More recently I discovered Charlie Winston while sitting at an Italian restaurant in Paris, where I’d been speaking Italian with the waiters and the song “Tongue Tied” came on which begins;

Now’s my chance, here in France, I’ve gotta give it a go.
How do you say I’m happy ? Estoy feliz contigo ? No ! No !
Désolé mon français est un petit peu confus
Possible que tout le temps si j’essaie
Hablo poco spanish – another stupid english boy !

Which seemed so appropriate for my situation, but the album wasn’t yet out in the Netherlands so I kept checking and a month or so later finally bought it.

These aren’t part of any traditional marketing strategy, in fact both men have full websites providing pictures, videos, lyrics and all sorts of giveaways, they run their own blogs (Jason Mraz is very active on his) and have well constructed facebook fan pages (Jason Mraz has a healthy 2.6 million fans).

Both have understood the value of word of mouth marketing, and how to use online tools to leverage it, neither is using (at least not visibly) the machinery of the record labels. Yet they’re getting attention.

Much has been written about the changes in the music industry, the decline of the studios, the rise of the power of individual musicians and the changing ways of distributing music – including U2′s live at the Rosebowl concert which was broadcast live -and free – via YouTube.

But the problem of attention has remained, how can a new artist gain an audience without a studio promoting him? It’s one thing to load a clip to YouTube but more than 20 hours of video are loaded every minute so how does your clip get attention? How can you build a following? How can you reach people like me, who like music, listen to it a lot, but never go in a record store?

The music industry has been through a period of disintermediation – which means the people between Jason Mraz/Charlie Winston (the producers) and me (the consumer) have been removed. They’ve shown that they can still promote their music and get a following using internet/social media tools. A new model for “getting attention” is emerging. How long before someone spots the opportunity to create a new “intermediary” and start providing that service? Well it’s probably already started, and not by the old record labels.

So I'm a globe trekker, according to bundle

But what is Bundle? It’s a site that collects consumer spending data built in partnership with msn money, citi and morningstar. Here’s how it works.

On top of the data there are expert articles analysing and explaining the data and trends, for example this in depth look at trends on food spending. There are also multiple opportunities to give your opinion and share via facebook (mostly) your views on money.

It’s well done, and feedback on the site indicates that visitors are finding it useful to compare their own spending or to compare costs/spend in different locations. The only minus point? it’s only US data.

just out of time?

I was watching BBC a while ago and saw the documentary about John Lewis. I’m fascinated by this company, the legal structure is a partnership so they do not talk about employees but about partners. They pride themselves on service, which means everyone is knowledgeable about their product line and their call centre performs well.

But the business is under pressure. In the documentary two cost saving innovations were discussed; one was to outsource the call centres, which I can see as a potential cost saver but I wonder about the impact on the level of customer service. The other innovation was to reduce inventory further, to push for their suppliers to supply them faster and hold more inventory. In short “Just in Time” inventory management.

“Just in time” reduces inventory carried as the inventory for sale is delivered much closer to demand. With barcodes and automatic stock taking it’s become possible to use it even in relatively fast moving and dynamic retail environments.

The advantages for retailers are that they don’t have to store large amounts of inventory, and can be more responsive to customer demand. It does push the costs and risks of holding inventory back to the supplier. Some suppliers are charging a premium for supplying on “Just in time” schedules.

However if the distribution channel is not reliable or if the price is volatile it may be wiser for the retailer to choose to hold inventory to reduce the risk of running out of stock, or to take advantage of lower price offers.

Greenpeace goes Post-it

I read about Greenpeace’s battle with Nestle in a newsletter published in April, and assumed that by now the heat would have died down.

Until I saw the post-it note at right in the metro station this week (complete with Dutch spelling of orangutan).

Nestle originally got a video removed from YouTube based on protecting their logo which caused a storm in the social media space, a bit of a spat on facebook, and now Greenpeace is using the Nestle logo throughout their palm oil campaign. They’ve also moved their campaign from facebook logos to supermarket shelves and, apparently, metro stations.

What’s interesting about this from a communications standpoint is that Greenpeace have been able to hijack Nestle’s logo and build up a following who will attack Nestle online yet are still able to cast Nestle as the bully. Their comment that they haven’t hired a “social media agency” is disingenuous, they employ communications experts to run such campaigns. The campaigns are solidly thought through, integrated online/offline, well targetted and well executed. Greenpeace’s core business is campaigning and they do it extremely well, the corporate world would do well to watch and learn.

Anyway the campaign is clever, you can see the effects on video.

You can see more video examples on this blog.

I’m a fan of interactive media like these and this is for a good cause.

Guess who?

One company put a little branding message into their robots.txt file. See if you can guess who it’s from. (If you’re really stuck the answer is in the alt text – so just mouse over).

Pretty much nobody reads this text, the only people who do are geeks, and 50% of the geeks I asked didn’t get the branding message. But 50% did.

This says something about the company, branding is so well done internally that the geeks writing the robots.txt file include a variant of the company’s tag line. It also says they are confident about their brand  can have some fun with it, whether or not it’s out there for public consumption.

I’m calling it deep branding.

Brainstorm Overload

I was invited to a brainstorming session a couple of weeks ago, I jumped at the chance – I love brainstorming sessions, I tend to come out of them with more ideas for my own work as well as contributing some to the session.

