Customer Oriented Company: Raidlight case study

I was watching French TV show Capital, which was discussing about the sport clothing market. What was interesting that it was comparing Lafuma, a fleece jacket producer, which was using a traditionnal approach to launch a new product in the market:

• They were conduction market research and monitoring what the competition was making.
• They hired an expert which has already worked on several accounts to bring new ideas
• They had long development timeframe before launching in the market

Afterward, they compared to another French company, smaller, but probably way smarter in their approach, Raidlight. Raidlight is expert in hicking and running clothing, and has very limited access to market research. They have based their success on their ability to create new products based on their customers' ideas. They gave the example of some running sticks which model has been thought and design by a customer, which gave them the right and the idea to develop it into a flagship product. Once again, another jacket has been thought by a customer, which in reward will see this jacket named after him.

They have created a section on their website called "l'atelier de conception", where the company publishes some needs, for example, their will to develop a new kind of bag for hiking, and where customers will be invited to tell their needs and ideas.

This is for sure a true "web 2.0" approach, as the company is able to be innovative and match customers' needs thanks to a customer centric approach. Hence, customers are contributing to the value creation chain of the company.

I find this example very interesting and I wanted to share it with you. I believe that it is very interesting and important to get your customers involved into your product creation process, in order to verify the potential of your products.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is not only about data warehouse and softwares, it is also about how to get fresh ideas in the market you would not be able to.

How To Measure Brand Success In Social Networking?

This question was asked by Loic Lemeur on his blog, as he is preparing a presentation on the topic. Unfortunately, as comments are closed on the post, I could not respond to this question.

However, this article raised up my curiosity, and I was thinking of a point I wanted to share with you.

Indeed, with the decrease of TV audiences and a larger population connected to the web and using social media, we could expect, either on a short or a long timeframe, to see the rise of a new mass media with social media. In fact, global companies need those mass media in order to broadcast their brand power.

There are several ways to identify the success of a social media strategy for a brand, depending on which point of view you are based. For example, you could consider your community management activities as a sales channel, like Dell did, announcing they've sold millions via Twitter. Or you could like Evian did use it for branding purposes, hitting records views on youtube.

The fact is that you should compare the GPR you could get from a TV commercial and the number of views you could get on social media, for the same kind of investments. This would be very interesting, especially for companies that are used to broadcast TV advertising, and hence, need to change their approach.

And you, what do you think about it?

Mon impression du salon MD Expo

Je me suis rendu vendredi à 2 événements qui me tenait à coeur:

• Le salon du marketing at retail, salon de la publicité sur le point de vente, et en général, de l'expérience shopper. C'était la première fois que j'en entendais parler, et la première fois que je m'y rendais. Ainsi, en tant que chef de publicité d'une chaîne de hard discount, il était intéressant de voir ce qui était disponible sur le marché en matière d'idées, mais aussi de budgets. Mes attentes étaient donc très hautes.
• Le salon MD Expo, dédié au marketing direct, et donc de toutes les innovations en termes de communication sur Internet. Cela fait depuis 2006 que j'y vais (presque) tous les ans. Etant passioné par ces sujets, et maîtrisant la plupart de ces composants, j'y allais plus d'un air distrait, pour voir des choses nouvelles.

Et pour être vraiment honnête, j'ai été déçu par MD Expo. En effet, on parle énormément de mobile, de réseaux sociaux, mais là, j'ai retrouvé les mêmes acteurs, avec les mêmes solutions, et un discours qui devient paradoxal, reprenant une sémantique "2.0" mais en proposant du MD traditionnel.

Il est en effet difficile de passer d'un support rôdé, ayant prouvé son efficacité, à un média à peine installé, où tout reste à découvrir. Mais je pense qu'il existe en France, des sociétés innovantes, avec de très bonnes idées, qui auraient dû être présente, pour ainsi marquer cette transition. Le marketing direct est différent des réseaux sociaux, car l'interaction ne se fait pas sur des périodes déterminées, mais d'une manière continue, avec un vrai dialogue.

Le MD n'est pas mort

Maintenant, je ne veux pas non plus qu'on se méprenne: je ne considère pas le marketing direct traditionnel comme obsolète. Bien au contraire, je pense que le marketing direct, notamment le mailing, garde des atouts importants. Il permet d'avoir un discours personnalisé, souvent innovant, et un message personnalisé. Mais les réseaux sociaux, et les médias mobiles, sont en train de prendre le pas, et il est important de marcher dans le sens de l'histoire.

J'ai notamment été déçu de ne pas voir des acteurs qui avaient l'habitude de venir, notamment CRMmetrix, ou bien soft computing à cet événement.

Marketing at retail: Une vrai réussite

De l'autre côté, le salon marketing at retail fut une réelle surprise, et une très belle réussite. Au contraire du MD Expo, énormément d'entreprises innovantes, dans le domaine de la technologie tel que les écrans tactiles, les hologrammes, la 3D ou le téléphone mobile, ainsi que des prestataires traditionnelles, proposant des mises en avant sur linéaire. Le point de vente, après avoir souffert de l'arrivée de l'Internet, puis de la crise, risque de prendre une nouvelle importance stratégique. En effet, le point de vente est le premier média social entre la marque et le consommateur. Car c'est le seul endroit où le consommateur peut toucher les produits, les voirs, et discuter avec de "vrais personnes", et non derrière un support tel le téléphone, l'ordinateur, le téléphone ...

La différence entre le marketing at retail et le MD Expo reste pour moi la capacité à s'adapter à l'innovation. Je retournerai bien sûr à ces 2 événements l'année prochaine.

Customer Relationship Management Is Not About Tools, But About People

I could have chosen a different title for this video, but as I wanted a larger spectrum for the ideas of this video. This video has been filmed during last year Leweb event. Chris Pirillo is discussing about community.

Indeed community management is nowadays a hot topic for companies, and we see community management job description blossoming all over the Internet. Companies start to understand how important it is to connect with customers, and the great shift media are experiencing, from mass media like TV or newspaper, to the Internet, and especially social media.

But these companies are thinking in an empirical way, which might not be appropriate with the media. Indeed, there are tons of tools to drive these community activities, through services like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Foursquare among others. But what really matters, in order to make your community management strategy works, it is people.

People are the ones who create the community

You can not create your own community around your brand. People are. This is what explains in this video. What really matters, in order to create a strong community, is the culture your company has, the culture which surrounds its product, even more than the corporate culture, that might even be perceived in a different way.

You can not control nor create a community. You should guide them. This is a very interesting concept, because it links your branding and your community management strategies.

Your brand results in your brand culture, which you will be able to build your community on.

But this is the very same thing with customer relationship management. For so long people have been talking about CRM softwares and programs, occulting totally the ultimate goal, customer relationship. By focusing on the tools, they have created some non sense situation, where customer service and satisfaction has decreased, because the way the company interacts with them doesn't make anysense.

Both community and customer relationship management are linked. Community and social media is a new medium for customer relationship management. The different is that social media requires a new approach focused on people and not on tools.

Mastering The 4 C's Of BtoB Marketing

You might know the 4 Ps of marketing, which is one of the basics professors might have talked to you about in your first class. But as marketing is a wide science which will evolve depending on the industry and your place in the market, I found this very interesting article about the 4 C's of btob marketing.

I have worked in the marketing field for a btob company, PB Gelatin, in Davenport IA. It has been a very fun experience, because I was in a totally unknown market, and as an intern, I understood a lot about btob issues and how it was different from btocs. Therefore, having an appropriate strategy really matters.

According to this article, the 4 C’s of B2B Marketing are:

• Content – the creation of a steady stream of engaging content
• Connection – connecting with the audience you wish to attract
• Communication – communicating with them in an ongoing conversation
• Conversion – and then converting them at the illusive moment of need

Now what is interesting with these 4 Cs, it is that they are all a component of a community, and actually of the concept of web 2.0. Therefore, mastering the web 2.0 sphere could give you an incredible advantage upon competition.

This is the reason why I have always considered the Internet as one of the best tool you could use for your business to business activity, especially blogging. Because as you are blogging:

1. You create content, that shows out your expertise, and also gives the will to engage the conversation
2. By blogging, you set up a relationship with your audience, that may come back, comment your posts, and even contact you.

