Category: Strategy

  • Social+

    Consumption and curation. At some point I can still remember, I consumed newspapers, magazines and all other mass publishers (across platforms) and expected them to curate for me. Curation for a large mass, when linked to their kind of production process and business model, got tits first whiff of trouble when the internet only models came into the picture. In the early days of content abundance, an algorithm came into our lives and changed the way we found content on the net. A bit later, I was introduced to a different kind of curation courtesy the service then known as del.icio.us.  #youremember I would put Google Reader in the same category too.

    Then came Facebook and Twitter, and RSS died several times if we go by the blog posts. Facebook for me has been and is a social graph. The only way my interest graph has crept in (in terms of content discovery and consumption) is in the form of pop culture. Can that change? I wouldn’t write it off. Twitter started out as an interest graph, but when it scaled, it began flirting with social graphs. For me, it’s now both, and I find that difficult to work with. It’s probably a bit of my laziness too – curating who I follow, making corresponding lists etc erm, not done. Anyway, my discovery and sharing on that network is minimal now. So, in that respect, the curation I expect on these platforms is minimal too.

    Purely by activity, it would seem that I am more active on my interest graph networks now. I wonder if I am alone in not being sure of mixing my interest and social graphs -Delicious, Foursquare, GoodReads., and until recently, (generically) Reader. The curation is by a set of people I trust in that domain, and any ‘social’ that happens remains ‘by the way’.

    Google didn’t even see the social boat IMO, and when they did, it was too far out. Wave, Buzz: crash, silenced. But while writing the WT5 column late last week, I found that Google+ has been creeping in everywhere – search results, news, Reader (I haven’t forgiven you, Google) and building in features like Mutual Circle Chat and search options.  I was thinking about this when I received one of my best sources of curation these days – the weekly Only Dead Fish newsletter (email, how ironic 🙂 ), and that’s where I saw this excellent post titled ‘From destination social to distributed social : why Google+ is the Trojan horse of the social web‘

    That’s exactly what Google seems to be doing. Unlike Facebook, which built THE social network and then tried to link consumption on other sites in an ‘oh, okay, fine’ way, Google is playing a balance act, and to its strengths. By giving me the tools to build a social network on Google+, and simultaneously being present at my points of consumption, Google is making me play curator to both social and interest graphs. If all goes well, I think Google will not only collect data, but also build several social networks based on interest graphs. Google’s cash cow still doesn’t have much to do with all this, but once the networks are built, Google will have better contexts for AdSense, based on a really smart social algorithm.

    I have always believed that Android is the next Google. Still do, but now I think that Google+ is a contender too. Or maybe the social OS will be built by them together.

    until next time, evil graphs 🙂

    Bonus: A Google Ventures backed app on iPhone named Stamped – very relevant in this context.

  • Coffee and brand stories

    One of the best Indian brand stories I have seen in recent times is Chetan Bhagat. He has pretty much nailed the product, price and promotion, and gets better with each release cycle. Place? Bookstores, Twitter, Newspapers…… He has loyalists and haters, online and offline, and most people I know have an opinion on him. I religiously read every book that he brings out, not because I think he is a literary genius, but because he’s a reasonably good storyteller, and like it or not, he has the pulse of the nation’s youth, or at least a significant portion of it. I do avoid his columns because I can’t handle that brand of humour on Monday mornings.

    I read his latest work Revolution 2020, and though it wasn’t quite the ‘Revulsion 2020’ that many made it out to be, I didn’t think it was a great piece of work either. (my review) But that’s not the story here. On page 108, a Cafe Coffee Day wove itself into the story, as the protagonist tells his father, “There is a Cafe Coffee Day opening in Sigra. It is a high-class coffee chain…..” I wouldn’t have thought more about it if I hadn’t remembered a story last year on how Chetan Bhagat had become CCD’s special friend, as part of their rebranding strategy. CCD makes another appearance in Page 116, and then several more later, as it becomes a routine rendezvous.

