I’d also recommend John Carreyrou’s book about the rise and fall of Theranos. It’s called “Bad Blood: secrets and lies in a Silicon Valley start-up”. It’s a great read.

The post The Elizabeth Holmes story appeared first on Clearhound.

There are some areas of business where there are right or best ways to do things, such as operational safety, legal and regulatory compliance, cyber-security. Marketing has its own best practices, in the principles of strategic marketing: understanding and segmenting the market, knowing the target customer and how to create value for them, delivering on the expectation set up by the proposition and brand. Those principles are just as relevant in a digital world. But these shouldn’t be confused with an actual proposition, or a brand’s look and feel; these are brand-specific.

As digital marketers rise to become the marketing leaders in their businesses, there is a growing tension. Non-marketers will naturally value the digital native advocating best practice in the brave new digital world. But so-called best practice is no substitute for brand strategy. Applied in the wrong places, it dampens down personality and flattens a brand’s distinctive voice into a monotone. It stifles proposition development and communication, tending to generic output when something distinctive may be more effective. Best practice can kill innovation stone dead. If everyone is copying everyone else, how does anything new appear? If Steve Jobs had followed industry best practice, we might all still be logging in on a DOS screen.

Here are the warning signs that digital marketing’s voice may be too loud in your business:

Website design that is based largely on how others do it, rather than what users of your website need and want. Counter this with user journeys. They prompt everyone to think about the needs of the various types of people who may visit the site, including current and potential customers and others like media and investors.

Calls to action everywhere on the website, especially the same CTA. Digital marketers are often measured on lead generation but a website is not a brochure or a sales pitch to potential customers. Nor will a sophisticated buyer be impressed. If I’m browsing in a clothes shop, I don’t want someone constantly at my shoulder saying, like to try anything on? This is easily solved with tailored landing pages for lead gen campaigns; there’s no need for the website to seek to ensnare the idle browser (or current client, or curious investor, or future employee) at every turn.

Marketing planning conversations that aren’t about customers or different user needs. Colleagues who are driven by lead generation tend to be single-minded about getting short term measurable outcomes. This can compromise the building of trust with prospects. It may also be at the expense of other audiences who matter to the long term success of the business. A customer-centred approach will help you find common ground.

Pointing to direct competitors as the key justification for recommendations. Fear Of Missing Out is not a strategy. Other brands’ choices are interesting and informative but unless their strategy is the same as yours they are not a reliable guide.

Try these simple rules to stay on track:

Have your own brand personality and tone of voice, and use it as a reference across everything. Bearing in mind, of course, that brand-building is not an end in itself – the goal is effective customer connection, not self-expression.

Speak the customer’s language not your own. In b2b, use their generic industry terms not yours. Prospective customers are experts in their business, not in ours. So we need to get into their world, and speak their language. For example, a software provider to the HR sector needs to speak HR language so as to connect with primary decision-makers, who will be HR people not IT experts.

Go where your customers are. Best practice steers you to focus on what competitors are doing. A brand-centric approach dares you to be different. Combine this with customer-centric thinking and go to their industry events, not your own. Don’t worry about where your competitors are. This can deliver tactical advantage – you may find you’re the only one of your type in a sea of potential clients.

Copy if it saves you reinventing something where it’s ok to be the same as everyone else. Some digital marketing best practice is valuable. Generic industry-standard language is essential for search engine optimisation, for strong natural search results – bearing in mind it’s the search terms clients and prospects use that matter, not what the experts say. Some standardisation of a site such as icons, and perhaps navigation, can make sense if they’re familiar to your customers and prospects. That means referencing their world, not just your direct competitors’ activity.

Don’t copy in any area where differentiation matters. If innovation seeks the next big idea, best practice leads to conformity. If you’re aiming to create an exciting new flavour, don’t end up vanilla.

The golden rule: Set up your marketing communications and interfaces to enable customers to get what they need, not what you want them to do. If you’ve followed marketing best practice, your proposition will give them what they need, and they’ll click on the Call me button, not out of frustration but because they want it.

