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

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

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

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

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 ?

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

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

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.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-wanted-to-buy-spotify-but-internal-fighting-stopped-it-2010-12#ixzz18eZ6frry

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

The Daily : Aiming To Define New Ways To Consume Magazines

Ruppert Murdoch has always been fighting in order to find a way to monetize information on the Internet. He is totally against the idea of free information on the Internet. Actually, I quite agree with him. The news companies market is plummeting, and even though Internet is growing fast, revenues from online activities has not turned out to be profitable.

Ruppert Murdoch is willing, as a lot of actors in the news market, to benefit from the Ipad to find a new reading experience which would be profitable. Hence The Daily, the first ever magazine to be designed for a tablet, has been released not so long ago. It costs $0,99 per issues, which makes it cheaper than any other magazines.


The Daily have great advantages:

• First, as I have said, the price, which is cheap.


• The reading experience: It has been designed in order to benefit from the great potential of the Ipad, and hence, provide more than a simple newspaper.
  

To be honest with you, I hope that Ruppert Murdoch succeeds. I consum tons of information online, and I actually contribute online, via my blog, where I post daily my thoughts and valuable information I found online about the topics I master. But it remains important to find professional magazines, profitable, in order to maintain a certain level of information.

Nespresso: Etude sur la guerre des capsules

Article trouvé sur le blog de l'excellent Yann Gourvenec au sujet de la guerre des capsules Nespresso.

En effet, la guerre des capsules a été l'un des principaux sujets de la grande distribution alimentaire en 2010. D'après ce que j'en sais, aussi bien pour Casino et L'Or, le lancement de leurs produits ont été plus que des réussites.

Ce qui est intéressant dans cet article, c'est la présentation de Vanksen sur l'impact qu'à joué les réseaux sociaux lors de cette bataille. En effet, Nespresso possède une forte présence sur les média sociaux, et l'événement du lancement des dosettes par des concurrents à créer un très gros buzz.

A voir.

Happy New Year!

I wish to all of you a happy new year! May 2011 brings you happiness, joy, laughs and success. I am sure 2011 will be better than 2010, as we are clearly leaving behind the financial crisis. I am sure we will still hear from it once in a while, and still some institution are going to struggle (I am betting on Spain, which in my opinion will mark the very end of the crisis).

What I am going to improve for 2011: Working on my wedding, that's for sure, but also my main goal will be to learn Spanish, in order to be perfectly fluent.

An ambitious goal, but I am pretty confident in myself.