Therefore, I believe that in any btob company, you should have blogging activities. What do you think about it?

US Oil Companies Are Setting Up Partnerships For Loyalty Reward Programs

Loyalty reward programs aim to keep your customers into your clientele, and hence to maximise your sales/customers by making sure he won't go to the competition. If loyalty reward programs involve a reward system, it does not necessarly imply to give some of your actual products, or even some special offers in your store.

Hence, there are some very interesting loyalty reward programs that are set by several companies. This is what is happening in the US Oil market.

"In what one loyalty provider called ’a huge turn’ in how loyalty plays out in the convenience store channel, oil companies have launched or are in the process of initiating large-scale programs involving price rollbacks, grocery-store ties and their own branded credit cards," reports cspnet.com. "San Antonio, Texas-based Valero is the latest to confirm that it is in the testing phases of a loyalty program that could potentially be rolled out to its entire network. While ’still under development,’ officials told CSP Daily News that their California pilot program ’worked well.’ Though too early in development to discuss details, the official said rewards kick in after a certain number of fillups or purchases, with one of the incentives being free movie rentals from DVD kiosks."

Also in the article: "Just last month, Houston-based Shell and Cincinnati-basedKroger Cos. announced a partnership involving grocery ties to fuel-reward redemption. Beginning February 15, Kroger and Shell said they would roll out the grocer rewards program in Cincinnati and Dayton, Ohio; Knoxville and Nashville, Tenn., and San Diego. Customers can earn rewards including a minimum of 10 cents off a gallon of gasoline for every 100 Fuel Points they earn by using their free loyalty cards when purchasing a variety of products inside Kroger and Ralphs stores. Last fall, Houston-based BP announced a loyalty agreement with Irving, Texas-based Excentus Corp. to work with the loyalty provider’s fuelperks! program. The companies announced that BP will become the fuelperks! redemption partner in the majority of marketing areas in which BP operates."

"These moves represent the most significant turn of events regarding loyalty in the channel since Speedway SuperAmerica LLC (SSA) established a formidable program within its 1,600 stores five years ago, according to Anton Bakker, president of Outsite Networks, Norfolk, Va. The sheer numbers involved back his assessment, with as many as 8,000 BP sites, many in major U.S. markets, being eligible for upgrade."

What is very interesting about this idea, is that you could get a good customer relationship management strategy by setting up some key partnership with some companies that your customers visit, and hence propose a wider range of services to your customers.

How The World Is Connected

One of the main result of globalization has been that most of countries economies are interconnected. The subprime crisis has been a great example of it. The national US real estate market has collapsed, and had lead to the main financial crisis the world experienced since the great depression.

If the world has been bipolar after the second world war, divided in two groups of same strength, the fall of the Soviet Union drove the world into a global market. I have found this great picture, which maps all the different major global risks and how they are interconnected to each other. The fact is that we are in a complex world, composed by thousands of different potential risks of all kind, which makes it difficult to read through and to find simple solutions.

Of course, you may try to find easy solutions for segmented problems, like a sandwich composed by layers you would add on to each others. But as you solve a problem, the component of your solutions have great chances to impact other components. I think this idea of mapping an interconnected world is very interesting.

If You Can Harness Social Media You Don't Have To Pay For Advertising Anymore

These words come from Sequoia Capital partner Mark Kvamme, in a New York Times interview he accorded. Mark Kvamme is a venture capitalist, which had some experience in social media. Indeed, he believes that social media is way cheaper than advertising, and with the Spike of uses of those social network, you can have a large audience to interract with.

I believe that advertising is still very powerful, but somehow, I think he is write. We are still far from this era where we won't need advertising for mass media marketing. But at some point, we have already some examples of companies which would rather spend money on social media than on TV advertising. As a matter of fact, more and more advertisers switch their budgets from TV, which TV markets is collapsing, to the Internet, which is actually becoming the main investment.

Social media could be way more efficient than advertising, because it allows customers to interract with a brand, and there for provide a great customer relationship.

What is interesting, it is that it is not the words of an advertiser, but of a venture capitalist, which is more interested into return on investment than on brand equity. I believe this is a sign.

Marketers Facing Information overload

Information and data are very important to marketers. Marketing is based on monitoring markets, in order to identify trends and opportunities, and then to measure the return of the different campaigns. Hence, information systems have provided them with tons of data. Especially, those companies who own CRM programs are most of the time overwhelmed with data.

A new study has bolded this fact.
Although marketers collect large amounts of data, they struggle to apply that information to their campaigns, according to a study of global marketers by Unica, an analytics and integrated marketing firm.
“The State of Marketing 2010” survey found that 70% of marketers say the data issue is “very important,” while 24% said it is “somewhat important.” Unica and independent research company Salloway & Associates surveyed 200 online and direct marketers for the report.
“This proliferation of channels is creating a lot data, but marketers don't always know what to do with this data,” said Jay Henderson, director of product marketing at Unica. “They have plenty of data and not enough insights, and they struggle to turn them into action.”
Indeed, a lot of CRM programs provide large amount of data, but it requires know how, expertise and people to analyze and then to get information that you could base your future campaigns onto.

I believe this is the reason why it is important, while owning large amount of data, to actually focus on small projects, and very simple issues to leverage the potential of it. But that studies shows that owning lots of data don’t necessarily mean you’ll have a competitive advantage. What really matters is being able to leverage it for efficient marketing campaigns.

Kraft Iphone App Case Study

I have checked the Kraft Iphone app for quite a while. I believe it is very nicely done. I have found this interview of Ed Kaczmarek, Director of Inovation and Consumer Experiences at Kraft Foods. He gives us some insight about the application.

Kraft Foods launched the iFood Assistant in late November 2008 and released the upgraded iFood Assistant 2.0 a year later. The $0.99 app offers access to more than 7,000 recipes, cooking tips, a shopping list builder and how-to videos commingled with ads for Kraft brands. Ed Kaczmarek, director of innovation, consumer experience, discusses the branding goals of the iFood Assistant and insights into consumers’ app usage.

eMarketer: What is the goal of the app?

Ed Kaczmarek: Ultimately, our goal is to engage the consumer in a meaningful and relevant way. We want to make their life easier and to get closer to them during the point of purchase.

eMarketer: How does the app work?

Mr. Kaczmarek: The iFood Assistant provides a Recipe of the Day idea for seven days, as well as Dinner Tonight suggestions. It allows users to search our database of over 7,000 tested recipes, all with photos. We have a What’s on Hand search where they can type in up to three items they have and the app will offer recipe suggestions for those three items.
There’s a full-functioning shopping list that’s been refined a bit so that users can now check off items as they shop.

eMarketer: How do you promote the app to consumers?

Mr. Kaczmarek: We promote it across all of our Kraft channels, so it’s promoted on KraftFoods.com, KraftCanada.com. We have a recipe by e-mail that goes out on a weekly basis so we have periodic promotion there.
“We’ve concentrated on the mobile ad network and it’s very beneficial.”
We’ve concentrated on the mobile ad network and it’s very beneficial because we’re able to track actual conversion. We’ve added code into the app for the different ad networks. These have been efficient media buys that have driven a good amount of downloads for us.

eMarketer: How does the app interact with the online channel?

Mr. Kaczmarek: Users can sign in to iFood Assistant and their recipe box and shopping list will also be saved online. So if they’re at the computer, they can go to KraftFoods.com and access that recipe or shopping list. At any point, they can e-mail a recipe or shopping list to themselves or a friend.

eMarketer: What are the social hooks that are built into the iFood Assistant? For example, can users upload their own recipes?

Mr. Kaczmarek: We have that capability on the Website, but we have not yet activated it on the iFood platform. The social media hook right now is being able to send the different items to themselves or someone else. They can e-mail any recipe or their entire shopping list. We activated push notification where they can choose any day of the week and a time to be reminded of the Recipe of the Day or Dinner Tonight, even if the app is off. We also added a promotions and announcements section where we can notify users if something special is happening.

eMarketer: Since the iFood Assistant’s launch, how many downloads have you had?
“Six months after people download the app, we are experiencing over 60% of continued user engagement, which we feel is phenomenal.”

