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Monthly Archives: March 2009

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The SIVA Model for Customer Focused Marketing

March 18, 2009 – 10:02 AM

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the difference between traditional marketing and Marketing 2.0, and this post will talk about how the latter interprets the “marketing-mix” as articulated in the SIVA model (proposed by Chekitan Dev and Don Schultz in the Marketing Management Journal of The American Marketing Association).

What Is The “Marketing Mix”?

The term has origins going back to 1948 when James Culliton said that a marketing decision should be a result of something similar to a recipe. Neil Borden interpreted this concept in 1953 in his American Marketing Association presidential address by referring to the recipe as a ‘Marketing-Mix’. Later, E. Jerome McCarthy, proposed the famous 4 P’s classification in 1960.

What Are The 4 P’s?

I’ve talked about the 4 P’s in an earlier post here, they are:

  1. PRODUCT: This refers to what’s being sold, whether it’s a product of service. Traditional marketing served as one of the key drivers of product development through market research.
  2. PRICE: As the name suggests, this is about setting the selling the price of the product. Again, this was traditionally driven by market research and economic theory.
  3. PLACEMENT: This refers to where the product is sold and how it is distributed to target markets.
  4. PROMOTION: This represents all of the communications that a marketer may use in the marketplace. This traditionally focused on advertising and public relations.

This model has been modified by various people over the years to include additional P’s, such as “people”, in an attempt to make it for customer focused. These efforts have largely failed though because the articulation of each element reflects the top-down approach of traditional marketing. Of course, marketers have always conducted market research to understand the market, but the idea that customers build brands as much as companies is not consistent with this approach.

How Is The SIVA Model Different?

The SIVA model attempts to rearticulate the 4 P’s in a way that is more consistent with the idea that in today’s market environment brand building power has shifted from companies to communities. This is an idea at the core of the Marketing 2.0 philosophy.

  1. PRODUCT becomes SOLUTION: The idea here is that what’s being sold is driven by consumer need. The community now defines that product instead of marketing. Marketing’s role is to understand and articulate user need to the company.
  2. PRICE becomes VALUE: Here pricing is driven by the value a product offers users rather than by economic theories. With new economic models there are more and more opportunities for customers to actually set pricing through services like Google AdWords.
  3. PLACEMENT becomes ACCESS: Again, rather than defining where the product will be sold, it’s about providing access to users when and where they want it.
  4. PROMOTION becomes INFORMATION:Rather than placing advertisements out in the world, this approach is simply about providing users with information about the product so they can determine if it offers value as a solution and is readily accessible.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to your feedback.

By Roland Smart | Posted in Marketing | Tagged Marketing 2.0 | Comments (3)

A Call To Marketers

March 17, 2009 – 8:32 AM

Fellow Marketers,

Have you been to Wikipedia recently to see what vox populi has to say about marketing? I regret to inform that the entry leaves a great deal to be desired, especially considering the number of marketing related conversations in the blogosphere. I think marketers can do better, and I’d love to work with a bunch of editors to clean up the entry, which Wikipedia iteself has flagged for improvement.

My personal interest is in defining the difference between traditional marketing and Marketing 2.0 … but that’s hard to do if the entry for traditional marketing is so poorly written.

Anyone interested? Send me a note.

By Roland Smart | Posted in Culture, Marketing | Comments (2)

Three Steps To Better Product Development Roadmaps (Nike+ & Fitbit)

March 16, 2009 – 7:04 AM

The Nike+ is a device that often comes up when talking about what makes for a smart product development roadmap because the product embodies all three steps that I think are essential. For those who are unfamiliar with the device, it is pedometer which you attach to your running shoe and which connects wirelessly with your iPod (see Apple’s site for a good introduction). Here are the aforementioned steps:

