The Values Of Leadership

Leadership topics interest me very much. I found this great article about values of leadership I wanted to share with you. As a department manager for Auchan, I received some classes about management, and acquired some techniques in leadership. I totally agree with the following ones I found:

1. Understand your values

It’s tough to live a life of consciously-chosen values because there is relentless, seductive pressure to alter your beliefs.

Anybody who has a role for you — as consumer, constituent or manager — stands to profit from you not having a sure sense of self. After all, when you’re not on your own agenda, you’re prey to the agenda of others. It takes just a little more work to list your personal values, why they are important to you, and which ones really matter the most but it’s important to do so.

2. Get support from your people

If your employees know what your values are and care about them, then you can live them. If they don’t, you won’t. Translate your values — the meaning of family, integrity, adventure, creativity, spirituality, and health or whatever your values are — into the promise of better working conditions for your employees. If they want those conditions, they’ll protect your values to help make them happen.

3. Take responsibility

Leadership doesn’t come with a job title — and you can’t order it on the Internet and can’t just wait for it to happen to you. Leadership happens when you understand your values and understand how to enroll others in supporting them. It’s your responsibility to assume an active role in forming your values and then evangelize them to your employees.

The irreducible essence of leadership is living your deepest personal values every day at work and at home without compromise. Leaders use those values to make life better for their employees. This is why people become leaders and why people follow them.

Air France Launches Its Low Cost Subdivision For Local Flights

Air France is experiencing difficulties to keep a leading position in the local flight market in France. Due to its high pricing policy, low cost companies have thrive on this business segment which was hence neglegted by Air France, as it was not representing a profitable activity for them.

Nevertheless, the overal airlines competition has become tougher, and with high gas prices, it is difficult to remain profitable and earn money in the industry. As we have seen, United and Continental have merged this month. And this trend has gone on for quite a while.

Hence, Air France decided to launch its low cost company, dedicated to local travels.

Now some experts are questioning this decision, doubting about how Air France could deal with such a heavy administration to cut cost and hence have a profitable low cost business.

Nevertheless, launching such a service can’t hurt: Local travels are a non profitable business for Air France, and switching for low cost could just help them to improve their market shares and to adapt to the competition landscape.

If I were Air France, I’ll try to monitor what happen with other brands which decided to launch a low cost branch. I have always found interesting to go further than your basic market to find ideas in other industries which you could adapt to your own.

Thus, some great examples of premium brands that launched their low cost subdivision :

• Carrefour owns DIA stores, and they have been able to leverage the purchasing power of the group to get great pricing.


• Esso which launched Esso Express.


• Renault created Dacia


• Levi’s created Levi Strauss Signature for hypermarket distribution channel.


• Dannon with its pack of 6 yogourhts for 1 € (which actually was a failure).


• Accor hotels with Formule 1 (which is the leader on the low cost chain segment)

It is difficult for large companies like Air France to get into the low cost business. Most of the time low cost companies have started as start ups, which gave them the ability to innovate. Bigger firms tend to be more prudent than younger ones. As strange as it might seem, large corporation, which owns great innovation budget and large R&D departments are less likely to leverage it into actual new concepts.

Also, as a company developed a strong business model, acquired a certain size, and have to meet expectations of shareholders, it is difficult for it to adapt to brutal shift in market trends. I have heard on the radio this very great phrase: “It is not stagecoach firms that invented the car”. But I believe that low cost has changed so much the airlines market that it is mandatory for Air France to find a viable way to take advantage out of it.

It is funny because this post comes after having discussed about how Esso went low cost. As I have said for Esso, as you have developped a wide range of service and customer relationship management tool, you may know which ones you may take away, and which ones are the most important.

And you, what do you think about it?

Carrefour Planet : My Thoughts

Carrefour Planet is the new store concept created by Carrefour, the second largest retailer in the world. For quite a while now the hypermarket format is going in limbo. France has always been the land of the "everything under the same roof" concept, which was actually invented by Carrefour. As a matter of fact, even Sam Walton, founder of Wal Mart acknowledged he had the idea of Wal Mart while visiting some Carrefour stores in Brazil.

Hypermarkets have thrived on the automobile boom. "No Parking = No business" was the motto. But with the high cost of gas right now, and with dramatic consumption behavior changes in France, the hypermarket marketshares are plummeting.
Hence Carrefour Planet seems to be the answer designed by Carrefour. Here are some of the new ideas that are in it:

• Some brand booth has been designed: In order to get some specific know how in certain areas, Carrefour has set partnership with leaders like Virgin for cultural products, Apple to set an Apple booth, or L’Oreal to design its cosmetic department.
• New services are proposed to customers: A hair dresser for 10€ for example.

What is for sure is that Carrefour has made a remarkable communication strategy around it. The day of the stores opening the French magazine "Que Choisir" released an article on how French customers were unsatisfied with hypermarkets. Carrefour made a remarkable job leveraging this article that made the headlines of French newspapers to provide evidences on how Carrefour Planet will solve those issues.

I can't wait to see this concept.

Imposing Your Brand Language

Very interesting article by BBC, about how Starbucks has imposed its own terminology to its products. It is of course a great marketing asset, because when your customers are accustomed to your products name, then it becomes part of their daily life.

There are a lot of companies that have been able to create their own language, and hence, control the market. A great example is the Ipod. The Ipod became the reference for mp3 players, and hence, everyone was referring to the name of Apple's product to speak about mp3s. Or of course the Game Boy is another good example.

"It is every company's dream to get their language out there and being used - it's linguistic product placement. And so the Manhattan scene probably was a reaction, albeit an extreme one, to the jargon imposed on us."

Of course, the purpose of the using language in this way is to burrow into the consumer's subconsciousness with one's own concepts and values.
Brand consultant Jonathan Gabay says carefully-chosen language can make a difference to consumers, but only if it is used subtly.

"The idea is that it's about more than just buying a cup of coffee - you're part of the club, using this supposedly sophisticated language, doing something a bit different," he says.
"The problem is when it's too heavy-handed and and the staff are effectively saying, 'Computer says no.' Marketing is ultimately about communication and some of these companies need to put down the guide books and remember that."