    Inserting a product into a story is not a new thing. Product placements in movies are now taken for granted. I still remember the time I worked on a project in the early days of this phenomenon – WorldSpace (my employer then) and Lage Raho Munnabhai. But these days they are mostly a force fit and all the brands involved try to one-up each other through their own promos. No one wins.

    But I haven’t seen a product placement in a book yet. To be fair, a few other brands like Frankfinn, Ramada, Taj also make appearances, but CCD gets top billing in Revolution 2020. Ah, billing. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, and it’s the author’s way of making the reader identify a little more with the story. CCDs are now, after all, ubiquitous. But if this is indeed an official tie-up, I think it’s quite a neat job by CCD. In the era of storytelling, when every brand tries to engage their audience via everything from TVCs to social media platforms, getting themselves into a guaranteed bestseller is a coup. CCD has always relied on its own stores than media campaigns for its storytelling, so this fits in. But if it’s indeed an official tie-up, and not a “what’s a few mentions between friends” arrangement, I’d have liked a disclosure from the author. It would’ve done his brand story’s credibility a world of good.

    until next time, a plot can happen over coffee…

  • Brands, Identity and Consistency

    So, Google+ kindly consented to host brands and organisations on the platform (announcement) and immediately gave examples of pages already available. These include Pepsi, WWE, Burbery and so on. The typical ways most brands have approached their new Google+ page is to use the features of the network (mostly Hangouts) to reasonably good effect, in addition to using the platform for content distribution and in a few cases, even displaying their employees. This last one was an interesting use case and has potential, I thought, and better than Facebook’s fanpage Admin version.

    When I read the announcement, I immediately thought of brand identity. In the initial days of Google+ launch, the circles feature that allowed users to compartmentalise their different identities created a little flutter. It helped that, at that point, Facebook’s options for achieving the same ends were pretty well concealed. The visual identities of the brands on Google+ remain consistent with other online and offline platforms and so far, so do the tone and activities.

    I have a different identity for different sets of people I deal with. Work, Friends, Family, Acquaintances, Twitter connections etc. How I behave with them and what I share with them varies too. (though there are overlaps)  I thought about this from a brand’s perspective. My relationship with a brand is different from the one that another person has. (use cases, context etc) And if I do have to share this relationship, what I’d share and the way I would share it would also vary among my own different audience sets.  In a world where the consumers are moving towards a fluid identity, do brands have to consider one too?

    In the real world, brands sometimes tweak their identity according to geography. This was reasonable and worked fine in an era of mass media. With the internet, the whole world would easily see the changes across geography. And the end consumer could ask questions too. He/she even expects the brand to communicate like a human. If we consider different networks as different geographies, with peculiar consumption patterns (of information, for starters), does the consistency that brand currently focuses on become a constraint? Considering that different platforms have different advantages and are used for different objectives, how fluid can the brand and its communication be, on the web and off it?

    until next time, identity crises

  • Building brand stories

    There was a superb post at Misentropy last week on story-telling that opened up new perspectives for me on that art, and science, especially the last few lines on subliminal commands that could set or reset a new memory episode in our minds.

    The coincidence in the timing was excellent, because it is related to a subject that has occupied my thoughts for a while now – brand stories in recent times. Notwithstanding recent splurges, a Google or Apple or even an Angry Birds has not really built a brand on advertising. On any given day, there are hundreds if not thousands of websites and blogs which compete among themselves to ensure they get the latest dope on these companies first.