  1. SERVICIZE IT:  Part of what sets the device up for success is that it’s positioned to turn a product into a service. In this way, its reminiscent of the first iPod which took most of the features out of the actual device and relocated them in the management software, iTunes (the service). This may seem obvious today but at the time all the mp3 player manufactures were competing on how to get more features into the player, which was a losing proposition. In the case of the Nike+, they’ve taken the idea of defeaturing the device even further. The device itself has no display and no interactions. You simply put it in your shoe. The display of your iPod can then offer information about how far you’ve run, how many calories you’ve burned, etc.
  2. ACCESSORIZE IT: One beauty of servicizing is that it also opens new revenue streams. For example, users can download PowerSongs from iTunes which will play on your iPod if you start falling behind your normal pace, or when you hit that massive hill. Now that you’ve got people online, there are also opportunities to sell them other stuff to enhance their running experience.
  3. COMMUNITIZE IT: Getting users online has many benefits. Connecting the Nike+ to your iPod means that you’re connected to your community because your iPod gets synced with your computer, and your computer get synced with the internet. Now you can not only look at all your runs and highlight trends, but you can share them with your friends. Of course, your iPhone may be GPS enabled which means that it can track where you run as well. Perhaps you’ll set up a special  route in your city so that you can participate in a marathon that is a continent away in real time. And, fostering communities online is the best way to power future  product development because you’re users are the best source of market research, new ideas, innovations, etc.

Now there’s another device that may do it even better, it’s called Fitbit. What I like about Fitbit is that it goes beyong running to address the larger implications of this kind of product. In other words, why stop at running? How about walking? How long I was sitting during the day? And, how I slept? Yup, you got that last part right. How I slept. Wearing the device at night while allows it to gather information about how you’ve been sleeping. I wonder if there’s a market for PowerNappingSongs? Fitbit also presents all the infomation it collects in a digestible and intuitive way.

These two examples just go to show that there’s always more roadmap. I remember feeling like the Nike+ absolutely nailed it and that no other product would have a chance to catch up any time soon. And then, Fitbit took a step ahead. I can’t wait to see where they go from here. If you’ve got a product I encourage you to think about these two examples as you look ahead.

By Roland Smart | Posted in Design, Marketing, Podcast | Tagged Product Design, roadmap | Comments (0)

Twitter Digest

March 14, 2009 – 5:19 PM

twitterheader2

  • UNDERSTAND / FIX THE WORLD
    • My friends at VegRev will upgrade your diesel to run on veggie. Cool video interview on Link TV
    • CNBC covers my friend Martin Fischer at KickStart in putting a major dent in rural poverty in Africa with human powered water pumps.
  • MARKETING RELATED LINKS
    • Advertising in virtual communities, interesting podcast.
  • SOME FUN
    • My good friend Eilen Jewell will be playing at SXSW, she’s increadible go check it out!
    • Someone found a portrait of Shakespeare, maybe.

Hope you’re enjoying the weekend.

By Roland Smart | Posted in Twitter | Comments (0)

My France Photography Book

March 12, 2009 – 10:11 AM

My passion for art was fostered at a young age by my parents, but it wasn’t until I bought a camera that I began scratching the surface of how art and design were related. I was fortunate to be able to build a darkroom at home in the attic where I could conduct all sorts of photographic experiments. At some point I’ll share those on this blog, but for now I want to share a collection of more traditional photographs that I made while traveling in France in 1994.

The prints fit in an over-sized handmade case containing 60 unique 16″ x 20″ photographic prints derived from 6 cm x 9 cm negative film. The are individually matted and are held in the right side of the open book (as in a portfolio case). On the left, there are over-sized collage pages made from my journals and material that I collected during my travels in France.

Here is a slide show that features many of the photographs in the case. The digital scans do not do justice to the orginals, but at least they are now online to share!

This project represented the impulse to do something in the traditional way (the “right way” according to some) before deconstructing the process. Thus, the results are traditional black and white photographs hand printed on fiber paper. For those who have a technical interest in photography, these were printed using a split filtering process, whereby the exposure of the paper during printing was split into three periods, each with a different contrast filter. The result is the grouping of shades of gray into three tonal ranges. This can be done remarkable easily today using a tool like Photoshop today, but was a rather advanced technique to master when I was in college.

By Roland Smart | Posted in Culture | Tagged art, phtography | Comments (0)

DIY Research Recruiting

March 10, 2009 – 4:37 PM

A big part of getting the information you need to make smart decisions about everything from messaging, to product positioning, branding, merchandising, pricing, etc can be attained if you can just get the right people to participate in your research. In this post, I’ll outline the key elements of DIY recruiting and how it has worked for me.

Why Do Recruiting Yourself?

First off, many small and medium sized business simply can’t afford to outsource recruiting. Plus, one of the benefits of doing recruiting yourself is that you can develop relationships with your research participants. Companies that have to move fast can get a huge advantage from working with a group of research participants who have already participated in previous studies. Of course, depending on your research, it’s not always possible to develop a group as a resource. That said, developing an internal competency around recruiting will save effort over time, and can be a resource for many areas of a business.