Mr. Kaczmarek: We do not share our download information, but what we’ve noticed is that six months after people download the app, we are experiencing over 60% of continued user engagement, which we feel is phenomenal. If you look at any of the stats out there, it’s more like 5% continued engagement two months after download.

eMarketer: Can you share any insights about consumer interactions with the app that were surprising or unusual?

Mr. Kaczmarek: We have 25% men using the platform, which was surprising to us. Also, over 90% of the people signing in to the iFood Assistant are new to the Kraft Foods environment so it has really been a great acquisition vehicle for us. Another observation is that when people share recipes, they definitely e-mail them more than they send them via text message.

eMarketer: How does the app promote the Kraft brand overall?
“The most important thing is we’re providing utility above branding.”

Mr. Kaczmarek:It’s a halo of innovation and helps position Kraft as contemporary. It really has connected us to the consumer closer to the point of purchase in a relevant way. The most important thing is we’re providing utility above branding. It enables all of our brands to connect with consumers because they are being included as a recipe ingredient. We also have advertising within different places in the app.

Here are some remarkable points of this interview, which you should think about while creating an Iphone App:

• Iphone apps are meant to improve customer experience. As we have seen with Kraft: 60% of people who downloaded the application was still using it afterward.
• The mobile advertising network could give you a real boost to promote the application. Indeed, the easiest way to download and use the application is by using a mobile webpage to download and set the application right away.
• Iphone applications are a tool for coach branding. Coach branding is an important element because it sets the brand as an expert of its product, and allows the brand to enter the every day life of customers. This is the main reason why I believe the Iphone application is the best customer relationship management tool so far.
  
  You would like to discuss about mobile application topics? Please leave a comment to start the conversation.

Risky Single Distribution Channel Strategy: Nexus One’s Case Study

Distribution channel strategy is one of the main key factor of success for a commercial success. I believe that it is more and more complicated to rely on a single distribution channel, as it could have been thought couple of years ago.

One of the best case is Nespresso. Nespresso is one of the leading company in the coffee machine and capsules market. Even though they aren’t distributed in retails, they have applied a multi channel strategy:

• By phone
• By direct marketing tools
• But now they are developing some retails activites for both a branding strategy and sales purpose.

Now I have read this interesting article about why the Nexus One launch. Indeed, Nexus One has decided for a online only retail strategy. But in fact, this decision may have a great impact on the slow start they have.

Google don’t have no experience neither in E commerce nor in any kind of retailing. Retailers, even though it has a price to deal with, are experts, and are able to market properly such a product to make it a success. For a mass market product, it is important not to rely only on Internet retailing.

If you compare to how the Iphone has been set there is a large difference. Apple is already present in electronics stores, and have an e commerce website they master. Hence, I believe Google should try to set partnership with larger retailers to boost its Nexus One sales.

Facebook Generates More Visits Than Google

Facebook has passed Google in terms of frequentation between March 7th to 13th. This is the first time Facebook is more frequented than Google, establishing 7,07% of the overall Internet frequentation, versus 7,03% for the Mountain View firm.

One year ago, Facebook was counting only for 2%, whereas Google has grown by a little 1.03 points. Of course, Google’s search engine market is more mature than Facebook, but this is an important step for web 2.0. Hence, for the first time, its main actor overpassed a 1.0 monster.

“The true value of Facebook and social networks is just becoming clear to marketers,” said Augie Ray, analyst at Forrester Research.

Facebook has doubled in a year its number of users, from 200 to 400 millions. Now these results only count google.com activities, and occult for example gmail or Google maps results, which if we sum up counts for 11.03%.

Now Google remains way more profitable than Facebook. Moreover, I believe that the operational costs of Google, which is mainly text indexation are far lower than Facebook, which hosts videos, pictures, chatting activities and so on. The main difference in terms of revenue generation capabilities between both is Google’s advertising program which rocks and is way on top of the line. Facebook struggles to propose to advertisers such targeting potential.

Indeed, Google has been able to set up the perfect targeting potential with its Adwords program, and Facebook lacks of know how makes it difficult to get the same kind of return on investments.

This remains a milestone for Facebook and social media, which have hence proven they were able to compete with the largest competitors.

Google On The Edge To Live China

Couple of months ago we have seen the fight the Chinese government and Google has undertaken. Due to some pirate attacks on google.cn, Google has identified it was coming from Chinese government representatives, and therefore, have condemned those attacks. Google has already made a lot of concessions to enter the Chinese market, hiding some searches which could annoy Chinese politicians, especially related to the Tien A Men events. But it seems that Google and China has gone to a no coming back point.

If that was the case, Google would turn its back to a multi billion dollar potential market, which is probably one of the most important in the future. The results of this fight is not miscellaneous, and it might even help some of its competitors like Bing or Yahoo to gain some global market shares. Of course, I don’t think it will change dramatically the landscape of this market.

As Google stops its search engine activities, it seems obvious they will probably leave with its mobile phone activities.

In my opinion, it would be no surprise to me that China has made on purpose to make Google leave in order to help its local search engine have a boost, and hence have a chance to earn some market shares on Google worldwide. China has no remorse on preventing foreign competitors to rule its market.

What do you think about it? Do you believe this news will actually change the face of the search engine market worldwide.

Has Twitter reached its peak ?

I have written on this blog not so long ago that Twitter was working on some business plan. I was saying that it was actually a good sign that Twitter was starting to envision how they would make money out of their audience.

Now I have read this very interesting article. Indeed, it seems that since September 2009 Twitter accounts growth was flattening. Twitter and its use was starting to mature.

These results might seem some kind of disappointing, as they are far from the expectation, and moreover far from Facebook’s figures.

I believe actually that Twitter is a little bit late, and that they should have started to work on building revenues before this maturation. Indeed, Youtube was making revenues way before they reached their best scores. Twitter should have been able to generate revenues and still increase its number of accounts.

Now this may explain why Twitter is multiplying the projects on how to make money with Twitter. Its main issue is that it has already allowed some competitors to get into its own advertising market, either Google, which owns a powerful Tweet search engine, Seesmic which enable people to tweet from a computer or a mobile phone, among others.

Twitter's growth seems to have lost its momentum, according to a new study.
Growth in the micro-blogging service's number of users peaked at nearly 20% last April, but had dropped down to 0.15% in December 2009, says a study by Barracuda Networks.
Recent web analytics had already suggested that Twitter had reached its peak, as Twitter.com recorded a traffic high in July 2009 and has never reached that level since. According to Compete, Twitter reached 23.5 million users in August 2009 and stayed put. However, as Twitter client applications have grown and have become a bigger percentage of Twitter's user base, the numbers didn't necessarily reflect the actual situation of the micro-blogging service. By using the growth in Twitter users, instead of the site's traffic, the Barracuda study now puts things into perspective.
Strong growth in user numbers of 21.17% in April dropped to 10.95% in July and to 0.82% in September, and has ever been under 1% since – 0.58% in October, 0.34 in November and finally 0.15 in December. The accounts deleted by month also was growing, from 3.36% in April to 12.03% in October from which they peaked off to 8.48% and 8.14% percent in November and December.
To get these figures, Barracuda analysed more than 19 million Twitter accounts for frequency and content of tweets, user-to-user interactions, and each account's overall activity level. "We have been monitoring Twitter for more than one and a half years and keep track of the public timeline, and any new account of the public timeline," says lead researcher Nidhi Shah.
The concentrated growth of users reached its peak in April 2009, according to Barracuda
Barracuda's chief research officer, Paul Judge, explains the stagnation of Twitter with the end of "The Red Carpet Era". Twitter shows "a very concentrated growth spurt during the early part of 2009 – a period that we define as the 'Twitter Red Carpet Era'. Twitter users came online to follow their favorite celebrities. The most famous people have already joined Twitter, so I don't think they'll see another growth spurt like that," says Judge. From November 2008 to April 2009, several big celebrities, including Ashton Kutcher, Oprah Winfrey and John Mayer, joined Twitter.
In comparison, the number of Facebook users has been rising continously. According to Facebook, today 50% of the 400 million active users log on to Facebook in any given day, with more than 35 million users updating their status and more than 60 million status updates posted each day.
Another Twitter study published by US web analytics company RJMetrics last month seems to confirm Barracuda's report. It says that Twitter has 75 million users, an estimation that Barracuda roughly agrees upon, with a large percentage of accounts being inactive.
Another study by RJ Metrics says Twitter is still gaining new users, but has lost 20% of its growth since July
According to RJMetrics' data, about 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than 10 times, about 40% of accounts have never sent a single tweet, and 25% of accounts have no followers.
RJMetrics concludes that "the past six months have shown steady decline in the number of new account registrations", but the number of new users a month is currently at about 6.2 million. Their report doesn't say anything on the number of deleted accounts.
Twitter, which has not yet commented on the reports, recently announced that it had hit 50 million tweets a day. According to Barracuda's report, users are becoming more active on Twitter, with the most active users being those with about 1,000 followers.

