Below is the remarkable entrepreneurial story of a colleague of mine, worth sharing…

Ahmed Shereba, founder of LETTUCEAT

The Lettuceat story, as told by A. Shereba himself …

“ The idea resonated 2 years ago. My father always had a passion for cooking various foods and cuisines, and we always had people over for dinner gatherings. He usually served a 5 course meal: a starter, a salad, a small dish, a main dish and a dessert.

What’s insightful about this is that his salads always left a mark! They were so good that actually a lot of the people always said “We truly love the salad. If it’s not offensive, I would love to take another serving“; or “ This is my perfect meal, I could live on this every day!”

Even though the rest of his food was phenomenal, Egyptian consumers are just not used to eating tasty delicious salads as meals…this is how it all really started! And so, I went to my father. Leveraging my innovation marketing background and experience with launching new brands in Egypt, I told him it was time to capture this opportunity and offer something unique and distinctive to the Egyptian consumer. It was time to re-position the salad perception in Egypt!

Let’s introduce salads as meals, ‘fresh, delish dishes ‘as we say at Lettuceat. That’s when we kicked off the idea of menu engineering, which was the building block of the project. We wanted to get everything right, especially when it comes to maintaining the quality of the dish: every salad one gets has to taste great EVERY time … everything gets weighted, chopped exactly in perfect dimensions and sizes, time and again. We engineered the ‘formula card’ for each dish so that it would be really be perfect every time and it would be just a matter of assembly, with only the dressing kept as the x-factor ingredient that only us -the owners- know (secretly made away from the staff). After the menu engineering was finalized, I wanted to have the right structure and team for this company to get started. Our vision: become a serious competitive brand in the Egyptian market.

At that time my very dear friend and running partner, Walid Hamdy, was thrilled and saw the opportunity. He shared our vision and belief that we could turn things around. And with his experience as a great entrepreneur, we brought it to life.

Finally, my sister Hadir Shereba was already working as an account manager on some of the food restaurants for a below-the-line agency, so she had some experience in the execution part of restaurants. She was an integral part of connecting with the right stakeholders, from Interior designers for the restaurant, to menu design , packaging materials etc…. she handled it all. With the right building blocks in place and a well synergized team, we set up a company called “Creative Foods ” which would be the hub for innovative restaurants concepts such as Lettuceat, our first restaurant concept, launched this year.

As a starting point in our positioning strategy, we all agreed on one thing and one thing only and that is: we are not here to make salads nor to just offer the Egyptian consumer a great fresh product; we will sell them a whole new salad experience: the right way of eating a perfect salad. Any competitor can make a salad, but the experience would be the hardest thing to imitate. We knew that this business would be mostly based on delivery service; 80% of orders are delivery based. We target the “at work” occasion, which really also contributes to 75% of our sales so far.

And with that in mind, we went into serious details when it came to the whole salad pack experience:

1- For starters, the salad bowl. We had to import the salad bowl from Taiwan because we wanted to offer a salad bowl that would carry enough volume to position this salad as a meal. More importantly , the rounded bowl would allow you to easily dress the salad and toss the dressing around in the bowl without spilling the vegetables outside , cause currently in Egypt ALL restaurants that offer salads serve them in a very small squared bowl that you would just hate tossing your salad in cause it will all spill out. So this was actually KEY.

2- The product: our salads are full meal salads, so it’s not your typical lettuce with a slice of chicken that makes you wonder where is my food? ( like all competition do) You would get a whole 150 grams of chicken or 150 grams of smoked duck with nuts, cheese, the whole nine yards that would make you feel like WOW this is seriously a full MEAL! From a product perspective, we also wanted to ensure our consumers get the freshest, most delicious and highest quality of salads they can get. All our vegetables ingredients are freshly sourced on daily bases from local suppliers and go through an enormous cleaning and cleansing process. Our ingredients such as smoked duck or shrimps, are sourced from the best qualified ISO certified manufacturers. We also went a step further; ALL our ingredients are washed with RO Water, Reverse Osmosis water. We have invested in machinery to be able to get this bacteria free water unlike regular tape water that is not perfectly clean as we all know. Most importantly we wanted to be the most delicious salad you will ever have, we always had problem eating salads anywhere in Egypt as their dressings are dull and boring, and this is where our secret “Know How” makes us unique! I can proudly say that we have signatures dressings that are unique to us and our consumers have quickly noticed that.

3- As we call it, is ‘the magic bread pill’. All our salads are served with 70 gram of our signature-own-baked-multigrain-bread. This is key for the positioning, which also none of our competitors do. This piece of bread helps in positioning the salad as a meal because Egyptians love bread and it help curb their appetite and bread is part of the everyday meal.

4- The quantity: all restaurants in Egypt don’t serve you salad in a quantity that would satisfy an average Egyptian appetite. We wanted to make sure that when you’re eating our salad, you are getting more than what it’s worth. When it comes to size, I can claim that easily we are double any normal salad quantity served in any of the top restaurants in Egypt.

5- Pricing: the most important factor to us, the average salad price in Egypt would be between 30 to 35 pounds, with our biggest competitors averaging around 40 to 45, we went above that as well with an average price of salad as 50 LE. The rationale behind it was three things…

A- we want to be premium to competition: we offer consumer double the serving size and offer a quality that is top notch in terms of pack / product / experience

B- An average meal [and remember, we are positioning ourselves as a meal with our salads] would cost around 60 + LE if you are dinning out. Hence -although we are be the most expensive salad in the market, we would still be a convenient affordable “meal”  

6- Exciting: salads in Egypt are known to be dull and boring, anyone who would be eating a salad would be asked “why are you on a diet?”…… We don’t really cater to a certain diet; this is actually something that we are trying to change about the perception for salads. Most people see salads as diet food, something boring and tasteless, which we are definitely NOT. That’s why we have all sort of exciting salads that could cater to any food philosophy. What we really want to reach is for Egyptian consumers to get into the mentality of eating right and not dieting. Diets are pre historic; eating deliciously right is our ultimate goal. This was part of the brief for the artwork and our brand identity; we wanted to have a fresh, exciting clean look.

