800-CEO-READ Excerpts

Branding Unbound by Rick Mathieson - Part VI

Q&A

Howard Rheingold: The Mobile Net's New "Mob" Mentality

Howard Rheingold knows a revolution when he sees one. In 1993, he wrote The Virtual Community before most people had ever even ventured onto the Internet. And in his landmark book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, he explored the outer fringes of the mobile Web, and how it’s creating new bonds between human beings-—for better and for worse.

Writing for the online tech community The Feature, and his Smart Mobs blog, Rheingold continues this exploration of how mobile technologies are reshaping the social, political, and economic landscape worldwide. He says smart mobs represent a fundamentally new form of social connectivity that will empower the "mobile many" to have fun and do both good and evil in the decade ahead.

RICK MATHIESON: Why makes smart mobbing such a powerful social force?

HOWARD RHEINGOLD: People all over the world are beginning to discover that they can use coordinative technologies--the mobile phone, the Internet-—to coordinate face-to-face activities. On the more privileged social side of the spectrum, we have the "flash mob" phenomenon. A lot of people say, well, 'Geez, there’s no purpose for that.' I say, 'What’s the purpose of standing in line buying a ticket and sitting in a stadium with 100,000 people to watch men in tight pants kick a ball around?' It’s entertainment. What’s interesting about flash mobs is that it’s self-organized entertainment. You’re not standing in line buying a ticket and having someone else’s prepackaged entertainment sent to you.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have the president of Korea elected by a combination of a "citizen reporter" Web site, AllmyNews.com, and people using e-mail and text messages to coordinate get-out-the-vote efforts. When they put a call out literally during the election that their candidate was losing in the exit polls, they got out to vote and hit that election. In Spain, there was the terrorist bombing, and the elections several days later, in which there were official government-organized demonstrations followed by self-organized demonstrations. They were organized by SMS and may well have tipped that election.

And in the United States, we saw the [Howard] Dean [presidential] campaign using his blog and Meetup.com to organize. At one point he was bringing in $50,000 a day in small contributions, and 140,000 people at house parties were actively promoting him. And although Dean did not get the [nomination], this ultimately is going to change the way politics is run in the Unites States.

So, clearly something is happening worldwide; it’s at the level of many people organizing some urban entertainment. And it’s at the level of deciding who’s going to be president of a country. And that threshold for collective action is lowered by the merger of the mobile telephone, the PC, and the Internet.

RM: How will the next wave of multimedia, mobile broadband networks, and location-aware technologies impact the dynamics of smart mobbing?

HR: Hiptop Nation is the first example of something that can evolve. Hiptop Nation is a combination of picture phones and blogging—-people sending small, low-res photographs and a few words from their wireless device through a Web site. And that will evolve as these new technologies evolve.

Moblogging is a really interesting example of people, spread out all over the world, using mobile devices and the Web to get information out. It may seem frivolous, but it illustrates how mobile technologies can change how we view time, the way we navigate our cities, and how we collaborate with other groups of people. I think both blogging and picture phones are very powerful phenomena in
themselves, but when you combine the ability of anyone on the street to send media from where they are to anyone else in the world through the Web, I think it portends significant changes, though it’s rudimentary today.

Add in GPS [and other] location capabilities that let you know where your buddies are, or how to get wherever it is you’re going, and that will enhance this revolution significantly.

And, in connection with that, the ability to add presence [awareness], presence being like your buddy list on Instant Messenger, so you know who is in the neighborhood now, will be huge. We’re seeing some experiments with that, not necessarily from the big companies, but from small experimenters like Dodgeball. So, that’s going to make a huge difference. It’s hard to tell at this point whether this is going to grow from grassroots efforts like Dodgeball, or whether some [cellular service carriers] are going to get the clue and start offering that, too.

RM: What does this all mean for marketers?

HR: Anybody that has bought anything on eBay knows how reputation systems work. Before you buy something, you want to know whether to trust the seller. Online, mobile or otherwise, you can go find out what people who have bought things from that person before are saying.