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Holmes’s company was reported to be worth $10 billion by 2013 and she was a paper billionaire. Now she’s facing fraud charges. Yet her purpose, to make blood screening for infection and disease accessible to all, was laudable. Her idea was to miniaturise blood analysis machines so that one piece of kit the size of a desktop printer could screen for many diseases, using a single blood sample from a simple pinprick on the finger instead of an intrusive needle in the arm. Great idea. Hugely desirable aim. Solves many problems with the current approach. No wonder the great and good of US politics and business pumped $700 million into Theranos. Rupert Murdoch invested $125m. He ended up with nothing. In 2015 it all unravelled amid scandal and accusations of fraud, and the company collapsed, worthless.

Was it just that they needed more time? Maybe, if you think twelve years isn’t long enough to make demonstrable progress. Was it wrong to claim they had made a breakthrough, rather than just hoping to? That isn’t unusual in Silicon Valley, where “fake it until you make it” is seen as a sign of confidence in the future.

Failing fast is part of never giving up – as long as the failures are teaching you something. The original Edison’s many failures represented progress towards success. By contrast, it seems Holmes’s main tool was to demand that no one talk down their progress, and just try harder.

Perhaps it simply wasn’t achievable. If it was, someone would have done it already, wouldn’t they? But there’s a counter-argument to this, from Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, which he calls “the innovator?s dilemma”. He says radical innovation isn’t usually in the incumbents’ interests. We’ve seen this in other industries. Until Nest came along, home thermostats were ugly beige boxes that hadn’t changed in decades, making nice money for market leader Honeywell. The global leaders in medical syringes for vaccination, Becton Dickinson, are alleged to have stamped out an upstart competitor that created an alternative syringe (one that prevented reuse and hence the spread of infection), in order to protect BD’s own products. In the case of Theranos, a couple of companies dominated the blood testing industry, with huge labs full of dedicated machines and skilled staff. The fact it’s not yet been done can never be a reason not to try. Here’s how to check you’re on the Edison track and not the Holmes one.

1. Is it just a wish? Idea generation often starts with “I wish there was a ….” “What if we could…” That’s a great way to identify unmet needs. But it’s not, in itself, an idea. “I wish I could fly” only starts to be an idea when someone starts suggesting ways that could be made to happen. A machine with propellers. A suit with air jets. They might not work, but it’s a “how” to work on, to prototype and refine.

2. Is it constrained by real-world physics or chemistry? Most Silicon Valley backed start-ups are for services. Write the code and see if enough people will pay for it. Theranos did have a prototype Edison but it wasn’t remotely viable. Battery size is a major constraint for electric cars. I can put a few bits of copper, lithium and acid in an old tin can and tell you it’s a prototype for a miniaturised car battery. But all I’ve done is illustrate the problem.

3. Is there a credible hypothesis as to how to solve the problem? Try it, test it, improve it. That’s where Edison’s approach was different from Holmes’s wish. With a basic idea about heat and light generated by electrical resistance in metals, Edison kept experimenting until finally something worked. Holmes was not a scientist and relied on staff to work it out. Another lesson. Who’s going to solve this problem you’ve identified? Do the people with the skills believe they can do it? Can they say anything about how? It seems Holmes never did, and investors never got to talk to the experts in R&D.

The post Blood simple: innovation lessons from the failure of Theranos appeared first on Clearhound.

Did these brands do well, by generating a ton of media coverage and awareness they didn’t pay for? Or did they do badly, by upsetting people and making themselves unpopular? Let’s evaluate what they are accused of, and whether it’s good or bad for business.

Greggs is the easy one. A novel and harmless product which fits easily into their product portfolio was criticised by a controversial media figure with 6.5 million followers on Twitter. This new product is a bit surprising for a traditional bakery chain, so it may prompt some people who don’t shop there to think maybe there’s more to Gregg’s than they thought. People who like Greggs but dislike vegan options can ignore the offending item. Everyone now knows it’s there. Goal!

Gillette is more problematic because it appears to be having a go at its own customers. That’s if you, a man, are offended by the suggestion you shouldn’t shout at people. It seems many were. One could argue this entirely vindicates Gillette’s decision, proof that the message is needed. The issue here is, I suspect, that people are split on whether it’s Gillette’s place to be the messenger. Having a social purpose is fashionable for brands. At best it wins them support, at worst it attracts cynicism. If Gillette stick with it, in time it will seem a lot less controversial. If they drop it, we’ll forget pretty fast. Either way it’s not going to make that much difference to how many razor blades they sell.

