la fréquentation des sites Internet. De plus, il ne faut pas oublier qu’une grosse partie de la fréquentation des sites est en train de migrer vers les réseaux sociaux, notamment Facebook. Certains sites de marques ont des trafics plus fort sur leurs pages Facebook que sur leurs sites.

Il va donc falloir trouver un moyen d’intégrer les statistiques de visites sur mobile et sur les pages Facebook et Twitter (outils qui n’existent pas réellement à ma connaissance), pour pouvoir gérer des sites de marque à l’avenir.

Internet est devenu un média multi canal, complexe à gérer, comprenant comme composantes principales :

Le site Internet
L’activité mobile
L’activité sur les réseaux sociaux
Tout ce qui est push, notamment l’emailing, l’achat de mots clés.

Nous nous trouvons dans une situation proche de celle du début du CRM et de la gestion de la relation client. Ainsi, la multiplication des canaux de marketing direct (courrier, téléphone, emails, contact avec le vendeur, etc…) a obligé les sociétés à construire des programmes CRM importants, visant à coordonner ces différents canaux. Maintenant, sur Internet, cela va devenir la même chose.

Qu’en pensez-vous ?

Carrefour améliore ses relations avec les fournisseurs

2011-01-21T13:32:00.002+01:00

La grande distribution a toujours eu une image négative de sa gestion des négociations. En effet, alors que cette activité représente l’une des plus importantes parties de son métier, les rapports que les distributeurs et les fournisseurs entretiennent sont très conflictuels.

Ce mal est très français. En effet, aux Etats-Unis, depuis de très longues années, distributeurs et fournisseurs travaillent ensemble afin de pouvoir optimiser leurs affaires mutuelles. Notamment, c’est de ces bonnes relations qu’est né le category management.

En France, le category management existe bien évidemment, et est très performant. Néanmoins, les rapports restent toujours basés la plupart du temps sur le rapport de force.

Lars Olofsson est le directeur général du groupe Carrefour, distributeur français, 2ème distributeur mondial et 7ème plus gros employeur privé dans le monde. L’une des particularités de Lars Olofsson est qu’il vient du monde du fournisseur. Ainsi, il connait bien l’envers du décor, mais surtout, a la réelle volonté d’améliorer les pratiques et relations que Carrefour entretien avec ses principaux partenaires.

C’est dans ce cadre d’ailleurs que Carrefour Planet est né, de la collaboration des leaders de chaque category afin de repenser la distribution et l’expérience client en magasin. De cette volonté est né en décembre 2010 un nouveau code de conduite pour les managers Carrefour.

« On apprend ainsi que, chez Carrefour, règle numéro 1, il faut « respecter strictement la légalité ». « Contribuer à un environnement de travail sûr et sain » vient de deuxième position des top priorités, suivi de « s’engager pour la diversité et des conditions de travail respectueuses », « garantir la confidentialité », « éviter les conflits d’intérêts », « refuser toute forme de corruption », « développer des pratiques commerciales loyales et transparentes », « fournir un reporting fiable et fidèle », et, dixième point, « être l’ambassadeur de la marque Carrefour. » »

J’apprécie beaucoup le travail que fait Lars Olofsson, car il a une réelle volonté de transformer Carrefour. Je suis aussi en accord sur cette vision de la négociation. La négociation n’est pas un rapport de force, mais plutôt un processus qui doit mener à obtenir les conditions désirées, tout en s’assurant de la pérennité de l’accord. Ainsi, il est important que les 2 parties ressortent un bénéfice de la négociation. Il est important de garder ainsi pour Carrefour des partenaires avec des revenus stables, qui sont le garant de la bonne continuation de la collaboration.

Google Facing Global Companies Problems

2011-01-20T13:10:00.002+01:00

It has been a while that Google has become an Internet giant. It is dominating the search engine market, but is also the leader of several other markets. What is sure, is that the exceptional growth it experienced this past decade change its status from a promising start up to a dominant company. Such a fast growth is difficult to manage, as dealing with a small company does not imply neither the same structure nor the same discipline.

Google’s know how and market is mature now. And therefore they are starting to face the same problem global companies are experiencing: fewer and slower innovation, problems in making quick decisions…

The Business Insider gives us a good example of how it impacted some of their decisions. Google aimed to buy an actor in the Internet music distribution market. Nevertheless, due to its unappropriate structure, trying to work as a start up, but in a large company frame, it has not been able to make a decision.

Google places a lot of value on agility. Instead of having a strong dictatorial leader like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates sign off on every product decision, the company is organized in a collection of interdependent teams. This is supposed to let Google respond quickly to market conditions.

This example shows you how Google is not innovating anymore, but would rather by some existing company/projects, in order to grow. It is also adopting some methods which they were not accustomed to. For example, they have rationalized their customer relationship management for Adword clients to make it more profitable.

