In Dubai talking to agencies and brands about “digital velcro”. How linking content seamlessly between one screen plus other consumer screen equals a multiple of value for a brand. 20 mins – view here.
Category Archives: Book Related
SuperBrands and the Unreasonable Screen
I was speaking with David Epstein, the founder of The Unreasonable Institute, the brainchild of Unreasonable at Sea, the Google sponsored innovation ship that is presently sailing from port to port globally.
Mr. Epstein’s mission statement is borrowed from George Bernard Shaw who in 1903 wrote in Man and Superman:
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
The Unreasonable Institute, based in Boulder, Colorado and is working to bring entrepreneurs, innovators, thinkers, and investors together for social change. He now has these same folk on a ship sailing the world with that disruptive mandate.
What Mr. Epstein is championing, and what Mr. Shaw posited over 100 years ago is applicable, if not essential, across all verticals today. In the 2010’s, when industry after industry is being rudely disrupted, we may need to be more unreasonable about our search for solutions and our adaptation to the new status quo. We have to become superbrands.
Man and Superman
Music, retail, media buying, broadcast, publishing are all incumbent industries that have, or are, about to pivot in a profound and irreversible way. Many extant business models will dry up. Many old revenue streams will become commodity channels or be circumvented over-the-top by new technologies or new business models.
Telecommunications, more than any other industry, has profoundly impacted businesses. Some bemoan that “mobile” innovation has horizontally cut many companies at the knees.
Telecommunication innovation and disruption is not new. The history of telecommunications is the history of open systems and the invisible hand that attempted to close these systems: From RCA closing down FM Radio and early television. It is the same recent history of Apple disintermediating the wireless carriers with an “internet device” and then turning around and using the same iPhone to shut down the Mobile Web with a closed App Store.
What is new about telecommunications in the 2010s is the pervasive nature of the technology, the democratization of information and access, and the liberation of the consumer.
The new entrepreneurs, innovators, thinkers, and investors that are sailing on Epstein’s ship are the crew of innovators that needed to rethink the way we communicate with this new consumer.
And this requires a motley crew.
Chief Unreasonable Officer
Labels, Retailers, brands, publishers, and broadcasters cannot simply open innovation labs in the vain hope that they can reinvent their business from within. Forces are at play in the mall and in the media houses that will require some unreasonable thought. The walls of our store are porous (Mike Duke) and the internet cloud is in our malls to stay.
To paraphrase Mr. Shaw: The reasonable person adapts to the world; the unreasonable person proactively turns the tables.
How do new-age brands become unreasonable?
- Industries need to understand their new world and their new consumer. This world is made up of consumer moments across their connected-screens during the course of the day. Ten years ago, you never needed to follow these consumers; now you need to plot their screen journey in minute detail.
- The value may not lie exclusively on the screen but in connecting these screens. In a world where (according to Google’s Multiscreen Report) over 90% of people use more than one screen to accomplish a single task, brands need to focus on the “digital Velcro” to connect these screen experiences. One screen + another screen = a multiple of value: (1+1=3)
- Stop relying exclusively on third parties and social networks to find your consumer. “Dating services” are important . . . but you need to get out more. Forge a direct relationship with this new connected consumer.
- Be unreasonable. Believe that your consumers can love your product and can share a common dialogue with your brand on their private and personal screen.
- This maybe simply the ability to shop for a brand seamlessly across their screens understanding the needs of the consumer at that moment of the day on a particular screen form factor.
- This maybe establishing a common interest (wellness, nightlife, etc.) and become part of their multiscreen narrative.
The new Chief Digital Officer needs to create superbrands, and to do that she needs to be unreasonable across all her consumers’ connected screens.
I am content chair of the MultiScreen Summit in NYC, June 11th and 12th.
MultiScreen Summit
www.thescreensummit.com
June 11-12, 2013
Metropolitan Pavilion
125 West 18th Street
New York City
The Incredible Shrinking Barnes & Noble
“The Incredible Shrinking Barnes & Noble.” This was the LA Times‘ blog post yesterday. I like it and I have stolen it. It speaks volumes to the future of the mall. Entertainment centers for browsing shoppers are shutting down.