Nonetheless, there is undoubtedly method in Starbucks' approach.
Tony Thorne, King's College London's former language centre head, now a language and innovation consultant and the author of several slang dictionaries, says companies like Starbucks have appropriated the kitchen slang of 1920s New York diners to convey their message of authenticity and good taste.

However, he believes the impact of such marketing techniques is insidious.
"Some of this stuff is ludicrous in its complexity," he says. "They're not trying to turn us into food snobs - it's simply about imposing their brand values.
"It's intended to bamboozle and intimidate. I see it as a form of corporate bullying."
For their part, Starbucks have insisted that there "are no rules and customers have always been able to ask for drinks any way they want".

La relation client sur mobile

J’apprécie beaucoup le travail de GS1 pour promouvoir l’utilisation des mobiles dans le cadre de la relation client. En effet, le potentiel de nos smartphones semblent sans limite en terme de CRM. Voici une vidéo réalisée par leurs soins montrant les possibilités d’usage grâce à leur technologie de scanning.

Proxi-Produit, créez une nouvelle proximité entre la marque et le consommateur from Marc Benhaim on Vimeo.

Cela reste encore très abstrait, car, travaillant dans l’alimentaire, je ne suis pas sûr que tous les clients vérifient sur leur portable ces informations avant d’acheter leurs produits. Néanmoins, je vois la possibilité de proposer du contenu à valeur ajoutée sur les produits (recettes, conseils d’utilisation, commentaires d’utilisateurs,

Companies Are Still Struggling With Their Social Media Strategy

The hype is still very high around social media for companies. It seems obvious that social media will get a large market share of media consumption within the next decade. Nevertheless, it is very difficult for brands to apprehend this new medium, as it is very different from all the other ones. It is obviously not (or at least not yet) a mass media. It is also very far from other CRM tools. Therefore, despite some tries, a lot of companies seem to struggle with their online strategy.

I found out on the web this presentation.

Why Social Media Projects Fail?! – A European Perspective

View more presentations from BSI.

What shall we think about it? I believe that it shows that social media remains a new medium. And therefore a lot of people are still figuring out how to do. I can't blame managers which don't really know how to handle those media, and especially what to expect.

I believe that there are a lot of progress that happened. New statistics came in, new marketing success came up, and I believe that we are starting to have a good outlook of what the future will be for social media.

Promising Start For Promoted Tweets

It is never easy to create a new advertising medium. Some might seem more obvious than other ones, especially for traditional media. Now, for social network, the task is not so easy.

Of course, on Facebook you could have some advertising like display ads, or keywords ads. But it would not make the best out of the media. Indeed, you are not going to get the wonderful potential of conversation enabled by those social media.

Twitter has been looking for quite a long time a way to monetize its service. And to be honest with you, I have been sceptic about their strategy. First, their constant technical failure makes the service unstable. But also, I was questioning the fact they have never thought for the longest time how to become profitable.

Nevertheless, couple of months ago, Twitter have set up their advertising program, named “promoted tweets”. The idea is quite original: placing promoted tweets into users’ search results, which would be related to their points of interest. The idea is that the best the advertising it, the most retweeted it will be. Hence, you have the resonance effect, when people are retweeting your ads, and therefore, you may have a strong buzz out of it.

A recent study has been conducted to analyze the first results of such campaigns. And it seems quite promising:
Promoted Tweets are on average retweeted 50% more time than a regular Tweet. Some specific cases went even up 200 to 300%.
One of the main interest is that it gives to the brand clear data about campaign results. Indeed, you may know how many times your promoted tweet showed up, how many people clicked on it, and how many times it has been retweeted. It is therefore easy to have a clear view of campaigns efficiency.

Now everbody are waiting for the day when Twitter will insert some promoted tweets into users’ threads. It might be disruptive, but I believe it will be necessary to secure Twitter’s profitability.

From Premium To Discount : Esso France Case Study

A lot of brands aspire some day to become a premium brand. Owning a premium brand offer a high esteem, but very few are the companies which are aiming to go the opposite way.

I had a very interesting talk with a guy of an Esso gas station. Indeed, I was wondering if I could access to the customer loyalty reward program, which they used to have for years. It was some kind of virtual money, coupons with “points” on it, which was providing you access to some gifts.

The guy told me the abandoned the concept while ago, and that actually they were turning their whole park of gas station into automatic ones.

I know the Esso Express concept for quite a while. The idea is to get rid of the store which was held by employees, to propose some automatic vendors machines. Of course, the goal is obvious: cutting down salary expenses.

The gas station market has become very competitive over the past few years. French leading company Total has become a tycoon, and there is not a lot of room for competition. Actually, the only competition that emerged was retailers, which started first to set some gas stations on the parking of their stores, and then secondly, to buy other gas stations on highways.

This is actually funny, because discounters like Carrefour or Leclerc now proposes the best service to employees, as they propose a vast choice of grocery products in their gas stations.

Now there is something easy for a premium brand to become low cost: you have developed an extensive range of service, so you are at the better spot to know which ones are not vital.

In terms of customer relationship management, going low cost might be difficult. Indeed, what makes you different from your competition? Most of the time it is the customer relationship you have with your customers. Great service ultimately leads to loyalty. And by taking some of this service away might hurt your ability to keep your customers.

Now sometimes, excellence in customer relationship management is not based on how many service you could provide, but how great you may be in delivering. This is the reason why in a recent study French hard discount retailers had greater satisfaction grades than hypermarket, which are constantly developing new service to improve customer experience.

Of course, let’s face it, this strategy of Esso has been driven by their inability to compete with Total, which became much bigger those past years. Therefore, I don’t think it is possible to target market shares gain with this technique.

So has this strategy emerged due to the impossibility to become leader? Or has it been planned to increase profit and merging on a mature market? This is a very good question, but unfortunately, I can’t respond to it. But it is interesting to see what strategical turn Esso decided to make.

Seeking For Your Scarcest Resource

I was reading this very interesting article, which is an interview of Fred Brooks, writer of The Mythical One Man-Month. Fred Brooks has a long experience in engineering. He is also famous because of his Brooks' theory.

ou can’t accelerate a nine-month pregnancy by hiring nine pregnant women for a month. Likewise, says University of North Carolina computer scientistFred Brooks, you can’t always speed up an overdue software project by adding more programmers; beyond a certain point, doing so increases delays.

