Influential Marketing Blog

5 Marketing Lessons From Uber (The World's Best Travel App)

Several weeks ago I was standing on a street corner in New York. (This is not the sentence I thought I'd start this post with, but go with me ...) After unsuccessfully trying to hail a cab, I decided to try out an app I had heard about called Uber. I had heard it was useful for those kinds of situations. From the moment of signup - a process which took way less time than I expected, to the actual act of immediately booking a car and heading happily on my way to LaGuardia Airport just 15 minutes later - the experience transformed my NY trip. Experience itself is getting lots of great media attention for solving a big problem in the taxicab experience - but what was particularly interesting for me, of course, was the marketing lessons their successful experience can offer. Here are five big lessons you can learn from Uber:

1. Simplify mobile signups. I hardly ever sign up for any kind of service on my phone, because typing on a touch screen is such a pain. Unfortunately, when signing up for Uber, I was literally standing on a street corner and had no choice. The app seemed to be designed for exactly that. They only captured the most important and basic details, and let me take a photo of my credit card to scan in the number (instead of having to type it). Every app and signup process should do this one simple thing.
2. Add fun to necessary waiting. After I requested a pickup, the app confirmed that I had a driver ... but it didn't stop there. As I was waiting, the app showed a Google map image of where I was and where my car was. Then I could track my car's progress in real time as it drove to meet me. Sure I was checking email and Twitter while waiting, but it was actually fun (yes fun!) to watch that car coming closer and closer until it arrived exactly as the map predicted. No empty hoping that every next car would be mine. The entire experience was stress free.
3. Give people useful data they didn't ask for. After my trip, I received an email with my final total cost for the trip and a receipt. This was what I expected. What I didn't expect was that they also told me exactly how long my journey had taken, how many miles we traveled (which is how they calculate the fare) and what the average speed was that whole time. I definitely didn't need that information, but somehow I was still glad to have it.
4. Make rating a two way street. When your journey finishes, you have the chance to rate your driver - which is nice. What you don't expect is that your driver also has a chance to rate you. So now karma has a real rating system, and it penalizes you for being an a-hole to your driver, if you happen to be that kind of person. That's how the world should work, and people should get rewarded or penalized for how they treat other people, so I love this. Not to mention that it finally gives drivers some way to be part of that rating conversation as well.
5. Don't apologize for excluding some people. The app has been criticized for its focus on urban city dwellers and price point that makes it about 50% more expensive than taxis, if not more. But this criticism also means that they have a clear picture of who their target audience is ... a consumer who doesn't mind paying more for the reliability and comfort of a clean black sedan that shows up exactly when you expect it.

All of these together make Uber probably my favourite new app ... and marketing story to offer lessons to each of us no matter what we are trying to promote.

How MindValley Is Building the Next TED (Only More Useful)

This morning I watched an amazing TED video of flying robots that can operate autonomously and collaborate with each other at the same time. It is exciting technology ... just the kind of thing you would expect to come out of a TED event. As I write this, the video (and its big finish where the robots play a song together) is rapidly going viral online, and I have to admit I love watching things like this. The only problem is, I'm not sure what I can do with this mind blowing example except to share it with friends. It is great to get me thinking about the world, but not immediately easy to apply to my daily life. 

Earlier today on stage at the Underground Online Seminar 8, Vishen Lakhiani had a collaborative idea of his own to unveil. In a conference room filled with over 500 online entrepreneurs - many of whom have made their entire fortunes selling advice online - his announcement was unexpected, to say the least. As Co-Founder and CEO of a company named MindValley that publishes personal growth products, Vishen fit right in with the group of internet business owners packed into the crowded Crystal City hotel ballroom just a few minutes outside Washington DC. 

His company MindValley has a bold mission to help help people achieve their dreams through offering them the tools and resources to inspire them to get there. The products the company has launched are among the most popular and best selling in the personal development space. The company has won multiple awards as an amazing place to work, takes their entire 75 person staff on an annual retreat to an exotic island, and works with speakers and visionaries in many different industries.

