- The Japanese Tsunami
- Fukushima's nuclear catastrophe
- Usama Bin Laden's death
- The rise of democratic protests in the arabic world
- The Greek crisis
- Then, the following Euro crisis
- The death of Steve Jobs
- The Dominique Strauss Kahn affair
- The Lybian war
Saturday, December 31, 2011
2011: A Year To Remember
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Some Facts About The Mobile Application Market
It is a very interesting information. That shows you want should be your target depending on the platform in order to consider your application productive. You can see that there great gaps between the different services. That shows that a lot of the different services may disappear soon. For example, Blackberry has unfortunately failed at developping an interesting app plaftorm. Google has clearly become the leader in the market.
Freemium is becoming a more and more important part of the business model of mobile applications. The bigger the audience will be become, the larger the advertizing opportunities will be, and the easier it will be to propose free applications.
This is an interesting one, because supposely it explains that mobile advertizements are more efficient than Internet once. However, I would like to know what they consider as mobile campaigns. It is more and more difficult to identify mobile campaigns, as now they are closely linked to the Internet. The consumption of email and social media thanks to mobile devices constantly grow, and it is important to consider these new usage to propose an accurate way to deliver commercial messages through those devices.
I remain skeptical about the methodology of this chart, as I do not know the data itcomes from, but I believe there is something to digg there.
The mobile aplication market is for sure a marketing with a great future ahead:
- The penetration rate of smartphones, and other mobile devices allowing to download and use applications is growing at a very fast pace.
- The market is becoming mature, and users are increasing the number of applications they download.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Insights About Marketing On Facebook
- It does cost money to communicate on social media. A common wisdom, especially at an early stage was that it was cheap and almost free to communicate on social media. Also, a lot of people thought it would be a great opportunity for small business to communicate, as it was a fast growing medium, and the freedom of speech would bother and limitate big corporations. However, it is the total opposite that happened, as the medium became pricy, and the efforts need to be high in order to bond with the community.
- There is no cost scaling possibilities.Whatever your number of followers/fans is, it will cost you per user about the same price. It is very diffferent from the other "direct marketing" tools, where the bigger the data base, the cheaper the costs are.
- There are big gaps for cost per clicks. Now it would be interesting to see the return on investment of the different categories. Indeed, cost per click is not really important. What does really matter is the conversion rate, and the way you may transform one lead into a customer.
Friday, December 23, 2011
Quand Google prend la plume
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Where Is Heading Twitter ?
Saturday, December 17, 2011
How To Bring Value Thanks To Customer Experience
- The shopper experience: Before the good or service has been purchased.
- The customer experience: When the customer uses the good and after.
Tuesday, December 06, 2011
LeWeb 2011 Starts Tomorrow
- Social media events used to rock at the early stage, while every one was starting and enthousiast. The last couple of months we have seen a lot of services shutting down, due to the financial crisis of course, but also as a natural event, as markets and players starting to define their playground. This is the reason why it is less "spectacular".
- It is still great to be able to access in Europe to such prestigious speakers, and simply for that, I want to warmly thank Loic.
Friday, November 11, 2011
Facing A Changing Business Model: How To React?
Tuesday, November 08, 2011
How Will The Financial Crisis Impact Customer behavior
We are facing very difficult times. Since 2008, two main financial crisis hit the world, and the road to recovery seems long and tough. Most of the time, it is during these difficult times that we see the biggest change in customers' behaviors. They need to adapt to a changing world.
Monday, November 07, 2011
How Strikes May Impact Customer Relationship Management: Air France Case Study
Friday, November 04, 2011
Let Your Customers Speak Out
"Always Remember: If customer don't have effective way to voice complaint, they just quit doing biz w/ the co."
This sentence is a quote from @tedcoine I found out on Twitter. I believe it is a very interesting one in term of customer relationship management. Indeed, social media have changed the way companies interract with customers.
They can not anylonger avoid listening to angry customers, and they must now deal with it. This is the job of community managers, a new trade which is blossoming.
It is not a natural behavior for a company to let its customers to speak out its complaints and issues. A company sells products, and is seeking for efficiency, which implies standard processes in order to save time and costs.
But ultimately, customer satisfaction is the key factor which will bring success or not to one company.