Pre-Requisites For Recruiting

There are some things that you’ll need to know before you start:

  • Research Goals: It’s important to have clearly articulated research goals and objectives before you start any recruiting activities. This will not only tie your efforts to actionable results, it will ensure that you’ve recruiting relevant participants.
  • Participant Segmentation: Having research goals in place will support participant segmentation. You can also use existing market segments, but it’s most useful to segment your participants on a behavioral basis. So, if you’re recruiting to test brand identities for a new beverage for kids you might want to segment retailers, end consumers (kids), and purchasing consumers (moms). If you’re on a tight budget focus on the segments that have the greatest potential for returns.
  • The Screener: This is a document that will assist in screening potential candidates to participate in your research study. It will include information from the participant segmentation as well as:
    • Clear expectations for the participant – How long the commitment will be, when it will take place, etc.
    • Sample size – This can range widely by the research methodology you use. The point is to make sure that the sample is large enough to spot the trends that will serve as your design targets.
    • A demographic profile of ideal participants – Gender, age, income, family, etc.
    • Additional information that is relevant to your research – Do they use your product/service, how often, etc.
    • Background – Have they participated in such research before, do they work in the industry, etc. Depending on how your research is being conducted, this can be built into the study itself.
  • Recruiting Schedule: This is a realistic time-line for your recruiting project. Depending on your research program you may have to make a significant number of phone calls, or send a large number of e-mails, to coordinate research participants, so leave plenty of time. It takes longer to do recruiting that you’d think. Also, you can count on a decent number of participants not-showing up or finishing your study, so plan accordingly.
  • Project Management: Ideally, you’ll have a project manager of some sort to help coordinate your research program, manage the time-line, budget, and communication.
  • Compensation: You may have to compensate people for their participation in your study, so make sure you account for this in your budgeting. If you’re on a tight budget it is possible to motivate people to participate with a chance to win a significant prize which costs less than compensating every participant. The single most important motivation is a chance to make a difference though!

Finding Participants

Obviously, if you’ve got a business up and running  you may not have to look any further than your list of current or past customers. If, however, you’re working on something new such as a business plan, or a new product or service, you’ll have to recruit from the wild. This is where things get creative. Here are a couple examples from my experience.

Back in 2005 when I was working with Adina For Life, a beverage company that makes sustainable, organic and Fair Trade beverages, I was involved in developing two test markets. At that time, we had an initial product line of juices with small production runs, which meant we could go out into the field to obtain data and incorporate findings into our next  run. But, how to get the data?

Some of the DIY options included in-house focus groups, online surveying for packaging and branding, and interviews with retailers. Though we ended up doing a variety of programs, the most significant was embedded into an in-store demo program that I’d set up. Since we were already in the stores, this was a great opportunity to interface directly with customers. We developed a research guide for our “juice ambassadors” who would conduct a sampling of a variety of flavors before collecting a short paper-based survey . Because we had two test markets on opposite coasts, and were selling primarily to independant stores that sold other organic products, we had a fairly controlled market segment based on a specific purchasing behavior. This saved us from collecting too much demographic information, and allowed us to focus on the flavors and packaging, while assessing regional preferences.

Several years later, I was conducting research for another food venture that exploring a mobile BBQ restaurant concept that would essentially sell BBQ out of a truck in major urban areas. The business did not exist yet so there were no customers to reach out to. The main DIY option that came up at first was to find other mobile restaurants and talk with their customers. Of course, there were no other mobile BBQ truck nearby so that approach had certain limits. Then I started exploring online; what I found was a ton of communities that were interested in BBQ, or dining out in general. I started participating in these groups and sharing a little bit about the project. I got an enormous response and soon had hundreds of participants taking a survey. I created trackable links for each community where I invited participants (Chow magazine, Craigslist, Yelp, etc) so I could track where they were coming from.

Both of the recruiting methods I used had the benefit of developing community around the brands conducting the research. I hope these examples are helpful and inspire you to get out there and start recruiting on your own. If you’ve got examples from your own experience, please share!

