From The Head Of Zeus Jones

Some good new projects.

2009-11-04T00:14:51Z

We don’t usually do this but we wanted to let you know about a couple of different projects we’ve been working on that will launch in the next few weeks. We’re especially proud of these because they’re programs that combine commerce with doing good.

First is Cheerios. For the past 8 years they’ve put award-winning children’s books in specially marked boxes of Cheerios during the months of October and November. This year’s books are very cool and if you have a child at home it’s a great way to get some new reading material for free.

As a part of this project, they’re also donating books to First Book – a non profit based in Washington DC that gives new books to kids in need. This is where you can help:

For every person that becomes a Fan of Cheerios on Facebook (http://facebook.com/cheerios) from now through November 5 they will donate a book to First book. All you need to do is go to their page and click on the become a Fan button to donate.
Starting November 9, Cheerios will also be running a read-athon on their Facebook page. Reaching the goal of 6 million minutes of reading time with children triggers an additional 250,000 book donation to First Book. In order to participate, all you have to do is visit the page every time you read with your child and click the button that says “I read today.” We’re hoping to get everyone who cares about reading to their kids to sign up and show their support.

The second project we’ve been working on is Box Tops for Education. As you probably know this is a program that has helped to send over 300 million dollars to schools through clipping coupons on the tops of General Mills product boxes. One of the things that most people don’t know is that there’s also another way to donate money and that’s using the Box Tops marketplace at: http://www.boxtops4education.com/earn/marketplace/Default.aspx. We’ve been helping to redesign this and the new version also launches on November 5.

This program lets you shop at a ton of online retailers (including Nordstrom.com, Target.com, Best Buy.com and even Expedia.com) and sends a percentage of your purchase to the school of your choice. This is a great way to do your holiday (or other) shopping and donate money to your kid’s school at the same time.

If you aren’t signed up for Box Tops, you’ll need to sign up at the site. Once you’ve created your account and selected your school, any purchases you make through Box Tops Marketplace and Reading Room will generate a donation to your school.

We hope you like these programs as much as we do and if you think any of your friends would be interested in participating, feel free to pass this along.

Your friends at Zeus Jones.

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Planningness: new marketing tools.

2009-10-22T18:29:24Z

As you probably know, our recent Planningness session revolved around getting people to think about new tools for marketing. We were the penultimate session and, to be honest, were pretty worried that everyone was going to be completely exhausted. However in the end the energy was very high, and I walked away with a bunch of new ideas.

To get everyone started, we kicked off with a quick primer on modern branding just to get everyone’s heads on the same page:

Modern Brands V1

View more documents from Zeus Jones.

It seemed to resonate and was a good recap of many of the themes that had been discussed over the last two days. After that, the real fun began. We started by brainstorming a list of all of the tools that aren’t relevant anymore.

It was a revealing list. Even more revealing was that we managed to fill a whiteboard in just 5 minutes.

Next, we broke the group into teams according to birth month and asked everyone to think about a new “tool” that could be used to replace the ones on the board.

In no particular order here were the ideas:

Max from Good and his team came up with the idea of a dual audit for companies. Things both customers and employees love and things they hate. The idea would be then to work on the things we hate in a transparent way and enlist our customers in helping. Here’s Max explaining:

Modern Branding Toolkit August Birthdays

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Next up was a team inspired by a presentation on Alternative Reality Gaming from Ken Eklund. They came up with the idea of scenario planning a brand using an ARG framework. As we ran out of time I didn’t get to hear their presentation on this, I’d love more details if any of the people on this team are reading.

Arg

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Avin and his team came up with a really cool idea for breaking down monolithic research projects and briefs into micro-research and micro-briefs. This is research and briefing for an ongoing, iterative marketing model. The anti-campaign. (p.s. Avin, commenting on Posterous sucks – I logged in using FB connect and they still asked me to log in to Posterous)

March Making Planners Doers

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Rob Perkins and his team came up with replacing the messaging model with the invention model. The goal of this is to create brand experiences that surprise and delight. I love this thought – again, because we ran out of time I we didn’t get to hear them present. If any of y’all are listening, stop by and tell us more.

Workshop

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Next up was a team that came up with the idea of using stories to present the belief. This one needs some voiceover I think so I won’t try to explain this. It’s very intriguing – can someone tell us more?

How Present The Belief

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The always entertaining Jason Oke and his team came up with the idea of creating the anti-awards show. A show based on failure so that we can actually learn from it and move forwards rather than shovelling failure under the carpet and stepping away. I really like this idea. In a time when we’re really all trying to figure things out, our failures are way more instructive than our successes.

The Epic Fail

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The November birthday group had a really nice idea about creating a repository of good, interaction-based marketing examples. I love this! We’re all always looking for case studies to put in our decks and always end up coming up with the same old examples. I think this is something we should start STAT on planningness.com. Mark, are you listening?

November Birthday Planningness

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Next was an idea for a new kind of creative team. Agency structure came up a bunch in the brainstorm about tools that don’t work – it’s nice to see new thinking around this.

Tool

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This next team had a really interesting idea around getting to the truth of a company’s culture by using technology. While some of the examples are a bit extreme, I really think there’s something to this thought. It’s a really nice application of social technologies pointed inwards at the company rather than outwards at the customer.

Modern Brand Tool

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The June birthdays group came up with a really interesting looking dashboard for monitoring a brand’s health. It combines both internal and external inputs and could really do with some further explanation. Nien, care to jump in and elaborate? (Apologies for the smallness, that’s what I got given)

Marketing Dashboard

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In a similar vein to the ARG group, the July group came up with the idea of role playing as a brand R&D tool. Again, I think this is a really interesting approach – it gets to a larger theme which is that truth is often revealed by doing rather than by thinking. I think this is a big insight that we’re all starting to come to terms with.

Role Playing

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Last but not least was a group who proposed the idea that brands should act first and think later. Again this is another dimension of doing and then seeing what happens.

Planningtools

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So what can we learn from all of this? I’ll be buggered if I know but the themes that stuck out for me were:

We’re all pretty clear on the fact that many of the tools we use currently aren’t working
We’re much more interested in dynamic processes than static tools
We want our new tools to be social, to be participatory not just for individuals
We’re looking for our tools to reveal complexity and depth rather than hide it with simple-mindedness
We need tools to plan the company as much as we need tools to plan the customer
We want to learn by doing rather than by thinking and strategizing

I find all of this extremely exciting and promising. I’ll post more on Planningness separately but I came away from this session really inspired and filled with a bunch of new ways to look at stuff. I have no doubt that this kind of thinking will continue to be sharpened and refined over the next few years and I’m looking forwards to the results.