According to internal documents leaked to TechCrunch, the company's forecast that it would go "from 25 million users at the end of 2009 to 1 billion in 2013".

Google seeking for new branding products

Google is the king of keyword advertising. But this advertising system is far from being interesting on a branding point of view. Indeed, keyword advertising is text based, and there is no references to anykind of design or artwork.

In order to generate new revenues, Google is aiming to boost a new advertising program, on display ads. The clientele is much different than Google’s core target: Keyword advertisers are sales driven, looking to create traffic, and therefore well designed for e retailers.
Display ads are better for brand equity, and might be more appropriate for companies which don’t own a e commerce.

This is also a sign that TV advertising will continue to decrease and advertiser will focus more and more on Internet as the new mass media. TV still has an image advantage, providing a better experience while watching the commercial. But the Internet is creating new ways to have such a branding capacity.

What do you think about it?

Inside AdWords Blog Post:
New tool for brand advertisers on the Google Content Network
Two types of advertisers run campaigns across the Google Content Network. The first group, direct response advertisers, measure the success of their campaigns by looking for clicks, traffic to their sites and sales. In contrast, brand advertisers typically use display ads to raise awareness and purchase consideration for a product or service a person might buy down the road. Other advertisers are looking to achieve a combination of these goals to both drive awareness and elicit a response.
On the Google Content Network, we’ve been focused on building new capabilities that make it a great place for brand advertising of all kinds. For example, last year we introduced frequency capping to enable advertisers to manage how often their campaign reaches the right users. We’ve also developed new innovative tools to measure the impact of brand campaigns. Today, in response to feedback from brand advertisers, we’re announcing a new feature that allow these advertisers to reach their advertising goals more easily.
This feature, which filters out “Below the Fold” inventory, enables brand advertisers to be more selective about where ads appear. The new filter gives advertisers the ability to show ads only in places that appear on the user’s screen when the page loads, without requiring them to scroll down. Learn more in the Help Center.
With a host of different web browsers, monitor sizes and screen resolutions, it is hard for advertisers to predict where an ad will land, since the same placement may appear significantly different on each user’s screen. To simplify the process for advertisers, Google has implemented a statistically driven solution to determine which ads are above and below the fold. The statistically-driven model only considers ads “above the fold” if they are completely on-screen when the browser window loads.
Our goal with this release is to give brand advertisers greater control over where their ads appear, and make the Google Content Network an even more powerful, controlled environment for running, high performing brand campaigns.

Inside AdSense Blog Post:
Attracting new brand advertisers to your site
We’re constantly focused on bringing new advertisers and more advertising spend to AdSense sites. One way to do so is to make it easier for brand advertisers to reach their goals on AdSense sites. Brand advertisers are focused on raising brand awareness and driving engagement, typically with display ads, for a product or service a person may buy in the future. Brand advertisers differ from direct response advertisers, who typically look for clicks and conversions from the campaigns they run on your site.
For example, an advertiser selling DVDs online may want users to click through and make purchases, while a brand advertiser for an upcoming summer blockbuster may want to generate awareness among users. Because of their campaign goals, brand advertisers tend to be more selective about the sites their ads run on, as well as where on the page their ads appear. We want to help these new advertisers compete for the portions of your ad space that are most attractive to them so that we can increase your earnings over time.With that in mind, we’re launching a new beta advertiser feature that we believe will help accomplish this goal. The new feature enables brand advertisers to target their ads to ad units that are immediately visible when a page is loaded—in other words, the portions of the page a user can see without needing to scroll down. The ads that are immediately visible are called ‘above the fold’; those that require a user to scroll down in order to be seen are called ‘below the fold.’

In order to determine which ads are above and below the fold, we’ve implemented a tatistically-driven model. The model takes into account various user experiences and situations, including different web browsers, monitor sizes, and screen resolutions, and only considers ads above the fold if they are fully on-screen when the browser window loads.
If you’ve placed your ad units above the fold, advertisers using this feature will now be able to reach your site in a new way. If you haven’t, placing new ad units above the fold will enable them to do so. We believe this feature will help attract new brand campaigns to AdSense sites, bringing more revenue to publishers over time.

Moving Toward TV Apps

The TV concept is changing fast. The TV advertising market is plummeting and new technologies have revolutionized the way we consume it. Several changes have made TV consumption not a mass media any longer:

• 
  Video on Demand
  Cable TV, which provides more and more channels, more and more specialized
  The rise of P2P first, and then streaming videos on the Internet, with shorter content
  
  Hence, TV sets producers and high tech companies are rethinking the concept. And it would not be surprising if we will see soon enough some TV applications, which would makes the TV usage more interactive, and more compelling. Indeed, there is little difference between an Iphone and a TV except for the size. You may watch some TV shows on your mobile phone, and if you have Iphone apps, why couldn’t you use them on TV. Therefore, some companies have started to work on TV applications.
  
  So far, it is a struggle to launch into the market. Regulation is heavy. But I believe that the difference between a TV and a computer will be slim, and you will be able to access some nice applications, like the ones you may use on video games hardware for instance. I believe the market is penalized by the large number of TV makers, which makes it difficult to have a consensus and hence to create applications that could generate thousands of downloads. But once TV makers, and maybe a provider like Itunes has become for Iphone apps will appear, I believe this market will become very interesting.

E merchants Willing To Monetize Their Audience

E commerce is still fast growing market, but the growth speed is decreasing as the market is becoming more mature. Hence, e retailers start to seek for new opportunities to grow.

Hence, according to Forrester, 97% of people visiting an ecommerce website leave without buying anything. The idea is to leverage this mass of people into revenues. And therefore, some big e merchants have started to use advertising on their website.

Monetizing audience of emerchant has become a strategic talk in the US. And this is no surprise to me such programs are being discussed right now. Indeed, some of these websites are among the most popular in the US. In October 2009 Walmart.com generated more than 31 million unique visits on its website. Any other content based website with this audience would be profitable.

The key is not to allow any kind of competition to advertise on their pages.

Nespresso To Face A New Challenge In The French Market

Casino, one of the largest retailer in France, has announced it will sell a private label version of the famous Nespresso capsules. Hence, Nespresso owned an exclusivity contract which allowed it to be the only producer of those capsules.

Now the exclusivity contract has come to an end, and therefore some new competitors can reach in the market. Nespresso has based its success on its exclusive mindset. Hence, you could not find any of their capsules in traditional retails. You needed to order it to Nespresso, either over the phone, on the Internet, or by catalog.

What makes Nespresso’s coffee unique was especially the high pressure the machines could provide, and hence astract the most of coffees’ flavors.

Now Nespresso has to compete on its “own market”. Customers won’t have to buy their products in order to use their machines.

What does that implies?
Nespresso had a huge competitive advantage: They owned a comprehensive data base about customers usage. As customers needed to create a profile and then order through their services the coffee, they had a clear view of custmers. This is the dream of any customer relationship manager: Have comprehensive data on which you could settle your strategy. Now this will not be possible anymore. Is it hence still worth it to keep a direct sales approach? I believe there are some chances we’ll see some capsules on sales in retails like Carrefour, Casino or Auchan.

It also implies to strengthen the image of the products quality. Because if private labels gets into the market, we should not wait for long until other competitors gets in it too. And it will be a hassle to keep a clear position in the market.