7- Finally, the store: we opened in Zamalek, an upscale area of Cairo. The reason is that if you make it big with Zamalek consumers, you make it big with Cairo – they are the trend setters. Zamalek is affluent and it is the prime spot of Cairo for night outs and restaurants. We wanted to stand out with a cool looking small design store that would be the hub for all our fresh salads. The interior was carefully designed to reflect freshness and comfortable to sit in, we introduced the communal dinning table sittings which is not common in Egypt, but this is also intention from day one, as we wanted to create a unique friendly fun atmosphere, so random walk in customers would come in and sit and enjoy a meal together which is not very common in Egypt but it’s also part of our unique mix. In a nut shell as we say “Lettuceat” is truly your fresh, delish dish.”

A remarkable story! It made even it to the newspapers in Egypt : http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2013/04/11/lettuceat-perfects-salads/

I’m a fan!

Here’s my two sense on it: FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS! With passion, a good idea and the right people around you, you can do almost anything. Clearly, Ahmed is going for it, pulling this off on top of a full-time job. Kudos! Kurt

Pricing. A precious subject. Difficult. But essential. In the end, all a company does is 3 things: (1) drive frequency (through equity building, creating desirability and through availability), (2) drive volume per usage/consumption (through great product performance; i.e. delivering on the brand promise), and (3) manage pricing. The combination of these 3 give you the revenue of your business.

Pricing is the one strategy that moves the least as a strategy (by strategy here I mean ‘system’, ‘theory’). If it moves at all. And that in itself is strange; knowing that it is the most impactful element in a company’s revenue delivery. Companies are built on certain pricing strategies (sometimes through unwritten rules that ‘have been around’ for 100 years), and it is difficult to let go or change over. And, it is the CFO’s baby. But it actually should be the marketer’s baby …

Why pricing should matter (more) to marketers

Price of a product or service is an important signal sent to the consumer. It is and rightly should be a supporting lever to the equity of the brand. It is a signal that labels whether your product is cheap …affordable …expensive …exclusive …for you …not for you …for everyday …for special occasions …etc. Consumers’ psychology is such that price comes with a lot of baggage based on previous experience with your product, or potentially previous experience with a competitive product. It is immediately put in the wider competitive set, and, relayed back to money available in the wallet (our on the visa) at the time of purchase. All of this makes price setting a complicated matter.

Question is: do you really spend the time thinking about all these (equity and brand) aspects when you determine the price of your product?

Current practice

At the risk of generalizing dramatically, I’d say that for a lot of companies, pricing is a p&l exercise, internally focused, based on a cost+ method (input being the cost of the product and package plus the cost of the go-to-market in all its aspects). In most cases, it is an exercise whereby one is trying to match a competitor’s price -great, at least an external factor is added. That system is comfortable, predictable, gets you what you’ve always gotten. Hooray, the CFO will be happy. BUT…it is not at all consumer based! <That doesn’t mean it’s bad; it’s just not enough> If Porsche would follow a cost+ model then we’d probably all drive a Porsche for less than 15.000 dollars. Or we’d all be wearing UGC boots for 100 bucks, or drinking a Starbucks coffee for a few $cents only. Get my drift!? Pricing is much more of a strategic equity weapon than we might think.

Future of pricing?

Time for a change I’d say. Why? Well, the cost+competitive price strategy leaves opportunities on the table. Because it doesn’t start from the consumer ‘willingness’ to pay a certain amount for what he gets, you either under-price or over-price your product. Consumer might get the wrong ‘signal’ about your brand, and price might determine buying or not buying (in the ideal world it is “this product/brand is perfect for me” that should determine buying or not buying). Not good. So the question is: How can you start from the ‘worth of a proposition’ rather than cost+? How can you use price as an ‘equity signal’? How can you generate more profit by pricing higher to invest in A&M/image/identity (that by the way in turn leads to desirability and premiumness)? How do you really leverage the power of your brand more?

All of these questions warrant a change to what is called VALUE-BASED-PRICING. [definition: VBP sets prices on the value - perceived or estimated - to the consumer rather than on the cost of the product or historical prices]. The benefit I think is big: as a company you can move from the just-right-price quest (which is always a struggle) to a maximum-possible-price-for-a-proposition, which will boost profits! VBP is all around us, outside FMCG. Why can’t it be working in FMCG for instance?

Caveat

Value-based-pricing is much more complex than any other pricing strategy. You need to understand consumer price psychology before you can make a call. And that leads to a need to change systems that lead to pricing decisions dramatically. From how you research pricing [you need to reframe ‘willingness to pay’], to how you develop VBP-modeling-tools to manage the portfolio. Understanding elasticity, in all its shapes and forms is essential. Stretching prices is possible, but there obviously are limits too. Uncovering those is critical (circling back to the opening sentence of this article: price is one of the 3 key components to a business… that means that if you get it wrong, you suffer!)

FYI – two years ago I wrote an rather controversial view on pricing, based on my theory I call “distance to the bin” …how risky is it for consumers to “bin” your product/brand, and how does that influence price setting. Read it here.

Any other views on the subject? I’d love to hear them!

You can easily distinguish the good from the bad these days. The good and bad brands I mean. The good will focus on conversation and message distribution, 24/7 interaction, an always-on strategy; the bad…well…don’t. Now, that’s very simplistic, but that way of thinking holds a lot of truth. Companies and brands become publishers of content, and while doing so they build communities of interest around their brands. Communities interested not only in consuming that content, but in engaging with it, liking-sharing-promoting-etc. Hooray -mission accomplished. Engagement leads to brand interest and love and ultimately, sales.

With that in mind, the focus should shift to Return on Engagement [ROE], instead of “simply” ROI. The goal, in the end, is a long term one. And that goal is: bigger communities, stronger loyalty, an unbreakable bond with the brand, and a desire of the consumer/user/fan to refer the brand to others.

ROI as we all know, says something about how you invest your money, and what you get back mostly in economical terms (in media terms, e.g. how much free media got generated). ROE on the other hand aims at what you get back in brand strength: to what extend did your content captivate your consumer, and has it resulted in brand equity, in making the brand stronger?  Key ‘return’ components being…

• … was there ‘participation’ (Comments, Shares, Likes)
• … did it confirm ‘Authority’
• … did it generate ‘Influence’
• … did it generate ‘positive sentiment’

Easier said than done, but the “formula” is not cracked yet. The whole industry, advertisers and media alike, are in search for this holy grail answer (i.e. to what extend does a piece of content on social media contribute to brand equity of a brand).