When Vishen took the stage, he talked about a common problem that any online entrepreneur will recognize - that great ideas are quickly and shamelessly stolen and copied. For MindValley, that meant that everything from copywriting to the design templates were being ripped off by their competitors and used to get results for themselves. Instead of getting angry, or speed dialing his lawyers (as other entrepreneurs might do), Vishen and his team embraced the copycats. And then they made a big promise.

Starting today, MindValley will be one of the first companies to be completely devoted to sharing everything about their business in an open source model. This means every template, every meeting, every spreadsheet about how they run their business will be shared online. The website www.mindvalleyinsights.com just went live about 8 hours ago, and the site is filled with videos, written articles, advice and tips. The site promises a treasure chest of information on everything from hiring and retaining great people to effective branding. 

Why would they release all this material for free? Unlike many others, the motivation isn't what I often call "karmic kickback" - a term that describes people who only do something for the expectation of some future return of positive karma. Instead, it is part of a bigger world view that Vishen and his entire team share.  He often speaks about "why happiness is the new productivity." The more you learn about MindValley, the most this announcement feels like the perfect fit for their mission of touching 500 million lives through their content by the year 2050.

In the months to come, it will be interesting to see how MindValley Insights evolves. For now, I highly recommend bookmarking the site and returning often to consume the great content there. It will help you hire better people to create a stronger business and find more happiness and fulfillment. Not to mention we'll need all the free advice and insights we can get just in case those autonomous collaborating robots finally figure out the nuclear launch codes ... 

Honda Masters The Art of Marketing Timing

Every year at the start of the new year there is something that most of us do without realizing it. It is related to making new year's resolutions, but it is more about sequencing your long term goals into the order in which you want to achieve them. One example might be saying to yourself, "I want to be married and then have a kid before I turn 35." Life is full of these little promises. So full, in fact, that often we make them to ourselves without even thinking. It raises an interesting marketing question as well.

What would it take to get a customer to reevaluate the life sequence they have already set for themselves?

It becomes a particularly important question when you consider a brand selling a product that is all about fitting into the right stage in life. A product, for example, like a car. When you consider when people buy new cars, it is very much about life's stages. Graduating from college, landing a new job, getting married or having a kid. Each of these life changes can often be triggers to consider buying a new car.

Honda's new campaign for the CRV may have found one way to solve that challenge. With their Honda LeapList campaign, they encourage consumers to go online and make their own lists of what they want to accomplish before they turn 30, or what they want to do before they get married. It is a brilliant way not only to encourage people to dream and perhaps even act on their longstanding dream to travel the world, but also to encourage them to think about how getting a new car might fit into that sequence. The underlying message is a perfect one for their consumers: why wait? You can do all the things you want to do, and you can do them on your own time. But maybe you should just think about buying that car right now instead of waiting.

Sure it's clearly a marketing message - but what they perfectly prove is something that any marketers would do well to remember. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do to sell your product is help your customers to imagine exactly when they should buy it.

2012 Edition: 15 Marketing and Business Trends That Matter

Let me tell you a little secret.  I look forward to putting together an annual trend report the same way that some people look forward to having Turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. I realize that may sound a bit strange, but ever since I did my first trend recap last year I was hooked.  This year, the process of collecting the trends took all year.  I have a folder on my desk labelled "Trends 2012" and throughout the year I would rip out articles from magazines or printout webpages to save. Last November I started actually writing my trend presentation and finally released it on Slideshare yesterday. 

 

A few things surprised me about the trends this year. Here are a few of the most unexpected things:

