Tech Tows Consumer Companies in Engaging Customers

McDonalds give away toys with Happy Meal; an attempt to keep their young customers engaged. Chocolate maker Ferrero India, packs toys as a surprise inside its Kinder Joy chocolate egg. These are small examples of a fast growing trend. An increasing number of businesses are embracing the customer activated enterprise model. As per an IBM study, leaders in organizations that outperform their peers are not just managing customer experiences; they are reorienting their organizations, strategies and investments to cultivate contemporary relationships across all manner of customer interactions.

Progressive ones are transitioning from selling products and services to being an active partner with customers’ interest group. In short, more and more organizations can be seen fervently attempting to create an ecosystem around customers’ sweet spot. According to David Aaker, a sweet spot reflects customers’ “thinking and doing” time, beliefs and values, activities and passions, possessions or places they treasure. Ideally, it would be a part of, if not central to, their self-identity and lifestyle and reflect a higher-order value proposition, much beyond the benefits provided by the offering.

Aaker illustrates this with the example of Pampers. The brand went beyond diapers by creating the Pampers Village community that provides a “go to” place for all issues relating to babies and child care. Its five sections – pregnancy, newborn, baby, toddler, and preschooler – all have a menu of topics. Its online community allows moms and soon-to-be moms to connect with each other to share their common experiences, issues and thoughts about how to raise a healthy, happy child. The program demonstrates that Pampers understands mothers, and works to establish a relationship between the brand and the mother that will potentially continue throughout the mother’s Pampers buying life.

What is surprising is that this marketing ploy isn’t restricted to B2C businesses. Technology giant IBM recently announced ‘IBM Cloud Marketplace,’ one place where clients and partners can discover, try, and buy cloud-based capabilities. The IBM Marketplace has mobile apps, software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings, and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings - all in one spot  - where they are easy to locate, easy to understand, easy to order, easy to try out, and easy to purchase. That’s not all. The company also launched a BlueMix Garage development center in San Francisco,  where it plans to work hand-in-hand with entrepreneurs and startups on next-generation, cloud-based agile applications. 

Aaker says that connecting with a shared-interest area provides avenues to a relationship much richer than that of an offering-based relationship that, for most brands, is driven by a functional benefit and is relatively shallow and vulnerable.

Views are personal

Is Facebook’s Acquisition of WhatsApp a Threat to Telcos

A cousin of mine, aged 22, can always be seen tapping fervently on his mobile. For someone sporadically glancing at this exercise, it might seem as a new generation rhythm. For others who are forcefully but passively involved in this so called music, it is a mobile-centric social paranoia that is seizing especially the young ones. The culprit is the ever increasing mobile messaging apps.

The recent announcement by social media firm Facebook about the acquisition of WhatsApp will only trigger the obsession towards real-time content sharing. It is soon turning into an emotional activity. And, such emotional activities are what marketers are increasingly trying to tap. It is also a great handle for customer engagement. Consider this; the 22-year old spends more time on his mobile than chatting with his family members staying with him. He is just one among the 70% of WhatsApp users that use its services every day. Facebook comparatively has only 61% hooked onto it every day. 

      

It is clear that social media gorillas are transitioning to the traditional mainstream industries ousting well entrenched and seemingly unshakable giants. Consider the case of telcos. The goings on hitherto indicates that they completely missed the social media phenomenon. Grappling with continued operating challenges, telcos’ rhetoric of continued innovation to create new revenue streams from analyzing user behavior is increasingly seen as yielding no outcomes. Communication tools like WhatsApp, WeChat, Viber to name a few are in fact overtaking telcos initiatives towards meaningful customer engagement.

The recent announcement by WhatsApp CEO is further damaging to telcos already waning significance in the communication ecosystem. Beginning Q2 2014, WhatsApp will enable voice within its app. And, like how the communication tools previously chipped away the once prominent SMS from telcos, there is likelihood of a threat on telcos’ voice revenues.   

Staying Ahead with Mobile;Losing Fun in Life

When someone doesn’t pop the question – what plans for the New Year – it might seem atypical. Well, that is what happened to me. No one cared. But that is typical of folks now. The mobile devices keep everyone engaged. So engrossed are people that most have absolutely no clue of the time passing by. What do they care of others plans? I was mulling over the clutter of mobile applications – some device resident while others in the cloud – and a way to stay away from it when some marketing to-do list for the year struck me. 