Few thoughts on where to get started

• Define what you want to get out of ROE
• Set up continuous tracking online, on different platforms aiming at the content>equity relation
• Work in continuous, repetative intervals (since you can’t survey 24/7, nor every single piece of content), e.g. every 25 hours <I’m taking an odd number so you’d rotate time>
  • a sample of your engaged user group can be surveyed to capture equity and even consumption intent 
  • then it can be cross-validated with another survey with a controlgroup of ‘non-consumers of the content’
  • If you do that repeatedly over a period of time, patterns will occur
  • Put a few other research elements in the blender, shake it all up and my guess is it will spit out interesting facts

SOURCE : http://www.slideshare.net/brandonmurphy/the-true-value-of-social-media-4267498

Caveats

1-Brand equity and brand love are obviously not built solely on social media. So the above ROE measurment is going to give you only a slice of the pie. What can i say, life is difficult

2-ROE is a long term measure. Difficult for brands and companies that want to see short-term action/reaction to investments in social. Time for a mindset shift! 

What do you do with ROE results/numbers?

• Build a stronger content strategy, focused on real impact
• Tailor content better to be relevant to your consumers/users
• Compare to competition so you differentiate better
• Build greater, better, stronger, more loyal brand communities  -that’s the ultimate goal

 Once you crack ROE, you have a strong component of ROI !

Any other views on the subject? I’d love to hear them!

WOW. You can not believe the number of times I’ve heard the words “BIG DATA” in the last two weeks. It’s been a hot item for the past few years, but for some reason, at least in my social/professional circles, it has moved up the ranks, and is creeping in every sector, every business, every person. So, let’s tackle the number 1 buzz word in marketing and business today …

Let’s start with a confrontational question: Are you leveraging big data or drowning in the data pool? Or…are you just ignoring the issue?

What is big data?

<taken from wikipedia> Big data is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications. The challenges include capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, transfer, analysis.

It ain’t gonna stop!

Data is exploding -we all know it, we all see it. Here’s an interesting data point to prove the point: every month, 30 billion pieces of content are being shared on facebook. Wow! Try “handling” that. Twitter users send more than 600,000 tweets per hour. People own more mobile phones than they have toothbrushes -just sayin’! Data is increasing in volume (i.e. the amount of data), in velocity (speed of data -in and out), and in variety (range of data types and sources). The world’s technological per-capita capacity to store information has roughly doubled every 40 months since the 1980s! Cisco announced that data will grow 10-fold by 2016. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt predicts that every two days now, we create as much data as has been created from the dawn of human civilization until 2003! Decoding the human genome originally took 10 years to process; now it can be achieved in less than one week.  The average person processes more data in a single day than a person did in a lifetime in the 1500s! And you can go on and on and on. During the World Economic Forum in 2012 is was agreed amongst leaders in the world that “Data is a new class of economic asset, like currency and gold.” On a more abstract level, the world’s relation with data/information is changing, and with that, the fabric of humanity will change as well -AMEN.

Land of opportunities

BIG DATA is nothing new. There has always been data, and there has always been a lot of data. Some sectors have been better at capturing big data than others though. But now, rather than the “mathematical approach” to things, I feel that the coin has flipped and focus has shifted to the opportunity side. A great move. Because leveraging big data can lead to fantastic opportunities for marketing:

# greater consumer understanding, faster and cheaper
# being more relevant
# real-time mkt
# ability build tighter brand communities
# greater retention and loyalty
# greater efficiency
# more profitable advertising
# eCommerce

How the hell do I get started?

The trick nowadays is figuring out how to capture the data, how to analyse it, and how to deploy it efficiently to grow your business. Here’s a few pointers to start getting your head around it…

Understand the big data issue.
Understand the data sources that you have.
Understand what data can do for your business.
Figure out what matters. Not all data is valuable.
Get technology savvy.
Go CLOUD !
Focus on turning data into transactions. Make it actionable!
Get close to your CTO.
Rally your marketing team around big data.
Put it on your CEO’s agenda.
Automate. To the max.
Take small steps. Don’t drown in the data ocean.
and … address the big ENABLER: get organized!

3 critical questions that you need to answer sooner rather than later:

- do you have a ‘big data strategy’?

- do you have the talent?

- do you have the tools?

Why all of this matters, in my opinion.

The key idea here is: COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE. Every business is struggling with big data. Those who will figure it out fast will have an edge over their competitors. Reason enough to get started, I say.

Success stories exist already today

Wal-Mart

$444bn retail giant Walmart started using big data before the term was even remotely known in the industry. They organised their operating business around it; esp after setting up Walmart Labs, which was created after Walmart took over Kosmix in 2011. As an outcome, they now can reach customers, and friends of customers, who have mentioned something online to inform them about that exact product and include a discount -not bad. They are currently analysing over 100 million shopping cart  transactions per week. And some serious “magic” is coming out of that:  charcoal and tongs go alongside the barbecue grills, Tiny baggies go next to the pretzel boxes so Mom can pack snacks for the kids …and… customers who buy Barbie dolls have a 60% likelihood of buying one of three types of candy bars! That is data at work.

Amazon

Amazon has an unbelievable mountain of data on its consumers. They can follow, interpret, and influence purchasing behaviour that it can mine from more than 150 million customers. Just think of the “you might like” suggestions you see when you land on your page. Amazon also uses Big Data to monitor, track and secure its 1.5 billion items in store that are laying around its 200 fulfillment centers around the world. Net net, Amazon moved away from an e-commerce player to a giant online player who offers much more than just products. In doing all that, they are given the consumer a sense of control. They focus on big data and are changing into a “big data company”.  Watch and learn, I would say!

Check out the BIG DATA BLOG of the Wall Street Journal: http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/tag/big-data/ > lots of stories and best practices there.

Data remains data unless people make something of it!

