MRM Worldwide / London, where I spend my days, has a blog.
Participation Marketing » About Participation Marketing:
“Suddenly everything has changed. In the new, democratic digital age, customers are taking control. Agencies need to work harder than ever to get their attention and their loyalty.
We believe that getting customers actively involved with brands – across all media - is the way to succeed in today’s marketplace. The deeper the involvement, the greater the emotional bond. We call this approach Participation Marketing.
Here are our some of thoughts and observations about the new era and the role of Participation Marketing in connecting with customers.”
Welcome to mah internets.
Having said that WriteRoom was really good at stopping me from procrastinating while I’m writing it’s not being of any bloody use to me today. I have a pitch on Monday afternoon, I have a shit load of work to get done for it although my bit isn’t even going to get presented, it’s a handout, and I’m spending my Saturday afternoon trying to do PowerPoint. I need a full screen version of powerpoint or for the internet to be switched off or something, or actually just a kick up the arse. Todays procrastination time: 1 hour and 28 minutes.
Later: General procrastination last week meant having to work Saturday, Sunday evening and mean getting up at 6am on Monday to finish up. Sigh.
So I don’t like using the word mojo cos one of my clients is at the moment, but I do like Austen Powers, but anyway…. I think I’ve lost my mojo.
Thing is there’s a lot of stressful stuff going on outside of work at the moment, and work in itself can be difficult, but the last few months I’ve felt like someone has constructed a dam in my mind… if that makes any sense. It feels like any creative thought is being held back. So what I’m looking for are suggestions to help clear the blockage. OK I need a holiday and have loads to use up before the end of the year, but it does feel like something else is needed. Any suggestions? Help!
Reuters opens in-game news bureau in Second Life - Joystiq
“Reuters is launching its Second Life doppelganger this week joining the corporate race to reach new audiences by way of the game. Second Life currently boasts 900,000 registered users that spend an average of $13 million a year on digital goods and services. When money talks, corporations listen.”
Gartner: Prepare for consumer-led IT | CNET News.com
In a keynote speech on Monday, Gartner’s director of global research, Peter Sondergaard, warned conference attendees that consumerization will be the most significant trend to have an impact on IT over the next 10 years.
“We stand at the foot of a new high tide,” Sondergaard said. “There is a shift in technology ownership.”
Sondergaard argued that consumers already have a great deal of power over how services and technologies are configured and used.
“Consumers are rapidly creating personal IT architectures capable of running corporate-style IT architectures,” he said. “They have faster processors, more storage and more bandwidth.” - CNET news.com
OK so I’m plugging an ex-client from a previous agency here, but anyway…
1. They have Chewbacca on their web site
2. They want you to eat Fugu
3. They have grannies in cars on their web site.
The Talent Hunt (Buiness week) “A B(usiness)-school class would have started with a focus on market size and used financial analysis to understand it. This D(esign)-school class began with consumers and used ethnography, the latest management tool, to learn about them. Business school students would have developed a single new product to sell. The D-schoolers aimed at creating a prototype with possible features that might appeal to consumers. B-school students would have stopped when they completed the first good product idea. The D-schoolers went back again and again to come up with a panoply of possible winners.”
In-Browser Wireframe Prototyping with Frametastic a nice start to what could be a very useful tool.
Mr Tate writes today that US Agency Organic has a nice blog: Three Minds, which indeed it does. So on a similar topic, here is a list of a few other agency blogs wot I have in my bookmarks, generally the quality is pretty good, though obviously a little on the self promotional side.
So taking the ‘BPSC Venn’ and plotting some companies or rather products on it (MP3 players), the Apple iPod, Sony Walkman, Creative Zen, you end up with this (based on my opinion and 5 seconds of thought). iPod… has great brand, is a great product, is supported by a good service (iTunes Store), and has a strong web community. Sony Walkman… great brand & product, has an online store, but little if any community. Creative Zen… Pretty much a brand and a product.
So these diagrams below, again only with 2 seconds of research could be said back up the commnunity aspect of this…
So… the next thing would be to put some measurables against this, i.e. to look at sales figures or market share of these three products. I can’t find anything reliable that is a comparison of the three, but I’m pretty sure that Apple still dominate the market (if you exclude mobile phones with mp3 capability) from the 10 second research I have done. So is Apple dominating because it has the right combination of B P S C ?????
Thanks Matt. Much better. Still not sure how to use it though yet, in a way that I haven’t used this before anyway.
So did manage to make it to Laptopdance II (the one in the middle where the hero gets frozen in carbonite) hosted by Nigel and the RMM Crew at Milk & Honey . Though I didn’t manage to make my laptop dance much and spent most of the time drinking and chatting with lots of interesting people most of whose names I forget completely, except Dave,I’m quite bad like that. Looking forward to the next one. Thanks all!
So this is a basic addaption of a model that I’ve used for varying ways of describing the relationship of Brand, Product and Service to each other, in particular with referenece to B-P-S being used as basic ‘needs’ within a customer lifecycle. I introduced community into the equation and ended wp with this diagram, which is a little flawed, but kinda makes sense. I’m not sure where to go with it next though? So will take along to Laptopdance II tonight - the one in the middle where the hero gets frozen in carbonite and see if we can work out wtf do to next, or at the very least decide wether its a load of old bollocks or not. decklet here ppt 20kb
5 mins later…. Uh that makes no sense on it’s own….
Some definitions:
- Brand: The emotional aspects of the enterprise brand that attract a customer to a particular brand, such as the ‘image’ associated to the product.
- Product: Straightforward information about a product.
- Service: The services a company provides to help a customer buy and own its products.
- Community: As it says on the can, but both managed or owned and independent, of the brand.
An extract from some previous guff:
These three, uh ok, now 4, elements combine to reinforce each other: The brand underpins and promotes a product, and vice versa, while services support the product and help reinforce the brand. When we communicate online, we should always therefore communicate in terms of brand, product and service.
Customers however have varying needs for BPS, and these needs vary as they move through the sales cycle; when they are a ’suspect’, they may be highly influenced by the brand, so communications should be brand heavy. Once they are a new customer, they may be very interested in ’service’ to support their products communications, so communications via the web site should reflect that etc etc etc
I wont go into community because it’s obvious as to the role that also plays. The challenge is that the way I have combined them in the diagram above I think is interesting and makes sense in some context, I just don’t know, as I said, to bin it or evolve it.
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