These documents and the discussion around them are to be posted on the Planningness wiki soon. I hope to see you over there.

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New marketing in action: Method

2009-10-20T16:33:04Z

As you know, we’re big believers in the idea that brands are increasingly defined by a company’s internal culture. The two examples that we use in our presentation to clients to make this point are Zappos and Method. So it was a rare treat for us to be able to get a tour of Method and spend time with Eric, on our recent trip to Planningness.

Apart from some very cool and top secret stuff they are doing on a product front, the stuff that impressed me the most was the amount of energy and creativity that they devote to their culture. It’s no accident that culture is what defines them. One of the things that really stuck with me was something that Eric said offhandedly, “we always try to find ways to help our people feel like they’re working at a place that matters.”

This becomes increasingly more clear and evident as you walk around their space. From their wall of values which every employee has posted a quote onto, to their staircase of employee pictures with their ideas on “how to keep method weird,” to their grass-lined quiet room, every part of their space is a reflection and an embodiment of who they are. It is literally impossible to work there and not understand what they’re about.

Lest you miss it, one of the touches that I really loved was seeing the kit they lay out for people who are just starting to work there.

Of course it contains all the stuff you’d expect but on page two of their orientation binder is this:

A lottery ticket! It’s a really nice little touch and is emblematic of the attention to detail they’ve taken in all things cultural.

We try to make culture a focus here at ZJ, but I walked away realising we don’t spend half the time on it that we should. I also realised that if, as I believe, brand strength is directly correlated to the strength of your culture, there are very few brands out there who can compete with Method at the moment.

Technorati Tags: culture, eric ryan, method, new marketing

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WOMMY judging.

2009-10-20T15:19:35Z

Back row from left: John Grudnowski/FRWD, Kim Garretson/Realist Ventures, Rob White/Zeus Jones, Will Setliff/Target, Jim Cuene/General Mills, John Colasanti.

Front row from left: Yours truly, Aki Spicer/Fallon, Paul Isakson.

Last week we were fortunate enough to host the Minnesota jury for the 2009 WOMMY awards. These are designed to recognise the best thinking in WOM campaigns. We pulled together some of the best thinkers and doers in new marketing (who are in my address book) and had a fantastic session…after we’d finished looking at the papers.

While I can’t say too much as the judging process is still proceeding, I can tell you that the overall quality of the papers we looked at were quite poor. WOM is clearly becoming very important in many marketing strategies and there is clearly a need for new thinking, however, it doesn’t feel that we (collectively) are stepping up yet to deliver the goods.

Our day was saved by the discussion that followed. The jury represented a bunch of different perspectives and it was fascinating to hear how each of them are coping with all of the changes that we are living through. We are all, in our own ways (as client, agency, boutique, specialist, entrepreneur), experimenting with new ways of working. What is certain is that the old way of working isn’t delivering the results. What is less clear is what the new model is, but it was eye opening for me to hear how differently people are approaching the same problems.

The conversation was so good that we plan to regroup over alcohol rather than WOMMY papers and continue the discussion in the near future. If I remember, I’ll try to keep better notes so I can share them here.

Technorati Tags: awards, new marketing, wom, womma, wommy

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Recently Launched: BP Photobooth

2009-10-13T03:51:17Z

About a year ago we started a project for Nordstrom’s juniors department, BP. At the time, the department was going through an evolution – tightening up its customer target and product mix – and was looking for new ways to express itself. As we normally do, we went through a strategic process that lead to a bunch of specific ideas, one of which was just launched as a prototype in Nordstrom’s spectacular Bellevue store.

One of the things that makes BP and it’s customers unique is their commitment to personal style. The vast majority of popular teen stores really focus on selling a “look”, a specific image. Customers either buy into the image, or they don’t, but they take a very prescriptive view of fashion.

With BP, personal expression is always a part of the equation – and our goal was to enable that in way that also drove business for the department.

Our research uncovered two behaviors among BP customers that we thought were interesting:

First, we found that girls would bring their camera phones into the dressing room with them and take snapshots of outfits they tried on – to help with later purchase decisions.

Second, groups of girls would get together, do each other’s hair and makeup and take photos for their MySpace / Facebook profile pics – obviously big platforms for self-expression.

Our goal with this project – which we called BP Photobooth – was to enable these kinds of actions in the store, but with much higher quality output. The result is a system that allows customers to try on clothes, take professional quality pics (in flattering lighting), add custom graphics and art and then print or email their images.

Here is a video walkthrough of the entire process, with further explanation below:

The process starts inside the dressing room. A “magic mirror” with a camera behind it is activated by a touchscreen which prompts the customer to pose for 3 pictures. The mirror, camera enclosure and touchscreen application were done by VaryWell – an amazing Seattle-based company that specializes in interactive installations.

The pictures are then sent to the Editing Table – a Microsoft Surface device – for cropping, editing, customizing, etc.

We designed the overall look and feel of the application (which was developed by Identity Mine) and created an extended graphic language of icons, logos and borders that customers could apply to their images.

Customers can then print the pictures on stickers and email them to themselves, or to friends/family for help with purchase decisions.

Some example output.

The prototype of the BP Photobooth is installed at Nordstrom’s Bellevue, WA store.

Technorati Tags: bp, fashion, installation, juniors, microsoft surface, Nordstrom, retail, touchscreen

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Help us create the New Planning Toolkit at Planningness.

2009-10-08T20:19:14Z

Image via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_amanda/

I’m very excited about Planningness in SF next week. As I mentioned, me and Rob are giving one of the sessions. And in the spirit or making things rather than talking about things, we’re going to try to use our session to crowd-source the new planning toolkit. We’ll get the planners who come to help us create tools for new-marketing and new-planning. Then we’ll share them with the community on a wiki for everyone else to use, modify and improve.

For a while now, it’s been increasingly clear that a lot of the tools we use; like briefs, brand architectures, planning processes, etc. are less and less useful in helping to create new-marketing. However, over the past couple of years we’ve come to believe they’re actually worse than useless, they’re anchors which tie us firmly to the past. They were designed in an era of communications, and their output can only be communications and communications managed brands.

Great digital experiences don’t have a single-minded proposition. The most interesting brands aren’t about just one thing. There are now a host of instances and reasons why the practices of the past are completely opposed to the requirements of the present.

So, a question for you: which of the planning tools, documents, frameworks, processes, etc. do you want re-invented? Which parts of the planning/branding/marketing toolkit are the worst offenders in your opinion? We’ll be able to tackle only a few of these so I’d love your thoughts on which ones would be the most useful?