Revolut probably thought they were just having a little fun, while showing how a tech business can do clever things with its data. Is anyone single really harmed or even offended? There is a problem, though, and it’s nothing to do with how you spend Valentine’s Day. Good marketers try hard to understand the needs, preferences and behaviours of their customers, in order to develop better products and services, and to communicate more effectively. Mostly customers are happy with this. We want relevant stuff, which requires some analysis and sorting. But this is too visible. If they can analyse this data, what else are they doing with it? Spying on my habits? Telling other people? Financial services is one of those sectors, along with healthcare and media, that people are particularly sensitive about. Revolut should have thought of that. This advertisement offers nothing useful to anyone, so the intrusion is hard to justify. In fact it’s not even aimed at current customers. It’s to recruit new ones. No matter whether this data is real or made up. They are having a laugh at their own customers’ expense, for their own benefit. Own goal.

Footnote: Remember the row about the Beach Body Ready ad on the Tube? Can you name the brand? While the original ad was banned from the London Underground in 2015 after hundreds of complaints, it was mimicked by a plus size clothing brand only last year. A form of success, perhaps.

More on brands doing “purpose”: a perspective on that Nike advert, and on the notorious Pepsi Kendall Jenner spot

The post Offensive marketing? appeared first on Clearhound.

(If you’ve time to waste on this, start here and look at the related questions panel.)

For ordinary folk, the non-believers, Elon Musk is the Tesla guy. The space rocket guy. The crazy who wants to live on Mars. Also the guy who co-founded Paypal. He’s definitely rich, presumably clever and unquestionably ambitious. Not perfect, though. Watch him on YouTube (here he is launching his domestic solar panels on the set of Desperate Housewives) and you’ll see he’s a pretty dismal presenter. His delivery is stilted, awkward at times, and a little repetitive, a man who is untroubled by adherence to a script and certainly doesn’t bother to rehearse.

But the message is amazing. I thought Tesla was about electric cars. It’s really about accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy. You don’t have to be a signed-up member of the cult of Elon to admire the clarity of his vision. He says providing sustainable energy has three parts: energy generation, storage and transport. His solution is: affordable, attractive solar panels; larger better batteries; and desirable electric vehicles. Each of those three parts is described in this piece, and each one feels attractive and achievable. Perhaps it’s his outrageous ambition that inspires adulation.

So here are three take-aways about Elon Musk:

First, his cars are not what matter. Sure, Tesla seems disruptive in the motor industry. But the reason the automotive industry should really fear Elon Musk is that he’s not really competing with them. Like he says, there was no shortage of car companies in the world, good “gasoline car companies”. He?s not really in the car business – not as an end in itself. He’s in the sustainable energy business. The aim is not to build a better car but to create an alternative ecosystem. That must include how we power transport, one of our biggest uses of fossil fuel. So he’ll keep working on electric transport. Perhaps that’s where the Hyperloop fits in. It seems daft but it’s just another experiment in energy-efficient transport.

Second, he isn’t a great presenter but he knows how to create a good proposition. In a throwaway fashion, he delivers one of the best propositions ever. It’s here, six and a half minutes in. He says they’re aiming for a solar roof that looks better, lasts longer, has a better insulating effect, provides your electricity and where the cost of the roof plus electricity is less than a normal roof. The core idea is super-slim solar panels in the form of glass tiles which are printed to look like small clay tiles, large terracotta tiles, French slate, whatever you fancy, and all tougher and more resilient than those materials. Summed up as “beautiful, affordable and seamlessly integrated”. Just like his electric cars are way more desirable than both other electric cars and most combustion engine cars, his solar panel roof isn’t just nicer than an ugly solar panel, it’s preferable to a standard roof. That’s what will drive uptake of sustainable technologies. As the great man says, “if all those things are true why would you go in any other direction?”

Third, his big idea really is a big idea, and a coherent one. The real vision of Elon Musk is a sustainable future. If he succeeds we all benefit. Good luck to him.

The post What’s all the fuss about Elon Musk? appeared first on Clearhound.

His central thesis is that “don’t be evil” is a clever smokescreen. Google didn’t ask for permission to copy the entire contents of the world wide web into their servers and then index it. Nor to digitise all books, most in copyright, nor to photograph your house and your neighbour’s, and everyone’s.

Think instead of Ayn Rand libertarianism, coupled with, in some cases, deliberate exploitation of other people’s intellectual property. It’s summed up by this brief exchange in Rand’s vast novel, “Atlas Shrugged”:

“My dear fellow, who will let you?”