Actually, thanks to his philosophy, modern productivity has been designed. Thanks to computers, a person which knows properly how to manage its resources is able to be more efficient than any other groups of people.

But as I was reading through this article, another very interesting point stood out. The concept of scarcest resource:he critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scarce; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you’re optimizing.

This is very interesting, because the scarcest resource may actually not be money in most of situation. And by rethinking what is your scarcest resource, you may find new ways to envision problems or a project. I believe actually that as a common wisdom, you should consider that money is by definition not your scarcest resource. By thinking so, you will be forced to scan through all your different resources, and range than by how important they are. Therefore you might find new approaches to your supposely lack of money.

Another very interesting thought: You can learn more from failure than success. In failure you’re forced to find out what part did not work. But in success you can believe everything you did was great, when in fact some parts may not have worked at all. Failure forces you to face reality.

I like this point because this is very true: When you succeed, you don't really take the time to analyze why you have succeeded in order to reproduce the same path. I think this is worth thinking about this point.

Why Would People Follow Your Brand On Twitter?

Twitter usage is still growing at an incredibly fast pace. Since it started a lot of brands have been willing to take advantage of this new medium in order to interact with their customers. Actually, Twitter is a great customer relationship management tool. By different ways, you may use Twitter to interact with customers. It could be by creating a new salesforce, like Dell did. It could be for customer service, or to as a direct marketing tool.

Of course, if your customers are on Twitter, following you, it would be great! Now the question is why would your customers follow you on Twitter? Wouldn't it be interesting to know the reasons which will convince people to follow your brand.

A recent studies shown 5 min reasons why people would follow your brand on Twitter:

1. To get updates on future products

38% of respondents said that they use Twitter to get updates on future products or new product developments.

From a brand’s perspective, this shows that Twitter is a useful PR tool for creating buzz around a new product launch. It would also work well for innovative companies who continuously update their offering or for FMCG businesses where new products are frequently launched.

2. To engage with the company or brand

32% of respondents said they wanted to stay informed about the activities of a company or brand, with a further 20% stating they become followers to interact with, share ideas and provide feedback about services or products.

From a brand’s point of view, this proves the value of Twitter as both a customer engagement and customer feedback tool. Customer relationship management has evolved, and customers expect more interaction that traditional media provide them. Customers are willing companies to offer more transparency, and social media users don't understand why they could not speak to a brand they buy like anyone else.

It requires a real community management effort to be able to engage fully with customers.

3. To save money

Saving money seems to be another key motivator for people to follow brands on Twitter. 31% of respondents said that they follow a company to receive discounts and promotions. A similar percentage of people also hoped to get “insider” information about upcoming sales, discount events and free samples.

This means that businesses could use Twitter to feed out discount codes and coupons in order to encourage brand loyalty and drive sales.

A lot of companies are already using Twitter like this. Now it would be interesting to see the type of return on investment they may get. As the media is pretty low to use, I believe it could be pretty promising.

4. For entertainment

For 26% of the people surveyed, following brands on Twitter was simply for entertainment and no other reason.

With this in mind, perhaps brands and businesses need to evaluate the way they engage people through Twitter and include more fun, interactive content, like videos and pictures, rather than just a news and updates, in their Twitter stream.

5. To display loyalty

23% of people surveyed said they follow brands or companies to show support. In other words, it is to show their loyalty to others. Now, this bullet is very interesting. It means that being a loyal customers of your company has a social value which your customer is willing to show off online. I believe this is a great evidence of a strong CRM program.

A lot of examples exist on either categories. Now, if you are planning on setting such a Twitter strategy to add in your CRM, you must take into consideration these stats. They could help you decide on which of those ideas you may develop your core Twitter activities.

Can Internet Replace TV Retail Advertising?

The Internet audience is getting larger and larger. Internet usage is growing at a fast pace. Also, the spike in mobile Internet usage will for sure mark heavily this statement. On the other side, TV consumption is getting lower and lower. TV companies are hurt by the Internet competition. The consumption of videos on the Internet, either streaming shows, Youtube-like videos and video on demand, has been way more appealing than a large TV channel choice, which actually becomes difficult to scan through.

Tony Ceresoli owns a very interesting blog about retailing and TV advertising. Retailers have been big fan of TV advertising. As they are reaching a large number of customers, this mass media was of good use. Actually, this is very funny to compare retailer's usage of TV advertising in the United States versus in France. Indeed, in France, until 2003, French government forbid retailers to advertise on TV, in a silly attempt to protect local businesses. Now they struggle into getting the best of this medium.

Tony wrote a great article about Gap's new marketing strategy. On a recent blog post, Tony commented on the new advetising campaign named "Born To Fit". For once, this campaign has dedicated its whole budget to Internet, according a large amount to new social media.

Julie Channing, senior account director with The Gap’s digital agency explains the strategy this way, “We were really looking to reach out to fashionistas and influence audiences to start a conversation about how Gap has built this line of denim from the ground up.”

Really? So, consumers are going to visit a Facebook page and soon after begin conversing with friends and family about the development of a new brand of blue jeans?

What should we think about this attempt? Is it possible for a large company like Gap or other retailers to get rid of their TV budgets, to set it online. Of course, you need to check your core target, and see if actually that makes sense. For young active people, the Internet might actually be a better bet than TV. But can you really avoid going on TV if you need to reach the mass market?

Maybe someday it will be possible. When the Internet will be stronger, Internet companies will be able to propose to reach such large audience as the TV can right now. But so far, it remains unknown what kind of results those kind of campaigns might generate.

And you, what do you think about it?

L'histoire des vidéos du succés

Est-ce que vous connaissez les vidéos du succés? Ce sont ces vidéos-conseils qui cartonnent sur Internet. Le concept est simple: Henri Kaufman aka HK et Pierre-Philippe Cormeraie, aka PPC donne 7 conseils en 7 minutes sur un sujet définit. Voici une vidéo qui explique le succés et le concept.

Les highlights?