Secondly, I’m hoping that you can join us in person at Planningness to work through this with us. I’ve gone on record saying that I think planners are ahead of the curve in figuring new marketing out. The problem is that we’ve applied our learning sporadically and haven’t come together to establish a baseline of practices, processes and techniques that everyone can use. That’s clearly a much larger issue, but I’m hoping we can at least make a dent in that next week and, because I know readers of this blog are smart and well-informed, I’d love to have as many of your minds there as possible.

Technorati Tags: planning, planningness, SF, strategy, tools

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How I learned to love makeup.

2009-09-30T14:55:53Z

Last year we received a call out of the blue. It was a former colleague, asking if we knew of any firms that would be interested in potentially redesigning the website for Bobbi Brown Cosmetics.

After a brief moment of shocked silence, we politely requested Zeus Jones be thrown into the mix of contenders.

From there, we competed against a veritable who’s who in the Interactive and website development worlds for the assignment. What set us apart from the crowd, and ultimately won us the work was the statement we opened the meeting with: “Although several of the partners have many years of experience doing interactive work, we don’t do websites. We aren’t an interactive shop.”

After that got their attention, we convinced them what they needed wasn’t a website, but a set of services across all their channels that created deeper engagement and relationships with their consumers. The website was certainly part of that mix, but we explained we saw the website as a vehicle to deliver those services, not the end goal in and of itself.

The Creative and Executive teams at Bobbi Brown ended up agreeing with our point of view, and ultimately awarding us the work. What then ensued, at our request, was a crash course in Bobbi Brown the individual, Bobbi Brown the brand, and the world of cosmetics.

In the Immersion phase of all our client engagements we almost always uncover an underutilized or underperforming marketing asset. This case was no exception. During our meetings with Bobbi and all the members of her staff and team, we were amazed at how complex and dynamic Bobbi Brown (the individual) was on so many levels. We were blown away by her amazing philosophy and approach to beauty, her hands on work elevating the practice of professional makeup artistry, and her broader advocacy around health and beauty issues for women of all ages. None of this was being fully utilized across any of the brand’s marketing channels, and least of all on the existing e-commerce site.

Also, as part of the Immersion phase we spent time at a Bobbi Brown makeup counters.The experience at a Bobbi counter is very different from that of other brands. When you walk up to a Bobbi Brown counter you don’t have the color of the month thrust into your face. Core to Bobbi’s product design and overall philosophy is the notion of individual beauty. For Bobbi, the best color is the color that looks best on you, and that brings out your natural beauty, which is why many women hear things like, “Wow, you look incredible. What’s different?” after they’ve had a consultation at a Bobbi counter.

Bobbi also believes that all women should be empowered to be their own makeup artists. As Bobbi artists are consulting with a customer they demonstrate all of the techniques you will need to complete everything they are doing at home. They also arm consumers with take-away materials like Bobbi’s 10-Step process and Face Charts that they can refer back to.

Despite all of our “We don’t do websites” talk, the first part of our assignment was to tackle the website, since it was lagging behind the rest of the channels, and also had the most upside potential.

So how do you create a website that is at once a streamlined e-commerce experience, but also communicates the personality and passions of Bobbi, helps consumers place themselves in the product line, and empowers them to be their own makeup artists?

We decided to create an experience that has three distinct but interrelated “layers” of engagement.

First we tackled Shopping. We needed to create an experience that welcomed users that were unfamiliar with the product line and helped them easily discover products, but that also allowed loyal Bobbi customers to quickly replenish their favorite items.

We accomplished this by streamlining the navigation and allowing users who knew exactly where they wanted to go to dive deep into product categories in a single click. For the uninitiated, we created category landing pages that were rich with content and tools to help consumers get a better sense of how best to use a product line, and find those products that are right for them.

At any point during the shopping experience, a customer in need of help for advice can access the second mode of the site, the Consultative layer. This layer takes advantage of one of the other underutilized assets we discovered in our Immersion phase, the Online Artists. Unlike many other brands with online chat support, the Bobbi Online Artists are fully trained makeup artists, some of whom were among the first artists Bobbi ever hired. These Artists provide real time consultation and advice to consumers shopping on the site. As part of our work, we raised the profile of this service, and made it more available contextually throughout the site.

As another part of the Consultative layer of the site, we created an interactive version of Bobbi’s famous Lip System. To use the Lip System, a consumer selects a shade closest to their natural lip color, and then is shown an entire “lip wardrobe” of different shades and finishes that have been hand selected by Bobbi to look great with their skin tone.

The third layer of the site is the editorial layer. This was the area of the site where we infused Bobbi’s teaching, philosophy, and personality into the experience. The content in this section is as varied as Bobbi herself. A few of the items you’ll find there include: detailed tips and how-to’s, behind-the-scenes videos of Bobbi working runway shows at Fashion Week, details of her charity work with Dressed for Success, beauty guides for both teens and women over 50, and a list of her personal favorite fashion, health, and fitness products.

As I mentioned before, the three layers are all connected and interrelated. We architected the site so that they weave together seamlessly and play off each others strengths. Consultative supports and reinforces the shopping experience, Shopping is present in Editorial so you can easily buy the products from a how-to you are reading etc.

We worked for many months bringing the site to life in close collaboration with both the Technical and Creative teams at Bobbi Brown, and you can see the preliminary results for yourself at bobbibrowncosmetics.com.

We set out with a very ambitious scope for the site, that was somewhat tempered by the realities of the development process. We look forward to phase 2 where we roll out more of the Consultative features that we’ve designed for the site. And who knows what phase 3 will hold…

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Creating richer interactions.

2009-09-25T18:14:28Z

I caught part of this ESPN spot the other night that had a brainstorming session as a part of it (thanks Seth!). One of the things that stood out was the state of the whiteboard; it was smudged and well used. This small detail told a story (to me at least) that the brainstorming session that we were seeing was simply one in a sequence of brainstorms that had gone on over time. While it was a small touch, it was probably intentional and added to the overall story in an important way. Rather than making me feel I was seeing a staged event, it helped to create the illusion that I was seeing a window into a different world.

I think the best advertising has always done that. It’s offered a window into a world that has been sustained and created by a myriad small touches and details. I think that’s why some of the best creatives I worked with often completely overwrote the scripts they were planning to shoot in order to be able to pull from a more richly defined world. Perhaps they needed to fill out the story beyond the spot in order to get the details right, but the result was a much richer, more textured, layered and complex story than otherwise.

It occurs to me that this is one lesson from traditional marketing that can be useful to preserve as we try to innovate and create new ways to reach people. Even though we are now often creating interactions and experiences rather than communications, the same principles apply. Interactions and experiences are still windows into a world that we are trying to create, we can make these worlds as rich (or as barren) as we choose by “overwriting” them and creating context and layers of additional meaning.