For many years Nespresso has worked on its CRM program in order to create a real club, and hence, they have a clear advantage, as the customer relationship is already legitimate.

But for how long? How will the market turn in couple of years? It will be interesting to see the strategical adjustments Nespresso will make.

What do you think about it?

Casino place des bornes cdiscount dans ces hypermarchés

Casino vient d’annoncer qu’il allait placer des bornes de commandes « cdiscount dans ces hypermarchés ». L’objectif ? Faire le lien entre le canal de distribution Internet, en forte progression, et l’hypermarché, endroit de trafic, mais où les produits électro ménagers sont à la peine en terme de chiffre d’affaires. Ainsi stratégiquement Casino se prépare à diminuer la surface des rayons électro ménagers, tout en proposant plus de choix au consommateur.

L’idée est bien sûr intéressante, et pour être honnête, cela fait au moins 6 ans où j’ai la vision de magasins d’electroménagers sous forme de show room, sans stock ni caisse, où les vendeurs feraient vraiment du conseil et de la demonstration et où les consommateurs commanderaient sur des bornes Internet.

Mais là où j’ai un doute sur la stratégie, c’est sur le fait que cdiscount est tout de même loin du positionnement de Casino. En effet, cdiscount est un vrai discounter en ligne, et je ne pense pas que la qualité de service soit encore en mesure de remplacer celle d’un magasin Casino. De plus, la marque « cdiscount » est loin de la marque Casino, et une convergence des deux seraient souhaitables.

Maintenant, cdiscount reste tout de même une référence dans le ecommerce en France, et Casino a ainsi un avantage sur Carrefour par exemple, qui est toujours en recherche d’un partenaire pour gérer son ecommerce en Europe.

Le groupe va proposer des borne dédiée pour commander sur Cdiscount, avec l'assistance de "quelqu'un qui pourra réconforter et rassurer le client" ainsi que lui expliquer "comment opérer sur Internet". Le groupe Casino compte ainsi amener les clients de ses magasins sur son site Internet de ventes d'électroniques et de culture, Cdiscount. Le PDG du groupe, Jean-Charles Naouri, explique que "certains clients n'aiment pas passer par Internet, notamment les clients âgés. Ils sont méfiants, notamment du paiement en ligne, à tort ou à raison".Le groupe Casino compte ainsi proposer une offre "plus large qu'en hypermarché" avec l'exemple de la dizaine de machines à laver en hypermarché Géant contre 150 références sur Cdiscount. "Nous pensons qu'il y a quelques catégories" de produits "comme le gros électroménager sur lesquels sur une longue période il y aura un glissement au détriment des hypermarchés" prévoit le PDG.Cette stratégie s'inscrit en plus de la volonté de Casino de proposer un service de "drive". Casino, à l'instar d'autres enseignes, va proposer de passer commande sur le site Internet du supermarché et d'aller la chercher en magasin avec sa voiture.

Carrefour lance Promo Libre (2)

Je souhaiterai revenir sur le lancement de « Promo Libre » par Carrefour. En effet, le système est novateur en terme de programme de fidélisation mais aussi de gestion de la relation client.

En effet, Promo Libre permet de choisir ses promotions, et ainsi, Carrefour reprend sa liberté en terme de promotions. En effet, la plupart du temps, les distributeurs proposent aux consommateurs des mécaniques promotionnelles proposées par les industriels et ainsi, ces choix ne sont pas forcément basé sur l’intérêt du client, mais plutôt sur les opportunités offertes par les fournisseurs. Maintenant, ce système est pervers, mais permettaient de proposer des offres promotionnelles très fortes, tels le « 1 acheté = 1 gratuit », qui est impossible à réaliser sans un fournisseur. Ainsi, il va être difficile de piloter la marge.

La deuxième chose qui est fascinante, c’est que ce programme soit reprise par l’ensemble des formats de la marque Carrefour : Carrefour hypermarché, Carrefour market, Carrefour City et Carrefour Contact. En effet, chaque format a ses spécificités, ses largeurs de gammes, et être capable de faire une campagne promotionnelle cross format est très intéressant. C’est certainement un exemple des synergies que Carrefour attend de ces enseignes, et la raison pour laquelle il a décidé de changer les noms des différentes enseignes.

Maintenant, il sera intéressant de voir les prochaines offres issues de « Promo Libre », pour identifier l’utilisation qui en est faite.

How To Turn Twitter Profitable ?

The latest news from Twitter is that they are working on a business model to actually earn some money pretty soon. I believe the crisis and the questions about its economic potential have driven its CEOs to speed their revenues search.
Twitter has announced they are working on a way to advertising on Twitter search pages.

A story at the Wall Street Journal's AllThingsD says that "Ads will be tied to Twitter searches, in the same way that Google's original ads were. So a search for, say, "laptop," may generate an ad for Dell. The ads will only show up in search results, which means users who don't search for something won't see them in their regular Twitterstreams.
"The ads will use the Twitter format – 140 or fewer characters – and will be distributed via the third-party software and services that use Twitter's API. The services will have the option of displaying the ads, and Twitter will share revenue with those that do.
"Twitter will work with ad agencies and buyers to seed the program, but plans on moving to a self-serve model like Google's, down the road."
That will be a dramatic change from the present advertising model, where small text adverts appear on the top right of Twitter users' home page. It is not known how much those garner in revenue - but given the low public profile of many of the advertisers there, it's unlikely to be as much as the search deals that Twitter signed on the same day last October with Google and Microsoft's Bing.
It is not clear how soon the new service would launch, though AllThingsD suggests it could happen "in the first half of the year".

Now, what the article shows out, is that Twitter’s audience is still to low to actually secure profitability. But this is a godd step toward a healthy business model. I have always questioned most of web 2.0 business plans for two reasons:
They’ve loved to show off they are not working at all on a business model. They have settled their future on the number of people which would use their service.
They’ve considered brands and advertisers as milk cows. But the advertising market is hurt deeply by the crisis, as marketing budget is most of the time the first one to be cut. Also, they might focus on main web 2.0 platforms like Facebook and Youtube, but they won’t multiply their investments on the web.

But actually, the fact Twitter is working on those projects is a good sign for the company: they start to shape the way the service will look like in the future, in a shape that will be healthy and strong.

Chevrolet Spark: Une mauvaise illustration du Glocal

L'art d'adapter une marque à un marché internationale est difficile. Souvent, plus la marque est puissante, plus il est dur a lui faire épouser les aspérités et spécificités des cultures où elle s'installe. Ainsi, Mc Donald ou Coca Cola sont de très bons exemples car partout où ils sont installés, ils incarnent les valeurs fortes des marques US, tout en trouvant ces mêmes aspérités pour accrocher le consommateur.

Certaines sociétés internationales, ayant pour ambition d'optimiser et de rationaliser leurs budgets marketing et leur image, décident de créer une unique campagne de publicité qu'ils déclinent partout dans le monde. C'est le cas de Gilette, qui le fait très bien, notamment grâce à des sports internationales connus de tous.

Mais là, depuis quelques semaines, nous pouvons voir sur nos écrans cette publicité pour la Spark de Chevrolet. Rien n'est compréhensible. On se trouve dans une situation où est mis en dérision l'absurdité du nom des produits des kings du fast food américain. Très loin des préoccupation et du mode de vie des français. De plus, le slogan "tout commence par une spark", ne veut rien dire. En anglais, Spark est une étincelle, et la "tout commence par une étincelle", cela a plus de sens. Pour moi, cette publicité copiée collée des Etats Unis certainement pour des raisons budgétaires, et un très mauvais exemple du "glocal", une communication internationale reposant sur des adaptations aux marchés locaux.

Et vous, qu'en pensez vous?

Barnes and Noble : 10% Of Sales Coming From The Internet

Internet is becoming more and more strategic for traditional retailers. Hence, during the crisis we are experiencing, most of the sales growth is coming from online activities, as ecommerce is still growing while retails are impacted by the economical downturn.

Barnes and Noble’s Internet activities count now for 10% of the whole sales. Online sales have been boosted by the release of its electronic book “NOOk”, a Kindel-like handset. It seems that this electronic book seems to be a promising market as great companies are launching their versions.