• Une vidéo en home page de Youtube
• Une mini interview dans un sujet du journal de France 2
• Une vidéo à plus de 1 millions de clicks.

Twitter Advertising And Marketing One To One

Twitter have made couple of moves those past few days to speed up their “promoted tweets” advertising program. The idea is to implement advertising in Twitter users feeds. Of course, Twitter ambitions to have advertising which will matter to users. Hence, they have committed themselves to stop the promoted tweet if it did not get enough retweets in a specific amount of time.

Now the real challenge of Internet companies which based their business model on advertising is to propose customized ads to the brand. This is what we can call market one to one in customer relationship management term. You will segment your data base into different groups which would have the same behaviour, characteristics or hobbies, and then you will be able to propose them ads that will match their needs.

Google has thrived on its abilities to connect search requests with commercial offers. Facebook is starting to do the same, and seems to move fast into getting the best of the humongous amount of users data they own.

Now the third one is Twitter. I am still wondering about Twitter’s potential in terms of advertising. Because they have never really considered a business model while their user growth era, they don’t seem to know where to go in terms of how to get advertisement into it.

Therefore, I believe Twitter remains pretty far to monetizing its great audience. Developping a tool which will analyze through tweets and determine specific groups of people is hard to do. It seems easier on Facebook, where people have let their data about location, likes, hobbies, age and so on. Basically, while you register in Twitter, you leave no data about yourself at all. And this is the reason why it seems difficult to actually get accurate data.

Of course, Google is able to do so and they don’t ask you for any data. But Google has mastered the search market, and thanks to it, it was easy afterwards to get commercial on it.

It will be interesting to see what technical solutions will be developed and how efficient/attractive it will be for brands.

Why Your Brand Should Care About Social Media Users

It is a common wisdom to say that bloggers, Twitters or other social media users could have a great impact on a brand. As they master a fast growing medium, which is actually difficult to handle for brands that don’t have any experience, they could have a great impact on your customers thanks to word of mouth.

A recent study of Exact Target shows out that Twitter users, bloggers or regular comment reviews writers are 3 times more likely to impact brand’s online reputation.

"What happens on Twitter doesn't stay on Twitter. While the number of active Twitter users is less than Facebook or email, the concentration of highly engaged and influential content creators is unrivaled-it's become the gathering place for content creators whose influence spills over into every other corner of the Internet."Twitter users are the most influential online consumers - 72 percent publish blog posts at least monthly, 70 percent comment on blogs, 61 percent write at least one product review monthly and 61 percent comment on news sites.

According to these data we can see clearly that the “resonance concept” is true: Twitter users are more likely to spread the word of mouth at a high pace. All the different activities linked to twittering allow them to make a lot of noise on the web.

What does it mean for a company? It mainly means you must take care of your community. Community management is a key factor of success in order to spread positive vibes on these social media. You should not neglet this aspect, because if you don't take advantage out of your community by taking care of it, it will eventually cause you trouble if a crisis happen.

Also it is very important to take into consideration these data for customer relationship management purposes. Indeed, CRM is set to take care of the most important customers. Those customers might be important in terms of purchase power, but also due to their ability to spread good feedback about your products. You should find a way to evaluate the potential of these people, to act properly. Also, it would be a good idea to cross this information with your CRM data base, to see if some of your A+ customers are twitter users. It might help you go viral easilly in case you decide to plan such a campaign.

Micropayment As A Business Model To Monetize Content Generation

Have you heard about Flattr? I have recently read an article about it and I found the idea very interesting. Indeed, I am still skeptikals sometimes on the way you may have a profitable activity out of generating content on the web. A lot of newspapers are seeing their revenues falling because of the Internet: Not only they have fewer readers which pays the actual newspaper, but the revenues they generate from their website is way too few.

Another example would probably this blog, as any other blog. I spend a lot of time looking for information, ideas, which I could share here. And writting blog posts often during the week is time consuming. Do I get any money out of it? No. Actually, it is not meant to be. I write this blog because it allows me to share my ideas and opinions with other. I have met a lot of very interesting people thanks to it, and I still do. But if you really think about it, the articles I write could easilly be worth money if I was working for a newspaper/magazine.

Now, the professional news industry need to find a way to monetize its content. If not, information might get actually of bad quality. This is the same thing for all kind of art wich is present on the web: music online sharing has resulted into a decrease of music labels revenues, whereas we have never consumed more music! I have already discussed on this blog about Ruppert Murdoch which is willing to find a way to monetize its websites.

How does it work?
The user decides an amount of money he is willing to pay each month online for contributions he would have liked. Then, contributors can get a "Flattr" button to put on their sites. Each time the user click on it, it will give a part of its money. The total amount he was willing to pay on a month will be divided by the number of times it clicked on a button, and hence will split the amount given.

My thoughts
It reminds me a little bit the system Radiohead set for their new album: It was free to download, and people could make a donation if they liked it. The concept seems great, but would it be fair? Will people actually be able to make a reasonable amount of money thanks to it? I believe it could be interesting to see how it helps bloggers or other people to go on with their activities, and also if it will make them improve the quality of their posts.

What I like about the idea, it is that the user agrees to dedicate a part of its revenues to share with people it reads. That means that at some points it considers the information it consumes has a real value, as good as the one it reads in a newspaper.

How much revenues could you get?
Thanks to the system it seems difficult to get real revenues out of it. For example, let's say you aim to get 1300 € per months thanks to it, which is the minimum wage in France. If you start with the assumption you get 2€ per users (which is the minimum amount you may get per months on Flattr, you'll need at least 1000 real fans to get a minimum revenues.

I wish this service a great success, because it will probably be a first step to a new way to monetize information. And you, what do you think about it?

Disneyland Annual Passport Offer: a great CRM case study

Ok, i decided to share with you some of my thoughts about Disneyland Annual Passport Offer as I am queuing right now to obtain one. Couple of weeks ago, I received in my mailbox a letter offering me an annual disneyland passport offer. The passport provides the access to the park for 300 days a year (exluding some blackout days like week ends during summertime).

The facial value of the passport is 99$, which could be even more if you actually come several times in the park. The entrance tickets cost. About 40€, so if you come every months it would be about 400 €.