Make no mistake. Even if you are all geared up, have your computers working at the speed of light, and analysis tools at the tip of your fingers, you will only be half done.  Data doesn’t get intelligent itself. Human interpretation remains the biggest final leap. And in my opinion, it is the forgotten element in the whole discussion. Data will show you what’s up, but people will have to tell you the why, and what to do with it!

The above is obviously (not even) scratching the surface of the issue. So, more to be expected on this blog, soon. Stay tuned!

Thanks for stopping by and reading this article! Let me know what you think – here, on twitter (@kurtfrenier), on facebook, or on LinkedIn  /Kurt.

Erik Saelens, marketing guru and CEO/Founder of BRANDHOME, and a good friend of mine, has written a marvelous little book called TripleA. I thought it was worth writing about it, building on many articles in this blog that talk about brand coolness, brand authenticity and how brand activation should be done. This book galvanizes all of that, in just 100 pages.

The premise of the book is as follows:  “The world is a mess, trust is out the window, spending is low, money is scarce, markets are driven by low budget sales, and people and business alike are holding their breath about the future. Could it be any worse? Actually, it couldn’t be better! This is the very best time for a brand to make the transition from being “just a brand” to becoming a real Triple-A brand, and to start a completely new era of brand marketing!”

AAA (Triple-A) has always been an indication of value, from real estate locations, to school grades, to financial products, and so on. Following the same logic or analogy, a Triple-A brand is a brand that ensures its value for all its stakeholders. A Triple-A brand is a balanced brand, combining the values of three elements that reflect today’s global trends towards brands: authenticity, accountability and activation. These elements are essential in forming the main driver of brands that must deal with a rising demand for transparent, sincere and trusting brand behaviour.

AUTHENTICITY: ARE YOU FOR REAL?
As social media have become fully-fledged communication channels, and new communication innovations appear on the horizon (e.g. interactive TV), brands and their actions will have to become more identity driven. In other words, brands will have to be themselves, in a straightforward and transparent way.

ACCOUNTABILITY: TRUE COMMITMENT PAYS OFF
With fewer tools and more challenges, demonstrating sustainable results is more important than ever. Brands must remain accountable to internal and external stakeholders. This requires more thinking before acting and less “we do things because we have always done them this way”.

ACTIVATION: DON’T WAIT FOR APPLES, SHAKE THE TREE
Brands will have to be and act more sales driven due to the pressures of the brand owner’s financial situation. Internal and external brand activation will become more pragmatic, and provide tangible KPIs (key performance indicators), for the brand owner as well as for the client.

Brandhome has developed a quick questionnaire that will rank your brand on the TripleA index: it’s worth taking the test:  http://www.triple-a-index.com

* From growth at any cost to growth with a focus on sustainability

* From competitiveness to willingness to cooperate

* From conquering markets to embracing communities

* From pure profit to providing meaningful value

If that wasn’t enough to convince you to read TripleA, then look at this endorsement of mine:

 

Thanks for stopping by and reading this article! Let me know what you think – here, on twitter (@kurtfrenier), on facebook, or on LinkedIn. Kurt.

Here’s another brand in the BBI, the “BRILLIANT BRAND INDEX” ®Kurt Frenier.

As a reminder, the BBI® model has 8 dimensions that I deem important to qualify for a “brilliant brand”: 4 ‘brand coolness’ dimensions (a lovable brand, a beacon of trust, inherent universality, a memorable visual identity), and 4 ‘brand hotness’ dimensions (novel/contemporary marketing, on a growth trajectory, creativity & awesomeness, executed to excellence).

BIT OF BACKGROUND ON Burberry:

Who doesnt’ know and recognise the Burberry checkered tweet print?

Burberry’s history starts 156 years ago. Its sturdy, all-weather raincoats were worn by the solders in the trenches of a.o. WW1 and thereafter became part of the “fabric” of British culture. The Burberry fashion house was officially established later, in 1956, by Thomas Burberry, opening the doors to a store in Basingstoke, England. After the first world war, the “trench coat” became popular with the common people, and is still one of the most iconic pieces of clothing in associated with the Burberry brand. Celebrities and legends alike have worn the coats.

Burberry is a remarkable company. More so now, since CEO Angela Ahrendts turned the company and brand around: from being everywhere to everyone and on a downward slope , back to its core: luxury, firmly entrentched in coats as icon item!

The 4 ‘brand coolness’ dimensions:

1-A LOVABLE BRAND

What a brand! My guess is that a lot of people either have a Burberry item or envy having one. Love for the brand runs deep as it comes with a particular image people want to associate themselves with: Britishness, high quality, class and elegance. Burberry sells ”luxurious effortless style“, and creates designs that represent current trends. BUT – they are loyal to the idea of what Burberry is all about, captured by the ‘trench coat’ : a Burberry statement piece! Burberry targets both male and females in their late twenties/early thirties that are (rather) wealthy, successful, stylish and slim. A lot of their garments and clothes are so called “casual smart” so they appeal the modern day business person.

2-A BEACON OF TRUST

Once diluted as a brand (as they were making cheap socks, quilts, shirts, condoms, and what not), Burberry is once again an item sold at high price with a matching quality. [or at least they're well underway on the road to recovery; brand erosion takes a while to rectify] Many of the cloths they sell cost more than $1000. And that’s just because the brand can easily command a premium. When you buy a ‘real’ Burberry, you know what you get!

3-INHERENT UNIVERSALITY

Burberry is everywhere. But Angela Ahrendts is clear in not taking it too far. “In luxury, ubiquity kills you”, she rightly states. Amen to that. See an article I wrote on a non-related luxury & exclusive industry, the famous El Bulli restaurant: here.

4-A MEMORABLE VISUAL IDENTITY

WOW. Burberry “own” their white/brown/black tweet. It has become recognisable, memorable, … iconic. And it is of such nature that you can really play around with it; not just on clothes, but accross all consumer touchpoints (all products, stores, communication…)

What they are doing right, is having all design choices and decisions go through one single person, Christopher Bailey. The premise: great global brands don’t have people all over the world designing and producing all kinds of stuff. Agree!

The 4 ‘brand hotness’ dimensions :

I-NOVEL, CONTEMPORARY MARKETING

After Burberry’s turnaround, they have “embraced” new media tools. All the way from their website, to a florishing facebook page, that last time I checked had nearly 15 million followers. All Burberry touchpoints gavanise the idea of consistency against their core values (luxury + the tweet print).