This article simply shows out once more that Internet is a very important tool for traditional retailers which are seeking for growth, in mature and highly competed markets.

Les cafetiers à la recherche d'un nouveau modèle économique

Les cafetiers français sont depuis des années, de manière régulière, touchée par la baisse de consommation du tabac. Celle-ci est générée par la hausse du prix du tabac, mais aussi par les campagnes anti tabac qui se multiplient. Ainsi, beaucoup d'entre eux ont du mal à survivre.

Mais le réel problème est que les cafetiers doivent faire face à une remise en question complète de leur modèle économique. Ainsi, il est évidemment impossible d'attendre un inversement de tendance, qui permettrait une croissance de leurs revenus issus du tabac. Il faut donc trouver un moyen de garder ses points de vente rentable, surtout que pour la plupart d'entre eux ils ont la chance de posséder des emplacements privilégiés en centre ville.

Moi je crois beaucoup au modèle "Starbucks". Un concept fort, qui véhicule plus un style de vie, une atmosphère, que la simple consommation d'un produit, qui plus est basique. Seulement, afin de pouvoir faire de la sorte, il faut que la profession se regroupe autour de corporation, pourquoi pas un système de centrale d'achat ou de commerce associé, de type Leclerc, afin de pouvoir d'une part améliorer leurs conditions d'achat, mais aussi proposer une force marketing pour pouvoir se différencier sur un marché plus que mature.

Maintenant, les cafés ont une longue tradition encrée dans la culture française, et je pense qu'il serait facile de mettre en valeur l'aspect social de ces lieux, afin de pouvoir recommencer à générer du traffic.

Maintenant, il est sûr que les buralistes et cafetiers se doivent d'accepter ces profonds changements, au risque de disparaître définitivement.

Carrefour lance Promolibre: Ou bien le début du marketing one to one dans la grande distribution

Carrefour est source de nombreuses innovations dans le domaine de la grande distribution. Il y a plusieurs dizaines d'années, il avait lancé les produits libres, soit le premier concept de marque de distributeur. Le concept a tellement bien marché que maintenant les MDD représentent dans la plupart des familles de produit un leader de categorie. Aujourd'hui, Carrefour souhaite innové avec son programme de fidélité en lançant PromoLibre.

Il faut bien reconnaitre que dans le domaine de la grande distribution les programmes de fidélisation sont souvent bien triste et peu différenciant. En effet, n'importe qui peut en posséder une, les offres et les média de communication ne sont absoluments pas personnalisés. Il suffit simplement de s'inscrire à une Newsletter de Carrefour ou de Auchan, pour voir qu'on nous propose une pression très forte et peu d'effort de segmentation.

Maintenant, le système de Carrefour semble simple: On laisse au consommateur choisir certains produits, ceux qu'il utilise le plus, afin de lui proposer des promotions sur ceux ci.

le consommateur choisit les produits qu’il souhaite acheter en promotion en fonction de ses envies, de ses besoins ou de son budget. A partir du 23 février, l’enseigne proposera ainsi chaque semaine aux porteurs de la carte Carrefour - qui sont actuellement 17 millions - de choisir, en alimentaire, leurs trois produits préférés, qu’il s’agisse de marques nationales ou de marques distributeurs, le moins cher leur étant remboursé. S’ils en achètent six, l’enseigne leur remboursera les deux produits les moins chers. En non-alimentaire, la règle diffèrera légèrement : les clients pourront choisir librement dans le rayon "PromoLibre" le produit qu’ils souhaitent acheter et obtenir une réduction de 20%.

Maintenant, le challenge est de rentre cette communication simple pour le consommateur, et aussi de le mettre en place de manière opérationnelle. Je pense que ce système de "PromoLibre" est effectivement une avancée majeur et un système différenciant pour la carte de fidélité Carrefour.

Et vous, qu'en pensez-vous?

Next Generation Kart's to boost retailer's CRM programs

Most retailer's CRM programs are based on membership and loyalty reward programs. These little plastic cards allow retailers to geyt data from customers and hence have a more efficient commercial offer, to boost sales.

But there are three different timings when these programs trigger the purchase decision making of customers:
- Prior to have entered the outlet: thanks to advertising on brochures, mailings, internet websites, emails and more and more often cell phones.
- During grocery shopping thanks to end of the aisle display, special offer stoppers, and so on.
- After the sales process. At the cashier coupons are given based on the previous purchase to push some cross selling or upselling techniques. If someone gets a
Coffee machine, you could give them coupons for the appropriate coffee caps.

But soon, we'll have smart karts that will boost even more those programs. Auchan already proposes a self scanning method: they give you at the entrance of the store a scanner and let you scan your products along your shopping. Then you don't go through a cashier, but to a specific desk where you pay.

Thanks to these new scanner, it provides data during your shopping process. And hence instead of proposing a cross selling or an upsell when you are done with shopping, you could actually gets it during the process, in a way more efficient manner.

Now this technique must be taken into consideration with caution. Indeed, the shopping experience shouldn't be packed up with a lot of those type of interference, because that would result in an horrible threshold. But I believe this would allow retailer to be more reactive and interactive with their promotion techniques.

What do you think about it? Do you already have examples about these systems?
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Facebook As A Leading Traffic Generator

Social media has now become a main stream, and hence we can now see how it has changed the way we consume the Internet. On a business prospective, I have found this article which is pretty interesting. According to the results of a Compete.com research, Facebook.com has generated more visits on main websites like AOL or Yahoo than Google.

This shows that indeed Facebook has a huge potential in terms of generating leads on the web. The only think is that I believe Facebook hasn’t been able to unlish this fantastic potential. As I have spoken with several announcers on Facebook, they seem kind of deceived by their results. I believe a lot of people are trying to figure out how to make the best out of their social media investment. Also, I believe it is difficult to control the traffic generation on Facebook. Most of the traffic generated is done by word of mouth of users, and hence, it is pretty difficult to have a clear view of Facebook campaign’s efficiency.

Now we certainly understand why Google is so eager to make of Google Buzz a success. That would also be very interesting to see how Twitter can become an important way to generate visits on a website. I believe that these new media are changing the way we use the Internet, and hence, it will change the way we advertise on the web.

Facebook now counts for 12.4% of the traffic generation for the movie related websites, 2nd in the category, and samewise, 12.7% for the video websites.

Referral Marketing: Character and Competency More Important Than Customer Experience

This is a very interesting article I found on the blog of Evan Misner, founder of the BNI, and expert in referral marketing.

just finished a survey of more than 12,000 businesspeople from all around the world on the subject of networking. One of the questions we asked the respondents was “Which of the following is most important to you when referring business to others?” The choices were:

• Knowing a person’s character.
• Knowing a person’s level of competency.
• Using the person’s product or service myself.
• Knowing a person’s success.

Not surprisingly, “knowing a person’s character” ranked No. 1 in the survey. Interestingly, “using the product or service myself” ranked third out of the four choices! This is important to understand when building your own personal network of people referring you because it shows that people are definitely looking at more than just the quality of your products and services when they think about referring you to other people.
Often, we think that the best source of referrals must be our clients, customers or patients. Although they definitely are a good source, they are not our only source. In fact, based on this survey, personally using and experiencing another person’s product or services before referring business to that person was not as important to the respondents as other factors.
What this means to you is–you need to build your credibility with people who know you (whether they’ve used your business or not). If people trust your character and competency, they are likely to refer you regardless of whether they’ve actually used your products or services.

Now if you are considering a customer relationship management point of view, this study is very interesting. Indeed, maybe your best lead of prospects might not be your actual clients, but some people that have had a good impression after a commercial, or visiting your website. And you must take advantage of this feeling, this state of mood, to drive the buzz or so. This might be actually the reason why so many companies are interested by buzz marketing campaigns, to spread the word of mouth.

That also shows that branding, and especially the story that you tell people about your brand, is a valuable asset, that might trigger people to become your customers.

What do you think about it?

Google Changing into a Multinational Company

Google as A Trailblazer
Google has evolved a lot this past decade. Since it has started its business, revolutionizing the way information is consumed and boosting the Internet use, Google has always been a trailblazers in most the activities it set.