Imagine the whole notion of information on places: location blogging where you subscribe to a group or service to see what kind of information they have on real places, 'This restaurant is no good,' or, 'This is my favorite bookstore.' One of the first applications I’ve seen is for speed traps. Someone notices a speed trap, and then sends a notice, or it pops up on [an online] map, for everyone else to see. I’m sure that law enforcement is not happy about that, but that’s an example of the kinds of things that people come up with.

Likewise, the manufacturers of mass products are not going to be able to hide for very long if people are talking amongst each other about them.

Which brings me to yet another aspect of this, which is being able to use your mobile device to point at the bar code or RFID tag on a manufactured product and find out all kinds of things-—from what kinds of ingredients are in there that aren’t on the label, or a Webcam at the factory where teenagers are assembling your sneakers in Pakistan, or what either the Moral Majority or the ACLU has to say about the politics of this company. That could tip power to consumers and clear the way for the kind of economic smart mobbing that would create very significant changes, if that happens.

A friend of mine who’s a Microsoft researcher has put together a handheld wireless device with a bar code reader and connected it to Google.

I was able to go into his kitchen, scan a box of prunes, and see that it was distributed by the Sun-Diamond Growers Cooperative. You Google Sun-Diamond, and you find "U.S. versus Sun-Diamond," [an article] on the U.S. Supreme Court looking at questionable lobbying practices. You will see a partisan site called corpwatch.org with their headline to the effect of "Bromide Barons Suppress Democratic Process." You’re not going to find this out in the label, but Sun-Diamond is [allegedly] the largest contributor to lobbying against control of the chemical methyl bromide. Sun-Diamond is not going to tell you that. But if you Google it, if you connect that ability to find that information out there to your ability to scan something in real time, that changes a lot.

RM: So how can companies embrace smart mobs and use them to have a positive impact on their business?

HR: Any business that can’t keep in touch with business makers, key people, and customers when they need to is going to fall behind. We’re seeing that people who can’t be interrupted by phone calls can be reached by SMS or instant messaging, and that groups are able to coordinate their activities at all times anywhere around the globe.

When your buddy list is an executive team or an engineering team that is split up around the world, to react to the conditions very quickly, being able to not just talk, but know when the others are online, send them text, send them rich messages, and send them documents, in real time, is pretty important. And it will make all the difference in a competitive situation.

From a marketing perspective, I think this is the very opposite of some small group deciding who’s going to be marketed to. Many communities are, for the most part, self-organized. So, I think you’re not going to get that smart mob power unless you have something that really moves a lot of people to go out and self-organize. It’s like how AOL tried to build a top-down Internet with their little 'walled garden’ of Web sites. That’s not the same as having millions of people put up their own Web pages and link to each other, and create 4 billion Web pages in 2,000 days. It’s about harnessing the power of collective action that enables anybody to act in a way that adds up, not organizing something from the top down and trying to broadcast it. There are some things you just can’t do that way.

Branding Unbound by Rick Mathieson - Part V

Q&A

Tom Peters: The Gospel According to St. Peters

Part polemicist, part unabashed cheerleader, Tom Peters says the future of business will be driven by those who laugh in the face of today’s play-it-safe corporate mind-set and fearlessly allow themselves to "screw up, think weird, and throw out the old business playbooks."

Of course, he’s always had a sensationalist streak. With the success of his best-selling books, In Search of Excellence, The Brand You, and half-dozen others, Peters invented the manager-as-rock-star ethos of the 1980s, and the "Me, Inc." entrepreneurialism of the 1990s. The Los Angeles Times has called him "the father of the postmodern corporation." And today, companies pay the sixty-year-old rabble-rouser up to $50,000 for a one-hour speech in hopes of gleaning some secret to success in twenty-first-century business. In Peters’s eyes, tomorrow’s increasingly messy and chaotic world belongs
to those who embrace "creative destruction"; nimble, creative innovators who go beyond the production of mere products and services to master the all-powerful customer experience.

RICK MATHIESON: One of your major themes is the power of disruptive technology. How do you think the emergence of mobile technologies and pervasive computing can best be put to use to enhance the way organizations operate?