II-ON A GROWTH TRAJECTORY

What a story. After a serious blimp in growth, Burberry has DOUBLED revenues in 5 years, now passing $3bn. And they have a healthy $600 million operating income. Many companies in the fashion industry would die for that. In 2011 they were named the 4th fastest growing brand by Interbrand.

III-CREATIVITY AND AWESOMENESS

Imagine being on the creative side of the business, and making campaigns for a “quintessentially British” brand. Not bad. A briefing document must look something like this : “strengthen the authentic British heritage;  establish uniqueness of Burberry, but add a dimension of ’democraticy within the luxury industry; stay within the principles of quality, function and modern classic style, rooted in the integrity the trench coat; make it global; and don’t shy away from glamorous celebrities” [this is my own interpretation by the way] … lots to play with!

One thing they could do better, in my opinion, is leveraging their strong history of the trench coat. I doubt whether people really know they are the fathers of the trench coat. They could “own” that, just like O’Neill owns the wetsuit, and Lacoste owns the polo shirt.

IV-EXECUTED TO EXCELLENCE

What can I say? Walk into any Burberry store and you’ll see what excellence looks like.

On the “BRILLIANT BRAND INDEX MAP” ®, they are another “BRIGHT & SHINING STAR”

Thanks for stopping by and reading this article! Let me know what you think – here, on twitter (@kurtfrenier), on facebook, or on LinkedIn. Kurt.

For once, I am going to make it easy for myself and copy/paste. I found this fantastic TED TALK on the subject of “sharing” – a phenomenon covered in multiple posts in this blog, and relevant for so many [if not all] brands these days, that it’s worth just putting it up in its entirety.

Lisa Gansky nailed it in my opinion, talking about what she calls “the mesh”. Lisa is the author of “The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing”, and is the “instigator” behind the Mesh Directory (http://meshing.it). She often speaks on the topic of technology, social currency and business platforms and models.

First, the transcript of the talk, and below the video of the TED TALK.

I’m speaking to you about what I call the “mesh.” It’s essentially a fundamental shift in our relationship with stuff, with the things in our lives. And it’s starting to look at — not always and not for everything — but in certain moments of time, access to certain kinds of goods and service will trump ownership of them. And so it’s the pursuit of better things, easily shared. And we come from a long tradition of sharing. We’ve shared transportation. We’ve shared wine and food and other sorts of fabulous experiences in coffee bars in Amsterdam. We’ve also shared other sorts of entertainment — sports arenas, public parks, concert halls, libraries, universities. All these things are share-platforms, but sharing ultimately starts and ends with what I refer to as the “mother of all share-platforms.”

And as I think about the mesh and I think about, well, what’s driving it, how come it’s happening now, I think there’s a number of vectors that I want to give you as background. One is the recession — that the recession has caused us to rethink our relationship with the things in our lives relative to the value — so starting to align the value with the true cost. Secondly, population growth and density into cities. More people, smaller spaces, less stuff. Climate change: we’re trying to reduce the stress in our personal lives and in our communities and on the planet. Also, there’s been this recent distrust of big brands, global big brands, in a bunch of different industries, and that’s created an opening. Research is showing here, in the States, and in Canada and Western Europe, that most of us are much more open to local companies, or brands that maybe we haven’t heard of. Whereas before, we went with the big brands that we were sure we trusted. And last is that we’re more connected now to more people on the planet than ever before — except for if you’re sitting next to someone.

The other thing that’s worth considering is that we’ve made a huge investment over decades and decades, and tens of billions of dollars have gone into this investment that now is our inheritance. It’s a physical infrastructure that allows us to get from point A to point B and move things that way. It’s also — Web and mobile allow us to be connected and create all kinds of platforms and systems, and the investment of those technologies and that infrastructure is really our inheritance. It allows us to engage in really new and interesting ways.

And so for me, a mesh company, the “classic” mesh company, brings together these three things: our ability to connect to each other — most of us are walking around with these mobile devices that are GPS-enabled and Web-enabled — allows us to find each other and find things in time and space. And third is that physical things are readable on a map — so restaurants, a variety of venues, but also with GPS and other technology like RFID and it continues to expand beyond that, we can also track things that are moving, like a car, a taxicab, a transit system, a box that’s moving through time and space. And so that sets up for making access to get goods and services more convenient and less costly in many cases than owning them.

For example, I want to use Zipcar. How many people here have experienced car-sharing or bike-sharing? Wow, that’s great. Okay, thank you. Basically Zipcar is the largest car-sharing company in the world. They did not invent car-sharing. Car-sharing was actually invented in Europe. One of the founders went to Switzerland, saw it implemented someplace, said, “Wow, that looks really cool. I think we can do that in Cambridge,” brought it to Cambridge and they started — two women — Robin Chase being the other person who started it. Zipcar got some really important things right. First, they really understood that a brand is a voice and a product is a souvenir. And so they were very clever about the way that they packaged car-sharing. They made it sexy. They made it fresh. They made it aspirational. If you were a member of the club, when you’re a member of a club, you’re a Zipster. The cars they picked didn’t look like ex-cop cars that were hollowed out or something. They picked these sexy cars. They targeted to universities. They made sure that the demographic for who they were targeting and the car was all matching. It was a very nice experience, and the cars were clean and reliable, and it all worked.

And so from a branding perspective, they got a lot right. But they understood fundamentally that they are not a car company. They understand that they are an information company. Because when we buy a car we go to the dealer once, we have an interaction, and we’re chow — usually as quickly as possible. But when you’re sharing a car and you have a car-share service, you might use an E.V. to commute, you get a truck because you’re doing a home project. When you pick your aunt up at the airport, you get a sedan. And you’re going to the mountains to ski, you get different accessories put on the car for doing that sort of thing. Meanwhile, these guys are sitting back, collecting all sorts of data about our behavior and how we interact with the service. And so it’s not only an option for them, but I believe it’s an imperative for Zipcar and other mesh companies to actually just wow us, to be like a concierge service. Because we give them so much information, and they are entitled to really see how it is that we’re moving. They’re in really good shape to anticipate what we’re going to want next.

