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16 Oct 09

Seth's Blog: Creating sustainable competitive advantage

One of the better definitions of "brand" that I've read in a while:
QUOTE
"You can build a brand (shorthand for relationships, beliefs, trust, permission and word of mouth)."
UNQUOTE

Love the last sentence, too:
QUOTE
The reason the internet is such a home to wow business models is that it's easier to create a network here than any other time in history.
UNQUOTE
So true.

sethgodin.typepad.com/...ble-competitive-advantage.html - Preview

seth_godin branding competitiveness marketing

12 Jun 09

YouTube - Seth Godin: Sliced bread and other marketing delights

Still one of the best talks on ...well, sliced bread and all it has spawned.

www.youtube.com/watch - Preview

seth_godin marketing ted_conference

20 Nov 08

Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us - Tribes Q & A (PDF)

PDF companion to the book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us (http://tinyurl.com/6fklwd), by Seth Godin: a booklet of Q&As around growing one's tribe (eg. "Is it possible to influence a tribe without being the leader?"). The questions are at the beginning (six pages), and after each there's a clickable "answer" button - very convenient.

sethgodin.typepad.com/...TribesQA2.pdf - Preview

seth_godin tribes marketing

26 Feb 08

FREE LOVE

Available as a 15-page printable PDF, too, this is the website version. From the intro:
"FREE LOVE: the ongoing rise of free, valuable stuff that's available to consumers online and offline. From AirAsia tickets to Wikipedia, and from diapers to music.
FREE LOVE thrives on an all-out war for consumers' ever-scarcer attention and the resulting new business models and marketing techniques, but also benefits from the ever-decreasing costs of producing physical goods, the post-scarcity dynamics of the online world (and the related avalanche of free content created by attention-hungry members of GENERATION C), the many C2C marketplaces enabling consumers to swap instead of spend, and an emerging recycling culture.
Expect FREE LOVE to become an integral if not essential part of doing business."

trendwatching.com/briefing - Preview

free marketing trends trendwatch

So let's look at five manifestations of FREE LOVE: 'Any excuse to advertise', 'Courting saturated consumers', 'C2C', 'Swapping, not spending', and 'Less is more', which all incorporate one or more of the above drivers.
5 more annotations...
- Student textbooks • U.S.-based Freeload Press provides free college textbooks in electronic form with advertisements inserted at chapter breaks. Inexpensive print-on-demand versions with no ads can be ordered for about USD 30. 'Customers' include students at four-year and two-year colleges throughout the U.S. and Canada. Freeload publishes primarily business and finance books. Students who register and complete a survey on Freeload's website can download a free PDF version of their textbook. Advertisers include Discover Card, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the College Loan Corporation.
  
  In Europe, Danish Ventus Publishing runs a similar concept in 5 countries: (Denmark, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium). Ventus offers titles in the fields of economics, science and engineering, featuring ads from companies such as T-Mobile, British Airways and Deutsche Bank every four pages.
- Finance • Free software may be nothing new, but sophisticated personal finance/money management tools had until now eluded the FREE LOVE dance. Enter Mint, which has relationships with more than 3,500 banks, credit unions and credit card providers, and each night securely downloads transaction data to give users a unified view of all account activity. Transactions are categorized and organized to show users how much they spend on gas, groceries, parking, rent, restaurants, DVD rentals, etc., while an alert system proactively notifies them about unusual activity, low balances, unwanted fees and charges, and upcoming bills. Mint's revenue model is based on lead generation. The system keeps tabs on the latest offers from hundreds of providers and recommends ways users can save money on interest rates and other expenses. Mint is currently available only to U.S. consumers, of whom more than 100,000 have already signed up. The company claims it is now organizing USD 6 billion in user transactions, and has identified nearly USD 90 million in savings opportunities.
- Also check out Wesabe, which is part financial software, part community. With Wesabe, users can see all their bank accounts and credit cards in one place, categorize their transactions however they want, see spending and earning summaries, discuss things with other interested users, and receive tips for saving money based on their spending. Membership is free.
- If giving is the new taking, then hundreds of thousands consumers/individuals are on the right path. Never before have we witnessed such an explosion of free content, courtesy of individuals who—for free, nada, zilch—are happy to share their thinking, their novels, their photos, their movies, their music, their knowledge and expertise, their advice, their crafts and more.
  