TOM PETERS: The most important thing I can say is, 'I don’t know.' And anybody who says they do know is an idiot,
and you may quote me on that. And what I mean by this is, I think the change is so profound, particularly relative to the extremely young men and extremely young women who will be peopling organizations ten years from now, that I think we’ve got to make the whole damn thing up anew. I refuse to consider that I’m the genius who has mapped the path out.

I think I’ve said some things that are not silly. But as Peter Drucker said, we’re still looking for the Copernicus of the New Organization. I quote a lot of people, like David Weinberger, who I adore, who wrote this book called Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and Howard Rheingold with Smart Mobs, and so on. I think that there are a whole lot of very smart people who are painting some very interesting pictures right now. But to say that somebody has painted the correct picture is a gross exaggeration, and it sure as hell isn’t me.

RM: Some of your most exciting themes have always been around branding and creating memorable customer experiences. Today, when companies look at new technology, how should we move the discussion about technology from creating efficiency to creating experiences—the value that technology can bring to your brand?

TP: Obviously, even though it’s technologically driven, Apple/Pixar has always created great experiences, albeit at
a price.

Look, we’re moving to a more and more ethereal society where the manufactured product is less significant than before. And as we continue to shift these very expensive jobs offshore, the question, the issue, the struggle is, "What’s left?" And presumably what’s left increasingly is the very high value–added stuff, and that value-added stuff is the stuff Steve Jobs has understood since the beginning of time.

RM: In your recent book, Re-Imagine: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age, you write about your own tombstone and wanting to be remembered as "a player." What does that mean in the disruptive age when wireless is redefining just about everything?

TP: I’m older than you are; that’s the easy answer. People at sixty think about things that people who are significantly
less therein don’t. I’m almost in a sappy way taking advantage of my age here. But I think the big message is: This whole new technology thing—-whether we’re talking Napster, whether we’re talking the Recording Industry of America, whether we’re talking wireless, whether we’re talking about war with terrorists—-[means] we’re engaged in this exceptionally energetic process of redefinition, which will generate some number of winners, and lots of losers. And participation vigorously therein is what it’s all about.

I look at all the people who are sour, including Silicon Valley people who thought God put them on Earth to make $1 million by the age of twenty-six, if not $10 million, and I say, how cool to be part of this. I love some of those who have made a trillion dollars and some who are less well-known who have lost a trillion dollars, but were vigorously engaged in the fray. [It’s all] about those in the fray at a time of truly dramatic change. Something quite exceptional is going down. In the best sense of the word-—and not said with naivete or rose-colored glasses—-it’s a very cool time to be alive.

Branding Unbound by Rick Mathieson - Part IV

Q&A

Seth Godin: Permission Marketing and "My Own Private Idaho"

"Permission Marketing." "Purple Cows." "Idea Viruses."

As the progenitor of literally dozens of branding’s most popular buzzwords, Seth Godin is virtually responsible for the entire lexicon of modern marketing.

A one-time Yahoo marketing VP, self-proclaimed "change agent," and author of bestsellers from Permission Marketing to Unleashing the Idea Virus to All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World, Godin has long argued that successful companies must stifle the "antichange reflex" to build brands and create products that practically sell themselves.

Of course, harnessing change takes on new importance in an era when mobile technologies promise to extend the brand experience as never before.

RICK MATHIESON: Invoking Darwin, you’ve said the companies that are best able to adapt to change—-to "make something happen"—-will thrive. But you simultaneously argue that it’s the small ideas and the low-cost, low-risk tests-—evolutionary steps versus evolutionary steps-—that often result in the largest ROI. What does that mean to companies that might be thinking about using mobile technologies to competitive advantage?

SETH GODIN: I don’t think there is such a thing as revolution in nature. I think nature just does evolution, and it’s
revolution that gets all the good publicity. But it’s pretty rare. Today, business is about irrevocable, irresistible, accelerating change that every company is wrestling with. It’s about how innovation—-mobile Internet technology or anything else-—can change the ground rules of an entire industry.

What I’m telling companies is, don’t sit around waiting until you have the perfect solution, because the perfect is the enemy of the good. In the enterprise space, I can easily imagine a sales force with fifty people, where you give ten people the sort of mobile toolkit that has the potential to increase their efficiency and gives them the freedom to test and to try things and to keep evolving. Pretty soon the other forty people will be yelling and clamoring and saying they want that stuff too. That’s how change happens. And the companies that experiment like that will be able to identify what works, what doesn’t, and what could lead to fundamental new ways to do business.