It seems like this might be a different way to think about interaction design. The trend up till now has (driven by companies like Google) been geared heavily toward the utilitarian and functional. Our collective obsession with user-centered design exacerbates this, but as more and more brands start creating interactions rather than communications, there will be a need to create differentiation that won’t be possible from simply following best user-centered design practices.

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Specialists v. integrators part II.

2009-09-25T01:07:18Z

You’re probably quite familiar with Gartner’s hype cycle (above) which describes the stages of hype, disillusionment, and then actual productivity that many new innovations go through. However, one of the not so obvious implications of it is that the real value in any innovation only gets unlocked when people start to figure out how, when and where to use it. Another way of stating this is that:

The value is not in the innovation itself, rather it’s in understanding how, when and where to use that innovation.

I think this insight is also quite important when overlaid upon the discussion around specialisation vs. integration that I started yesterday. Specialised businesses can each be thought of as separate innovations. In the marketing world we might think of these as SEO companies, social media companies, mobile application developers, Facebook developers, Advertising agencies etc.

While each of these are important, the real value doesn’t lie at this level, instead, I’d argue, that the real value lies at the level of deciding how, when and where to deploy each of these different companies in order to solve a business problem.

The real value is in the creative and/or strategic combination and deployment of resources to solve a business problem.

In fact, in most cases there are almost too many SEO, social media, mobile application, etc. companies to choose from. As a result, these individual businesses will tend to become commodities over time. Even less of the real value will lie among those companies and even more of the real value will lie upon those companies or people who can see the big picture and who can knit together a brilliant, comprehensive and cohesive solution. This being the case, the natural question that follows is, “who owns this very valuable integration or coordination role?”

In the marketing industry there are a lot of different companies who would claim to be architects of a business solution, but this is where I think things start to get tricky. It’s my belief that in order to be able to properly deliver that integration role, you must be compensated solely for the integration role. If your compensation, as is the case for most companies, is around the delivery of specific and specialised skills or services, then you will inevitably be biased towards the usage of those specialised skills or services in the creation of your solution. We’ve talked about this for ages, so much that it’s become clichéd. Agencies often talk about media and solution neutrality but the vast majority of what they create are ads. Consultants, on the other hand, suffer from a different problem. Typically they are paid for high-level strategic thinking but then leave the difficult work of implementation, integration and execution to others. They are paid to articulate a vision but are not paid to implement a vision.

This leaves clients themselves as the ones who benefit most from integration, and I think this is why we’re seeing clients of all sizes shift from single, full service agencies and move towards a stable of best of breed partners. While this solution makes sense it does also clearly demonstrate that there is a large gap in the marketplace. There may be times and situations where clients want to outsource that integration or to turn to a partner better equipped to handle that integration. Right now they have very few options.

It’s for this reason that I think we will start to see a new class of company arise. These companies will truly be architects of business solutions in that they will be compensated solely for the definition and implementation of a full marketing program but will not be compensated for the specific services and skills that are required to implement these programs. In fact, this is precisely where we see the future of our company.

What do you think?

Technorati Tags: business models, integration, marketing industry, specialization

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If we’re all specialists who’s responsible for the big picture?

If we’re all specialists who’s responsible for the big picture?

2009-09-22T22:18:25Z

Image via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jackcheng/

Back at the start of the century, I worked on HP’s e-services campaign. For me, this was an early exposure to the thinking around web services that eventually became a foundational component of what we now think of as Web 2.0. The idea that digital services (like mapping, package tracking, etc.) offered by different people or companies could be combined on the fly in order to accomplish complex tasks. Inherent in this model was the idea that companies would begin to specialize and create services in their specific areas of expertise. People could then pick and choose the best of breed services in any given area and combine them with the best of breed services in any other area.

While somewhat Utopian, this is largely what we see happening. Best of breed shipping companies like Fedex have created package tracking services that seamlessly plug into best of breed retailers like Amazon.com which itself served as the retail “engine” for sites as large as Target.com until very recently. This is an elegant model in technology. Common standards and API’s take care of messy integration issues and interoperability is a background function performed by silent and invisible “plumbing” that hooks everything together and keeps everyone on the same page.

Take this model off the web and into the business world and things become a lot messier. It’s pretty clear that the same forces are shaping businesses themselves. Companies are continuing to specialise to a greater and greater extent and either outsource or partner to round out their skill sets. Customers are increasingly looking for customized solutions built from combining best of breed partners. However, while integration on the Web is a low-level task, integration in business, of a herd of various “specialists,” is a Herculean task.

As a small company, we deal with this on a daily basis. Creating complex solutions for our clients almost always requires bringing in specialists in certain areas and getting them to all work together towards a common strategy or goal. Additionally, we’re also seeing more desire amongst our clients to create teams comprised of best of breed partners rather than working with one full-service partner. This means we often sit at a table with multiple other partners, all of whom bring their own areas of expertise as well as their own biases, prejudices and assumptions. Reconciling these can often be extremely difficult.

I think it’s safe to say that this trend will continue for the foreseeable future. In any industry that you can name, there are a bunch of brand new companies who are making a name for themselves by carving off parts of tasks that used to be done by a single company and positioning themselves as specialists in one specific area. For that reason it seems to me that integration is rapidly rising from being one of the lowest value tasks in the business world to becoming one of the highest value tasks.

There are a number of different issues that arise from this that I’ll be exploring in future posts:

Who’s responsible for integration in business – is this something that can be outsourced?
How can integration best be accomplished? What are the business equivalents of common standards and APIs that need to be created?
Forming partnerships is often made more complex by legal and billing issues. How can these barriers be minimized so that companies can form ad hoc partnerships on the fly?
Is integration, and/or the creative combination and management of specialists a specialised task itself? Do we need a new class of companies focused on integration?
Etc.

I’m curious what your thoughts are on this? Is this something you’re seeing in your lives and how is that integration role being handled?

Technorati Tags: integration, specialization

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Specialists v. integrators part II.

Planning-ness 2009.

2009-09-18T13:55:24Z

What started off as a murmur on Twitter after the 4As planning conference was cancelled, has become a reality thanks largely to the efforts of Mark Lewis! Planning-ness 2009 is on and scheduled for October 16 and 17 in San Francisco.