Somehow, Google is experiencing the same thing Microsoft has the past few years. They have not been able to innovate with their core products, the operating systems and the Microsoft office softwares. They also have struggled to enter new market.

Google is facing a very important era of its history. It needs to succeed in turning into a global companies, and to structure its business in such a way they will be able to make more consistent decisions.

What do you think about it?

Getting Outside The Promotion Loop

2011-01-15T19:29:00.000+01:00

Promotion is a very effective and easy way to boost sales. Indeed, when you offer to customers some discounts on products, they tend to respond pretty well to the stimuli. Nevertheless, and that is what has been seen during this economic downturn, when you start increasing the number of promotions you deliver, the less effective they become, and you enter into a vicious spiral which is difficult to leave.

This vicious spiral is created when competitors start to grow their amount of promotions. The more they are offering vouchers, the less they are effective, but the more they tend to make, as they find it profitable, and the only way to convince shoppers to buy.

I read a very interesting article about Emmanuel Casabianca, which is the CEO of Telemarket, one of the most important grocery online retailer in France. Hence, they have set up a commercial strategy which prefers to offer products to customers rather than discounts and % off. Why? As he explains, when you offer a discount to some customers, they take it, but they forget about your gesture very fast, whereas when you offer something, it seems to remain in customers’ memory more permanently. Hence, they offer in some occasions for customers which spent over 80€ a basket of fruits, or a full breakfast.

That reminds me also something about a concept which is “always exceed your customers’ expectations”. If your customer expect a voucher to come to your store that means your business model is not reliable. Customers should come to your store because you deliver good service and/or a good product. Now, you should also always exceed their expectation, and by giving them a little extra, you may increase a lot customers’ satisfaction.

This reminds me also something else. In November, two of the largest retailers in France, Carrefour and Auchan, around the same period of time, proposed to customer to collect some cartoon cards, in order to boost the traffic in their store. A study showed that traffic has been high thanks to these cards, and that actually customers were basing the choice of the hypermarket they were going to due to the cards they were collecting.

If you really think about it, the marketing investment in cards is very low, compare to the price investment you may use to promote some of your products.

If you want to get out of the promotion loop, and strengthen your customer relationship, you should consider more offering gifts, presents to your customers, than the price.

What do you think about it?

Mobile Price Comparison: Will It Impact Customer Relationship Management?

2011-01-12T18:57:00.000+01:00

Price comparison has changed a lot the way we consume. Now that customers are aware both of the quality of products and of prices in different stores, they are taking this information into consideration. It has been several years now that price comparators rule the ecommerce industry. Thanks to this tool, a website visitor is able to compare thousands of online retailer prices for the same product, and accordingly switch from one to another.

We are on the edge of the mobile revolution, and thanks to smartphones, price comparison will be possible in brick & mortar stores. People will be able to scan products and find the prices of the same product in local competitors. Some applications already exist, especial RedLaser which has been the first one.

It will for sure impact the way you deal with customer relationship management. It is somehow like one competitor being able to sell inside your own store! CRM has worked a lot on the way to create added value for customers not to only make its decision on prices, but on the overall experience and service one company can deliver.

What it will imply:

A faster pricing management: You will need to check competition pricing on a regular basis to adjust your price, to avoid customer leaving the store only for price purpose.
Propose a better service: As long as the customer feels it has a better service in your store, it won’t leave the store simply for a price difference (especially if it is minor). If your store allows him to gain points, or to leave faster the store thanks to fast cashier, it will stay.

What is sure is that these bar code scanning applications, which will compare prices, will change customer behavior in a way we don’t know. This is the topic of this very interesting article how mobile will effect on impulse purchase.

According to Nick Holland, senior analyst at the Yankee Group, smartphone-empowered consumers are growing in numbers and, as a consequence, the number of impulse purchases being made is decreasing.
Indeed, he believes those that compare prices via mobile, before succumbing to an emotional buy, show "intelligence and cunning when confronted by aggressive sales staff".
"Impulse purchases are the opposite," says Holland "showing personal weakness - they are a dirty little secret that probably isn't to be shared with others."
StorefrontBacktalk editor, Even Schuman, disagrees. He believes shoppers, even those armed with smartphones, won't be able to control their natural urges.
"Impulse purchases are indeed emotional, and rationality does not come nearly as naturally," he writes.
"For every in-aisle price- and feature-comparison that an Android or iPhone enables, there will be 20 purchases in the heat of the moment. And those impulse purchases will be enabled by mobile."

If the customer is already in store, then he has already made a great step toward purchasing. Maybe not now, but sooner or later. Therefore, an appropriate use of mobile technology may actually trigger the sales.