And so what percent of the day do you think the average person uses a car? What percentage of the time? Any guesses? Those are really very good. I was imagining it was like 20 percent when I first started. The number across the U.S. and Western Europe is eight percent. And so basically even if you think it’s 10 percent, 90 percent of the time, something that costs us a lot of money — personally, and also we organize our cities around it and all sorts of things — 90 percent of the time it’s sitting around. So for this reason, I think one of the other themes with the mesh is essentially that, if we squeeze hard on things that we’ve thrown away, there’s a lot of value in those things. What set up with Zipcar — Zipcar started in 2000.

In the last year, 2010, two car companies started, one that’s in the U.K. called WhipCar, and the other one, RelayRides, in the U.S. They’re both peer-to-peer car-sharing services, because the two things that really work for car-sharing is, one, the car has to be available, and two, it’s within one or two blocks of where you stand. Well the car that’s one or two blocks from your home or your office is probably your neighbor’s car, and it’s probably also available. So people have created this business. Zipcar started a decade earlier, in 2000. It took them six years to get 1,000 cars in service. WhipCar, which started April of last year, it took them six months to get 1,000 cars in the service. So, really interesting. People are making anywhere between 200 and 700 dollars a month letting their neighbors use their car when they’re not using it. So it’s like vacation rentals for cars. Since I’m here — and I hope some people in the audience are in the car business — (Laughter) — I’m thinking that, coming from the technology side of things — we saw cable-ready TVs and WiFi-ready Notebooks — it would be really great if, any minute now, you guys could start rolling share-ready cars off. Because it just creates more flexibility. It allows us as owners to have other options. And I think we’re going there anyway.

The opportunity and the challenge with mesh businesses — and those are businesses like Zipcar or Netflix that are full mesh businesses, or other ones where you have a lot of the car companies, car manufacturers, who are beginning to offer their own car-share services as well as a second flanker brand, or as really a test, I think — is to make sharing irresistible. We have experiences in our lives, certainly, when sharing has been irresistible. It’s just, how do we make that recurrent and scale it? We know also, because we’re connected in social networks, that it’s easy to create delight in one little place. It’s contagious because we’re all connected to each other. So if I have a terrific experience and I tweet it, or I tell five people standing next to me, news travels. The opposite, as we know, is also true, often more true.

So here we have LudoTruck, which is in L.A., doing the things that gourmet food trucks do, and they’ve gathered quite a following. In general, and maybe, again, it’s because I’m a tech entrepreneur, I look at things as platforms. Platforms are invitations. So creating Craigslist or iTunes and the iPhone developer network, there are all these networks — Facebook as well. These platforms invite all sorts of developers and all sorts of people to come with their ideas and their opportunity to create and target an application for a particular audience. And honestly, it’s full of surprises. Because I don’t think any of us in this room could have predicted the sorts of applications that have happened at Facebook, around Facebook, for example, two years ago, when Mark announced that they were going to go with a platform.

So in this way, I think that cities are platforms, and certainly Detroit is a platform. The invitation of bringing makers and artists and entrepreneurs — it really helps stimulate this fiery creativity and helps a city to thrive. It’s inviting participation, and cities have, historically, invited all sorts of participation. Now we’re saying that there’s other options as well. So, for example, city departments can open up transit data. Google has made available transit data API. And so there’s about seven or eight cities already in the U.S. that have provided the transit data, and different developers are building applications. So I was having a coffee in Portland, and half-of-a-latte in and the little board in the cafe all of a sudden starts showing me that the next bus is coming in three minutes and the train is coming in 16 minutes. And so it’s reliable, real data that’s right in my face, where I am, so I can finish the latte.

There’s this fabulous opportunity we have across the U.S. now: about 21 percent of vacant commercial and industrial space. That space is not vital. The areas around it lack vitality and vibrancy and engagement. There’s this thing — how many people here have heard of pop-up stores or pop-up shops? Oh, great. So I’m a big fan of this. And this is a very mesh-y thing. Essentially, there are all sorts of restaurants in Oakland, near where I live. There’s a pop-up general store every three weeks, and they do a fantastic job of making a very social event happening for foodies. Super fun, and it happens in a very transitional neighborhood. Subsequent to that, after it’s been going for about a year now, they actually started to lease and create and extend. An area that was edgy-artsy is now starting to become much cooler and engage a lot more people. So this is an example. The Crafty Fox is this woman who’s into crafts, and she does these pop-up crafts fairs around London. But these sorts of things are happening in many different environments. From my perspective, one of the things pop-up stores do is create perishability and urgency. It creates two of the favorite words of any businessperson: sold out. And the opportunity to really focus trust and attention is a wonderful thing.

So a lot of what we see in the mesh, and a lot of what we have in the platform that we built allows us to define, refine and scale. It allows us to test things as an entrepreneur, to go to market, to be in conversation with people, listen, refine something and go back. It’s very cost-effective, and it’s very mesh-y. The infrastructure enables that.

In closing, and as we’re moving towards the end, I just also want to encourage — and I’m willing to share my failures as well, though not from the stage. (Laughter) I would just like to say that one of the big things, when we look at waste and when we look at ways that we can really be generous and contribute to each other, but also move to create a better economic situation and a better environmental situation, is by sharing failures. And one quick example is Velib, in 2007, came forward in Paris with a very bold proposition, a very big bike-sharing service. They made a lot of mistakes. They had some number of big successes. But they were very transparent, or they had to be, in the way that they exposed what worked and didn’t work. And so B.C. in Barcelona and B-cycle and Boris Bikes in London — no one has had to repeat the version 1.0 screw-ups and expensive learning exercises that happened in Paris. So the opportunity when we’re connected is also to share failures and successes.

We’re at the very beginning of something that, what we’re seeing and the way that mesh companies are coming forward, is inviting, it’s engaging, but it’s very early. I have a website — it’s a directory — and it started with about 1,200 companies, and in the last two-and-a-half months it’s up to about 3,300 companies. And it grows on a very regular daily basis. But it’s very much at the beginning.

Thank you for stopping by. Stay tuned for more interesting stuff every week.