“That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?”

Taplin covers the origins of Facebook, Amazon and YouTube, and the book is worth reading for that alone. But Jonathan Taplin has stories of his own to tell. He was tour manager for Bob Dylan and The Band, produced Hollywood movies, and had a spell on Wall St. He was there when Dylan went electric. He knew the “tune in drop out” guys. So, he traces the social and cultural origins of the internet, way beyond Tim Berners Lee at CERN, showing the critical role of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and then its partnership with Steve Jobs and a nascent Apple Computer before that famous Super Bowl ad of 1984.

The cast of characters is spectacular, from the earliest hackers to the secretive billionaire Koch brothers. There’s Alexis Ohanian, founder of Reddit, and now husband of Serena Williams, making an idiot of himself. A few criminals, including Dread Pirate Roberts the founder of Silk Road – real name Ross Ulbricht, currently serving life without parole in a US high security prison. Larger-than-life Kim dot com. Sean Parker, convicted hacker, founder of Napster, with his $10m Lord of the Rings-themed wedding. And Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder, who says proudly “Of the six people who started PayPal four had built bombs in high school.” Not surprising then to hear him say, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

The other side of the story is that US regulation and anti-trust legislation doesn’t work. Designed on principles established by Hamilton (he of the hit musical, so clearly somewhat pre-internet), it’s intended to ensure competition, but focuses on consumer prices as the proof. We all feel queasy about the value of the data we’re giving away to Facebook and Google. But if the product appears to be free to the user, anti-trust legislation doesn’t seem to apply. Taplin sums it up like this: “Monopoly, control of our data, and corporate lobbying are at the heart of this story”.

There is hope. Apple is a dissenter from the libertarian creed. That’s why they support ad blockers to stop surveillance marketing, and fought so hard against being forced to unlock the San Bernardino bomber’s phone. On the sunnier side, there are some lovely examples of co-operatives, from the Sunkist farmers in the 1890s, through to Magnum photography, to local ISPs in Chattanooga providing a better service than the national players and regenerating their city. Incidentally, Sunkist was the earliest registered brand name, in 1908. It’s still going. Maybe that is some comfort.

The post Move Fast and Break Things – how Facebook, Google and Amazon have cornered culture and what it means for all of us, by Jonathan Taplin appeared first on Clearhound.

This was Paul’s way to keep in touch with his running club friends while he was injured. He recalled long sociable Saturday mornings in Johannesburg that started with a run and ended several hours and countless coffees later. The coffee bit was integral – he would time his mates but they had to come and spent time with him afterwards. It was that simple. Paul created something he wanted, that he knew his friends would find useful and enjoyable.

Twelve years and a name change later, there are over 1000 parkruns a week, in fourteen countries, with over three million registered parkrunners. Three new countries will host their first parkrun this year. A new parkrunner registers every 29 seconds. The 2k junior parkrun is also expanding rapidly. The growth is seemingly unstoppable. Yet it does not advertise and it operates on a shoestring. Paul says, “It was never supposed to be more than a single event.” So what kind of start-up goes global despite itself? What can businesses in pursuit of growth learn from it?

I interviewed the people behind this remarkable growth story – parkrun’s founder, its former UK chief (now global COO) and its first CEO – for the business journal, Market Leader. For the answers, read the full article here: Lessons from the ultimate start-up Market Leader June 2017

This article is reproduced with permission of Market leader, the strategic marketing journal for business leaders. To subscribe visit warc.com/bookstore. Copyright  Warc and The Marketing Society.

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To do online personalisation well, we have to recognise its stages, and how to use them. There are four stages:

Stage one: Recognition. The magic of prepopulated forms, remembered sites, relevant offers. These provide a service for customers – make it easy, make it faster, be useful. These are pre-algorithm tricks and tools that automate the user journey. There’s still room for improvement here.

Stage two: Approximation. Amazon in its early days – for many of us, our first known encounter with an algorithm. The “people who bought that also bought this” feature felt like genius, and provided inspiration, particularly necessary in an online bookshop. But for me it’s gone stale. Perhaps it’s because Amazon now has so much data about my own browsing and purchases. It no longer inspires because there is no element of surprise, just more of the same. This is:

Stage three: Precision. The point reached by the current market leaders in online retail, and it is so dull and unhelpful. “You bought this egg poacher. How about this egg poacher?” “Fiona, we have offers for you in Leicester.” (Yes I was there for a meeting last week. No plans to go again.) “Great deals on sportswear.” (Not now I’m fully stocked on Lycra for the next ten years.)