Procter & Gamble in the 2000s has spent a lot of money in optimizing the “First Moment of Truth”, this short period of 7 to 10 seconds when the customer make his decision on which products it will buy. Mobile usage will change this important period of the customers’ decision making process. It is still undetermined what will happen, and if, as the article proposes, mobile price comparison will kill the impulse purchase. I am still not convinced. I actually believe it will help customers to make its decision while in front of the aisle.

What do you think about it?

Groupon Case Study: How To Succeed Your Sales

2011-01-10T18:54:00.002+01:00

Groupon is one of the fastest growing company in the ecommerce industry. The concept is simple: It proposes only flash sales, which allows the website to have attractive pricing. Nevertheless, as Groupon doesn’t seem that well organized, it seems some brands which have used the this retailing channel were not quite happy about the end, as they have been blown out by the success: They had not enough supply to please the generated crowd of buyers.
I read this great article for Business Insider about Amerian Apparel which flocks Groupon, thanks to a successful campaign. I like this article as it gives us a good case study on how to use Groupon.

But a source from American Apparel tells us he's seen sales numbers following his company's deal with Groupon "that disprove many of the ongoing doubts about Groupon."
He says customers who purchased the $25 Groupon – worth $50 – ended up spending an average of $70 once they cashed in the deal.
Our source says the best part of the deal, though, was how American Apparel was able to add a whole bunch of Groupon customers to its own email list.

"The killer was email address acquisition... We converted approximately 25% of in store redemptions into signing up for our email list... which is on track to generate an additional five to six figures in online revenue."

Groupon ended up selling 133,000 Groupons at $25 a deal in the US for a total revenue exceeding $3.3 million. Our source tells us Groupon came out of this deal with "much much less than half" of that $3.3 million figure.

But in my opinion, the main reason why it is experiencing such a success, it is probably because American Apparel prepared well the outcomes of the channel:

It proposed a large enough supply to content the demand. In France, it is forbidden to advertise for products which you know you won’t have enough to please all the demand it will create (what we call “produit d’appel”). Because it creates dissatisfaction, and hence gives a bad image both to the brand and the retailer.

It set up a system to boost its email data base thanks to the campaign. Therefore they were able to completely retain this customer data base to use it for further sales.

I believe Groupon is still a retailing channel that needs to be explored. The more retailers and/or brands will have experience with it, the better they will be able to manage it. Groupon is too big now to be used with amateurism.

What do you think about it?

Utopia: If France Decides To Create Its Own Facebook

2011-01-09T11:13:00.000+01:00

I am always skeptikals when I see some web 2.0 companies valuation. Indeed, some of these companies have not sold anything yet, but investors spend billions into it. Most of the time these evaluations are based on the number of users one company have, as investors are counting on the audience to sell advertizing space, either it is keywords, banners, sponsored articles, or "promoted Tweets".

Here is some of the valuation I found:

LinkedIn is worth $2 billions

Facebook $33 billions

Twitter $4 billions, even though they are still loosing money

Myspace was bought in 2005 for $580 millions

These are some of the examples I found.

A lot of people are scared about how big Facebook is getting. Indeed, Facebook is the ultimate social network, which allows you to find all your friends, chat, share pictures... And people are affraid about losing the control of their private life on the web to a private company. I understand it may be scary. This is the reason why some projects like Diaspora emerged. They are willing to create an open source social network to compete with Facebook.

Now I wanted to share with you another idea of mine. Let's imagine for a moment that France decides to create his own social network, and to use the full potential of the long tail.

There are 60 millions of French persons in France, and about 40 millions have a regular access to the Internet. Let's imagine all of them decides to invest in a Facebook-like company, investing only 20€ in it. You will have a company with an equity of 800 millions €, and if you translate it into US dollards, it would be over $1 billions.

Now let's consider a ration between the number of users and potential advertizing revenues:

Facebook: 33 billions for 500 millions users: $66 by users

Twitter: 4 billions for 200 millions users: $20 by users

LinkedIn: 2 billions for 70 million users: $28 by users.

If we really think about it, with $20 invested by 40 million of French people, we would be able to have a tycoon of the Internet of our own.

Of course, this is pure utopia, but I just wanted to show two things:

Valuation of companies just based on the number of users is dangerous. You may not sure that your website will turn into a highly efficient advertizing platform, Like Google accomplished.
There is some money in France, and I don't understand why people complain we are not able to finance interesting start ups.

What do you think about it?

Interactive Advertizing Technology: Another Way To Interact With Customers

2011-01-08T10:53:00.000+01:00

During this christmas celebration season, you have probably heard of the Microsoft's Xbox Kinnect system. This system allows you to play with a video game in a totally new way. If the Wii has let people be more interactive with games, by using body movements to control the game, Kinnect is using your whole body.