RM: What does this mean for consumer goods companies-—the Pepsi-Colas of the world--who might be exploring ways to use the wireless Web to create remarkable experiences?

SG: The bad news about packaged goods companies is, they built their business model around something that was true a hundred years ago. Just because they were really successful and really profitable selling sugar water, doesn’t mean that that’s a guarantee it’s going to be true in the future. Procter & Gamble is sucking wind, and will probably do so for the foreseeable future, because the mantra of supermarkets and television aren’t what’re driving our economy anymore, but that’s what drives their companies. So when I look at, "Can I use my cell phone to buy something from a Coke machine?" I think that’s sort of a cool innovation, and it’s probably going to happen. But it’s not going to change the dynamic of their business in a big way, in my humble opinion. If I were one of those packaged goods companies, I’d be scrambling as hard as I can to say, "How can we be in a completely different business five years from now?" If we’re going to be in a completely different business five years from now, we better start now trying lots of little things so that we know what the big thing’s going to be when we need it.

RM: What’s an example of an innovation that could attract customers in the wireless age?

SG: Well, I can tell you what I’d like. I call it My Own Private Idaho. I want a device, maybe using Bluetooth, that I keep in my pocket. And I want it to tell every merchant, when I walk into their store, where I’ve been—-sort of like [an Internet] cookie for the real world.

So now, if I’m in the mall and I just spent a fortune at Abercrombie and Fitch, and I walk in to the Gap, all those guys with the headsets instantly get word that I’m a big important customer, and they drop everything and run over and fawn over me like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. And then when I’m done browsing, I just throw the merchandise I want in the bag, and I leave—-because the system knows who I am, and it knows how to charge me, the way Amazon remembers my one-click preferences, and I’m on to the next store.

I want to subscribe to that, and I will gladly permit the businesses my mobile carrier signs up with to know everything about me. I insist they know everything about me.

RM: As you know, these sorts of scenarios are becoming reality, sometimes connecting directly to consumers via mobile devices, sometimes transparently through RFID and other technologies. Why should companies be looking at wireless as a brand enabler?

SG: [As soon as businesses realize that wireless is] an asset that increases in value, as opposed to a wasting asset or a
decreasing asset that you use up, then we end up with a whole different business dynamic.

In the future, the stuff that used to work isn’t going to. That’s nature. The early adopters in mobile are the ones who pay all the bills, because after you get to critical mass, it’s all gravy. What do early adopters want? They want to save time, and they want to save money. If you can’t figure out how to deliver that, wireless technologies aren’t going to help. The secret is trying small pilots, new experiments, to see where things might go, so you can ride the next wave of innovation. Because as long as change is the only constant, evolving businesses will always win.

Branding Unbound by Rick Mathieson - Part III

Q&A
Christopher Locke: "Cluetrain Manifesto" for the Mobile Age

Not everyone believes mass-market advertising translates to the wireless world. Just ask renegade marketing strategist and dyspeptic malcontent Christopher Locke, coauthor of The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, and author of Gonzo Marketing, Winning Through Worst Practices.

The problem, says Locke, is that in an increasingly interconnected world of the wireline-—and now, wireless-—Internet, new communities of consumers are growing immune to corporate pitches and officially sanctioned marketing-speak, much less mainstream news and media.

As a result, "the artist formally known as advertising must do a 180," contends Locke. The goal is market advocacy-—tapping into, listening to, and even forming alliances with emerging online and wireless markets, and transforming advertising from clever ways of saying, "I want your money" to "We share your interests."
_________________________________________________________
From The Cluetrain Manifesto, The End of Business As Usual, by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger. Courtesy of Perseus Books.

Branding Unbound

RICK MATHIESON: What do Gonzo Marketing and Cluetrain Manifesto mean in a mobile age where the Internet travels with us?

CHRISTOPHER LOCKE: The big shift here is away from oneway communications from large organizations—-whether they were media organizations or big companies or the government, telling people, "This is the way it is." We’ve moved from broadcast to point-to-point, peer-to-peer, group-to-group, where it isn’t just a question about beaming out advertising. It’s people who can go where they want, buy what is attractive to them.

You had a little of this with the remote control and TV, which bothered the hell out of broadcasters at first—-"What if they switch away from the ads?" Well, this is orders of magnitude beyond that.

Now, people are talking to each other about your statements, creating online networks about any particular topic they’re passionate about, and saying, "Yeah, well, we don’t buy it," or, "We have a different view," which you never had before the Internet.

The fact that people can communicate with each other, that they can deconstruct and analyze and comment on the official channels of communication, is shifting power away from companies and the media, and more to masses that are self-selecting into micromarkets.

Look at blogging. With the wireless Internet, you’re starting to see a lot more real-time commentary and analysis that’s flying by so fast that if you’re outside of it, and you’re just reading the newspaper, you’re just getting the news, while another couple of million people have already compared it to ninety-six other events and cross-indexed
them, whether it’s the Middle East or whatever these folks are interested in.

RM: How does this shift hamper or help the objectives of marketers?

CL: Marketers are largely wedded to ideas that are intrinsic to the broadcast paradigm. They’ve never known anything else. From the perspective of gathering an audience in broadcast, you want the biggest possible audience. You want the highest Nielsen ratings. And from the perspective of advertisers, you want the real easy jingle. You want the vanilla message that can be delivered many, many, many times, and goes into your limbic system, so you go out like
an android and buy Downey Fabric Softener.

Marketers have made the mistake of thinking the Internet is like TV, when there are fundamental differences of interconnection and intercommentary and conversation. This is a technology that enables person-to-person and many-to-many conversations, and those conversations really define and characterize the medium in a way that just doesn’t bear a lot of resemblance to broadcast or television at all.

Marketers—-television is what they knew, so they employed the same sort of techniques, the same sort of shotgun, get the message out there, get the key points, get them to click the animated banner with the monkey who’s running back and forth, or whatever.

In the first blush, some of the techniques had a certain appeal because they were novelties. But the novelty wore off after the third time you’d clicked the monkey, and it was like, "Oh, I get it. This is just the same old crap," even with all this "permission marketing" stuff.

RM: In fact, you contend that online audiences are self-segmenting into micromarkets, where, as a marketer, you can’t really approach them on your own agenda anymore. You have to talk to them about theirs.

CL: Yes. Used to be, to start a television station, or a radio station, you had to sign up these big sponsors with highticket items—-car dealers, car companies, and so on. It worked in that medium. Here, the market is fragmented. But what’s happened is that the big companies just repeat the same stuff online as they do everywhere else. You have NBC, ABC, CBS, all hawking the same homogenized crap. But that’s the beauty of the Internet. It’s just not one place, it’s scattered all over. And audiences dig around and turn each other on to places that they like: "Well, have you
heard what this guy is saying, or that woman is blogging," and so on.

The community that you volitionally participate in is always more true than a segment a marketer places you in. And that’s the power of these micromarkets. They’re not demographic abstractions. They’re actual communities of discourse. Communities that are really talking to each other, and are not based just on interest, but passionate interest in how to make clothes for your kid, or how to powerboat,
or snowboard, or write Java code, or thousands and millions of other obsessions.

If you approach those kinds of communities saying, "Hey, buy our new tires for your SUV." It’s like, "Huh? Where the f—-k did you come from?" It’s like a guy walking into a party where people are in little groups around the room, talking about stuff that they’re interested in, and here comes the used car salesman who wants to tell you, "Hey, I’m with Joe’s Pontiac, and boy, we’ve got some great specials this week." How long would that guy last at a party? They would throw him out the damn door.

RM: So what’s the alternative? How can companies effectively communicate with, and capitalize on, these 'networks'
or micromarkets?

CL: Start by looking inside your own company at interests that your employees have—at passions. Not about your product. Not about the nine-to-five work. But what are your people really interested in? What do they care about? What do they do with their spare time?

Find those interests, because they are intellectual capital that has been left lying in the dirt, unrecognized. It's what they want to get the next paycheck for, so that they can go buy the motorboat, or the snowboard, or the trip to Vail to go skiing. Find those interests among your people. Figure out which ones would map into your market in general.

Then, go out on the Web and find similar passions and interests represented by Web sites that are doing a good job, that have a demonstrable ability to be engaging—-funny, well-written, graphically adept—-and form relationships with those sites. Give them money. Give them technical resources.

It's almost like third-world development, where you grow them and ink legal relationships with these Web sites, so that you can intersect the people inside your company with that outside network, so when people hook up together, they're not talking to shills from Ford or Motorola or whoever. They're talking to people that are talking the
same language about stuff they're interested in, and by the way, they’re also meeting actual real people in those companies that they begin to have a feel for.

At some point, people say, "Hey, I need help with this or that," and a conversation starts that can end in a big sale. Along the way, you’ll probably earn the kind of brand equity you’ve always wanted, in a way you never expected.

There are people who are highly, highly motivated and enthusiastic about certain aspects of the world, and there are usually products or services relating to those people in some way or another. Take fly-fishing. Advertising fly-fishing stuff on television probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. But online, a company can sponsor or underwrite a
fly-fishing contest, seminars, or an excursion, or tips on the best fishing spots this week. That can be very powerful.

But trying to get a bunch of sites to adhere to your notion of what you want the customer to hear is trying to drive the square peg into the round hole with a bigger hammer. And if we’re not careful, that’s what will happen here. It used to be that really intelligent people saw what was going on and were attracted to the Internet because it was different. Now, you turn it on and it’s not different at all.

It’s like turning on the television. Yeah, I can get my flight information faster, and I can get my news without having to get those wet newspapers off the front porch. But the really radical stuff that’s possible in this medium is in danger of falling by the wayside.

It’s so much more powerful to go to these sites that are out there, give them some money to help them make their trip. And in each case, the money is a tiny fraction of what it would cost to do traditional advertising. It’s about going out there to build goodwill, to build relationships, to build, ultimately, not just a place to advertise, but a place to participate in those communities, and bring new ideas into your company-—real intellectual capital-—and to get people
really understanding what the company is doing, rather than just saying, "Buy my product."

RM: How will the mobile Internet give this trend pervasiveness?

CL: As the connection gets more ubiquitous, as you’re freed from the desktop, as you have the ability to be more constantly connected, you can tap into your network anytime.

It’s getting easier to go to your blogger, and say, "Hey, I’m at the corner of Walk and Don’t Walk in New York City, and I’m looking for a good Chinese restaurant." It’s fast enough that six people could come back and say, "Oh, you’ve got to go to Hop Sing’s."

That’s getting closer to real time, and guess what? It’s more fun. Because somebody else that you trust can say, "Oh, you know, Charlie’s telling you to go to Hop Sing’s, but actually, that sucks. What you really want to do is walk three more blocks and take a left, and go to this other place that nobody knows about, but it’s fantastic."

It’s like an instant, always-on community giving you information that you trust because you’ve trusted them in other areas.

RM: A reputation system built on some kind of 21st-century version of the Old Boys’ Club?

CL: Yes, that’s a good analogy. Or The Alumni Association. You go to a new city, and you say, "Charles, where do you
think we can get a good cigar?" You’re going to trust Charles because he’s from your class. You’ve got more tie-in to him than if he’s some guy wearing a bow tie talking at you too loud.

RM: Hmmm...sounds great, but it’s so grassroots. Is going Gonzo really a viable marketing strategy?

CL: No company in its right mind is going to shift its entire media budget to Gonzo Marketing.

But a lot of companies are spending a lot of money on corporate Web sites and not really getting much out of it. They can’t take these sites down. It would be like being delisted on the stock market. It would be very bad, so they are hostage to paying lots of money to keep these sites up. They’re not meeting their ROI expectations at all, and so what are they going to do?

I think a lot of these companies are scanning the horizon for alternatives. Gonzo Marketing is a really scary alternative. I think the classic company that is more desperate and has smarter folks is going to pick a few test steps to check this out, and I think they’re going to do it very quietly.

This is not something you can do by formula, by algorithm. You’re really going to have work by trial and error. On the other hand, I think Gonzo Marketing is only alternative because the dynamics that are embedded inherently in the medium are absolutely nonnegotiable.

Unfortunately, many companies are out there trying to shove their view on these communities, and I’m disappointed in what I’ve seen in terms of what could have been done, and what has been done. If we’re not careful, it will be more like Disney World than it is like the United Nations. I don’t know which one is more of a joke.

TRAIN OF THOUGHT

The Cluetrain Manifesto burst onto the scene as ninety-five theses on the Web, and became a bestselling book that challenged corporate assumptions about business in the digital world. As that world goes wireless, a little Cluetrain, revisited:

• Markets are conversations.
• Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
• Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
• The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
• As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.
• People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors.
• There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.
• Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.
• In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business—-the sound of mission statements and brochures-—will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th-century French court.
• Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves.
• Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.
• Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.

Branding Unbound by Rick Mathieson - Part II

Q&A
Don Peppers: 1:1 Marketing Goes Wireless

As an influential thought-leader whose groundbreaking books include Enterprise One-to-One: Tools for Competing in the Interactive Age and Return on Customer: The Revolutionary New Way to Maximize the Value of Your Customers, Peppers advises a Who’s Who of international marketers—AT&T, Ford, and 3M, among others—who count on him for insight on using technology to build unbreakable customer loyalty.

But that proposition is about to become increasingly complex, he says, as the convergence of wireless technologies and global positioning systems transforms the notion
of reaching customers where they live.

RICK MATHIESON: How will mobility change our idea of what constitutes the "brand experience?"

DON PEPPERS: The most compelling aspect of mobility is the continuous management of evolving relationships with individual consumers. You can be continuously connected with a customer, not just when he’s sitting in front of a computer. You can actually get feedback, and real transactions, on a real-time basis—it’s as if you’re tethered to your customer’s life. And that means there is tremendous opportunity in using mobility to increase the value of each customer, and your value to him or her.

Today, most of us can barely imagine life without a cell phone. Consumers are getting used to always-on communications, and those communications are gaining utility. As a result, companies that provide services and maintain relationships with customers are going to have to participate in this channel. And yet, companies are going to have to do it in a way that is nonintrusive, because nothing will give a customer a bigger red face with respect to a company than
if that company begins to interrupt him or her in order to try to sell them stuff.

Martha [Rogers, my coauthor] and I have a new concept in Return on Customer. Our argument is that for a company, it’s the customers that create all value. And like any asset, customers ought to be evaluated for what kind of return we get on them. Our central mission becomes finding ways to increase short-term profits, while promoting behavior that increases the long-term value of that customer. And usually, that can only happen when we help customers understand how to get the most value out of us. It happens when we earn the customer’s trust, treat the customer the way they’d like to be treated, and actually act in their best interests in a way that’s mutually beneficial.

For instance, if I’m Ameritrade, and I have a customer who trades three or four times a day when he’s in his office, but he doesn’t trade when he’s traveling, I’d strongly consider giving him a BlackBerry and a wireless trading account. It’s a win/win for both of us. The customer gets convenience, and the company gains potential new revenues.

There’s also a role for mobility in connecting the mobile salesperson and delivery person with the mother ship, so to speak. Whether we’re talking about the phone repairman who has access to his customer’s records, or the delivery driver who reconfigures the product on the fly based on initial customer feedback, mobility has a great deal to do with the intimacy with which any business can serve its customers.

RM: Many think mobility will enable further disintermediation of services. But you envision the rise of "Data Aggregation Agents" that enable companies to deliver 1:1 services based on my needs and location—as long as they play by my rules. What’s the business model for these DAAs?

DP: Instead of giving out personal information to every vendor that I might deal with in the mobile medium—my news service, my broker, my concierge, my travel agent--I’m going to want one entity that remembers my preferences and needs, but that provides me anonymity.

One entity that knows my account numbers for all the different companies I deal with, across a lot of different platforms and different mobile media. And that entity is something we call the "Data Aggregation Agent."

The DAA is going to simplify the consumer’s life because it will save them a great deal of time and energy. I’m not going to want to fill in my speed dial numbers, my friends’ names and e-mail addresses, my credit card numbers, my social security numbers, my everything, for everybody. The DAA will store all that information for me in one place, and then partition out data to companies as I see fit. It’s just a hypothetical, science fiction possibility, of course. But I think it’s a compelling new business model for the future, and could have a tremendous impact on the nature of competition in this medium.

RM: You’re talking about some pretty valuable information. Seems like a lot of companies would fight over playing the role of DAA.

DP: You bet they will. Already, there are a lot of infantile battles going on among businesses that all think that they can be Data Aggregation Agents. A very simple example was when Boeing started selling airlines on the idea of connecting airplanes to the Internet. Are you surprised by the fact that American Airlines doesn’t want its high-value business passengers dialing up on the Internet and connecting suddenly to the Boeing Web site?

The same exact battle is going to play out in telematics on the road. We’ve met with companies in the automotive manufacturing space, as well as companies in the mobile communications electronics space, and they have the same basic designs on the customer: I want that customer to be my customer.

But in the end, everybody can’t win. The most compelling business model is one where the consumer gets the value. And the value I’m getting if I’m a consumer is convenience, relevance, and not having to fill out the same form or keep track of different account numbers. So there are a lot of reasons why the Data Aggregation Agent model is
going to work. And that role could be filled by a wireless carrier like Verizon. It could be filled by an airline. It could be AOL or Yahoo. Or it could be filled by completely new players.

RM: As wireless moves into the in-store experience, what opportunities will there be to maximize the experience for customers?

DP: I think RFID technology, in particular, has a great deal of potential for that. The science fiction future of RFID is that I have my credit card in my wallet, I walk into the grocery store, I put a bunch of shopping products in my bags and I walk out the door and take them home, and I’m automatically billed for them. I don’t need to stop at the checkout counter, and I don’t have to do anything but walk out with my products. I think that will be highly desirable for consumers. But there is a big-brother aspect to the technology that is awakening some of the Luddites in the business, who say, gee, I don’t know if I want companies tracking every movement that I make, and so forth. But I think on balance, consumer convenience is going to be the trump card. That said, whether it’s in-store, or out in the world via consumer cell phones, companies will have to be very careful about how they apply wireless technologies.

In this medium, you’re playing with fire when it comes to privacy. It’s impossible to architect the regulatory structure in such a way to ensure that you’re not going to get hit with some kind of privacy problem.

The best defense is to adopt a holistic view of your business. In my conception, every business would visualize their service in terms of treating their customers the way you’d want to be treated. The golden rule of marketing, if you will. With that in mind, you simply can’t go wrong.

RM: The same applies to 1:1 mobile advertising, no doubt.

DP: If you’re driving down the street and an ad comes on because you’re a block away from McDonald’s, you’re going to be extremely irritated. And if you have to listen to an ad before you place a call, you’re going to be pissed.

But unlike a lot of folks, I don’t think that means push is going to always be excluded from people’s requirements-—as long as it’s pushed at the customer’s initiation and doesn’t trespass on the legitimate use of their time.

For instance, if I execute a trade on my cell phone, and you’re my online brokerage, I don’t mind you piggybacking an ad for an offer I might be interested in at the bottom of an order confirmation. Or if you’re Amazon, you might recommend an additional book based on my profile. Or American Airlines might send an e-mail about cheap tickets
I can buy because they haven’t sold enough seats to the locations on my preferred destination list.

I can see a lot of potential for that kind of push message—as long as the customer says it’s okay to send them. Because whether we’re talking about an ad message, a service, or a transaction, it’s all about using mobile technologies to add value to our customers’ lives based on what they want, where—and when—they want it.

If you get it right, you win big. If you get it wrong, you’re history.

Branding Unbound by Rick Mathieson - Part I

Branding Unbound: The Future Of Advertising, Sales, And The Brand Experience In The Wireless Age
by Rick Mathieson
AMACOM – July 2005
244 Pages – 0814472877

This July 2005, Rick Mathieson published Branding Unbound on the application of wireless technology on marketing. In this book, he features several question and answer sessions at the end of each chapter with well-known business people. This excerpt consists of five of the Q&A sessions hosted by Mathieson.