Mark’s done a brilliant job of lining up a really diverse group of speakers on a wide range of topics:

We asked respected people from fields such as product design, film making, game design and politics to help teach some of us what they know. And to help this feel even less like one advertising person lecturing to another, we’ve organized the sessions into workshops, not speeches. Each session (link to list of speakers/sessions) will consist of:

- 30-45 minutes of teaching

- 45 minutes to 1 hour of you putting that into practice

- 20-30 minutes of evaluation and discussion

This is a list of sessions currently planned. More information, and a full guide will be published shortly.

How to run a political/grassrots campaign

How to build a chief culture offcer

How to save the world

How to design a good game

How to start a conversation

How to design a good product

How to launch an OS

How to map behavior change

How to help a company survive the recssion

What connection planning means in 2009

How to best use a medium / fit a brand with the right opportunity

How to do stand up comedy

How to design digital epxeriences

How to tell a good story

How to use semiotics

How to make a good documentary

How and why you should replace a creative brief

How to distribute video on the web

How to market content in the age of free

How to run a political/grassrots campaign
How to build culture into an organization
How to save the world
How to design a good game
How to start a conversation
How to design a good product
How to build a successful application
How to map behavior change
How to help a company survive the recession
What connection planning means in 2009
How to best use a medium / fit a brand with the right opportunity
How to do stand up comedy
How to design digital experiences
How to tell a good story
How to use semiotics
How to make a good documentary
How to operationalize marketing

The theme is Unplanning the Planning conference. It’s a place to learn by doing rather than by being talked at and I’m really looking forward to it. I’m especially proud that this was done by members of the planning community for the planning community.

Rob and I are doing a session on operations as marketing which I’ll talk more about in another post. I hope to see a lot of you there. Tickets and more information can be found at planningness.com.

Technorati Tags: planning, planning-ness, unplanning

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Conversational UX Design

2009-09-30T15:05:29Z

This spring at the U of M’s MinneWebCon I heard Doc Searls (a co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto) talk about efforts to shift from a mindset of vendors managing customer relationships toward one of customers managing vendor relationships. It is a radical shift in thinking for a culture that has grown around a hierarchical structure where capital markets are built on the backs of an entire class of workers whose labor is highly managed and prescribed.

The interactive revolution is challenging the inertia of this system by repositioning the relationship between the public and the institution. Ironically (albeit predictably – if you are a McLuhan follower), the very mechanisms of this revolution are still catching up with their own ideology. Mass culture naturally applies old methods to the new medium until it has figured out its true potential and meaning.

Thus the early days of the Web saw a proliferation of brochureware, taking the stuff we already had and just presenting it in a different medium. Today we see a proliferation of what I call broadcastware – and let’s face it, pushing video through an interactive channel is not so different from pushing a billboard. These engagements don’t utilize the true potential of adaptive, social technology. To tap the potential, we must open the platform and provide mechanisms and personal tools rather than messages. And to do that, we need to ask users for a deeper engagement early in the process. As Albert Einstein said, “information is not knowledge.”

There is no lack of conversation about the importance of early engagements in site experiences. Registration forms, sign-ups, and the like qualify for this kind of interaction. Initiatives like OpenID are underway that hint at a possible future where the dreaded registration process becomes less painful by consolidating your online identity. RFID technology and other ambient recognition will go a long way toward creating deeper relationships without much input required. But there will always be a need for dialogue, and if we are to have a meaningful conversation with our users, we have to facilitate the conversation with an interface that welcomes them with open arms.

The standard way of inviting people to the conversation is with a carrot and a stick, hiding the most important parts of the conversation behind sparkly objects and hoping that the users really really want to talk to us. This requires us to clearly spell out what is commonly called a value proposition (the carrot). Already, we find ourselves slipping into our bad marketing habits. We are back to our old tricks, telling instead of showing. We’re like that guy at the party who only listens to you until he can return to talking about himself, sending a clear message that you are not important – you are interchangeable with anyone else who will endure his greatness. We have long been treating conversations with our customers as transactions, withholding the goods until we have a signed prenuptial agreement with the user. Where’s the romance in that?

Let’s skip the paperwork and get straight to the romance. When I have an experience online that invites me into an open conversation, it reveals itself to me and teaches me about how to use it with every interaction. Now I’m sure you can think of a hundred reasons why this is a bad idea. Especially if you’re a corporate lawyer (no offense). But as consumers, we are living in the world of what is, not the world of what if. Our time is valuable and our attention is overwhelmed by the saturated media space. So if you make it easy to talk to me, I will immediately be a lot more likely to keep talking.

A great example of conversational interaction design can be seen in the registration process on tumblr.com. There is no sales proposition – the first page you see beckons you to start using the tool. If you really want to, you can go see the 21 reasons why you’ll love tumblr. But you don’t have to. You can just dive in.

This idea is carried through into the smallest parts of the interaction. The example text in the URL input field shows you immediately that you’ll have your own web address with your username as the sub-domain. The label on the button shows you that you’re doing this so you can create a blog post, reassuring you that you are moving toward your goal.

Next thing you know (literally), you are being prompted to create your first blog post. By simply starting the conversation, you have begun creating content and taking ownership of your actions.

Uploading an image, continues teaching you how to use the interface by focusing your attention on a real interaction rather than an instruction manual.

And now that you have some content posted on your new blog, you are prompted to name it and personalize it.

You can then easily follow other people you know who may have a tumblr blog.

Tumblr puts the actual interaction with their service front and center. They turn the registration process into a learning process where users learn by doing what they came there to do. So the question becomes, do you give people fish, or teach them to fish? Human psychology has shown us definitively that learning by doing produces the deepest imprint on our memory and behavior. It is far and away the most engaging way to teach, and this kind of interactive learning produces knowledge rather than just information. And knowledge, not information, creates a feeling of ownership. By asking users to engage on a personal level, we are creating a relationship based on shared ownership of knowledge and value. And best of all, it doesn’t feel like work. Actions really do speak louder than words.

Technorati Tags: id, interaction, ixd, registration, ucd, ui, UX

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SXSW Panel: operations as marketing.

2009-08-17T17:40:11Z

Jim Cuene recently asked me what I thought the advertising campaign of the future would be. While I didn’t use the term, I said that it would be some version of operations as marketing.

If you’re a regular follower of this blog you’ll know that operations as marketing is one of our favourite ideas (this post on it from a while back that was one of the two most popular posts we’ve ever done). Simply put it’s about the idea that the best way to run your business can also be the best way to market or advertise your business. That the best role for marketing can be to help to make an internal process, product, expertise, piece of information or asset visible to the public in a way that it also does the job of growing your business.

Operations as marketing describes the ideas that have most captured our imagination over the past couple of years. It also describes how we approach problems ourselves and it describes the vast majority of projects that we’ve done over the past 2-1/2 years. We’ve had to learn how to work differently, with different people, different partners and different technology. And we’ve also been able to figure out some useful ways to get these kinds of projects off the ground.

These are some of the things we’d like to share at SXSW next year in one of our two proposed sessions. Voting on these panels has opened today. So if you’d be interested in hearing about this subject (or even if you’re not) please go vote! You can find the full details of the operations as marketing session and vote here.

Thanks for your support.

Technorati Tags: 2010, panel picker, sxsw

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Zeus Jones Wins PhizzPop Nationals at SXSW.

Facebook Connect and nofollow.

2009-08-13T17:02:38Z

Not that Facebook needs any help in this area, but it occurred to me this morning that Facebook Connect is potentially an extremely one-sided affair as far as SEO is concerned. While FB Connect is probably generating millions of new inbound links for Facebook, I’m guessing that it generates absolutely zero in new links for sites that use it because all Facebook links are nofollow. Does anyone know if this is true or not?

(This isn’t true on Wordpress as the FB Connect widget removes the nofollow tag, unfortunately, if you’re like me and you have implemented FB Connect through Disqus, you are screwed.)

Technorati Tags: Facebook Connect, SEO

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Getting people to use your service.

2009-08-13T16:08:35Z

A recent post by Noah as well as a letter I received from American Express have been making me think about how the selling of services (rather than products) are creating new relationships between companies and their customers.

From Noah:

“Basically the story is that even though it would seem like Netflix would rather you had a subscription and never rented anything, it’s quite the opposite…Customers pay a flat monthly rate, generally $16.99 (although cheaper plans are available), to check out as many movies as they want. The problem with this business model is that new members often have a couple of dozen movies in mind that they want to see, but after that they’re not sure what to check out next, and their requests slow. And a customer paying $17 a month for only one movie every month or two is at risk of canceling his subscription; the plan makes financial sense, from a user’s point of view, only if you rent a lot of movies.”

This is why Netflix spends so much time and effort in getting you better and better recommendations. Because they realise that the more you use their service, the more likely you are to value it. And, the less you use their service, the more likely you are to ditch it.

The letter Amex sent me recently tapped into a very similar theme. It was from a personal service specialist who wants to talk to me about my card. They’ve looked at my profile and realised I don’t really use the majority of the benefits available to me and want to talk about how I can get better use out of all the services my card qualifies me for.

While it’s true that some great companies have always cared about their customers getting good value for money on an ongoing basis, I’d say that the majority of companies were, and are, much more focused on delivering value for money only at the time of purchase. It typically hasn’t mattered as much whether you actually used the product or service. However with the transition to services, as well as a growing realisation that happy customers can be beneficial in a whole bunch of ways it feels like more and more companies are now concerning themselves with customer satisfaction and more specifically with whether and how their customers are actually using their products or services.

Not surprisingly, I think this is a great thing in a whole bunch of different ways. Companies who embrace this kind of thinking can’t help but provide better service and more value for their customers and this is exactly the kind of alignment in customer and company fortunes that is missing in so many other places.

Additionally, I think this is also really good news for marketers because I believe the most innovative marketing successes in the next few years will be around creating relationships and helping customers get more out of the products and services they own; not around creating transactions and getting people to open their wallets.

Technorati Tags: customers, usage

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New-marketing strategies: turning your customers into your product.

Looking for the fundamental contradictions.

2009-08-10T19:36:19Z

Image via: mainblanche

We had an interesting meeting last week with someone very high up in the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, where the subject of 6 Gingerol came up. 6 Gingerol is a compound that can be isolated from common ginger which has been shown to be effective in reducing certain cancers. Not only that but it can also be produced very cheaply, apparently for around $14/dose.

Unfortunately this is a problem because the big drug companies aren’t interested in medicines that can be produced inexpensively. In order for their economics to work, they need drugs that cost lots and lots of money to make and which can then be sold for even more money. Ironically, this is also why drug companies aren’t lining up to cure some of the biggest diseases in the Developing World, because the Developing World can’t pay the prices required to fund expensive product development. (According to the person we spoke with, this has led to a situation where development and research on 6 Gingerol is stalled waiting for a smaller drug company to see some potential and take it on.)

I think of this as a very fundamental contradiction in the system. A system structure that rewards companies for doing the wrong thing. A system that, in the case of the pharmaceutical industry, simultaneously forces companies to look for the most expensive way to solve a problem and that prevents them from solving the most pressing problems.

A lot of other industries have very fundamental contradictions such as these. The credit card industry is built upon making money from the failure of its customers, the consumer electronics industry is built upon the lack of longevity of its products. In fact, there’s probably a contradiction somewhere in the systems of most industries. I think these fundamental contradictions are very interesting because can be the starting point for innovation. For example, as I wrote the other day, Netflix used a fundamental contradiction in the video rental industry as a starting point for its business. I also think that these fundamental contradictions are fairly easy to spot. The only question you need to ask is whether or not the financial gain of the provider is directly tied to what’s best for the customer. The fact that these contradictions still exist simply says that this question isn’t asked that often.

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Enabling marketing innovation.

2009-08-06T21:43:21Z

For some reason, I’ve had tons of conversations about the role that corporate IT plays in preventing marketing innovation this week. It’s to the point that I only need to say, “and then we took it to the IT department…” and whoever I’m talking to knows exactly what’s coming next. While this isn’t true of every IT department we work with, it’s true enough that I’m fairly safe in arguing that corporate IT departments are probably the single biggest obstacle standing in the way of digital marketing innovation today.

I’m pretty sure that most IT folks aren’t happy about this either and can give me a litany of reasons for why this is the case. However, the fact remains that there is a sharp and bitter disconnect between the fundamental goals and purpose of corporate IT and their daily practice.

As a result of this, it occurred to me that the real genius of programs like Best Buy’s Remix, isn’t necessarily that it will fuel external innovation and generate tons and tons of amateur mashups, but rather that it removes the obstacles to internal innovation. With Remix in place, Best Buy marketing is freed to innovate and experiment without having to go through the pain of a formal business evaluation.

If this is true, I expect we’ll see a lot more of this kind of thing from them.

Best Buy 3D Augmented Reality Ad from Tom Martin on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags: Best Buy, IT

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New Marketing in action: Netflix.

2009-08-06T15:57:46Z

Culture

View more presentations from reed2001.

I’m guessing that most of you have already seen this deck that made its way around the Interwebs yesterday but if not, it’s definitely worth a read. It’s another example of why Netflix is so successful – because they haven’t left culture to chance. Additionally it’s also a great example of a favourite theme of mine – operations as marketing. This presentation is catnip for investors because it points to an extremely well run company and a management team who are focused on the right things.

(Although as soon as I wrote that sentence I took a look at the stock price which has dropped today.)

I think this is also a smart move from an employee standpoint. They have very publicly told their staff that they are paid at the top of the market and they have told the competition it will be expensive to poach. Really there’s lots to admire about this from a marketing standpoint.

Around here we often use Netflix as a prime example of a Modern Brand. They’ve consistently used New Marketing principles to build their business and are a shining symbol of how this new thinking around business and branding can succeed. I was talking with Eric last week about Netflix and he told me that he’s had a DVD at home since before his daughter (who’s now almost two) was born.

Historically, the video rental industry built its profits upon people returning films late, but they profited by punishing you. In hindsight this couldn’t be a sustainable business model, your profits directly tied to your customer misery.

Not surprisingly however, Netflix haven’t once contacted him about it. Instead they’re actually probably quite happy that he’s sitting on it because that’s two years of movie rights, postage and handling costs that they’ve been able to avoid. Rather than penalizing him for his behaviour, they’ve figured out how to profit from it while actually encouraging the behaviour that generates more profit.

For me this is New Marketing thinking at its best, a rethinking of your value streams that involves your customers and treats them as allies in helping you make more money.

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Counting qualitative research.

2009-07-30T19:01:17Z

Image via: Dan Diemer

One of the biggest changes in the way I approach strategy that has taken place over the past 10 years has been the shift from relying primarily upon qualitative research to an almost exclusive reliance, today, upon quantitative research. Some of this may have to do with just simply getting better at my job, but I think a lot of it has to do with how technology has enabled formerly “soft” measures to be aggregated, counted and ranked.

A great example of this is Noah’s excellent Brandtags project. Prior to this, the default way to get at all of the different perceptions and ideas that surrounds a brand would have been to run a bunch of focus groups. But, where qualitative research uses small sample sizes and depth interviewing techniques to gather all the various meanings around a brand, Brantags uses scale and first response to deliver almost the same information.

There is, of course, one big difference. Qualitative research purists would say that the texture, nuance and context of these idea aren’t delivered through a format like Brandtags. Instead, Brandtags delivers a completely different benefit and that is the ability to be counted and ranked. Brandtags, and other things like it, make qualitative data digital, and, IMO, make it infinitely more powerful and useful in the process.

For example, both types of research could tell me that two brands have the same idea of value associated with them. However the data behind Brandtags will allow me to see which brand has the strongest association with value both in terms of raw numbers and also in relation to other ideas. Because I have numerical values associated with all of this information I can set up fairly accurate tracking to measure any changes and because these are numbers, I can mix them with a whole set of other numbers including sales and traffic data and so on.

What I lose in nuance, I am more than able to make up through being able to build much more expansive pictures of what’s really going on through being able to see the hidden relationships between different measures.

How does this fit with your experience?

Technorati Tags: planning qualitative, quantitative, research

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Usability in City Utilities

2009-07-21T16:59:10Z

Recently I’ve been noticing a change in the interface for city traffic signal buttons. A nice example of usable design proliferating into our everyday infrastructure.

Are you seeing more examples of usable interactions in your daily life?

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When objects become people and vice-versa.

2009-07-17T18:08:03Z

Image via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/h-k-d/

Personification of objects is as old as language, nowhere is this clearer than in languages where every noun has a gender, often arbitrarily ascribing a male or female identity to things like tables, helicpoters and placemats. However, it has always been obvious that these were figures of speech (no pun intended). The gender was metaphorical not literal, the act of personification a literary or poetic construct.

This clear delineation is breaking down today via the Web and social media. In particular, it struck me the other day that things like Twitter and Facebook, flatten out the distinctions between people, objects, companies and ideas as all of these things (and more) now have the ability to create a profile, collect friends/followers, describe their tastes, preferences and affiliations and generally build data that describes them and their social graph.

Obviously, to the vast majority of applications and services on the Web (barring captchas), the data associated with an object or idea is not really that different from the data associated with a person. Therefore, it’s possible to see that objects, ideas and other abstract concepts could start interacting with us in the same way that our friends, family and associates do. For example, the year 2010 could start posting on your Facebook wall, “see you in a few months.” Or perhaps more usefully, an object called “Tax changes for this year” could look at your behaviour and suggest various ways to cope with it.

Clearly a lot of this stuff is happening. Things like phone bills and bank statements and even refrigerators now have a lot more intelligence. It’s easy to see how the data fields around these objects could be expanded to include more of the meta-data that Facebook or Twitter build around us. And it’s an easy step from there to see how something like a Facebook group – which is often representative of an idea and which already has a lot of meta-data around it – could be made more intelligent and set free to act on its own.

I think this is already really interesting, but it’s even more fascinating to think about the other side of the equation which is what’s happening to us – people. Where we have, up till now, been extremely hard to define and describe using simple statements that anyone can understand, this is no longer the case – as far as the Web is concerned we are as logical and simple as anything else.

This is another view into how the Web is shifting the framework of our concepts. The word “idea” carries with it a clear (ha!) sense of abstraction and intangibility, while the word “person” implies tangibility yet also indefinability. While our usage of these terms on the Web assumes these same meanings, their actual potential and behaviour no longer match. It’s interesting to speculate that our language may hold us back from seeing a lot of the new possibilities that come from objects, ideas and people interacting at the same level.

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Does the future belong to Facebook?

2009-07-15T22:19:22Z

Image via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/libraryman/

Apologies for the absence, it’s unusually busy around here, especially for Summer. However, I wanted to point you to an article in this month’s Wired which is the first thing I’ve read that makes me re-think my assumptions about Facebook.

In particular this part of the article was eye-opening for me:

These are just the latest moves in an ambitious campaign to make the social graph an integral, ubiquitous element of life online. In December, Facebook launched Connect, a network of more than 10,000 independent sites that lets users access their Facebook relationships without logging in to Facebook .com. Go to Digg, for instance, and see which stories friends recommended. Head to Citysearch and see which restaurants they have reviewed. Visit TechCrunch, Gawker, or the Huffington Post and read comments they have left. On Inauguration Day, millions of users logged in to CNN.com with their Facebook ID and discussed the proceedings with their friends in real time.

In April, Facebook announced its Open Stream API, allowing developers to create mashups using Facebook’s constantly updated stream of user activity. Previously, users who wanted to read their friends’ News Feeds had to go to the Facebook site. Now developers can export that information to any site—or to freestanding applications, much as Twitter desktop clients do for Tweets.

Connect and Open Stream don’t just allow users to access their Facebook networks from anywhere online. They also help realize Facebook’s longtime vision of giving users a unique, Web-wide online profile. By linking Web activity to Facebook accounts, they begin to replace the largely anonymous “no one knows you’re a dog” version of online identity with one in which every action is tied to who users really are.

Essentially, Facebook is letting you use the expertise, preferences and recommendations of your social circle to navigate and filter the Web. If they are successful, I can see that I would want to bring my social graph (and its associated data) to bear on almost every interaction I have on the Web. As information grows, it will become less and less productive for me to browse or interact with any site anonymously.

I realise this is not new news, however the sophistication of many of the latest Facebook connect implementations that I’ve seen (I blogged about the Jansport one here) along with the amazing spread of Facebook connect across many of the sites I use has made me actually believe they could pull this off. Facebook is increasing in popularity as an email and chat client, even among people I know. They’ve just announced they’ve grown to 250 million worldwide users – almost the population of the US. Many of our clients are now saying that Facebook is one of the top referrers of traffic to their sites. And, these recent moves from Facebook are likely to increase the time spent within the Facebook experience, essentially making Facebook the portal though which I browse more and more of the Web. In this light it’s not surprising that there isn’t more of a panic about monetization. The end game is much bigger than any interim advertising inventory that they can uncover along the way.

All of this is making me start to reconsider the pecking order on the Web and beyond. What do you think?

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The Wabi-sabi Experience

2009-06-30T18:09:04Z

I’ve been reading a lot about wabi-sabi lately, and in it I have found a window into the art of experience design. Wabi-sabi is described as “the artistic mouthpiece of the Zen movement.” It is a conceptual worldview and aesthetic ideal. Just as experience design seeks to address human needs in their diversity, frailty, and flaws, wabi-sabi acknowledges the impermanence and imperfection of the natural world as an aesthetic ideal. It transmits feelings of transience and flux. In contrast to the Greek ideals of perfect order and harmony which permeate our Western culture, wabi-sabi embodies simplicity and asymmetry. It provides “space for the mental collaboration of the audience.”

This space, combined with the transitory nature of wabi-sabi, resonates with the idea of adaptive interfaces that change along with the user and her environment. The wabi-sabi approach seeks to minimize the ego and any personal branding, focusing rather on drawing out the natural qualities of the piece. So it is with great experience design, where the user is pleasantly immersed in an action and free to discard any conscious thoughts of the interface. Just as wabi-sabi style tea cups encourage a more intimate communion with the experience of drinking the tea, the user of a well designed experience should be liberated from the mechanisms of interaction.

The form of wabi-sabi expression is drawn from the “properties of the material used and the function it provides,” and this holds equally true for creating usable design. The more I learn about wabi-sabi, the more I feel it is another excellent directional filter for experience design. What do you think?

Sources:
Juniper, Andrew. Wabi Sabi:The Japanese Art of Impermanence.
Koren, Leonard. Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers.

Technorati Tags: design, interaction, UX, wabi-sabi

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Bling for your new iPhone 3GS

2009-06-23T21:27:06Z

The upgrade bug missed us completely here at Zeus Jones and we are all sticking with our 3G iphones, but we know that some of our loyal readers have probably succumbed to the allure of new Apple hardware and are proud owners of spanking new iPhones.

One thing we’ve noticed is that there aren’t any new features is that the iPhone 3GS looks disappointingly similar to the the iPhone 3G. No one can really tell that you’ve spent several hundred dollars more on your phone than people who still only have the 3G. So to rectify that situation, one of our designers, Celeste, has created some official Zeus Jones iPhone Bling which will mark you as a person of unusual discernment and taste.

Enjoy.

(These were designed specifically for the iPhone 3GS, but we believe they’ll also run on the 3G too – sssshhh.)

Technorati Tags: artwork, Backgrounds, iphone, Zeus Jones

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Operations as marketing makes back-end technologies the hero.

2009-06-10T15:25:18Z

It’s been busy here lately, not much time to put together a coherent thought let alone a blog post. Too much stuff swirling around in my head. However, the one thing I’ve been meaning to write a bit about was our recent co-presentation with Microsoft on operations as marketing.

The format was a 1-1/2 hour presentation from us and MS to some of their clients here in the Twin Cities. We kicked it off with a short deck that explains the concept of operations as marketing, then we handed over to Microsoft for an discussion of technologies that enable this kind of marketing and finally we finished with some case studies of work we’ve (ZJ and Microsoft) done to show how it can work in practice (sorry I can’t share the deck at the moment, maybe later). All in all we thought the presentation was a success. We had some good discussion afterwards and heard that a lot of the attendees rated it very highly. (Importantly, we have some good follow-ups too!)

What was most interesting though was while we had rehearsed a bit beforehand, we didn’t really know what Microsoft was going to say (nor they us), and to be honest, we were a bit nervous about that. However, when it finally came down to it, our talks were surprisingly consistent, because while operations as marketing is a great marketing story it’s an even better technology story.

As you know, the idea behind operations as marketing is to find some internal aspect of a company’s existing business, something that they’re already doing, that can be modified and made transparent in order to also serve as marketing. Because customers generally respond better to businesses who are better run, the best way to run your business can also be the best way to market your business. This is the definition that makes sense to a business or marketing person, but to a technology person, the way they’d translate that is that it’s about exposing one or more of your internal, back-end data feeds to the public.

For example the brilliant Hertz Freerider example that Beata shared, is enabled by exposing inventory data to the public. Dell Swarm is enabled by exposing sourcing data to the public.

As you can imagine, this is a particularly great story for a company like Microsoft to tell as its software powers the back-office of most of the world’s largest companies these days. In addition, products like Sharepoint are tailor-made for providing controlled access to vital back-end business data. What’s interesting about this is that this makes Microsoft a better partner for many agencies like us than traditional front-end players like Adobe or even web-based companies like Google!

I’ve been saying this over and over to a bunch of their people but I don’t get the sense they find it as interesting as I do. What do you think? Am I nuts here?

Technorati Tags: marketing, operations as marketing, technology, Zeus Jones

From The Head Of Zeus Jones

Some *good* new projects.

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WOMMY judging.

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Creating richer interactions.

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Specialists v. integrators part II.

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Planning-ness 2009.

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Facebook Connect and nofollow.

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Getting people to use your service.

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Looking for the fundamental contradictions.

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Enabling marketing innovation.

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New Marketing in action: Netflix.

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Counting qualitative research.

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Usability in City Utilities

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When objects become people and vice-versa.

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Does the future belong to Facebook?

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The Wabi-sabi Experience

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Bling for your new iPhone 3GS

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Operations as marketing makes back-end technologies the hero.

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Some good new projects.