So why would they offer me that? Well, I am leaving in the parisian suburbs so geographically I may potentially head to the park several times in the year.

Hence, as I am not a regular customer (I barely go once to the park a year), by providing me a free access to the park, they raise the chance I might come with another person that would pay its tickets, but mainly making myself purechase things and use services in the park. Therefore I might help the profitability of those.

In terms of customer relationship management, this is smart, by making such an offer, you have an opportunity to enlarge your database with new customers, and hence trigger new potential incomes.

Providing few tickets to former sleeping clients can't hurt especially compared to the large amount of traffic they generate on a daily basis.

I believe this is a great example of a new lead generation strategy, which fits perfectly in a global CRM program.
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Twitter's Growth Supported By Europe, Latin America and Asia

Found thanks to @skyboub a great financial expert of the valley, Twitter's traffic has more than doubled last year. This is not that surprising to see one of the hypest social media having such a fast growth pace, but what is very interesting as @skyboub said, is that Twitter has Twitter, with almost as many single users coming from Europe (100% growth) vs USA (20%).

Hence, if we analyse this chart, we can see that the Northen American market is near to be mature. With a worlwide growth of 109% compared to 22% in the United States, we can see that the US and Canada is already pretty big users of the service. 25 million users for about 310 million Canadian/US Citizens, we may say that 8% of the population of North America are Twitter users (unique users that connected at least once in the month of June 2010).

Hence, Twitter's worldwide growth is supported by Europe, but also other emerging continents like Latin America or Asia. But I'd really like to know how did Twitter has managed to cross borders and hence, to get such a large impact on other continents. Did they advertize? Did they have PR?

Indonesia had the highest penetration of Twitter usage, comScore’s data showed, with more than 20 percent of Internet users in that country visiting the website in June, followed by Brazil and Venezuela with 20 percent and 19 percent respectively. Venezuela’s adoption of the service could have been driven in part by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s decision to join Twitter in late April, comScore said.

Now Twitter is big, and as I have said already, they must rush now to get a business modell in order to monetize their large audience.

The Future Of CRM

I am currently working on a PowerPoint presentation about the future of CRM. Customer relationship management has been around for a while now and the whole environment has changed:

• The balance of power between companies and customers have dramatically changed. Now customers are more aware of its power, they are able to create communities and hence be listened by companies.
• Technologies have evolved, and new media are a land of opportunities for one to one marketing.
• The landscape has also changed a lot. From a niche of companies using top of the line customer relationship management program, most of competitors now have their own CRM strategy, which leads to an overload of programs and a high number of potential benefits in front of the customer.
• Multichannel retailing is moving fast, and most of retailers have both Internet and real stores. Some of them have also mobile commerce plateform. Therefore it is difficult to get a hold of the different point of contacts with the clientele.

This presentation will aim to make a summary of how CRM has been thought, and how it has evolved. It will also shows out the main trend and example of what new customer relationship management strategy will look like in a near future.

If you have any ideas, please feel free to share, I'd be happy to show you out my work while it will be done.

The Unloyalty Reward Card

Loyalty reward programs are very popular. Fortune 500 companies to the small coffee shop around the corner own ones, with different level of technology and benefits. Now what about creating a unloyalty reward program? What would it be? Well, let's imaging that instead of rewarding customers that purchase often in your stores, you would propose them to get benefits from consuming at your competitors?

You might think this idea is completely silly. Nevertheless, the unloyalty reward program exists. It has emerged in the UK, in an Eastern London neighborhood. The Prufock coffee has designed a card it hands out to its customers in order for them to try out different coffee shop in the neighborhood. Each time they consume into a different one, they receive a stamp, which allow them to get a free coffee at Prufock's. Each time they get their free coffee and purchase a new one, the customer receive a new card ready to be stamped by a competitor.

You might think this is totally counter productive. In terms of customer relationship management it doesn't make no sense. Isn't the purpose of such a program to keep away your customers from your competitors? On the contrary, this program incentive customers to check around. In 6 months, 6000 of those cards have been released.

So Why Would They Do That?

The main reason is they want to promote the consumption of their product, coffee. They believe that by pushing customers to visit several coffee shops, it will be better for them because coffee consumption will be pushed.

Let's face it, this strategy could work in declining markets. Hence, coffee shops are going in limbo. Competition of chains like Starbucks, or Mc Donald's which has launched a new concept to reach coffee lovers, it is difficult for small stores to counterattack. By doing so, they somehow provide an alternative to customers and secure their niche.

Also, by providing the opportunity to customers to visit other stores, you allow them to compare, and therefore get some insights, which will provide you a clear landscape of your competition. It will give by your own customers the idea of what they are looking for, what your strenghts are, and what you need to work on.

I'd like to see how other companies could benefit from such a customer relationship management strategy in other industries. What do you think about it?

RFID Uses By Wall Mart Raises Controversy

RFID technology has been around for quite a while. But its full potential has not yet been shown out. Hence, within the last few years, the cost of such chips have fallen from 50 cents to 7 to 10 cents. This is the reason why Wall Mart plans to use ID tags to track clothing goods in order to better control inventory.

This technology will allow the retailer to keep a track of stocks, wherever it is located, either in a wharehouse, back storage, or on stores shelves. To go even further, it will be able to track goods while going through cash desks, and hence also have statistics about stealing. You can now easilly understand why Wall Mart is making such a move.

Now those smart tags are also raising some concerns. First of all, this tags can't be turned off. They may be easily removed, but will still be on. It may hence be dangerous and give some customers data that could be used against customers privacy.

"There are two things you really don't want to tag, clothing and identity documents, and ironically that's where we are seeing adoption," said Katherine Albrecht, founder of a group called Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering and author of a book called "Spychips" that argues against RFID technology.

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748704421304575383213061198090.html#ixzz0w1SDqViD

In 2007 American Apparel implemented a similar pilot program which resulted in +14% of sales due to optimized inventory management. To know more about how technologies might revolutionize the way retails are managed, you should check this out.

Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) Still Struggles To Impose

When I have found out about Vendor Relationship Management 2 years ago, I have been thrilled about the potential. Indeed, it incarnated in my opinion the future of customer relationship management (CRM). It was the materialization of customers taking power over brands, and the ultimate stage of the relationship.