1.   Stay focused – I had been repeatedly suggesting to people I meet to stay away from mobile applications that challenge not just their stress thresholds but the tolerance of others around. What is increasingly seen is a tendency to procrastinate with the belief there will tomorrow to make up for today’s indulgences. Marketers who are relentlessly pursuing ways and means to garner consumers’ mindshare are being asked to stay away from strategies weighing down their brands. No marketer would want to commoditize a brand, right? Similarly, we ought to focus on one or two applications that keep us and others around us engaged. 

2.  Be seen – One of the advices from my boss early this year was to be seen where it matters. The connected world permits one to work from anywhere. It also implies that one can find the most convenient place to expedite work. While convenience matters, collaboration between team members should be a priority and hence regular meetings an imperative. The other day, I asked a journalist friend if she would want to walk across the road to meet a common friend. She preferred to take down the number and call instead. The conversation lasted 5 minutes; ending with the note of a possible meeting at a later date. Be it friends or relatives, whatsapp, Facebook, hangout etc are challenging the social aspects of human life. ‘Walking is no more a verb’ in my vocabulary, commented a young colleague recently. ‘Texting, pinging…etc are more frequently used,’ she continued. 

3.  Spread word that matters - In our quest to gain prominence across social media, we tend to indulge in activities that diminish the significance of matters that demand attention. A nine year old missing boy in Mumbai was fortunately traced with the help of his father’s extensive social media network. Not many are lucky though. The unedifying demeanor of our elected representatives in the Parliament should remind us of obstreperous kids and neighbors who get ostracized during community activities. Their political sagacity lies only in hoodwinking people.

Did the refrigerator message you?

‘Let us go party,’ Allen commented as soon as he received Joe’s message about a promotion. They chatted for a long time about their school, friends and work. Both agreed to call up their respective families and friends and meet at Allen’s place that weekend. Allen called his wife, Tina, and conveyed the news of Joe’s promotion and his invitation for a weekend party. 

As he hurriedly left office that day, Allen’s thought retraced childhood days at a small yet bustling town on the outskirts of a tech city. He had gone to school with Joe, founded a technology company while at college and decided to part ways when Joe decided to work for a tech major in China. Joe had travelled the world and was announced the CEO on his return to the US only a month ago.

As his car emerged out of the parking lot, a message popped up on his phone. It was Google. It had a list of party organizers. Yet another message had a list of his friends – mutual friends with Joe – to be invited for the party. A subsequent message had a calendar invite with names of all family members. Wow, this is going to be real fun, thought, Allen as he drove into his garage.

Welcome to the ‘internet of things’ which will certainly and significantly transform our lives. A blog by Ian Cook on the subject states the following - the ‘internet of things’ is an idea that suggests that not just access devices can be connected to the internet, but a whole host of other ‘objects’ might be able to join in as well.  For example, the Economist describes pill jars that know when an elderly patient needs to take a dose of tablets. A call centre can then ring the patient and remind them to take their pills.

According to Tom Fishburne, ‘as everyday objects in our homes, cars, and general lives start to connect, this has the potential to bring tremendous utility to people. For marketers, it also teases mouth-watering insight into and access to individual consumers.’

Now, Google’s acquisition of smart home device maker – Nest – could potentially change marketing forever.  The once-imagined future is less distant than we may think. A digitally enabled household no longer means simply maintaining a personal Internet connection or even syncing portable devices to a home network. Now, the digital home is becoming a conscious home — one that adapts and responds according to our behavior, states Anjali Lai in her Forrester blog.  

Gone are the days of brand building or relationship building; marketers will have to scamper for data pertaining to individuals so as to be the first to address their wants.  Well, the world’s really shrinking. What say you?

The Business of Joy

What would happen if a company had half of their team with joyful members and the other without? I was reading excerpts of a book – Joy Inc., by Richard Sheridan wherein this caught my attention. This has been a concept close to me; something I always attempted. 

Imagine asking a client which half they would prefer to work. Obviously, the response would be to work with the joyful half. Why would they want to? What difference would it make? The joyful members would be easy to work, more productive, more engaged, and would care more about the outcome. 

Of course, you don’t have to wait to hear from your client that a joyful team would produce better outcomes, right? A joyful team will ensure that the work they are doing will be largely adopted and delightfully used by their clients. They care about the change they are making – even if it is minute. Businesses would perform better if only they realize that they can’t sustainably achieve outside joy unless there is inside joy.  

  

Samuel Pierpont Langley led a highly educated, well funded team of scientists to build the first powered, manned airplane. However, he lost the race to Wright brothers, totally unknowns at that time. Why? Langley was trying to build an airplane. The brothers wanted to fly. 

A pursuit of joy within a business context is not the pursuit of fame or profit. Humans aspire to a higher purpose. Teams desire to work on goals bigger than themselves.