1. Only 2 out of 15 trends are based on innovative technology (Trends #10 and #13). Given the prominence of technology in our lives and more and more digital tools, I expected that more of the trends for 2012 would be based entirely on technology innovation. That ended up not being the case as most of the trends focused more on either behaviours or the use of sites and technology that already exist and don't really require much innovation in order to keep growing.
2. Creativity and design are more important than ever. While it would have been too obvious to point this out as a trend on its own, many of the trends that were included in the presentation were highly dependent on encouraging more creativity and delivering great design. Measuring Life, for example, has taken off in part thanks to great product and interface designs. Pointillist Filmmaking or Social Artivism are clearly based on creativity and design. Even Retail Theater, Tagging Reality and Charitable Engagement are all trends that require creative thinking and  strong ability to use design to engage people.
3. People actively seek opportunities to participate, collaborate or experience something. Doing something together came up as a big motivator for many of the trends this year, as Social Loneliness led people to look for more opportunities to have great experiences or be part of something worthwhile. Pointillist Filmmaking, Civic Engagement 2.0 and Retail Theater are all examples where people are seeking the chance to participate in something. Charitable Engagement ChangeSourcing and Co-Curation are other trends where people offer their time and passions to collaborate together on something.

Let me know what you think about these trends with a comment here or on Facebook, or feel free to send me an email at influentialmarketing@gmail.com.  Next week I'll be starting my trend folder to gather stories for 2013 ...

If you would like to get a downloadable version of this presentation, you can find it on my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/rohitmarketingauthor.

Can Coke Start A Trend To Make Inspiration A Form Of Co-Creation?

What if you could join your favourite band in studio to record their next single? For many, this is just a moment to dream of - but last month Coca-Cola partnered with the rock band Maroon 5 to do exactly that in a social experiment to create a new song in 24 hours. Fans could watch a live stream of the band working on a new song in the studio and contribute to the brainstorming process in real time via a Twitter screen that was broadcast live to the band. Check out the recap video below:



The end result was a single called "Is There Anybody Out There?" that is available for a free download from Coke. Aside from being an amazingly creative campaign idea, this could spark more brands to consider a new form of co-creation where consumers are invited not to create content themselves, but to be the spark for professionals to create content. In a sense, this is no different than real life where artists often take their inspiration from their fans.

Though Coke's efforts have cause some to raise valid criticism about whether the campaign can be considered all that successful since the views and audience seems small by Coke standards, sometimes the most forward thinking ideas aren't the ones which go viral right away. To me, the real power of this campaign is that it imagines a world where brands can help connect people with the artists they love in a way that empowers them to contribute to what the artists are creating.

Inspiration as a form of co-creation is not just a great marketing concept, but one which offers musicians and even filmmakers a new way to engage their audience on a deeper level and also get better ideas and inspiration to make their work better.  The only downside is that it leaves a lot of people to thank from the Grammy/Oscars stage ...

5 Crowdsourced Consumer Trends To Watch In 2011

Almost anyone you meet in marketing will usually be a fan of getting their data and insights about major trends in consumer behaviour from research reports. After all, we generally pay a lot of money for them, and (ironically) many of the most authoritative are BRANDED either by a research organization, or by an authoritative institution such as a renowned business school. To some degree, this is valuable and much needed ... since anyone can publish the results of any unscientific poll or survey done hastily on Twitter and more weight to the "data" produced than they should. Yet you don't need an MBA in analytics to have a voice in spotting hot trends.

For those of you who actively read and digest information about the world around you - Trendhunter.com has a home for your thoughts. Whether you happen to write your own blog or prefer to remain a participant instead of a creator, the site has built a platform for what they call "Crowdsourced Consumer Insight." Last week they released a sneak peek at their 2011 Trend Report which takes individual examples of interesting trends and applies a filter to identify some top level trends that they may point towards. 

The team at TrendHunter was kind enough to share an exclusive link to a sample of the report with the TOP 20 TRENDS and lots of great insights for FREE and you can get the 35 page report right here.