    For a while, I thought that this was largely due to the inherent domain association. Of the internet/mobile and therefore covered on the internet/mobile. But that’s not really true – Lady Gaga or Bieber or The Dark Knight Rises (check out Misentropy’s curated fan creations – Batmania) are not tech, they are popular culture, and yet they have all successfully built brand stories (also) using the internet to great effect. Are all music bands or movies operating at that level? Not. The only commonality I could notice was the ‘product is marketing’ (yes, even Bieber or Kim Kardashian actually belong here) credo, by design or not.  The product in this case need not (and is usually not) even be the core domain they’re operating in, it’s usually a core differentiator – in Gaga’s case, shock. I have no clue on Bieber, and Kim Kard’s sticks way out of the purview of this blog!

    But despite the above, and exceptions, I also wondered whether brands of an earlier era were at a disadvantage because they operated not only in domains that had become commodities, but also operated within frameworks that made their activities templates. Not just from a planning perspective, but from communication platforms as well.

    Thanks (also) to my weekly web wrap column, I noticed one interesting example of a brand that could weave its story into my life’s context – apparently by design. For 8 years, the Samsung TV and I have been staring at each other without getting into a relationship. But for the last few weeks, I’ve been scanning websites to check out the release of the Galaxy Nexus phone in India. The only other alternative I have in mind – the Galaxy S2. Samsung has piggybacked on Android to enter my life. However, just as this article states (about Samsung in the context of the Internet of Things), I’d say that Samsung has missed an opportunity in this regard. (though its Samsung Nation gamification based loyalty program looks interesting) The simple test being that I wouldn’t blink before changing my preferences if a different Android maker offered me a better product. But would I try a different OS family? Not a chance. Because, dessert name versions and all, Android is a story for me now.

    So, simplistically, I see two gateways to story telling – it’s either the story or the telling. In the first case, the product is so different that it leads the story, and in the second, the product might be a commodity, but the telling is such that it creates a story. Classic examples for the latter are ‘Will it Blend?’ and ‘The Old Spice Man’, episodic thought they might seem. Depending on its domain and competitive landscape, each brand would have to decide its focus and build the relevant skill set. The tools are more than ever before, as always, it’s how they are used. That story hasn’t changed.

    until next time, storied brands

  • Gamification – Level 3

    I ended last week’s post comparing the previous season’s buzzword ‘social media’ with gamification, and the need for brands to evolve their own way of utilising it. Though it’s easy to find a huge number of case studies that have been generated on the use of social media by brands to interact with consumers, the amount of material available on how the internal organisation has been wired to implement this, is relatively less.

    At a broad level, both consumer facing social media and gamification are ways to interact with consumers and engage them better. But though a single function in the organisation might be handling this interface (I think the vast majority of organisations have not evolved to the advanced social media frameworks), its effectiveness depends on coordination between functions.

    I read JP Rangaswami’s excellent post on Gamification and the Enterprise, on how the consumer and  the enterprise are changing and that new problems require new approaches and advocates a look at game design to solve these. I also read a counter-post by Sigurd Rinde which argues that gamification, dashboard and search are signs of enterprise failure. The disagreement seemed more to be on semantics, if you check the comments on Sig’s post.

    Both agree that extrinsic rewards based gamification is not the way to do it. Not that my agreement much in the debate, but I do agree. 🙂 To me, extrinsic rewards seems like a way to reward a process for its own sake, but intrinsic rewards might significantly work better to ensure that the intent is the bigger focus.

    Which brings me to implementation. Usually, social media outposts happen first and then organisations scramble to make processes and frameworks out of it. This is probably because the social networks enable customers to have a conversation about the brand anyway without its having any say in the matter. In the case of gamification, though, there is a requirement to build game dynamics, mechanics and aesthetics and it seems that this would have to be done by the brand. That leads to a choice.

    So should an enterprise first use gamification on the consumer side, finding ways to marry customer intent and business objective and then attempt this in the enterprise to ensure that employees work towards achieving these ‘ways’? Or should they identify business objectives and gamify the enterprise to ensure they are met and then attempt this on the consumer side, so employees can work on making the ‘ways’ smoother to execute? Or build both in parallel? I am swinging towards the first option. You?

    until next time, end game, for now