But since then, a lot of websites have used this concept, but still it is lacking of a clear leader which would drive the concept into a mass consumption trend. Community management effort on Twitter or Facebook have marked the premises of this type of relationship.

I am currently looking for airlines companies and travel agency to give up discounted fare to organize my wedding. Indeed, about 30 people coming from the US will land in France to participate in the celebration, and need both airline fares and hotels. I have contacted couple of agency, but none of them seem to propose interesting discounts, in regards to the potential business they could generate from it.

If a VRM service would exist, I'd be able to make a competition between the different potential suppliers, but none of that exists. Obviously, it is difficult for companies to be eager to develop VRM, because that means somehow to loose control over their pricing and their ability to price upon their mergins vs customer's will. But still, new media and web technologies will force them to make a move.

I'd like to know if some of you have good examples of vendor relationship management websites, and if you use it.

Ecommerce: 3D To Improve Shopper Experience

There has been a lot of work undertaken by e-retailers in order to improve shopper experience.
They set up different tools to give as much information as possible to customers in order to them not to need sales person advices. They have also tried to make as efficient as possible delivery in order to compensate the fact you won't be able to get out of the store with your gear on.

In traditionnal stores, you may try the goods, or touch them, which is impossible online. Now ecommerce have already set new ways to showcast their products:

• Videos
• Pictures
• Comprehensive details
• Customer reviews

But now, 3D technology might give a boost in shopper experience. E retailer espacemax.com has launched its 3D shopping. Hence, if you have a 3D computer screen, or if you own some 3D glasses, you may have an interactive and 100% 3D representation of the good.

Only 3 purses are available with this feature. But I believe this might really change the way we shop online. It is going to improve a lot customer experience. I can't wait to see more goods available to play with. And you what do you think about it?

Mc Donald's se lance sur Internet

Mc Donald's dans le E-commerce? Tout du moins Mc Donald's est en train de lancer les commandes sur Internet. Il y a plus ou moins 2 ans, Pizza Hut avait lancé un projet de ce même type.

Objectif? Utiliser le média Internet pour pouvoir capter de nouveaux consommateurs, via la publicité en ligne vers son site, mais aussi augmenter la productivité des équipes, en délaissant la partie "caisse", qui est bien souvent l'un des plus coûteux d'un restaurant Fast Food.

Pour l'instant le service n'est valable que dans 25 points de vente de la région parisienne ainsi qu'à Nice. Vous pouvez voir le sité dédié sur gomcdo.fr.

Pour l'instant, il semble qu'il ne soit pas possible de payer en ligne, ce qui est dommage car le paiement nécessite donc toujours du temps passé en caisse.

Maintenant, ce qui serait intéressant, ce serait pour Mc Donald's de passer à la vitesse supérieur en développant une application Iphone qui permettrait les commandes automatiques.

Je ne pense pas que ce service existe déjà, mais si vous avez des infos, n'hésitez pas à m'en parler. Et vous, que pensez vous de ce nouveau type de commande en ligne?

Social Media And Group Travel

Social media has changed the way we interact with our network. I have found this very interesting video about Trippy, wich gather Lonely Planet's content and Google wave into a collaborative trip planning experience.

It has never been easier to plan group travels. Now it is also a good example on how to use several different web services to create a mashup. What do you think about it?

Lorsque les défauts produits se transforme en succès commercial: Le cas Orangina

Vous devez certainement connaître la petite bouteille jaune d'orangina. Orangina a été une success story depuis des années en France. Et pourtant savez-vous que l'attribut différenciant principal de ce produit se trouve être un défaut de fabrication?

En effet, l'Orangina possède de la pulpe qui reste au fond de la bouteille après avoir été réalisée. Ce défaut aurait pu être ennuyeux. Néanmoins Orangina a décidé de trouver une parade et de communiquer sur cet attribut plutôt que de le cacher. C'est ainsi qu'est arrivé l'idée de "secouer, sinon la pulpe reste en bas".

Je trouve cet exemple assez intéressant, car grâce à un bon axe de communication, on a réussi à rendre le produit différenciant, et ce défaut, une qualité en elle même.

Social Media And Conversion Rate

A lot of companies are rushing toward social media, seeing it as a free and great way to promote their business. The hype is huge and the potential seems endless. But now a lot of them has been disapointed. It is difficult to apprehend this new environment, this medium that looks like nothing else. Hence, a lot of them end up getting high investment for little results.

Now social media remain one of the best way to communicate with your clients. It is the ultimate customer relationship management tool: For the first time, you are able to speak with your customers, share with them. And the benefit is that the word of mouth is so powerful that it will assure you a great exposure on the web. This is what we call "resonance".

Now new studies have shown that social media could lead to high conversion rate. It is important as a CRM tool to actually be able to measure the success of campaigns online. I found this very interesting article on a new website I discovered about retailing (In French) Vertical Retail.

Sage Pay, a payment system provider has established a study showing that if an Internet retailer has an average 7% conversion rate, visitors coming from social media would be 10 times more. 70% of those people coming from social media would buy in your online retail!

Harris Interactive undertook other research showing showing that half of the 35 years old or less population would follow the instructions of their friends, vs 17% for leader of opinions like famous people.

According to Sage Pay study, only 5% of marketers who have an online strategy would consider social media efficient. There is therefore a sky of opportunity for whom would be eager to take advantage of it.

Unilever's Chief Marketing Officer Keith Weed consider social media as "word of mouth on steroid". I dislike this term, but hey, it shows the importance social media is getting.

I like those kind of stats, because they show how important social media could be in your customer relationship management program.

Customer Relationship Management Strategy: Does The Loyalty Card Has A Value?

There is a lot of innovation regarding loyalty reward programs. This tool remains one of the most appealing CRM project, even though new kind of CRM has appeared with new media. At the beginning, one of the main component of this kind of CRM was the famous loyalty card, which was the symbol of the relationship established between one customer and a brand.

Now the new era of customer relationship management implies to set mobile strategies. Indeed, mobile phones thanks to fast technology improvement have become the best tool to be on customer’s at all time.