By Roland Smart | Posted in Marketing | Tagged research | Comments (0)

Three Steps To Brand Love

March 9, 2009 – 9:48 PM

People seem to fall in love with brands for three reasons that work together:

  1. Desire: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs sums it up best; a theory in psychology, proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation, which organizes basic needs such as food and shelter at the base of a pyramid and aspirational needs (self-actualization) at the top.*  No matter what level of the pyramid your product or service works on, it has to fullfil a need in order for people to fall in love with it. I actually think the word “desire” is more accurate than “need”, but either way a motivational force is essential because it’s pretty hard to make people fall in love if they don’t want to.
  2. Trust: In the diagram below, the brand experience stairway illustrates how brands build trust through interactions and over time. I’ve written about this in my post Where Marketers Are Today, but the gist of it is that satisfying customers’ desires/needs/motivations repeatedly leads to beneficial behavioral patterns and ultimately to trust. Actually, you can even go beyond trust to loyalty, but the underlying idea is that people don’t fall in love without establishing a behavioral pattern.
  3. Emotional Connection: First off, falling in love is not rational, does not obey economic theory, and is not simply based on a Pavlovian satisfaction of needs. Second, there are degrees of being in love, and you can fall out of love if you don’t acknowledge/appreciate the sentiment.  It’s really a cocktail of satisfaction, behavioral pattern, and disposition. In other words, you can do everything right and some people just won’t ever fall in love with you. It’s sad, I know, but there are lots of fish in the sea who will fall for your brand if you’ve got desire and trust. The trick to getting people to fall head over heals is to let them have what they love. Give them the brand.

behavior

*Chip Conley wrote an interesting book about how to apply Maslow’s hierarchy to business called Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow. Here’s a great video of him presenting on the topic:

By Roland Smart | Posted in Marketing | Tagged brand | Comments (0)

Twitter Digest

March 6, 2009 – 6:22 PM

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  • UNDERSTAND / FIX THE WORLD
    • Household Debt Vs. GDP – This chart tracks the relationship between household debt and gross domestic product. You’ll see two years when Americans’ debt becomes 100 percent of GDP — 1929 and 2007. Hmmm, why didn’t I notice that before?
    • This American Life, another great show explaining the economic crisis - this whole series is awesome.
    • How Bad is Tech Unemployment? – an interesting BusinessWeek article, but ouch!
    • Once Upon a School education is so broken, let’s fix it.
  • MARKETING RELATED LINKS
    • The Yelp Tee: Almost More Brilliant Than Pizzeria Delfina’s Pizza – a brilliant response to poor Yelp ratings from 7×7
    • Coroflot’s 8th Annual Design Salary Survey Results - are you getting a fair wage?
    • Dan Roam at the Commonwealth Club – it’s all about getting visual
    • How Amazon Aims to Keep You Clicking - an article about customer service.
  • YOUR LIFE, JUST EASIER
    • Realtime Twitter Search Results on Google - nice hack
  • SOME FUN
    • Mobility VIP - a new game about the future
    • SOUL TV is now available online! Get your funk on baby!

Have a great weekend.

By Roland Smart | Posted in Twitter | Comments (0)

Turning The Megaphone Around

March 6, 2009 – 11:28 AM

It’s all over the blogosphere, Skittles has rocked everyone’s world by putting down the megaphone and giving it to their customers. How did they do it?

Their home page is  the Wikipedia page about Skittles.
Their media page is a YouTube page.
Their friends page is a Facebook page.
Their chatter page is a feed of Twitter posts that include the world skittles.

They’ve demonstrated one of the key principles of Marketing 1.0 versus Marketing 2.0:

oldvsnew

With Marketing 1.0 the company owns the brand and broadcasts it out to customers. With Marketing 2.0, customers own the brand and have lots of ways of communicating the company about what to do with it. Marketers have must put down the megaphone, and start working to translate,  interpret, and present what customers are saying inside their organizations. The tricky part, and it remains to be seen if Skittles can do this, is to return value to customers based on their input.

Do you think you’re any more likely to pick up skittles next time your’re at the corner market?

By Roland Smart | Posted in Culture, Marketing | Tagged web | Comments (0)

Marketing Should Be Fun

March 5, 2009 – 10:19 AM

If you’re not having some fun, then you’re doing it wrong. I love marketers that recognize how the industry has gone astray and who can have a laugh about it. Here’s a perfect example. I love this:

Next time you have a client ask you to make their logo bigger, send them here.

By Roland Smart | Posted in Culture, Marketing | Tagged humor | Comments (0)
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