Even though it came into a populated market, like for instance the email account market, it changed users behaviour, by empowering emails account with extensive memory capacity, a great search engine, and an easy way to connect with other services, like instant messaging.

But now the Internet market is becoming mature, especially in the 1.0 aspect, where Google is a leader, with its search engine. Now, in order to seek for fast growth, they must go on some unknown market, and most of the time, already battle competition.

Google Expanding In New Markets
This is what happened with Google Android, where the smartphone market was already existing with major actors like Nokia, Blackberry, and that has already experienced a major change with the arrival of the Iphone.

Now I have seen that Google is launching Google buzz. The idea is to create a new Google experience, that will be empowered by instant information, usable whenever needed, especially thanks to mobile devices. The main idea is to counterattack Facebook and Twitter, which main interest is based on instant and close information.

But to be honest with you, I am not sure once more Google buzz will encounter a great success. Here are the main reasons why:
Google is entering a market far from its core know how. Google knows how to search and display information, that is for sure. But Google has never been a social platform.
Google is entering a fast growing market, yes, but it is facing companies that are already well settled on it, especially Facebook. What really matters in this market, is to get the critical mass that will allow the company to become a leader. The more people are using your social service, the more interesting it is becoming. And hence, if you are late, it is difficult to get back. And Google is late for sure.

Using traditional advertising for those kind of services has never shown any kind of success. Hence, Microsoft have tried several times to market products with TV and billboards advertising, but it doesn’t seem to work, especially to convince opinion leaders that play a key role in those kind of launches.

Google Adopting New Traditional Global Companies Processes
Actually, Google has become so huge, that it has totally changed the way it does business. Hence, it becomes to have global companies processes, even with marketing. Now Google to launch Google chrome in France used a massive billboard campaign in the metro, they start TV advertising. The problem that might come with this mid age crisis, is their ability to keep their pioneer mindset, and to keep going on with innovation, and not “fake innovation”, as mature international companies” often do.

What do you think about it? Do you really believe that Google has changed?

Could Twitter become a great VRM tool ?

I like the idea of Vendor Relationship Management. The first time I heard about it, it made so much sense that I knew it had a bright future ahead of it. Vendor relationship management aims to reverse CRM, meaning that the customer claims its need of a product, and companies need to get in contact with him.

This looks like too very traditional business to business process:
• Calls for tender: This is when a company sets requirements of its needs, and hence allow companies to develop an appropriate solution that will match these requirements.
• Reverse auctions: This is a time where the buyer sorted out a short list of potential sellers. Then, these competitions participate to a reverse auction, where in a limited time, they are going to battle to provide the best price to the customer.

The ultimate goal for customers is to get a product that suits their needs and at the best price. For the company, it is to focus its commercial and marketing effort on the “first moment of truth”, the moment where the customer has decided to purchase the product. This VRM solution is suitable for long decision making process, such as buying electronics, real estate, cars, or mobile phone plans.

Now the question is how could we set up a VRM process. What tool could you use? I believe Twitter could be a great way for customers to reach companies and exposes their needs. Indeed, more and more brands have created Twitter accounts, and dedicated some community management effort to interact with people.

Hence, a Twitter empower with great search engines capabilities could become the ultimate VRM tool, allowing customers to reach the largest number of companies able to suit its needs.

What do you think about CRM? Do you think it has a bright future ahead?

Mobile Banking

Mobile banking has a bright future ahead of it. As Internet has already revolutionized the bank market, by allowing customers to access their bank account and to make action at anytime, it has changed the way customers use their money. Now that Internet is going mobile, and that cell phones are getting smarter and smarter, empowered by Internet and applications, mobile banking is going to create a new revolution.

- The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) (www.mmaglobal.com) and its official research partner, Luth Research (www.luthresearch.com), today released highlights from the latest US Consumer Briefing, a monthly survey of U.S. adult consumers about their mobile marketing behaviors and opinions. Available exclusively to MMA members, the new survey shows that 17 percent of all adults currently use mobile banking, with interest levels suggesting that usage will grow to 22 percent within the next year.

The usage of mobile banking uses three media:

• mobile Web browser (11 percent of respondents),
• SMS (8 percent),
• Applications (5.5 percent)

I believe mobile banking could substentially grow by developing applications adapted to customers's needs. When I see what mint in the US has been able to accomplish with personnal banking and the Internet technology, I believe that the mint concept could be great on mobile devices. Hence according to the survey, half of the respondents are interested in such solutions.

Also, mobile banking might be a great way to earn marketshares for pure players, like boursorama in France, or ING, which doesn't own retails, but could be by this tool constantly in touch with customers.

My Thoughts About Dauphine's Master Prices

Lately the university of Paris Dauphine has claimed they were about to raise the prices of certain of their masters, which price range would start from 400 € to 4 000 €. This might seem cheap to most of you, especially the US audience that is used to spend tons of money to access the best university program.

Dauphine the exception

Now Dauphine is an elite school. Certain of its programs, like Finance or management, are among the best in Europe. It developed a reputation of excellence as several executives of global companies came from this school. But Dauphine is not like any business school. It is a public school, based on the French public university system. It has always had a particular status. Hence, since its creation in 60s, it had a specefic status that gave it more money, but also some privileges like selection processes other universities would not be able to use.

But Dauphine has a great challenge to face. As the globalization process speeds up, the competition is going international for universities. And owning the best professors and phds requires money and infrastructure. This is the reason why Dauphine is looking for new ways to increase its revenues, and therefore to provide the best to students.

Hence the main goal of this raise in scholarship aims to recruit professors, to boost the research effort.

I have studied in Paris Dauphine and I am proud of it. I believe Dauphine has a bright future in front of it. And actually, this raise of the cost of Paris Dauphine remains acceptable. Dauphine's master, if they cost 4000 € they are still among the most affordable ones, and it might even help those masters to increase its values by improving classes and infrastructure.

And you, what do you think about it?

Brand equity and brand story

I am currently readin the fascinating Christian Salmon's book named Storytelling. He explains the art of storytelling and how important it is in nowadays societies. Hence, storytelling is the art of creating a story around a topic, in order to help making it better, and therefore to sell it.

What is interesting, is that the author considers it is no longer enough to own a great brand equity, built on powerful advertising campaigns and great marketing budgets. What really matter, even more than the brand by itself, is the story associated with.

This is the reason why for example Apple is not the most proefficient company in term of TV advertising. It just has created a myth, a story about Apple and Apple's users, that makes it way different than Microsoft. As Apple has since the beginning inforced its image with this story, of excellence, of innovation, and of a niche market, they have been able to take a great advantage upon Microsoft.

Therefore, while managing a brand, you can no longer rely on a great baseline, nor on a powerful logo to expose the brand, you need to build and tell a comprehensive story that vehicles dream and how great your brand is.

I have just started the book, but I will probably gives you insight along the way, as the topic fascinates me.

Carrefour Targeting India

The Indian market is a fascinating one, especially for retailers. The numerous population added to the fast economic dynamism makes it a great target for fast growth. Hence, group Carrefour, the second largest retailer in the world, is aiming the Indian market. Carrefour already is one of the leader of the Brazilian, Chinese market, and after having failed in Russia, a country where Auchan is already well settled, CEO Lars Olofsson declared during the Davos world forum his will to pursue the Indian market.

I believe this will be very interesting, but risky at the same time, as the Indian government is very conservative, and therefore it will be difficult to get in the market.

Sébastien Loeb et la publicité: surmédiatisation

Sébastien Loeb est l'un des plus grands sportifs français sans aucun doute. Il a été multiple fois champion du monde de sa discipline, les courses automobiles de rallies. Maintenant qu'il a acquis ce niveau d'excellence dans son sport, il est normal qu'il essaie de monétiser ses qualités de gagnant via des contrats publicitaires et de sponsoring.

Maintenant, je ne suis pas sûr que la façon dont il gère cette nouvelle notoriété, que j'estime fragile auprès du grand public soit la meilleure. Effectivement, depuis quelques semaines, de nombreux spots publicitaires mettant en scène la star sont apparu sur nos écrans télévisés. Notamment, Citroën (ce qui me parait normal, puisqu'il court avec ce constructeur), Allianz et Mennen.

