How far can you go on luck?

How much does luck play into a company’s survival when confronted with a adverse business climate?

Author, Jim Collins explores this idea in his book, Great By Choice.

“The successful companies,” Collins explains in his book, “and the comparisons that were studied both got luck, good and bad, in comparable amounts.”  He continues by saying that, “luck does not cause 10X success.”  10X is the authors way of quantifying and defining the successful companies as measured against their industry competitors.

Collins goes on to write that companies that continuously perform in all business climates “use difficulty as a catalyst to deepen purpose, recommit to values, increase discipline, respond with creativity, and heighten productive paranoia. Resilience, not luck, is the signature of greatness.”

The Neverending Debate for Marketers

The Power of a Story

There is no better way to talk about the power of a story…than with a story.  I’m a firm believer in this type of marketing.  The research presented here backs it up and is quite convincing.  Turning a message into a story is a creative challenge but the effort is well worth it.

Additionally, I’ve added another resource from Harvard Business Review that talks about how to use data in your story.

The Customer Journey

The Chinese philosopher credited with founding the philosophical system of Taoism said, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”

So much of the customer journey has changed with the adoption of smartphones and mobile computing over the last five years.  22% of the global population owns a smartphone or connected device and this growing trend has shifted the balance of power from brands to consumers.

68% of connected consumers tend to trust the opinions and reviews that others post online, according to research from Nielson.  This has an immediate impact for every industry.  As evidence of this, a Harvard Business study that covers seven years of Yelp reviews concludes that a one star bump in a restaurant’s overall rating (based on five stars) impacts revenue 5%-9%.

You can’t ignore a prospect without risking a blow to your reputation and business.  Consumers have a loud voice and they’re willing to flex their muscles to make sure that they are heard.

The paths that your customers take are not linear and what they expect on their journey is a personalized experience.  They’re willing to provide personal data to brands, but brands need to be able to aggregate, synthesize and convert that data into meaningful experiences that deepen the relationship.

Understand that first step in the journey you want your customers to take and start thinking about how you’re going to build lasting, meaningful relationships.

What Makes the Best Infographics So Convincing

This powerful article highlights the methodology and rigor behind some of the best infographics.  According to Jay Lauf, publisher and president of the business site Quartz, “A big piece of the storytelling is finding new ways to tell stories that aren’t just necessarily the flat, written word.”

Infographics are a great way to visually articulate an idea or message that will resonates stronger with an audience in a way that the “flat, written word” never could.

Thomas Jefferson as a Tactician

Logical thought, power of appeal and tactfulness never fail to command attention and respect. It has always been thus, and it will unquestionably so remain. Many really able and brilliant men, however, lack balance and the faculty of calculation. They are too often swayed by emotions, and their intellectual powers, which otherwise might exert a controlling influence, are thus weakened, and often result in failure. True greatness in a man is gauged by what he accomplished in life, and the impress he left upon his fellow men. It does not consist of one act, of even of many, but rather their effort upon the times in which he lived, and how long they endure after the actor is gone from the throng of the living.

At the bar, in the pulpit, in the medical profession, and especially in political life, tact is the sine qua non to highest degree of individual success.

The Writings of Thomas Jefferson

Transitioning to a Digital Business Model

In the last decade we learned that many businesses couldn’t handle the transition when consumers started demanding more content digitally.

You saw it first with music.

Steve Jobs rescued music publishers. The new terms weren’t as profitable for publishers afterwards–a common theme that plays out across other industries.  Everyone that wanted to consume music digitally, prior to the launch of the iPod, downloaded it illegally.  It’s an awful position to be in if you own a record label

With newspapers, those that had valuable content, like the Wall Street Journal, had a clearer path to surviving and profiting.  Discovering that path was ultimately a difficult journey where publishers played with several pricing strategies before discovering that pay-per-view subscribers are an entirely different audience than print subscribers. As an example of growth, today the WSJ charges $275/year for digital content in comparison to $119 in 2008.

Publishers that are still struggling haven’t figured out how to monetize their content or their customers don’t value that content the same in a digital format.

New competitors also entered the market and provide content free.

Think about the Huffington Post, an all digital news publisher that doesn’t have the lag of legacy printing costs dragging it down; they were acquired by AOL for $315 million in 2011 in a deal that many thought overvalued the asset. Conversely, the Washington Post, one of the most storied brands in journalism, sold to Amazon founded Jeff Bezos for only $250 million in late 2013.

Simultaneously, you started to see the digital transition attack the brick and mortar video rental businesses.  Netflix decimated Blockbuster.  First by outflanking them with a more traditional DVD mail subscription model and finally with streaming content.  At the same time new competitors entered the market like Hulu. Others, like Comcast, adapted to the new trends with their OnDemand offering.

Book stores went through the same disruption.  Amazon became the disrupter by selling a digital reading device, known as the Kindle, which performed excellent in sunlight so you could still enjoy reading at the beach.  By selling the Kindle at a low enough price point Amazon was able to build a large enough community–and communities are king in the digital content world. It was reported that Kindle owners spend 55% more a year than other customers at Amazon.

