Category Management: Partnership Between Fnac and Microsoft

The Fnac has hit the headlines last week with its public offer to exchange with Darty, which would create a tycoon of the hardward retailing world in France.

But today, I wanted to share with you an article I read about the category management partnership Fnac and Microsoft set up.

This initiative have started in 2012, and the article is showing how to benefit of such a category management effort, especially in a market decreasing by 9% in 2015. Actually, let's remember that Walmart has set up its first category management initiatives while it was experiencing issues with its sales growth.

There are 6 pillars to this initiative:

• Microsoft's shop in shop, with specific merchandising.
• Microsoft staff in 40 of the largest stores. They aim to promote and demonstrate the products, enhancing the shopping experience and helping shoppers.
• Exclusive premiere launch, like for the new Surface tablet, available 1 month in advance. It allows the Fnac to create differenciation through its product range.
• Cocreation of products: they are exchanging information in order to create unique products, like the 365 Office Pack including Bitdefender
• 4 Microsoft employees dedicated to the Fnac.
• Data Exchange about sales and marketing.

Obviously, the partnership makes sense, as Microsoft is among the largest supplier of la Fnac, with a clear know how in terms of promoting high tech products, and la Fnac is  the biggest client of Microsoft (40% of shares in France), with a know how in terms of theatralization in store.

Those category management examples are pretty rare for different reasons in France, and I believe it was interesting for me to share with you those insights.

Global Companies Thrive On Social Media

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.

Microsoft and Google Fight For Twitter's Search Engine

Microsoft and Google are becoming the best enemies lately. We all know that Google is way ahead in terms of advertising revenues from its search engine, which is driving Microsoft to seek for a partnership with Yahoo. Google got onto Microsoft's market when developing some Powerpoint and Word-like softwares. They even got into the mobile business, where Microsoft is also struggling to stay in the competition.

Now, Twitter, one of the most trendy social media, has recently launched a search engine to look through Tweets. However, Twitter engineers don't have the Google's nor Microsoft's expertise, and both companies are fighting to provide a new advanced search engine.

This article is even thinking about a bid for Twitter, but I don't think we are going towards this. I'd rather think that Google and Microsoft could develop specific search engines to help Twitter users find interesting tweets. Now if Google and Microsoft are working on a search engine, that could be pretty bad for Twitter. Indeed, one of the most blossoming business in the Internet is advertising coming through search engines. Google might get a huge potential business out of Twitter's hands if so. Since Twitter is still struggling to get a business model... Nevertheless, Microsoft could get back in the social media competition if it succeed in creating a great search engine for Twitter, because I don't see them getting near Google's one...

@the_gman, thanks for sharing the info!