O no! Not a-gai-ain *child’s voice*

Less than half a year after PSY shook up the universe with Gangnam Style, another weird music/dance phenomenon is shaking it all up…

Very different than Gangnam Style, Harlem Shake is about spoofs, stupidity, remarkable videos only. The original owner of the song, Baauer, actually had nothing to do with it. The song itself is not even new. In May 2012, Brooklyn producer Baauer (23 years old) released the single. Little did he know that less than a year later, it would become one of the biggest memes on the internet. Very different than PSY, who intented to make a Youtube sensation [see the article I wrote shortly after I discovered Gangnam Style last year: here]

The start?
It started only 2 weeks ago and is already the newest big dance-sensation-in-the-making! Here are the idots that sparked it all [today, they've got close to 14 million views]:

The viral videos?
Did PSY create a totally new long-lasting genre and movement beyond his own video and spoofs? One where it’s about making the craziest alternative to an original viral video? And is this the first proof of it? Maybe. Very well possible actually. What helped for the Harlem Shake: the format is ultra simple. Whereas Gangnam had a bit of a “story” and was a full fletched 3’30″, these Harlem Shakes are merely 30″ and not much is really happening in them! The “plot” goes like this: The song starts, crowded space, all of a sudden one person starts dancing, and then -once the bass drops- the whole room joins in, mostly in very ridiculous movements! The virality around it is stunning : About 5.000 “Shake” videos are being uploaded every single day; and they’ve already reached over 50 million total views. God help us!

There are two spoofs that each crossed the 20 million views already, today:

THE ARMY VERSION

UNDERWATER SWIMMERS

Where is it going?

Celebs are jumping on it. Guess what… more shaking will follow quickly once that happens. First it was all about emulating the early starters, and proving that you can do better, now it will be about emulating the celebrities. One Direction uploaded their own Harlem Shake video yesterday:

The Daily Show also contributed:

My prediction: something new has started. And it will be bigger than PSY’s billion. Two reasons: it’s stupid (and that works well in the viral world of youtube), and it’s simple to do yourself (anyone with a phone cam can make a Harlem Shake video).

HERE is another article I wrote 2 years ago about a viral “incident”.

Or is it about “the first follower”? See the following leadership-related video; very relevant for how “movements unfold”:

Wherever this will go, you better start shaking

WHAT DO YOU THINK? “FUN!”..or…”WHATEVER?”

Who doesn’t love Ben & Jerry’s ice cream? I know I do. Chunky Monkey in particular -yum! [Chunky Monkey is one of close to 50 Ben and Jerry's ice cream flavors. It has a base of creamy banana ice cream which is blended with walnuts and chocolate fudge. Oh - bring it on]

The story of Ben & Jerry’s starts in 1978, when childhood friends Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, two dramatic underachievers, opened an ice cream store in a renovated gas station in South Burlington, Vermont, USA. The company had a bit of a hippie approach to business, but flourished so fast that in 2000 it was overwhelmed by a generous $330 million offer  by Unilever and got sold. Good thing: they were able to keep their philosophies and ways of working intact, delivering wonderful ice cream to the world. Unilever controls the financial and operational envelop, but Ben & Jerry kept control over the business, leadership and brand, with an independent Board of Directors. The hippie part of the business goes as follows. At the end of every month, the founders would ask themselves : “how much have we improved the quality of life in the community?” To date, B&J’s mission statement talks about a company that integrates product quality with economic success and social responsibility. They’ve preserved a strategy of slow and steady growth; not too fast, not too slow. Successfully. Here are 3 important building blocks of their business, and of their brand:

1] Quality first, and not just any quality

Ben & Jerry’s have always set a high standard when it comes to the quality of their products. They understand that a differentiated, exceptionally high quality product can command a good premium, and hence nothing but all-natural, above-market-price ingredients and innovative flavors are their way of operating. They crowdsource instead of market research. In 1981 Time magazine hailed Ben and Jerry’s as ‘The best ice cream in the world.’

2] Quirkiness as brand identity

Ben & Jerry’s brand is all about quirkiness and surprise. From the flavor names (Chubby Hubby, Wavy Gravy, Phish Food to Chunky Monkey), to the brand philosophy. If it ain’t fun, then why do it? is high on their values list, and you can feel that in the brand. Their overall corporate mantras also trickle through in the brand. In their book, “Double Dip,” Ben states that “Modern marketing is a process whereby faceless, nameless, valueless corporations hire marketers to determine what the consumer would like their brand to be, and then fabricate an image that corresponds. But they still only get a sliver of the market, because their made-up story isn’t any more appealing than the next. With values-led marketing you just go out there and say who you are. You don’t have to fool people to sell them your product” - something to think about! They create a wondrous world every day. With that also comes their fabulous design story [that wasn't even an expensive exercise - Ben & Jerry hired a local artist to design cartoons and graphics; fits their mission of intertwining the business with the community]. Important addition, from what I can see: quirkiness never goes at the cost of authenticity, core the B&J brand values.

3] A company that embraced novel marketing from the start.

Ben & Jerry’s also uses social channels to facilitate consumer participation in many aspect of the brand and innovation, both online and offline. Their website home page is sort of a ”jumping board”, branched out in a smart way to their Twitter and Facebook pages! They have apps such as their iPhone application, the Scoop of Happiness (how cool does that sound?), etc. Consumers can influence their menus in their stores, the next big launch, and interact with the company in cool ways. Their fans can post their own photos to the website, with a Fan Foto of the week honored on Facebook . Social media deployed in a nice way. Not bad for a couple of underachievers making ice cream. The center of their thinking is “how can we celebrate the fans and the product in a modern way” -or something of that sort.

TAKE-AWAYS

1- GO FOR EXTRAORDINARY! “Fly with the eagles, don’t scratch with the chickens” comes to mind when I think of Ben & Jerry’s. They wanted to stand out, be different, stay different.

2- SURPRISE. Core to their philosophy, Ben & Jerry’s surprise with whatever they do. They are creative in everything they do. Childishly creative.

3- BE SOCIAL. By that I don’t mean go social media. They have philanthropy, doing good to the community, real life as mantras. Commendable.