But this one fell flat and I’ve been thinking about what went wrong and what makes a good brainstorming session. Here’s what I’ve come up with;

Timing
Choose a time when participants have some energy to be creative; Friday last thing might not be the time of the week when people are feeling their most energetic or creative – or it might be a good opportunity if you can move them to a different environment and finish the week on a high.
Environment
Go somewhere different, or do something different to make the participants feel they’re outside the office and away from their work. One friend spent 50 euro at IKEA to buy everything needed to create a picnic environment for his brainstorm.
Participants
Choose a mixture of participants; you want a mixture of approaches, ideas, thought processes. Try to have a mixture of introvert and extroverts – but make sure the introverts get a chance to be heard. If the brainstorm is about a creative issue, for example a product name, make sure there are people in the group from the target audience – and make sure their voices are heard.
Purpose
Make sure the purpose of the brainstorming is clearly defined; “re-imagining how we work” or “naming the new product”.
Process
Be very clear on the process – even if not all steps are disclosed to the participants up front. The process should include;

• set ground rules – everyone’s ideas are valid, no ‘black hat‘ reactions, no blocking, no evaluating of ideas
• a briefing, outlining the purpose, the context, and how the outcomes of the brainstorm will be used
• an exercise to switch people’s thinking out of their daily grind mindset, I’ve used masks to reinforce that we needed to look at the question through different eyes
• an exercise to generate ideas – this should be a no holds barred free for all idea session
• order ideas – group or order the ideas, for example if the exercise is around naming a product you might group the names into types such as “emotional”, “descriptive” and “new word”
• discuss – it’s important to discuss how everyone arrived at their ideas, sometimes this will help convince at the next step, or help people think of new direction

Outcomes
I always go into a brainstorming hoping we’ll get the perfect answer, sometimes that doesn’t happen. It’s important that you drive towards the goal but don’t force it; if the right answer doesn’t come out of the brainstorm be positive about what has been offered and reinforce what the next step will be.
Fun
Do something original to make the brainstorm fun. Our meeting rooms have glass walls and after the brainstorm were I used masks I had several people ask if they could join the next session. Dare a little, it will be appreciated.

The best brainstorming session leaves everyone feeling positive about the project, and invested in the outcome – even if it wasn’t “their” idea that was chosen.

What was the best brainstorming you’ve been to?

image from boetter via flickr

We already had a team meeting to discuss the goals for the team in general, so next step was individual goals. We’ve agreed on performance goals and development goals for 2010.

I had a discussion with one member of the team, about how these goal setting and assessment systems are subjective and how frustrating it is.

How could I answer?

Goals

So I answered that there was always some element of subjectivity in any system and part of trying to make it fair was agreeing together on the goals. Then I explained my attitude to the goal setting process; set a range of goals, some which are regular business, some which are tougher, some which more of a best guess about what will happen in the second half of the year. I do this so that there is a full year of goals, some of which are sure to be achieved some of which will challenge the team member.

In terms of assessing the achievement I look at results. Yes, results-full-stop. Once I’ve done that I look back on the year and try to judge whether the goal was fair, or whether there were circumstances beyond our control that made it harder to achieve the goal. If it wasn’t I might have to adjust the assessment. In our system the goals are weighted so once that is taken into account a final score can be calculated. Then I think back on previous years and see if that score is a fair and consistent score. Of course each step involves a certain amount of subjectivity.

Then there’s a department-wide adjustment; based on the theory that we’re all on the same normal curve so you should have one team all scoring As and another all Cs. I find this a bit hard to take – it does mean that your best chance of getting a great score is to go and work in a rubbish team, but the idea behind it is around fairness and ironing out those super-generous or super-harsh managers.

Last year was a year of changing priorities, which meant that it was tough to meet existing goals in a changing environment. The thing that slipped was the development goals. I only spent a tiny part of my 2009 training budget, and there were/are some training needs. This year one of my performance goals is making sure my team get the training they need. If everyone follows through on the plans presented today that will be easy.

image from lululemon athletica via flickr

Book Review

Stefan Mumaw and Wendy Lee Oldfield

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” says the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland. And pushing our brain into the realms of the impossible is just what “Caffeine for the Creative Mind” is all about.

It’s sub-titled “250 exercises to wake up your brain” and there are some great and original exercises in the book. For example;

pictogram exercise, pg 25

“Draw a pictogram that describes each of these six words; Pressure, Delirious, Lucky, Suspense, Dangerous and Joyful. Use only four straight lines and a circle for each one…”

My pictogram for “Pressure” is shown left, which is the one I found easiest to imagine. Dangerous came out looking a lot like the symbol for mars and it’s pretty hard to distinguish between delirious and joyful when I draw them. But it struck me as a fun concept to remove writer’s block as well as waking up my brain.

Some of the exercises involve building something, some are about writing, some are reminders of games once played in school (or at strange parties) such as Mad Libs.

The book is sprinkled with interviews from some creative types; artists, writers, entrepreneurs offering wit and inspiration for those days where exercising your brain is just too much.

It’s a good book, a rich source of fun challenges to wake up your brain. Now if only I could think of an animal with a number in its name.