As I read it this weekend, there were a few trends in particular that caught my eye and will definitely be useful for me in the coming months as I help several of our clients with building and executing their own marketing strategies for 2011. Here are a few standouts:

1. Charitable Deviance. As I read this report about how charitable organizations are using more attention grabbing methods to capture attention, I thought of the recent Digital Death campaign that I profiled on this blog. Getting people to pay attention to world changing ideas is (and has always been) a marketing challenge. Finding a solution to these challenges through creativity is something every marketer should find some time in the new year to participate in ... even if it lands outside of your day job.
2. Brand Reversion. I have a live example of this in my own home, as my six year old son has become a huge fan of He-man - an animated series that was popular when I was a kid in the late 80s. This larger trend is about the return of the old, in many categories from fashion to art. Nostalgia will always be a part of us, but as social tools allow us to reconnect with our pasts in ways such as rediscovering lost grade school friends and purchasing those toys we used to play with on eBay - this trend will only continue to rise. Super Mario Brothers anyone?
3. Next Besting. One of the more brilliant terms to come out of TrendHunter back in 2008 was this term which described the consumer behaviour of finding slightly cheaper, but still good alternatives. Being number 1, in this world, can be a big liability because consumers may be more willing to trade down for your next best competitor. I agree with the report's assessment that this trend is on the rise again and will likely show no signs of slowing down in 2011.
4. Democratic Selling. A term that they assign to the process of consumers voting for products to get made - I think this trend speaks to something that is even larger, beyond selling to donations, or content creation, or even advertising. Consumer creation or co-creation as it is often called is extending into unexpected areas and I think we will continue to be surprised each time it creeps into a new area of the world we didn't expect.
5. Discreet Consumerism. I have a theory about this particular one in the sample report, and why it is placed last. If you happen to work in marketing, you will probably have the same reaction I had right after you read this trend ... that you need to get the rest of the report. Discreet Consumerism speaks to the idea that there may be a backlash growing against brands and our overly branded world. This is something I have been thinking about for some time as well, and the reason for this rebellion comes down to distrust. The challenge for marketing is how to regain that trust without relying to gimmicks or luck to do it.

To download the full 35 page PDF sample report, use this exclusive link for Influential Marketing Blog Readers. Also, stay tuned as the rest of this week I will be exploring a few other interesting trends not included on that report which I think will be worth watching in 2011.

How A Curated Competition Helped Find A New Logo For DC

If you come to Washington DC as a tourist at any time of year, chances are you will spend at least a part of your trip visiting some of the most iconic museums and national buildings in the city. Outside of most of them are a collection of street vendors selling an assortment of life-sized cardboard cutouts of Obama and tacky shot glasses with the Presidential Seal on them.

One of their best selling icons is a t-shirt which is a simple copy of New York's well known logo - "I Love New York" - with the city name replaced. It is just one symbol of what I have seen spending most of my childhood growing up in DC area: that it can be a difficult city to adopt as your own. Many people live in neighboring Maryland or Virginia, the vibe of the city can shift based on who gains political power and there has always been a large expat population working 2-5 year stints at NGOs or embassies locally.

Back in August of this year, at the start of the Fall tourism season for Washington DC, two young D.C.-based artists Brandon Bloch and Justin Young thought the city needed a stronger identity, and felt that the solution to this challenge could be design based. So they invited their design friends to participate in a "curated competition" to create a logo that could better represent the city.

The competition resulted in several designs, and the winner was a designer named Alex Slater who had a simple but elegant design that felt uniquely right for DC. They have been sharing this logo at local events throughout the fall and have been featured in media both locally and nationally. While many of these "crowdsourced logo competitions" awaken the ire of designers for their focus on getting design thinking for free ... the DC Love Project was different because it was a curated competition. All the designs were shown at a public event and the voting element offered a real time feedback method to help select one design to focus on promoting.

This campaign certainly helped to start defining a logo identity for the city that all of us locals would love to see ... but the bigger idea to take away is that sometimes crowdsourcing misses the chance to really value every contribution you get - a curated competition might inspire much more passion among those who participate, as well as those who will see the final result.

What USA Network Knows About Branding That MTV Doesn't

The day that Michael Jackson died, I turned to MTV for the first time in several years. Like others in the so-called MTV Generation sandwiched between the youngest of Generation X and the oldestof Generation Y, I remembered growing up in the 80s with the battle cry of "I want my MTV!" On that day, however, I was greeted not with news coverage about Michael Jackson's death - but with a reality TV series about teen pregnancies. Confused, I shared in a tweet what many of my generation had felt for years:

"MTV is officially irrelevant. Michael Jackson just died and they are airing 16 and Pregnant."