  Call it GENERATION C, the HOBBY ECONOMY, the GIFT ECONOMY or CROWD MINING, as long as you don't forget that besides undeniable passion, this user-generated FREE LOVE provides participants with visibility, with respect, with status. Even if they participate anonymously (Wikipedia is a good example), it gives them bragging rights among other GENERATION C members.
  
  Now, we’ve written and spoken about participation vs consumption so often that we won’t repeat the whole spiel, but two more thoughts:
  
  Firstly, nothing indicates that user-generated content, both of the paid and the free kind, and in all its variety, is not here to stay.
  
  Secondly, if many consumers are now producers too, and if they mostly produce for free, will they not expect a similar sharing and loving attitude from corporations? So as a brand, not only may you find yourself competing directly with individuals doing what you do for free, but you will also be confronted with growing expectations for your brand to be giving rather than just taking.
- Now, FREE LOVE is not about everything being free in the (near) future. After all, not everything commercial can be ad-sponsored (if only because those ads in the end have to sell something else), not everything will be copyable, and not everything that's non-commercial can replace the for-profit business world. In fact, scarcity can and will forever be redefined, creating an endless stream of new products and services that many consumers will be happy to pay for. For some instant inspiration on what may in fact be better than free, (re)read Kevin Kelly's excellent 8 Uncopyable Values.

Logic+Emotion: Thinking Through The "3 U's"...

The 3 Us -- damn that apostrophe, it's all wrong as used in the article's title. But if you leave it out, it reads as "the 3 us," as in *us* or *them*... Regardless, an interesting summing up of what might make applications interesting for users. See notes.

darmano.typepad.com/...thinking-throug.html - Preview

apps economy marketing socialnetworks web2.0

Usefulness
5 more annotations...
- Any experience is useful when it's meaningful
  and serves a purpose. Currently much of marketing still breaks down
  into self-serving gimmicks and interruptions that offer little value.
  - ..."interruptions"... key point. Think of the "attention economy": can you really afford to interrupt people? - on 2008-02-26
  Add Sticky Note
- Utility
- Utility = interaction that delights us in some
  way.
- Ubiquity
- We are living in a fragmented world with what seems like infinite touch points available to us. Brands and businesses who can distribute value across these endless touch points in effective ways will tap into new markets and solidify existing ones. Even though some of us are interacting through multiple social channels—we
  can now find people just like ourselves who we trust and see what they like/dislike. This influences our decisions from the stuff we buy to
  the things we recommend to each other. The best marketing in the world tries to
  simulate this, but usually ends up coming off as contrived. Meaningful interactions through multiple networks and channels leads to authentic word of mouth references and ultimately affinity.

08 Feb 08

The Artful Manager: What's ''authentic''?

Read the entry, "What's 'authentic'?," by Andrew Taylor, but then read the first comment that follows, by Bill Ivey. Taylor, writing from an arts manager perspective, observes: "Since arts organizations are often perceived (or perceive themselves) as havens of authentic expression, it might be worth a moment to define, exactly, what that means." Ivey, donning his "folklorist" hat, contrasts the "authentic" barn-raising, say, with the construction of a pre-fab barn -- or "authentic" blue jeans and their history of being workwear, with the "brand" of "authentic" designer jeans. Apples & oranges, and the oranges, it seems, are watery -- or "thin," as Ivey puts it: they offer "the illusion of purchasable membership in networks defined by exactly the history and shared values that in modern society are available to very, very few."

www.artsjournal.com/...079959.php - Preview

authenticity branding culture culture_industry folklore ideas ideology marketing

Since much of modern mass or popular culture is of the pre-fab barn variety, it's not difficult to identify a longing for heritage-defined, community-based products or performances as a significant element of our overarching ethos. There are many thousands of examples of the way th marketplace has exploited this idea. Blue jeans connect with the "authentic" idea of real men doing real work; a Ralph Lauren shooting jacket invokes the "authentic" world of entitled patrician ease; a faux-antique farm table links consumers with the sturdy values of an agrarian past.

This, to me, is the sense of authenticity that pervades mass culture today. It is an idea that is particularly potent in our "thin" consumerist society, offering, as it does, the illusion of purchasable membership in networks defined by exactly the history and shared values that in modern society are available to very, very few.