Barnes & Noble sees 30% fewer stores in the next decade. The bookseller had 726 stores in 2008, 689 stores in 2012 and in 10 years this will drop to 450? Perhaps this is optimistic? The certainty is that there will be much shuttering.
Barnes & Noble’s projected closings and Target’s new price-matching policy are all signs of retail in distress. The trend toward mobile shopping is likely to have a lasting impact on the retail landscape.
The physical bookstore could become a thing of the past.
With the mobile consumer in mind, a yoga studio could sell books about spirituality and enable customers to tap their phones to order a physical or digital book in a context-rich environment. The same is true for a doctor’s office, a movie theatre and other locations.
Barnes & Noble executives are undoubtedly aware – as Borders executives before them – that the 2010s are eerily reminiscent of the music industry in the 2000s. Books, reading, and commerce behaviour has changed.
The relationship between shopper and store has changed.
Does this mean good riddance to bookstores, publishers, agents? Perhaps there is a new, more efficient order in town? Perhaps a new, streamlined business model would be both good for consumers and good for the industry long term?
Unquestionably the market and mall is primed for new disruptive models. Amazon coming in with Apple-like book genius bars? New purchase, delivery and consumption models that live between the store and the Amazon cloud?
Stay tuned!
Compare Political & Retail Strategies
Just published an excerpt from my recent book Fast Shopper, Slow Store in the Retail Touchpoints publication.
As a post script to this chapter, the 2013 election underscored the value of digital BIG DATA. When President Obama hired an analytics war room that was five times the investment in his 2008 campaign, we knew where the focus would be.
Pointedly President Obama’s team hired a supermarket sales promotions “Chief Scientist” called Rayid Ghani. His team rated PERSUADABILITY. . . the art of knowing who was likely to “swing” blue.
Mr. Ghani knew where to target. This data helped them target media and played perfectly into the mobile (personal) opt-in strategy that the Obama team excelled at throughout the campaign. It allowed them to successfully knock on BLUE doors not RED and target BLUE (and possibly BLUE) phones and steer the vote.
I like to draw a parallel between politics and retail as it illustrates that tactics in one vertical as applicable cross-industry. I would say it is essential for banking, publishing, and entertainment verticals to understand that they are not alone.
The connected screen and the new (painfully) independent shopper are disrupting all incumbent industries.
Many people in the business of connecting to retail customers are busy reworking their game plan. It may reassure the reader that no one is immune to digital disruption, which has left most industry folk, from brands to broadcasters, from publishers to politicians, questioning the way they engage with their audiences.
The 2012 U.S. presidential election was a perfect example of brands desperately seeking buyers. As the candidates claw for positioning, it is evident that the election process is (surprisingly or not) similar to selling a product in a hugely competitive retail market. Each electoral cycle demonstrates the challenge of courting an increasingly digital public.
The techniques that President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney used to market their platform and gather votes are the same as those embraced by brands to manage their market presence, build engagement, and move their audience to a sale. All the challenges of chasing the itinerant mobile public are the same as those facing bewildered shopkeepers.
Mobile Retail Focus for 2013? (60min Business World interview)
In the following interview I discuss with Wayne Hurlbert, the preeminent business blogger (Blog Business World), that retailers need to embrace new strategies to reconnect with their customers. We discuss:
- Strategies to win back customers who have left the malls, big box, and other retail outlets for their mobile devices.
- How the behavior of mobile shoppers is different from both tethered online customers and from the traditional in store consumer.
- Techniques for winning back those customers, reconnecting with them, and regaining their long term loyalty.
- How to embrace mobile technology as a competitive advantage for your business, and place yourself in the forefront of the mobile shopping revolution.
Amazon & Books’ Slippery Slope
It is likely that ebook prices will soon start dropping as a result of a settlement reached between the Department of Justice and several book publishers last week.