Thanks to mobile loyalty reward programs, you may propose to customers more added value than a simple plastic card: you may access your points information, promotions, special features, tools to help you buy more.

Now the thing is that for some people, or at least some marketing directors, the loyalty card has steal a value: An emotional device which marks the relationship between the customer and the brand. With mobile phones, you may have several loyalty cards in the same handheld. But there is no challenge to become one of those card that customers are proud of owning in their wallet. I remember how proud people were to be part of the club Fnac program. They feld somekind of elite, due to the fact they were loyal customers to a retail which was considered as the best in the culture industry.

But to be honest, there is a very few number of companies that could actually set a premium loyalty reward programs which would be rewarding enough to get such a success. Hence I believe that the loyalty card, as we have known it, is on its way to vanish.

What do you think about it? I’d be delighted to share with you on the topic.

Facebook Delivers Poor Customer Satisfaction

Despite Facebook hype and unbelievable fast increase of users, some people are criticizing a lot the service. Of course, among the main reason why Facebook is not appreciated is due to privacy reasons. Nevertheless, Facebook can be considered as the best social network. There is no other service that allows you to share so much online with people you care. Facebook has been able to create some kind of online social communities of people.

Thanks to its social attributes, Facebook is considered for a lot of people as the ultimate customer relationship management medium. This medium provides to brands a new total way to engage with customers. It is actually the first time you may actually have a conversation with your customers.

However, I found this very intersting article: Facebook has poor customer satisfaction figures.

Facebook scored 64 points on a 100-point scale on the consumer experience front, according to a report based on the American Customer Satisfaction Index, developed by the University of Michigan’s business school.

The report finds Facebook score in parallel to two low scoring categories such as airlines and cable companies.

The report attributes privacy concerns, frequent interface changes and commercialization and huge advertising as the reasons affecting the consumer experience on Facebook.

I wanted to share with you the results of this study, because I find it ironic that this medium has such a poor results. Now it seems that one of the main weakness has been to change so much over such a period of times. The lack of consistency, either with privacy policy or with interface is always confusing for users.

Unfortunately Twitter has not been considered by the survey. With all the technical prolems they constantly have, I would be surprised if their index would be way lower than Facebook's.

Community Management: Why Creating A Facebook Page Is Not Enough

A lot of companies are very interested by what is going on with web 2.0. The high number of Facebook users is very interesting for businesses which would like to advertise. Nevertheless, even though the comon wisdom around social network is that they are free advertising you should not miss understand how it works.

Hence, developping a customer relationship management strategy using social network implies more than simply creating a Fan page where customers will be able to discuss about your brands. Indeed, like any other medium create before, social networks are used for malicious usages.

I have read not so long ago a book called the Victorian Internet, which explains the history of telegram, and how you could link its development and usage during its era with nowadays and the Internet. And since the beginning of telegram, telegrams have been used to "spam" users by providing commercial messages over the wires. I found thanks to @sleroux this link to the Ferrero Rocher's Facebook page.

What do you think you could find on Ferrero Rocher's Facebook page? Let's remember that Ferrero also owns Nutella, and has able thanks to this brand to create a strong community of lovers.

In my opinion, Ferrero Rocher could have done a page speaking about how to organize events, cocktails, which would be linked with their commercials and positioning in the market.

Instead, since they have not taken care of their community, the page is stacked with spam comments to win Ipads, naked girls pictures. It is a total failure. Now I don't know if you'd rather should not have a Facebook page, or own one but let people do whatever they want with. I believe this Ferrero Rocher page is a total failure, and it is one of the best example that you must have a community management strategy, which implies:

• A goal which will link the brand and its customers by providing service or content to customers
• Have some community management system to animate the community and to make sure it remains viable
• Have specific metrics which will show out the interest of the project.

Now what will be interesting to see is how Ferrero Rocher will be able to turn the situation into its advantage, by retaking the leadership over. What do you think about it?

Les meilleurs exemples d'utilisation de FourSquare

Trouver sur le site Influencia, voici quelques exemples très intéressant de l'utilisation de Foursquare par des marques ou des enseignes.

Foursquare est un réseau social ludique reposant sur une technologie de géolocalisation sur les smartphones. Depuis son lancement en mars 2009, nombreuses sont les marques qui ont tenté de réfléchir aux possibilités du service dans quatre grandes directions.

Outil de gratification socio-émotionnelle
C’est sur le principe de gratification socio-émotionnelle que repose le concept de badges, accumulés au fur et à mesure des check-ins.
Le badge “Fashion Victim” de Marc Jacobs, le “Louis Vuitton Insider” ou encore le “Elite Shopper” du magasine Lucky - tous reposent sur le même concept: entraîner le public dans un jeu urbain. C’est grâce à un système d’indices divulgués par la marque que l’on peut identifier les endroits où il faut effectuer un check-in. Il suffit ensuite de laisser la magie Foursquare opérer et là, c’est la consécration ! Le badge. Un simple clic et vous voilà “Fashion Victim”. C’est même Marc Jacobs qui le dit!

Lancement de produit
On retiendra de 2010 l’opération “CatchaChoo” de Jimmy Choo. A l’occasion du lancement de sa ligne de chaussures de sport, le créateur a créé une course poursuite dans la ville de Londres, avec une paire de sneakers à la clé, les cachettes étant révélées par un système de check-ins. Une idée simple qui en a fait courir plus d’une.
Plus récemment, c’est Barbie qui a fait parler d’elle avec le lancement de “Barbie Video”. Pour promouvoir son système de caméra intégrée, Mattel a choisi de se servir de Foursquare. L’idée : la célèbre poupée part en vacances, direction San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago et New York. Pour gagner une Barbie Vidéo, il suffit d’identifier un lieu de rendez-vous secret et, une fois sur place, de relever le défi lancé par les street teams Barbie. Les aventures de Barbie ont commencé le 20 juillet et devraient durer une bonne partie de l’été.

Intégration de contenus
HBO, Bravo, History Channel... Voici quelques exemples d’intégration de contenus réussis permettant à Foursquare de toucher un nouveau public, plus large. Bravo est allé loin mêlant jeu concours et système multi-badges, le tout reposant sur ses contenus télévisuels. La chaîne a ainsi transformé l’ensemble de ses programmes télé réalité (“The Millionnaire Matchmaker”, “The Real Housewives” ou encore “Top Chef”) en véritables usines à création de contenus.