A lot of companies have looked for ways to silence unhappy customers. They believed that by doing so, they will be able to keep the happy ones happy, and that eventually, unhappy ones would come back.
But it is no longer possible. And this is the reason why they must deal with it now.
This is the reason why it is important to have a strong feedback management system. A one which is able to deal with the large number of media one customer may use to get in contact with the company:
- A call center if it is via telephone.
- A customer service if it is by mail or email
- A community manager if it is by a social media
- A sales person if it is in a store
- An after sales service if it is because of a broken product.
Those media are expensive to manage, and to keep active. But they are vital, because it will minimize the lost of clientele in case of problems.
Also, something very important to think about is how to manage and leverage the large amount of information you may get from all those different sources.
The infromation will come from various ways, but it is important to have a tool which will allow the analyse of all the dysfunction customers may experience.
Thursday, November 03, 2011
Abercrombie & Fitch Growing Fast Thanks To Ecommerce
- Web sales increased 30.2% $207.9 million from $159.7 million in the first two quarters of 2010.
- Total sales grew year over year 22.4% to $1.75 billion from $1.43 billion.
- Net income increased 641.6% to $57.1 million from $7.7 million in the first two quarters of 2010.
Tuesday, November 01, 2011
E Commerce Struggles To Spring Up In India
Friday, October 28, 2011
Fight Opel Renault In France
- Does Renault has the right to copy Opel's commercial. It is clearly a copycat, and I find weird the fact they have been able to do it.
- It seems like Opel and Renault have played together to create the buzz around this campaign. Have they agreed on it? Was Opel aware of Renault's idea to take over the ad idea?
- Renault's commercial is clearly funny, and mark people's mind. But does it really show well the car they want to sell? I mean, people are more into the fun and the fact they mock Opel than into listening to the arguments of the guy.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Hommage To Steve Jobs
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
How I Deal With My Stress
The goal of all these techniques is to avoid the "burn out": it is when a person has lost all its energy and is not able to perform anymore. The worst with the burn out is that it is very difficult to recover from it.
As I am dealing with a very stressful period of time, I wanted to share with you my techniques in order not to be stressed, or at least to master it:
1: Understanding what is stress
As David Allen explains it in Getting Things Done, stress comes from a situation you can not control. That means when you face a situation, you are stressed. That also means that you need to understand the situation in order to take the control over. That also means that there are also some situations you can not control. And those situation, you should forget about them, because there are nothing that you can do about it. Hence, it should not stress you, and you should not think about it.
2. Eating
It is very important, while you are experiencing work overload, to have proper eating habits. "You are what you eat", or "what you eat is the fuel of your engine" are actually right. Therefore, I try:
- Not to eat to much, because digestion is requiring a lot of energy.
- Drink a lot of water because it irrigates the brain and therefore avoids migrains
- Eat a lot of fruits + take vitamin pills to have a lot of energy.
- Take coffee as a stimulating products, but not more than three a day to avoid heart issues.
3. Workout
Sport is very important to be in shape. It releases dopamine which helps you to feel good about yourself. It also helps me to be awake and actually to avoid tireness.
Therefore I swim for 30-40 minutes at my lunch break almost everyday, and play basketball three times a week.
Also, I am used to walk a lot in my offices and the walking process helps to irrigate the brain...
4. Talk about the stressful situation
It is important to talk and speak out the stressful situation you may face. Because most of the time, by simply saying it out loud, you clear up your mind. Also, by discussing it and sharing your thoughts with others, new solutions may spring up, and the serendipity may work.
5. Sleep
Sleeping and resting is very important. You need to recover from all the work you have to do.
6. Keep on being organized.
A lot of the time, as work piles up, a lot of people give up with the organizing process they have, because it requires most of the time a lot of time, and because they feel it won't help them. I believe it is wrong. Even though it may implies you will not complete all the work you are supposed to do, keeping on organizing your work will help you to remain efficient, and even though you want do all the work, you will be able to choose the less important tasks to leave aside.
7. What I refuse to do:
I refuse to be stressed by things I have no control over (see 1 section). If it is an unachievable task, then I don't want to feel bad about failing to achieve it.
I also refuse to take any kind of drugs. I believe this is false solutions.
8. Set up a deadline
You can not be stressed and fear a burn out on a long period of time. You must be able to identify how long the situation will be. Most of the time, there will be a clear deadline (a project deadline). If there are none, then you should give up right away. No one is immuned to burn out, so you are almost sure to get the wall.
Hopefully it helps you.
Do you have any tips you would like to share?
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Why I Go On Blogging
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Mobile Commerce Struggling: Tablet Sales Outcasts Smartphones'
Data provided for the three m-commerce clients indicates that the majority of their traffic from mobile platforms comes from smartphones, and typically from the iPhone and Android devices. For each retailer, those two platforms accounted for between 69%, 71%, and 43% of their visits, respectively, over the last year.
The iPad typically had a smaller share of mobile traffic, reflecting the lower penetration of tablets compared to smartphones generally. About 5% of U.S. consumers surveyed by Nielsen in the first quarter had tablets, versus 36% that had smartphones.
The Apple tablet made up 17%, 15% and 49% of traffic for the three retail clients studied by Ability Commerce, respectively. In the last instance, the retailer had an iPad-specific app that helped boost its share of traffic.
When it came to generating revenue, however, the iPad accounted for a disproportionate amount of m-commerce activity. The retailer, with 17% traffic from the iPad, got 35% of its sales across mobile platforms from the Apple tablet. The one with 15% iPad traffic got 51.5% of revenues from that device, and the retailer with an iPad app got 91.5% of sales from the tablet.
"The trend we are seeing is that while there is a significant increase in Web site traffic due to mobile phones, there is still a much higher percentage of conversion rates on tablets," said Jennifer Tonisson, marketing manager at Ability Commerce.
Research has shown that people tend to use tablets more at home than when they are out. A first-quarter Nielsen survey found about 70% of tablet owners use the devices while watching TV. People used tablets least while shopping or running errands (21%), or commuting (20%). About the same proportion (68%) of smartphone owners use their handsets while watching TV. But 59% use their phones while shopping or running errands.
Taken together with the Ability Commerce data, that suggests people may browse or research retail purchases using their ubiquitous smartphones, but wait to make purchases at home using the iPad or another tablet model. The larger tablet screen naturally makes it easier to complete a transaction than on a smartphone.
"Shopping on a tablet isn't that much different from shopping on a laptop or a home computer," said Tonisson. "You see the same amount of information and product detail. Shopping on a mobile phone is different. Graphics are downsized, descriptions are shorter."
New research from Forrester indicates that among online shoppers who have tablets, most prefer tablets to smartphones when buying online. Most find their tablet as easy to use as their computer when doing so. Specifically, 72% of Gen Xers, 67% of boomers, and 65% of Gen Yers say they use their tablet more than their smartphone to shop online.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Discount/Low Cost And Customer Relationship Management: Ikea's Case Study
Monday, September 26, 2011
Fermeture de Zlio: Mon opinion
Sur le blog de zlio, la société estime que c'est sa baisse du classement dans Google qui a engendré la perte du système. Il est bien entendu très important pour Zlio de proposer un moyen efficace d'être vu sur les moteurs de recherche. Car avec le nombre exponentiel de boutiques existant sur le web, il est très difficile de survivre si on n'a pas un bon classement. Mais j'ai aussi l'impression qu'ils n'ont pas réussis à intéressé les e-marchants, qui ont décidé pour la plupart d'arrêter leur collaboration avec Zlio...
Je trouve cela bien dommage, et j'espère que les différents salariés et créateurs de Zlio réussiront à relever la tête et trouver de nouveaux challenges intéressants.
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Has Groupon A Future ?
In 2010, Groupon has generated $644 million, and the number of users has skyrocketed. What I have always been impressed by with Groupon, was there ability at a very early stage to generate revenues, whereas most of the Web 2.0 actors are focusing on growing their audience than finding an actual business model.
As an evidence of its success, Groupon has seen a lot of copycats blossoming in the different countries where it settled.
Groupon ambitions to go on the stock exchange market soon, but bad news came up, as its audience seems to be decreasing since June. http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=157597
Even worst, Forrester forecasts that by 2016 daily deal market will be miscellaneous.