4- BE MONOPOLISTIC. Ben & Jerry’s operate their business as if there are no competitors (although there are many), hence putting them outside of the pack. That sets a very different tone to the business than being tangled in beating or catching up with competition.

The Result

An icon. Period.

Thanks for stopping by and reading this article! Let me know what you think – here, on twitter (@kurtfrenier), on facebook, or on LinkedIn. Kurt.

On many an occasion in this blog I have stated that “tv is dead” and it has been my personal rallying cry in my social and business scene for about 2 years now. That has led to many many interesting discussions with colleagues, friends and family where I had to justify and then reframe what I meant exactly by that. This post to clarify where I stand -today. You’ll have to read all the way through to the end to see what that is exactly

As a marketer, I am following the shift between traditional media and ‘new media’ (by the way, new media is mainstream media by now) to decide where the dollars I put to grow brands will work the hardest. When social media came on my radar for the first time, around 2003 (when I was responsible for marketing and communication at a telecom business), it was confusing the picture more than creating the excitement that I got later on. Few years passed, MySpace, Netlog, Yahoo!, Facebook and Youtube came into our lives, search became “optimised”, and then later on the whole world became connected [this one sentence is the summary of a decade in a few words -LoL], and tv moved more and more to the background -in my mind. But as I was and am sifting through what matters, let me clarify one thing: TV is still very much alive! Hooray! What has happened is that many more media and screens are complementing the media scene. OK -enough with stating the obvious.

One of the things that gave me the insight and proof that tv is still a driving force was a TED TALK of a few years back, titled “birth of a word”. At the surface not related to media and social media at all, but with a serious bit of magic around those topics at the very end. Deb Roy proves, scientifically, that TV DRIVES SOCIAL CONVERSATIONS.

Have a look at his 2011 talk:

For those that don’t have the option or time to watch the talk, let me post the transcript of the last 8 minutes:

Think of mass media as providing common ground and you have the recipe for taking this idea to a whole new place. We’ve started analyzing television content using the same principles — analyzing event structure of a TV signal — episodes of shows, commercials, all of the components that make up the event structure. And we’re now, with satellite dishes, pulling and analyzing a good part of all the TV being watched in the United States. And you don’t have to now go and instrument living rooms with microphones to get people’s conversations, you just tune into publicly available social media feeds.

So we’re pulling in about three billion comments a month, and then the magic happens. You have the event structure, the common ground that the words are about, coming out of the television feeds; you’ve got the conversations that are about those topics; and through semantic analysis — and this is actually real data you’re looking at from our data processing — each yellow line is showing a link being made between a comment in the wild and a piece of event structure coming out of the television signal. And the same idea now can be built up. And we get this wordscape, except now words are not assembled in my living room. Instead, the context, the common ground activities, are the content on television that’s driving the conversations. And what we’re seeing here, these skyscrapers now, are commentary that are linked to content on television. Same concept, but looking at communication dynamics in a very different sphere.

And so fundamentally, rather than, for example, measuring content based on how many people are watching, this gives us the basic data for looking at engagement properties of content. And just like we can look at feedback cycles and dynamics in a family, we can now open up the same concepts and look at much larger groups of people. This is a subset of data from our database — just 50,000 out of several million — and the social graph that connects them through publicly available sources. And if you put them on one plain, a second plain is where the content lives. So we have the programs and the sporting events and the commercials, and all of the link structures that tie them together make a content graph. And then the important third dimension. Each of the links that you’re seeing rendered here is an actual connection made between something someone said and a piece of content. And there are, again, now tens of millions of these links that give us the connective tissue of social graphs and how they relate to content. And we can now start to probe the structure in interesting ways.

So if we, for example, trace the path of one piece of content that drives someone to comment on it, and then we follow where that comment goes, and then look at the entire social graph that becomes activated and then trace back to see the relationship between that social graph and content, a very interesting structure becomes visible. We call this a co-viewing clique, a virtual living room if you will. And there are fascinating dynamics at play. It’s not one way. A piece of content, an event, causes someone to talk. They talk to other people. That drives tune-in behavior back into mass media, and you have these cycles that drive the overall behavior.

Another example — very different — another actual person in our database — and we’re finding at least hundreds, if not thousands, of these. We’ve given this person a name. This is a pro-amateur, or pro-am media critic who has this high fan-out rate. So a lot of people are following this person — very influential — and they have a propensity to talk about what’s on TV. So this person is a key link in connecting mass media and social media together.

One last example from this data: Sometimes it’s actually a piece of content that is special. So if we go and look at this piece of content, President Obama’s State of the Union address from just a few weeks ago [mind you -this is 2011], and look at what we find in this same data set, at the same scale, the engagement properties of this piece of content are truly remarkable. A nation exploding in conversation in real time in response to what’s on the broadcast. And of course, through all of these lines are flowing unstructured language. We can X-ray and get a real-time pulse of a nation, real-time sense of the social reactions in the different circuits in the social graph being activated by content.

So, to summarize, the idea is this: As our world becomes increasingly instrumented and we have the capabilities to collect and connect the dots between what people are saying and the context they’re saying it in, what’s emerging is an ability to see new social structures and dynamics that have previously not been seen. It’s like building a microscope or telescope and revealing new structures about our own behavior around communication. And I think the implications here are profound, whether it’s for science, for commerce, for government, or perhaps most of all, for us as individuals.

 

Now Deb Roy is co-founder and serves as CEO of Bluefin Labs, a venture-backed technology company. Built upon deep machine learning principles developed in his research over the past 15 years, Bluefin has created a technology platform that analyzes social media commentary to measure real-time audience response to TV ads and shows. Now that is fascinating!! And so now, on his site you can find e.g. which brands drive social conversations based on the technologies he first used to analyse the birth of a word:

And they can look at what is now being called “social tv”:

If you want to know more, then you *MUST* read the following articles: “A Social Media Decoder” [PDF] in Technology Review, and “Bluefin Mines Social Media to Improve TV Analytics” in Fast Company. Believe me, they are worth your time.

Just to be clear to my readers, colleagues and friends: I will continue to state that “TV IS DEAD“. Just because I like the controversy around it. And because we need a leap of faith towards more/better/stronger social media marketing! Voila -I’ve said my piece.

Thanks for passing by. Please do share my post!