Programmes de fidélisation
C’est Tasti D-lite qui a ouvert le bal
avec son programme de “TreatCards”, carte de fidélité directement connectée à Foursquare et générant des check-ins automatiques.
Dans la même série, le badge “Barista” de Starbucks est obtenu après cinq check-ins. Pour l’instant pas de café gratuit à la clé, mais cela ne saurait tarder. Starbucks envisage de passer à la vitesse supérieure et d’utiliser Foursquare à de nombreuses fins: remise de prix, invitations à des événements privés, partage de photos ou encore système de notation de la qualité du service. Affaire à suivre.
Évoquons enfin le programme de fidélisation lancé par Domino’s Pizza en Angleterre. L’idée: réduire les coûts de livraison en incitant les consommateurs à se déplacer chez Domino’s. Une exécution simple: un accompagnement gratuit par check-in. Une pizza gratuite pour les Mayors (les Maires). En quelques mois, on voit déjà les résultats de l’opération avec un profit brut grimpant de 29% sur le territoire. Un succès que la chaîne de pizzas attribue largement à ses initiatives social media et notamment sa promotion Foursquare.

Des usages créatifs et, comme le montre le cas Domino’s... lucratifs! Foursquare est un réseau social à suivre de près.

The Evolution Of CRM

Customer relationship management is about 30 years old now, since Leonard Berry in 1982 speaked about relationship marketing. Hence Gartner has decided to span the history of CRM since its debutes. CRM has been a trendy concept for quite a while, but its evolution has been fast.

Of course, CRM is still considered by the majority as a growth source for a company, and foremost the best tool to retain customers, but also some people have doubt about its efficiency, as CRM projects are most of the time big and costly.

CRM has been based since its early age, and remains based on metrics. The capacity of analyzing customer data to find cost optimization or commercial offers which will boost sales is obviously the main goal of CRM in a company. But as technology is moving fast, so does CRM.

Many business trends have affected the way people design customer relationship management projects:

• Multi channel retailing, which implies to have specific metrics set. It also implies it is more difficult to track customers relationship with the brand, depending on the retail he purchases. But what is sure is that the Internet channel drives in store business and in store visits leads some Internet purchases.
• Multi channel communication: Marketing one to one has become a huge advertising budget for brands. But new media have come up, especially on the web with social networks like Facebook, or micro blogging places like Twitter.
• CRM Know How: 30 years ago, CRM was brand new, and everything was to be designed. Now CRM managers have got experience and knowledge which helps.
• CRM competition: It is rare now that companies haven't set yet their customer relationship management program. Therefore, CRM programs is not a source of differenciation on the market by itself anymore. Innovation must be supported, and you need to take care of potential improvements you may get.

The Present of CRM: The Non Customer

According to this study, customers has become more and more skepticals about brands.

"Consumers are more skeptical, more willing to complain, more willing to leave you for a bad experience," Thompson said. "And 89% will tell their friends about their bad experience. Twenty-five percent do that on social media."

They are more eager to complain than they used to be. They have taken the power and knows it. I have read the book in French "le non consommateur", which explains it. It shows out how the relationship between customers and brands have evolved in a bad way, and why customers are expecting more of brands.

That is going to shift rapidly, he predicts. By 2015, 75% will tell other people about a bad experience with a company via social media, he said.

The future of CRM: C2B

Now the future of customer relationship management is that customers, due to all this factors and the fact that markets become more and more mature has got the power. Loosing one customer could be pretty expensive to a company, and customers know that as a matter of fact.

Now customers thanks to the Internet and social media are able to create groups which will empower them even more.

Now CRM is based on conversation, thanks to community managers which animates community of customers. This social part of CRM is very important because it is very difficult to apprehend with a traditionnal CRM prospective. Hence, CRM was based on pre definite data feeds, but now Twitter and Facebook feeds are hard to apprehend that way. This is the reason why CRM is becoming more "human", as community management can't be automatized at least for now. And I believe that after the failure of many sales force automation projects, the human side needs to be considered.

Finally, the three fundamental blocks of CRM will undergo more rapid change as well, according to Thompson. Currently, 90% of CRM spending is for operational processes, a little more than 9% is for analytics, and roughly 1% is for social CRM. Gartner predicts that will shift over the next five years to a mix of about 70% operational, 20% analytics and 10% social.

The Future Of Loyalty Cards

Loyalty cards and loyalty reward program have been around for a while. Most of the time, they are the central core of customer relationship management strategies. Companies spend fortunes to create those cards, but also to maintain them.

Hence, a company like CVS is counting 60 millions cardholders and Best Buy for about 40 millions.

Now I don’t think loyalty cards are going to remain as they are right now. Mobile technologies might give a real boost. Indeed, why would you keep actual cards in your wallet, while you may have them all integrated into an application?

There is a simple rule that I have learnt while I was studying customer relationship management and more precisely loyalty reward strategy with Michel Raicovitch, that people usually own a maximum of 5 cards they carry with them at all time. This is actually pretty few when you think about it, as most retail chains propose their own. If you are not into these cards, people don’t believe your program is worth it, and won’t use it, which ultimately leads to not getting data about your customers.

Now I have found this very interesting video on Youtube, about a new company called Cardstar. This company proposes you to enter in their applications all your loyalty reward program, in order to avoid to keep all those plastic cards. While shopping, you simply scan the code bar on your smartphone, and then the cash desk will recognize your profile.

Of course, you will also be able to get rewards and coupons thanks to this application, as a regular loyalty reward program would.

I believe it is a very smart idea, and what is very interesting about the service this company propose to business and shops, is that you will be able to have data from customers when they don’t visit your shop.





The program counts 700 different loyalty cards, which shows the potential of the idea to have a single application combining all of them.

For myself, top of the mind, I should have at least a dozen of those loyalty card on me. So it would obviously be more convenient to have them all on my phone.

A lot of new things are happening right now around loyalty reward programs and mobile devices. This is pretty exciting