"Standing out above the clutter [will become] harder for marketers as ad exposures grow," Forrester analyst Shar VanBoskirk explained in a report released last week."Consumers will grow so conditioned to micro-impulse offers they'll lose practice at considered decisions ... Facing a cultural descent into maladroit judgment, employers (and spouses) will blacklist impulse deals to keep people intentional," he noted.
Moreover, it seems that its operating costs are growing faster than its sales.
Here are some thoughts I have:
- In July and August, it is normal that the audience decrease as people go on vacations. Nevertheless, Groupon is still a start up, and despite a decrease in the pace, they should still grow.
- Groupon is probably hurt by its problems of executions. Countless of articles have been written because they oversell their deals. If execution is not there, even though the offer is good it can’t work.
- What is funny is that as a matter of fact, Groupon is not so much an innovation. There were already websites with coupons, they just added the possibility to get great coupons by the large number of people going on the website.
Does Groupon really have a future? I think it will, but its future may not be as bright as people expected. I believe they should focus on their operation and execution, in order to reach profitability. The good point about the story is that they are already able to generate comfortable revenues, whereas other websites of the web 2.0 sphere did not.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Customer Relationship Management And Serendipity?
Serendipity , as defined by Wikipedia: is the moment when someone finds something he was not expecting to find. More than that, serendipity implies finding most of the time the best ideas when it is not expected.
Two factors created the basements for serendipity to grow:
- The information age, where we are facing both information overload
- The new media allowing this information to spread fast.
Hence, one of the key challenges for people willing to create value is to help those moments to come, meaning, to be able to create such a momentum, where people, information and things can be brought together, in order to create something unique and valuable.
I read this very interesting article explaining clearly what kind of challenges companies will be facing to keep up with the innovation pace they must to face competition.
Because even though serendipity is by definition unexpected, and therefore can’t be found by a standard process, as you can force the chance so you can create space for it to grow.
What do you think about it?
Monday, September 19, 2011
Albertson Removes Its Self Service Cash desks
Albertson set up some self service checkout lanes in its stores as most of the chains in the US. The goal is simple: one of the largest expenses line of a retailer is its wages, and one of the activity which needs the most of one workforce time is the cash desk one.
Hence a lot of retailers, especially in France where the workforce cost a lot, decided to implement those kind of cashier, where customers deal by themselves with the check out.
Of course, it is difficult to explain the benefit to customers, as there are basically none (except by cutting the expenses, the retailer don’t have to increase its price to keep its profitability fine).
I learnt recently that the company decided to remove those vendors.
Probably Albertson found out that the total cost savings were not as expected + customers were not accepting this system.
It is interesting if we consider the customer relationship management side of it: To customers, the human touch is a key component of their satisfaction.
I also believe that the mistake of Albertson was not to think about customers benefits to use those cashiers:
- Was there a discount to get? (In order to share the cost)
- Was it faster, more convenient, or more fun?
- Was it compensated by something else (better prices, new service, new area in the store thanks to some space saving?)?
What do you think about it?
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Will The Internet Kill Mass Media Marketing?
But nowadays the communication landscape has evolved, due to the multiplication of communication tools, but also with the rise of Internet. Internet is by definition the opposite of a mass media, which pushes the content to the audience, whereas the audience decide which website they want to visit.
This change is happening right now. We can clearly see that TV audiences are decreasing while Internet usage is booming. Nevertheless, television advertising remains a must for most of those companies, especially when they are leaders or strong challengers of a market.
For decades, some communication gurus have ruled the world of communication, letting us known what to consume, but the new tools they will have to use for the next decade (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, blogs…) are not set up to become “mass media” tools. The whole idea is actually to segment the audience, in order to suit better their needs and points of interest.
Some brands have already experienced great successes by using social media for campaigns, but I believe that we are not done yet. And I believe that this decrease of power of mass media will not only change the way commercials will be designed, but also it will change the way companies will think their products, by focusing more on customization, and adaptation to customers’ needs.
What do you think about it?
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Key Factors Of Success To Innovate
Leonardo Da Vinci is probably the most gifted genius of all time. His genius was marked in different fields, from painting, to mechanics, to even entertainment (he was a firework masters). He was so creative that when you read his notepads, you see that from one page to another he could speak about botanics, mechanics or even philosophy.