The agreement is a blow to Apple, which was also named in a DOJ antitrust suit brought this spring alleging that the technology company and publishers fixed ebook prices. However, Amazon is likely to benefit by being able to sell competitively priced ebooks and attract consumers to its new ereader and tablets, which were introduced last week.
“Based on this ruling Amazon.com will undoubtedly grow its market share,” said Gary Schwartz, “But this ruling is a soft push down a slippery slope for the book industry that dates back to 2007, when we saw the first Kindle. This was the harbinger of a new power game and more important, a new relationship with the digital consumer.
“My concern is that Amazon.com is simply using books to build its m-commerce empire? It is a stepping stone to developing a commerce checkout for sectors such as apparel and electronics and the quality of the bookshelf will suffer.”
The publishers are also required, as part of the settlement, to phase out any contracts with retailers still using the agency model and bans them from imposing similar restrictions on prices for two years.
“Amazon.com says it is ‘pro-consumer’ but you cannot take the agent/publisher out of the value chain and expect the ecosystem to thrive,” Mr. Schwartz said. “The number of self-published titles in the United States has tripled over the past few years and will continue to grow.
“However, by cutting out the agency and publisher, the industry has made the online and mobile storefront into the Wild West,” he said.
“Publishing has become the easy part. Selling and driving profit for authors has become difficult.”
READ MORE: Amazon gains, Apple loses in DOJ ebook price-fixing settlement
Impulse Economy: Connect effectively to the M-Shopper (PodCast)
Welcome to episode #295 of Six Pixels Of Separation – The Twist Image Podcast.
While many companies were still lamenting a basic website back in the nineties, Gary Schwartz was already imagining how content, voice and mobility would change how we connect to one another… and the brands that serve us.
For over a decade, Gary has been a leader in the mobile industry. He is CEO of Impact Mobile (offices in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, etc…), is Chair of the Mobile Entertainment Forum and Chair Emeritus of the Mobile Committee for the Internet Advertising Bureau. Recently, he published his first book, The Impulse Economy – Understanding mobile shoppers and what makes them buy. He brings a plethora of experience and insights from the mobile landscape to our marketing world, and it’s a true privilege to have him as a guest on the show this week. Enjoy the conversation…
Here it is: Six Pixels Of Separation – The Twist Image Podcast – Episode #295 – Host: Mitch Joel.
Interview before MWC on mobile books & shopping
Interview with Ajit Jaokar in Europe before the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. We chatted on the subject of mobile books and shopping:
Ajit Jaokar: Mobile moves so fast. How can you write on the subject?
Gary Schwartz: Is similar to trying to work out who is winning a battle when you are stuck in the trenches and watching the missiles fly overhead. There is so much noise on a daily bases it seems improbable write a definitive book on the subject.
However the core thesis of book is universal and something that I believe strongly the mobile industry needs to content with: how to effectively drive impulse mobile consumption.
The shopper is natively an impulse shopper. They buy in what retailer call “5 by 5″ which is five seconds by five foot. They may write out lengthy shopping list and do hours or research on products but in the store, 80 percent of their basket is full of products bought on impulse.
The phone is now a shopping aid and it can help the shopper be more effective impulse buyers or it can fail and inhibit shopping behavior. This is the industry challenge. The retailer that manages to engage effectively with this new shopper will win.
Ajit Jaokar: What should the reader take away from the book?
Gary Schwartz: There is a disconnect in retail. The shopper is becoming faster and the store is becoming slower. The shopper is proactively looking for new phones, new applications, new ways to search and buy effectively. Just look at the power of the new devices that the consumer walks into the mall with:
The AGC (Apollo Guidance Computer) that sent the first person to the moon had 2kb memory, 32kb of read only memory (storage), CPU 1.024 MHz. The Samsung Galaxy II S that is in the shoppers pocket has 1 GB memory (1 048 576 kb), 32 GB storage (33 554 423 kb), CPU Dual-core 1.2 GHz (1200 MHz x 2)
This hand sized shopping aid is essentially 2 thousand times faster… but that’s just raw speed.