With all these transitions, the main obstacle comes down to your ability to monetize your content on a new platform, introduce new products to your installed user base, and develop new sales channels that complement your offering.

Sometimes this involves rethinking your entire business.

I’ve seen this transition take place up close in the education industry, where textbooks are quickly being replaced by iPads and digital curriculum.  Education is not an industry with a rich history of change.

This disruption changed the landscape and killed off those that weren’t quick enough or smart enough to manage the transition.  It also brought in a host of new competitors.

Finding new ways to monetize your content for a digital world isn’t a transition everyone survives.

Responsive Email Design

Designing a great email template that renders well in all web, desktop and mobile email clients can be a challenge.  It’s absolutely necessary that you put as much energy into your message as you do in how your message will be displayed.

In the United States, 38% of emails are opened on a mobile device every day and most of those are being opened on either the Apple iPhone (23%) or iPad (11%).   Unlike Android devices, Apple devices resize a current email to fit on the screen while Android devices may require you to scroll to the right to see the entire message.

70% of people delete an email on their mobile if it doesn’t look good and 55% of people don’t click on the “View in Browser” button.  Most startling, only 2% of people will reopen an email on another device.  With these kinds of numbers, you’re loosing a large part of your audience if your design doesn’t work in all inboxes.

Microsoft Outlook on a Windows machine seems to be the trickiest email client to design for.  I’ve found that separating your content into nested tables allows you to control how the email displays across all platforms the best but some techniques still won’t work in Outlook.  Often, CSS will be stripped out of the email when it’s rendered so there are several methods you can use to manage this.

If you’re having trouble with your design, the best thing to do is to use a template that is proven to work across different types of email and then adapt it for your needs.  You’ll have to do a lot of testing to be confident your design works.

There are enough resources out there for someone with intermediate HTML and CSS skills to design a great looking template.

Here are a handful of resources that I found that really helped me with my design.

RESOURCES:

Email Template plus Code – many different technique used here

Responsive Design for Mobile Rendering

Coding Mobile Emails

Design Articles and Guides from ExactTarget

HTML Boilerplate with Code

Starbucks Example

Tom’s Example

Connections 2013 – Indianapolis

September 17-19, 2013 in Indianapolis, IN, ExactTarget, now a Salesforce.com company, held their annual interactive marketing conference.

This was the fifth year I’ve attended the conference and I have always been impressed with the production CEO Scott Dorsey and team put on.

I went there looking for more information on device responsive communications, or simply put, the ability to create content that responds to the device you’re viewing the message on. There was a lot of talk about this topic and ExactTarget has a lot of resources on their website for those interested.

Overall, it was a solid message to marketers. ExactTarget, as part of Salesforce.com, has tighter product integration and a more developed offering that goes beyond just e-mail. Marketers should be excited about the “1:1 future.”

ExactTarget talked about making your brand into a “customer company” and getting out in front of trends and being more agile.

Dorsey said, “Customers have expectations and when those expectations aren’t met they have choices.” The focus was then on ways of meeting and exceeding those expectations during the conference.

The essence of the ExactTarget product portfolio is to engage customers and prospects in real time across many different types of media and technologies in a way that grows the relationship in a meaningful way.

The big product reveal was the Marketing Cloud–which helps organizations see a single view of the customer. It handles any “spectrum of knowledge you have on a contact.”

This was demonstrated by COO, Scott McCorkle.

Scott meticulously took 5,000 marketers through all the features using Red Box’s marketing playbook, a brand most people are familiar with. It was impressive. Once all your data systems are connected in the marketing cloud you have unlimited ability to engage customers in real-time. It’s the promise land for all marketers.

Don’t be surprised if you’re walking by a Red Box and they send you a text message that a movie you may be interested in is available 200 feet in front of you.

Building the marketing cloud for your organization using ExactTarget products looked like a very complicated integration process, but that wasn’t discussed much.

Speaker and author Jim Collins was there. He urged people to create a “stop doing list.” After a couple minutes of thought I added “create a stop doing list” to my stop doing list.

One of the statistics that I heard several times was that 70% of a sale is complete before the sales rep ever gets involved. That’s evolved pretty quickly over the last five or six years for B2Bs. Because consumers are doing more research online and brands are publishing more content to help them, It puts more pressure on marketing to communicate to customers farther along in the decision process and provide customers what they need to make their decision.

As for content marketing, the message was to stop focusing on thought leadership and more on delivering the right piece of content for the right person at the right time. If 70% of the B2B sale is going to happen through marketing, this seems logical.

It will be interesting to see how Salesforce.com and ExactTarget work together going forward and especially how the DreamForce and Connections conferences evolve.

Bruce Lee, Blue Label and Branding

Bruce Lee was recreated using CGI Technology. This video was sponsored by Johnnie Walker and targeted at the Chinese market; but here’s the catch, Bruce Lee didn’t drink.

There is some healthy debate about whether this is a good fit for Johnnie Walker. The technology to recreate Bruce Lee is amazing and it’s a great way to promote Bruce Lee’s philosophy to a generation unfamiliar with this legend.

What do you think about Johnny Walker’s content piece—good brand move?

(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)