I was classifying some of the articles I keep on my desk to review for my blogging activities and I found back this very interesting article of French business newspaper “Les Echos”.
It dedicated a special section to innovation.
Indeed, innovation is a common word, which can sound as a cliché, but companies which are really innovating are obviously successful but also a minority.
I wanted to share with you some of the key factors of success discussed in this article:
Information system
Innovating implies different departments and teams to connect together, to find new ideas and improve collaboration.
I watched once a TED video about how genius ideas show up, and how genius get to the point to find those. And the whole idea behind this video was that those ideas were the result of a connection between facts which did not have any link at first sight, but thanks to a specific situation seems to fit perfectly.
This is the same thing inside a company. It is important that people can connect easily together in order to get a project going fast
Human resources/management
It is very important to create connection on an information system point of view, but also people must be able to create and innovate easily. Most of the time large corporation struggle to innovate because of their size and the high level of procedure they have. Therefore it is important to create structures which allows individuals to create freely.
This is somehow the concept of intrapreneurs, which acts like “start ups” inside a company, in order to give the freedom necessary to develop a project fast. The idea is to combine the liberty of creation and innovation to the large capacity a company can offer (in terms of support like accounting or human resources).
Moreover, the innovation process can become a wonderful leverage of motivation for employees: People like to create and innovate and therefore, if you get them into the process, you will in the end create extra motivation.
Think Innovation And Not Growth Of Existing Process
Companies most of the time thinks about how to grow an existing business, by improving it. But once you innovate, you should avoid these thoughts, because your innovation may be totally different from the existing process. Horse trainers have not become car manufacturers, and this is the reason why it is important not to stick to the traditional processes.
Friday, September 16, 2011
Îndia To Rule The Mobile Internet Revolution
One of the best examples is India and mobile Internet. I have already attended once a conference about mobile marketing held by Forrester France, which was explaining why they believed that mobile Internet will spread fast through India.
I received not so long ago a Newsletter from Mc Kinsey about the same topic.
Therefore, wireless Internet could become the only way to grow the number of Internet users in the country, which is very low (17%).
Now, India is for sure an interesting country for Internet companies, as they can find a large customer base to market. But even though it is important to have a large market, it is also important that local companies can benefit from it. And so far, I don’t know if Indian companies exist, and if they have what is needed in order to thrive in India.
The risk is that the market is dominated soon by foreign countries, which will leave few chances for local companies to settle in the market.
For sure, India has a large base of highly skilled engineers but will it be enough? They need founds and most importantly ideas, which will create successful business there, adapting to the local specificities.
What do you think about it?
Monday, September 12, 2011
Trujillo: The Master Of Brand Coaching
- No parking = No business. He was then understanding and explaining that the boom of car ownership will ultimately lead to high revenues if stores would have big enough parkings to welcome customers.
- Pile products up and sell down: This is a way to explain how important the theatralisation is important in a store.
- Billboards are the best sellers: you pay them once, and they don't go on vacations: He understood the importance of mass communication and the rising advertizing market ath this time.
And it worked! Most of the founders of retailers like Gérard Mulliez of Auchan, or Halley from Promodes, from all over the world went to these seminars and got the bases of their soon to become successful businesses.
I could talk to you for hours about how genious he was. Unfortunately, not a lot of documentation exists about his work.
But I wanted to talk to you about Trujillo to show you how to aboard the launch of a highly innovative product: you must educate your customers.
There are a lot of products which experienced tremendous success even though customers did not understand them at first:
- Renault Espace, a large familly van in France, was shown to customer and all the metrics showed it would be a disaster. Nevertheless Renault launched it and it became one of their most profitable product.
- The Ipad: A lot of people were wondering what was so new and great about it. No other competitors would have invested a dime in such an handheld. But after having seen the demonstrations, then people loved it.
It is very interesting to go beyond what customers first reaction may be. It is important to have a vision on what customers could do about it, and to show him how to use it. But also, it is very important to look at the bigger picture. This is exactly what Bernardo Trujillo did.
When I talk about brand coaching, most of the time, the brand develops some marketing materials which will help the customer to use more effectively its products. But I believe in this specific case, it goes beyond: The brand added value is given out of its core circle of expertise, which is the cash register usage, Bernardo Trujillo was a product by himself.