Mais pour moi, le fait qu'il y est autant de publicité avec le même acteur nuit à la fois à Sébastien Loeb, qui se trouve sur exposé médiatiquement, alors qu'il n'a pas encore eu l'occasion de réellement établir son image auprès du grand public, mais aussi aux marques, qui à travers le personnage et les valeurs incarnés par Loeb (la victoire, l'excellence automobile, la virilité) se trouve en conflit avec des marques à intérêts divergents. Ce qui est rare a de la valeur, et là, Sébastien Loeb n'est pas rare.

De même, Sébastien Loeb ne parle dans aucune des trois publicités. Comme si Sébastien Loeb n'était pas capable de communiqué, sur ces valeurs que les publicités souhaitent utilisés. Il se trouve, notamment pour Allianz et Citroën, dans une position de poupée sans âme.

Je pense qu'avant de se lancer ainsi dans le grand bain médiatique, il aurait du se concentrer sur sa capacité à vendre Citroën, son constructeur et son vrai coeur d'expertise, et développer son côté "bankable", avant de répondre à diverses solicitations, peut être plus difficile à porter.

Et vous, que pensez vous de ces spots?

Time To Market Mobile Advertising

The mobile revolution is on the way. It has been a while experts have pictured a bright future for mobile advertising, but different aspects made it difficult to rocket:

• Mobile formats are very different, upon the operating system the device use (Blackberry, Windows Pocket, Symbian, Android, among others)
• The size and type of the screen
• The way to see the information (application, website, mobile site, and so on).
• The navigation system: keyboard, ball like Blackberry, tactile technology...
• The numerous number of actors willing to benefit from the new market, between agencies, advertisers, mobile network companies and so on.

But this year, it seems it will be good. The New York Times believes that the growth of Apple and Google, with its power to create applications and innovation in the market, will give a boost to a minor industry.

Now one of the reason it remains difficult to advertise on cell phones is the disruption risk. Cell phones are a very personnal device, and each advertising program could reach a threshold fast.

Also, I believe that the application ideas, enhancing customer experience and customer relationship management (CRM) potential is a great way to use it. Now, of course, editorial content like online news site and blogs could be leverage, by providing advertising at a specific format.

We can expect a lot of innovation within next months on this market. And I really believe it will be a great year for mobile advertising.

The Ipad Presentation In Less Than 180 seconds

I found this video on the web about Steve Jobs'presentation of the Ipad. Of course, as it is introduced in the video, it is supposed to be funny. It selected only the highlights when Steve Jobs says his product is gorgious. But it is also a great example on how to use positive vocabular to tune up a presentation.

Steve Jobs has always loved to qualify his products of amazing, spectacular and so on. And by using this vocab, and because he repeats it, people tends to agree, and he creates a magical effect. He is able to boost the audience by that, and actually, I believe this is a great example that great presentator use positive words to drive enthusiasm.

Walmart Changes Its Organization To Focus on Ecommerce

Walmart has recently decided to focus its strategy on the Internet. While Carrefour’s CEO Lars Oloffson declared he is seeking for a partnership with an ecommerce leader to play a leader role in this market, Walmart is sure of its strength while speaking of online business. They have reset their organisation to focus on the ecommerce strategy.

Indeed, as the Financial Times article says, Walmart has a clear advantage upon its main competitor Amazon, as it owns a large number of retails settled all around the US.

One of the key figure of this article is actually that currently around 40 per cent of its US business is delivered to stores for pick up under its “site to store” service, which it sees as also augmenting in the future the development of smaller format stores.

The electronic goods market is clearly supported by the growth of online commerce, and therefore, there is no surprise traditional retailers must adapt their bid. Moreover, the multichannel trend is becoming more and more a challenge for both brick and mortar and pure players. Each of them need both a strong online presence and a real retail. This is also the reason why Carrefour have faith in a partnership with a pure player, as Carrefour could become a great asset for a e-retailer, to propose in store deliveries.

It is therefore determined to create a powerful ecommerce platform which would be adapted to the different local markets.

Social Media To Manage Customer Complains

Social Media gives a great powers to users, allowing them to broadcast any kind of problems they experienced with a brand. Before the arrival of social media, it was difficult for customers to be listened by companies as they had to form customer associations to have a chance to be read by a company and taken into considerations. Now with social media, any individual has the chance to make noises.

Therefore, you may expect an increase into customer complains via this new medium. There are two main ways to react about it:
You don’t want to interact with it. This is what most companies would do. As they are afraid of what they don’t know, meaning having a clear interaction with customers, they would rather ignore it to focus on the same old mass media to hide the growing word of mouth on line.
You could decide to monitor this feedback, and try to analyze it for better use. You should take this new trend as an opportunity to improve your products, your customer relationship management. Facing customer complains is the best way to avoid major problems that could cause you much problems.

I like the concept of enterprise feedback management, solutions that aims to get feedback from people whenever they get in touch with the brand, either by phone, in store or on the web. These comprehensive solutions are very interesting, and they should also focus on social media, because as a matter of fact it might be the best way to interact with customers.

Twitter To Order: A New Way To Make Business With Twitter

Pizza restaurants like Pizza Hut have recently launched their online ordering service. The idea allows restaurants to be more productive, as they don’t need someone on the phone to get and type in the system the orders. It is directly set into the production line.

But I was wondering if it was possible to get such a system with Twitter. Indeed, instant messaging is becoming more and more popular, and there is no questions that Twitter is one of the leading service. Twitter will also enables people to order on mobile devices (Twitter is used 30% of the time on mobile handheld).

I believe we could send a Tweet like @pizzahut with the name of the product, and then it could be produced. It could also be delivered thanks to the GPS location of the person. Either the IP if speaking about a laptop or a desktop, or the GPS chip if on a cell phone.

Now the challenge would be to set a payment system that would secure the transaction while tweeting. This is a great challenge because Twitter doesn’t have any expertise in this field. But it might actually a great source of revenue, to get commissions out of financial flows over Twitter.

Actually it reminds me of the service of Blippy, that proposes to link your credit card to a twitter like system where you would send a tweet whenever you purchase something. I also know people that have been working for virtualized moneys, which could also be a solution.

Anyways, I think that ordering via Twitter could represent a great opportunity for:
Customers: It would be a fast and easy way to order things from the everyday life
Twitter: It would be a new monetization opportunity for the service
Companies: It would probably creates new possibilities to cut production costs, and maybe trigger more sales by easing the ordering process.

What do you think about it? Do you think it is possible to implement such a service?

Social Media engagement to replace customer loyalty cards.

Social media is a customer relationship management medium. It is in its DNA. Allowing people to speak about brands, and interact with others gives to CRM program a brand new way to think. Now some people believe that social media engagement could replace customer loyalty cards.

Customer loyalty cards are indeed not used as they should, or at least companies are fighting to leverage the full potential. A loyalty reward program implies to create a service dedicated to data mining, to manage the information systems dedicated to it, and also people to create the appropriate message to the appropriate customer. And it is not as easy as it seems. Especially, mastering a loyalty reward programs requires a learn through experience process that could become longer than expected.

Now loyalty cards have been developed a while ago. About 20 years, and it might be the time to think about some new ways. I was reading not so long ago that companies like Directgroup and Prylos are thinking about using the mobile phone to replace the plastic gear. I believe they are right about that.
There are also a great potential in the digital ID concept: You could use your Facebook profile to use as your loyalty reward management system.

The benefit of the fan and follower systemtic is quite obvious…- You become a fan and/or follower when a brand becomes of interest for YOU as a customer- You become a fan and/or follower of your favorite brand when YOU are in a purchase process- You can check status updates on sales, discounts and promotions when YOU need them (not when the company wants to sell more products)

But in the end, it is very different to use a social media to interact with customers and drive sales. Customer loyalty reward program provides a great way for companies to analyse data.

A relationship between a customer and a brand must go both ways. While the customer gets discounts, the company gets data. And that is the key. Getting data from social software about customers behaviour is very difficult. To link a Facebook fan and its purchase in a store is nearly impossible.

I don’t think we can mix both ideas.