In a time where services like VEVO are taking the role of offering 24 hour music video on demand, MTV has certainly had to reinvent itself. Others have written about how the brand has evolved (changing to a newly transparent logo) - but in that evolution the connection to the music has been almost completely lost. MTV is not about music anymore and this is a disregard for brand heritage that we see often in the world of television and entertainment. TBS was once a "superstation" offering all kinds of programming and sports and now is trying to focus on comedy and being "very funny." The Food Network, dealing with its own growing pains will be launching launched a cooking channel to separate the how-to cooking style programming from other food related programming. You could be forgiven for thinking that having a consistent brand really doesn't matter much in the world of entertainment.

Today the USA Network is launching a group contributed blog tied directly to the network's overall brand positioning focused on celebrating characters of all types. This blog, called Character Approved is featuring 10 voices in a variety of categories from Art to Food and I have been invited to write the Technology/New Media category.*

While the blogging project focuses on sharing stories of individuals, products and organizations that are having a positive impact on American culture - the marketing lesson worth repeating from this is how it is the latest effort in a branding campaign that essentially started more than 5 years ago where the USA Network created a vision for their brand that still exists and drives the brand today.

The tagline of "Characters Welcome" that you may have seen on the cable channel guides the programming decisions and recently has taken form outside of the network through programs such as the Character Approved awards and now this new blog. What I love about this guiding principle is that it allows the network to stand for something and extend beyond just the current programming of the moment. As of now, the strategy seems to be working - with USA currently placed as the #1 network in all of basic cable, with its programming being seen in 98.5 million U.S. homes. For me, focusing on sharing the stories of characters that are having an impact on the culture of America through technology and new media is a powerful idea and one that I am very excited about exploring and writing about over the coming year. Check out some of the initial posts now live on the blog and let me and the rest of the writers on this project know what you think!

*Disclaimer - I am compensated for my participation on the Character Approved blog as a contributing writer, however this and any future posts about the USA Network that I share on my blog are not compensated or scripted in any way and represent my own true opinion.

Why The "Old Spice Guy" Might Be The Perfect Branding Campaign

You might have seen a randomly bare chested and very good looking guy doing a bunch of short videos that look suspiciously like a funny commercial that has been on TV for months for Old Spice. Starting from a series of ads, over the last 48 hours the advertising team for Old Spice has created more than 200 short ads which are essentially video responses from the actor in the ads to comments and questions posted on Twitter. The real time nature of these videos has become huge online, driving millions of views of essentially what are branded ads and spreading the creative of the TV spots to a much wider audience online.

It is a good idea and the creative is funny, but there are several things that make this campaign stand out as a way to refresh the tired and sagging Old Spice brand. They come down to the basics of good marketing - from strategy to creative, but most importantly, the level of integration between television, online and social media in this campaign stands out. Unlike many other consumer goods campaigns that fall short when it comes to everyone collaborating, this is one of those few campaigns that seems like it was actually approached holistically by one team that didn't just chase the trend of the month, but used the platforms of TV, Twitter and YouTube primarily in the ways they were best suited. Here's a short summary with some key marketing lessons I will be taking away from this effort:

• Smart Strategy - The marketing strategy behind this campaign is simple - show a great looking guy and tell women that he is "the man their man could smell like." Everyone knows that when it comes to bath products for guys, a huge purchaser is likely women - so instead of turning women into sex objects as Axe does to reach the single guys, Old Spice set their target as including and even speaking directly to women.
• Creative Execution - The creative execution of the "Old Spice Man" using actor Isaiah Mustafa has been a hit, from his funny rapid paced TV spots and offered an instantly memorable pitch for Old Spice that people remembered and even mimicked. The campaign started with a strong creative execution that spoke directly to mostly women and while many men didn't quite "get" the commercial initially, it was all many women could talk about.
• Cross Media Integration - Moving from a TV spot, the team at W&K behind this integrated social media in a way that is often lacking. Even with brands that have significant followings through one type of social media (such as Champion with over 100,000 Facebook fans and a great current campaign all around sportsmanship) are falling flat when it comes to translating that audience to a different platform and type of conversation (their Twitter page has only 45 members). For Old Spice, they are responding to tweets directly through videos, letting people create their own versions of the ad, engaging on Facebook and it is all paying off. As of the time of writing this post, their YouTube channel has nearly 7 million views, nearly 600,000 fans on Facebook and more than 70,000 followers on Twitter.
• Personal Investment - This is a relatively intangible piece, but the advertising agency team behind this is clearly personally invested in the campaign. They love it, and are actively sharing their excitement about it. On the Interactive Creative Director Ian Tait's blog are photos of the line of employees waiting to meet the Old Spice Man and also a personal response to a negative tweet someone shared and more details about the team behind the campaign. While most consumers won't see this dialogue or probably even care, I happen to know as a fellow agency guy that when the team working on a project loves it - it comes through in the campaign.