Instead of trying to embrace this shopper’s new technology effectively, the store is trying to plug a leaky ship by making it difficult for the consumer to comparison shop, use their technology in the store or in the cloud.
Ajit Jaokar: How are retailers responding?
Gary Schwartz: Blockbuster, Borders, have all fallen to the digital efficacies of the internet. Are Target and Best Buy next?
It is clear that stores do not know how to use this super phone and are under siege. TARGET recently went on the defensive talking about “SHOWROOMING,” the phenomenon of using the store to touch and feel a product and then checking out in the cloud (a competitor’s internet cloud).
These retailers do not know how to respond. They try to leverage the phone and new channels but in large part they consider the phone a threat not an opportunity.
Ajit Jaokar: In that case, which retailers are in most trouble?
Gary Schwartz: There are two types of retailers:
Brand Retail: Like the Gap, Pottery Barn, Polo (in which one company makes and markets everything in the box) are channel agnostic. The brand retailer needs to make sure the shopper stays loyal and makes it simple to move from purchase intent to purchase. This retailer needs to count clicks to commerce and optimize the mobile experience.
Mixed Brand Retail: Like Target, Wal-Mart, Best Buy (in which one company houses multiple brand names on their shelves) need a more aggressive strategy to stay relevant and in business. They also need to work on optimizing path to purchase but they have the additional problem of price comparison and losing the shopper into competitive deals on the mobile internet (in four walls of the store.)
Amazon is their nemesis.
Amazon clearly feels that its success with the PriceCheck app is a good indicator that their new Kindle Fire tablet will be the mobile commerce device of choice. When this device become 4G later this year it will rake havoc on the mall. Already this holiday season we saw Amazon’s impact on retailers.
Amazon sees it role as “pro consumer” and if it is all about price then they are right.
If the retail industry continues to lament the rise of “showrooming” is it simply crying-uncle to Amazon. For Target to change its merchandise UPC codes, shut down WIFI or source unique product that are hard to price compare are not sustainable solutions. By making it more difficult to price compare items in-store is a short term or no-term answer.
Ajit Jaokar: So, what is the solution?
Gary Schwartz: The top three factors in shopper decision making is PRICE, CONVIENCE and TRUST. If it is all about price, we should all close up shop and go home. Convenience can work for the cloud and bricks & mortar. Trust is the silver bullet.
Mixed retailers need to use mobile technology to engage the shopper in the store and enter into a DIGITAL relationship. Use an iPad to clientel.
Clienteling is a retail term that predates mobile but mobile is the idea channel for the service. Clienteling is when the retailer interacts with the shopper and provides one-to-one personalized service, offers and communication in the store.
Retailers need to use tablets to interact with the shopper. Help them find a product. Add this to a wish list – tie this wish list to a profile. Ask them for their mobile number to send updates, sale reminders, VIP invites. Retailers need to engage the shopper at the cash register and ask for their mobile number for follow on deals and offers.
Ajit Jaokar: So what is the big take away?
Gary Schwartz: Cross channel disconnect is where most of the retail revenue is lost: between the store the online site. Amazon and other mobile savvy folk will either grab your shopper as they fall through the cracks or, worse yet, your will just loose the shopper to another store because you are just making the path to purchase too difficult.
Mixed retailers and brands retailers need to develop a “trust” relationship that will keep that consumer as a loyal consumer. Store that can develop a digital trust relationship across all their retail touch point will help the impulse shopper make that impulse buy at their checkout.
Interview: The Future of Shopping (MSN)
MSN 7 mins: Gary Schwartz, CEO, Impact Mobile, joins BNN to speak about The Future of Shopping
Interview: M-Commerce & Evolution of the Screen
At MEF Americas conference in Miami, Chair of North America, Gary Schwartz highlights some broader changes mobile is having on the way consumers interact and buy on a mobile device – he argues – that we need to better understand how to leverage the various mobile wallet options and navigate the multiple “mobile” screens. View full interview (4.5 mins)