The Wii of course has been the pionneer in this technology. But we can see that people wants more and more human interaction with the machine. This has also been shown with the tactile technology, which helped making the Iphone and the Ipad successes.

I watched this video I found a long time ago, on a blog. It shows how these technologies using body recognition could be use to create interactive advertizing in point of sales.

Intelligent Multi-touch Display - Testing from Immersive Labs on Vimeo.

Customer interaction will become more and more important, and as sales are now made online, point of sales will become large show rooms which will propose a lot of room to these kinds of machines.

What do you think about it?

Myshopanion = Social Shopping

2011-01-07T22:16:00.000+01:00

Social shopping is one of the hottest trend in the Internet world right now. It may be one of the most important one also to follow in 2011. As I would define it, social shopping encompasses all activities which will lead one shopper to use social media in his process to purchase a product or a service.

It can include several different features, among which:

Checking in Foursquare or Gowalla to let his/her friends know what he/she is doing, or to access some vouchers.
Visiting/asking questions/commenting on a blog/forum.
Asking friends on Twitter or Facebook about the products.
Simply reading comments and reviews either on Facebook, brand websites, ecommerce websites, blogs...

It appears that opinions of others online is very important in the decision making process. And hence, new social media are taking a very important part into this process.

Now, social media are migrating on mobile devices, and I found an interesting articloe about Myshopanion. It is a mobile application which aims to help shoppers to interact with peers. You may scan one product with your application to access several sources of information, such as comments of others.

I believe it is a good idea to launch such an app, in order to help the customers right before they purchase something, to make sure they are making the good choice.

In term of customer relationship management, it is a good thing those kinds of apps exist. Indeed, most of the new shopping tools emphasizes discounts and price comparaison, but when one company wants to show off its customer experience and customer service, what else than cusotmer reviews can be efficient? Indeed, I still believe that customers don't make their decision simply by comparing prices. They are also looking for a specific customer experience and customer service which they need and they feel they deserve.

Myshopanion is hence bringing social shopping onto mobile devices.

Lessons of Customer Relationship Management By Richard Branson

2011-01-05T21:31:00.000+01:00

Famous business man Richard Branson has become famous thanks to his skills to innovate, and to bring new ideas on existing markets. I read this very good article about Richard Branson writting about customer relationship management.

Of course, Richard Branson consider customer service as very important, but what I liked, it is his idea of using its staff to find new ways to excel in customer service:

"A good first step would be to encourage everyone on your staff to take an active role in coming up with new ideas and solutions to improve your products and services. Ask your people to experiment and to offer suggestions, and make sure that they are able to do this without worrying about speaking out of turn or being embarrassed in front of their peers—they should be confident that managers will listen to what they have to say. There is no such thing as a bad idea in my book; there are just some that are harder to achieve and pay for! As a manager, I would rather have the chance to weed through those ideas than rely on the status quo."

Indeed, you don't need to be a CRM expert to have good ideas about how to treat customers. Furthermore, it is important your employees feel concern about customers, because they are the most important thing they should care about.

Mozilla Phone

2011-01-04T20:54:00.000+01:00

Found on this blog, a video of a concept created by the Mozilla community. I like the idea we would be able to use the smartphone as a computer.

Best Buy: Innovating In The Pick Up Options For Optimizing Multichannel Advantages

2011-01-03T20:06:00.002+01:00

Multichannel is becoming a norm nowadays. Either brick & mortar companies are going online, or pure players are finding ways to reach their customers in the real world thanks to pick up options. What is for sure is that multichannel is starting to become a norm.

But there is still room for improvement as the Internant and brick & mortar world are still struggling to click.

Best Buy hence has innovated:

Customers may now pick up their products at the company's warehouses. For a national chain like Best Buy, it is very interesting to provide this service, as they may own several warehouses across country. Pick up at the warehouse may also decrease the logistic costs, as some part of the merchandise will not need to transit through the stores. The consumer electronics retailer also is letting customers pick up purchases directly from its warehouses to avoid delivery charges and scheduling conflicts for large items such as appliances, or to save time on orders that must be shipped to a store.
Best Buy says it launched the new delivery options, which it calls Store Pickup Plus, to expand on the free shipping promotions it periodically offers online, as well as to allow consumers to avoid shipping fees, receive products more quickly, eliminate concerns about package delivery and increase confidence that products will be available.
Thanks to a top of the line supply chain information system, they are able to tell to customers to pick up some of their orders 45 minutes after having ordered them online.

Now, I wanted to add something else about multichannel retailing. In France, drive ins are getting very popular for hypermarket chains. Some other type of retailers have started to use this system, like an optician in the north of France. But what about ecommerce? Wouldn't it be an efficient system to equip warehouses of these type of drive ins, in order to turn their warehouse into stores?

What do you think about it?