5 Types Of Consumer Generated Marketing (CGM) Campaigns

Over the past several years, consumer generated marketing campaigns have become more and more popular. After all, what brand wouldn't want tons of users to create content on their behalf and share it online with their entire social networks? And by the way, these consumers will create it all for free. For this reason, CGM was often heralded as a dream come true type of situation for brands and even a way to supplant their marketing agencies and get their advertising created for free.

As time went on, though, brands realized the downside of consumer generated media could be a lack of control and potential risk for their brand if the content isn't great. That added to the fact that while consumer generated media was the shiny new object that everyone wanted, it wasn't always the best choice in terms of a creative strategy or execution to get people involved. So when is a consumer generated marketing strategy the right choice for your brand?  To find the answer, you need to first understand that there are several different types of consumer generated media campaigns and picking the right one will have a lot to do with your future success or failure. Here are the five types that I have seen online as well as examples of each one:

1. Reinvent a branded asset. "What's Your Version Of ....?"

If your brand has been around for some time, you have likely built up some equity and recognition in the elements of your brand. One of the best ways to involve the online population of content creators in your brand is to ask them for help in reimagining something intrinsic to your brand. Folgers did this recently by asking consumers to re-record the famous theme song - "the best part of wakin up, is Folgers in your cup." The resulting finalists were great examples of talented individuals making the brand their own and also helped to remind anyone who watched any of these finalists just how much a part of their own past Folgers might have been.

2. Find your dream job. "What If You Were ... ?"

All of us might imagine ourselves reinvented, but the fact of social media is that it can offer many great tools to help you think about the process of being what you want to be. There are a growing number of campaigns that fit the mold of helping you to envision yourself as doing something different, with the most popular likely being Queensland Tourism's Best Job In The World campaign which invited you to pitch yourself as the new Tourism director for a small island in Australia. Another example is MTV's search happening now for the World's First "TJ" or Twitter Jockey. Contest elements there included creating your own hashtag and publicizing it.

3. Get rewarded for your creativity. "Submit your creative idea for ..."

This may be the most popular form of consumer generated media campaign, where you invite participants to submit videos or photos or stories and reward them based on their creativity. The rewards typically focus on visibility and promotion versus prizes or cash - case in point would be Doritos efforts around the Super Bowl for the last several years where they aired a consumer generated TV commercial during the Super Bowl.

4. Share your story, win a prize. "Tell us ... - and you could win!"

A format that works for just about any brand, this is a combination of a promotional campaign and something that engages consumers by getting them to share something personal in return for the opportunity to win a prize. An example of this type of campaign is one that Bertolli* recently launched on Facebook to get consumers to share what inspires them.

5. Share your idea to get a grant. "Get funded to change the world."

In a nice intersection between social good and marketing, there are a growing number of sites that allow you to submit your idea for how to make an impact on the world and get funded. Some are like the Pepsi Refresh project which cross into the realm of philanthropy while others are more focused on connected those in need with those who would fund or vote for them such as the American Express Members Project or DonorsChoose.org.

Are there any other types of consumer generated media marketing campaigns that you have seen which fit another category? Share them in a comment and I will amend this list.

*Note - Bertolli is a client of Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence.