Pet Branding
In Youngme Moon’s latest title, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd, the Harvard Business School professor mentions a case study covering Sony’s robotic dog, AIBO (Artificial Intelligence roBOt, or “pal” in Japanese). The ability of the robot to follow commands isn’t what makes the case study remarkable; rather, it was the AIBO not following a master’s orders that make the product special and relate-able to the importance of being “human” or “pet like” as a brand.
Make “The Wait” Less Boring
The iPhone 4 is dropping tomorrow, and if you read my Virtual Lines post from last week, or remember the past iPhone launches, you know there is going to be an insane line up of folks just dying to get their paws on the new “it” gadget. There are more opportunities as a result of the lines than meets the “i” (get it?).
Offline Online Shopping
We shop online, sure, but how come we don’t shop offline online? Confused? Don’t be, here’s something I’d expect e-commerce based retailers to start doing soon.
How New York and other cities are not already blanketed by Wi-Fi hot spots is beyond me. But rather than look at this lack of connectivity as a burden, I’ll look at it as an opportunity for online businesses. For this idea, we’ll look at Amazon.com, the online retail giant. Pop up shops have been trending for some time now, but I’m not certain there have been offline online pop-up shops. In order to do an online pop-up shop, you need to be online, of course. Making it an offline online experience comes from offering Wi-Fi for consumers in various areas of cities or towns. While you would pay rent for a physical pop-up shop, you wouldn’t pay rent if you provided internet access to say, a park. The park belongs to the City and people are free to congregate during park hours, so all Amazon needs to do is provide the internet access for people to get online and pair it with an incentive to shop offline online.
Virtual Lines
The upcoming release of the iPhone 4 has me thinking about how insanely long the lines will be for the early adopters who pre-ordered Apple’s latest “it” product. The formation of physical lines seems so 1995 with the technology we have today. Here’s an idea I came up with that just may work to resolve queuing up outside the Apple Stores the night before June 24th.
The idea will work with location based services like foursquare or Gowalla. Rather than lining up and waiting for things like the iPhone, you’ll simply check into a virtual line.
Make It “Like” This
I think the process of becoming of a fan, or “Liking” a brand on Facebook is too simplistic. While I understand making processes simpler is of value (as opposed to more complex), I think the “Liking” process can be tweaked to enhance the segmentation of fans (or is it “likers?” - so awkward!) by adding one additional step before becoming a fan.
The additional step I recommend for Facebook to implement deals with segmenting who fans are. For example, you can simply click “Like” followed by “Be a Fan of [insert name]” or you’ll be able to click “Like” followed by a step to insert another code or answer another question. The ability of the second step will allow brands to have fans sign up who will either have a certain code to insert (maybe for a secret promotion) or a question to answer before becoming a fan.
To give an example, we’ll look at Starbucks, a brand that has a pretty tight grasp on social media. They have just over 2 million fans for the Frappuccino drink alone! While Facebook will show you where these sugar loving fans live by region, it won’t show you fans by location. So if the Starbucks in Union Square (on 17th St. & Union Square West) wants to know who considers that store their “home Starbucks location,” allowing the person to tell you upon becoming a fan is a huge help for Starbucks. Once the Facebook user answers the question of their home location they will be placed into a micro fan page for that location while still maintaining their fan ship for the overall brand. So there may be 2,000,000 Frappuccino lovers, but only 1,531 of them enjoy the drink at the Union Square West location.
With that information, Starbucks will be able to engage with certain individuals based on their location. If they want to run an in-store promotion in certain locations but not in others, telling their 900,000+ followers on Twitter isn’t effective, but telling their local fans on the micro pages will be effective.
Location is not the only way the second step can be used, but it is perhaps one of the more important segmentation factors for tons of brands, especially national or global brands. The micro pages created as a result will allow fans to connect and communicate on a more local level to rival the location based service, foursquare.
Focus on L, M & O
If you ask two people with the same job title at two different companies what they do at work, they are likely to tell you they do A, B & C and X, Y & Z. Six letters out of the twenty-six letter alphabet will describe what these two people do for a living. If we generalize outside of the two person example, we’ll see most people are doing A, B & C and X, Y & Z, so shouldn’t you be doing L, M & O too?
Rarely does anybody ever tell you they do L, M & O. Maybe they aren’t brazen enough to admit they are doing something out of the ordinary, but whatever the reason, I think they have the wrong fear in mind. I’d be more afraid of admitting to focusing on A, B, C, X, Y & Z rather than the other three letters that will distinguish you from the pack.
Define what A, B, C, X, Y, & Z stand for in your industry, and do them, they are still important, but they won’t differentiate you from your competition or other applicants after your job. Finding your own L, M & O shouldn’t be hard - just find things you don’t like about your job/industry, and fix them in your own way. There has to be three things (one for each letter) you do not agree with within your industry or at your job, right? I’d bet there are more than three, but for now, pick the three agitating you the most and make change happen.
Put the change (L, M & O) you made on your résumé. “Change” helps you get ahead, not the all-too-familiar A, B, C, X, Y & Z.