It’s especially bad in travel. The absence of common sense or any human touch is apparent in Airbnb and Trip Advisor endlessly offering suggestions and deals on the places I’ve been. As if, having been to Seville one Easter, I surely must want nothing more than to go there again. Then there’s the retargeting that triggers buyer’s remorse. No sooner have you finished your extensive research and placed the order than you’re hit by a blitz of ads for similar products – always superior, of course, and always better value.

In some categories, perhaps most, stuff that’s adjacent to what we’ve already bought or done is more interesting than more of the exact same. The approximation stage delivered this because there wasn’t enough data to do otherwise. More data enables a more refined approach but it isn’t better for the customer. A little human thought will reveal the opportunity to move to?

Stage four: Customisation. Don’t give me Seville, give me mid-sized European cities. Recognise which of my purchases are one-offs and which are consumables, for which I might welcome more information and deals. If you don’t know, ask me. I’ll happily tick boxes to get information about similar or related stuff, if it lets me opt out of more of the same. Use your brain, and surprise me.

“So now you’ve been to Leicester, Fiona, you might like to try Coventry.” Oh hang on, there’s more to this than a simple algorithm can solve. Looks like marketers can’t be replaced by robots just yet.

The post What marketers need to do about the filter bubble appeared first on Clearhound.

First, think of being disruptive as an outcome, not a strategy. It’s rarely an end in itself. No, not even for Uber. I’m sure their funding pitch talked about being disruptive but the essence of the idea was using mobile technology to match capacity with demand in real time. It prospered because it delivers a consumer benefit. Any minicab firm could have done it. Or even, as it turns out, a firm without minicabs. It?s a brilliant and simple idea which made incumbents cry foul, but it was not born out of any malice towards them. Likewise, Airbnb didn’t set out to disrupt the hotel industry. They didn’t even see themselves as being in that industry. In both cases, the founders felt a need, and created a solution. It grew. That should give hope to insight-seekers everywhere.

Second, practise thinking as if your current business doesn’t exist. Embrace”the innovator’s dilemma”, so-called because it assumes that disruptive innovation will be damaging to the core business. It doesn’t have to be, and you don’t know until you try. There?s a perfect case study in the world of running. As parkruns sprung up all over the country, running clubs felt threatened by the arrival of a new timed 5k run, offered weekly, and free, on their doorstep. Why would people pay to compete in runs if they could do it free? parkrun now has three million registered runners worldwide, but it’s not hurt established running clubs, it’s stimulated category growth. Running clubs have more members than ever.

Third, look for as many different ways as you can to segment your market, based on people and their needs, preferences, attitudes and habits. Forget about the product categories that exist. It’s natural to segment a market how a retailer organises the products on shelf, or how a website lists a range of services. That’s a useful round-up of today’s responses, not a definition of today’s needs. New segmentations can reveal latent demand that is invisible to the incumbents in the market. The music business is stacked with examples, from Sony Walkman’s music on the go to Spotify’s music you can listen to but don’t own. Market segmentation can also show us how old technologies can make a comeback, if they deliver a benefit. Both camera film and vinyl are no longer the easiest way to do the job, but they’ve both found a new reason to exist, for the aficionado.

Fourth, play with mobile and digital technology. Chances are your business would not be like it is today if these technologies had been around when it started. That’s not unique to current tech; new has always displaced old. The ultimate example is the US railroads, largely bankrupted by air travel. Theodore Levitt called it marketing myopia. Know what business you are in, from the customer’s point of view. The way your business does it now is only one way, based on yesterday’s technology.

Fifth, as always, keep looking for consumer problems to solve. Ask any independent optician, if you can find one, whether Specsavers was disruptive. Its founders were driven by a consumer need, which pushed them to find a new business model. Proof you don’t have to be a tech-enabled upstart to be disruptive and successful.

The post Five ways to be disruptive appeared first on Clearhound.

In technology development, European businesses could usually garner plenty of good, progressive ideas for their markets by studying the USA and Japan. But something strange is happening in industry sectors and product categories where technology can make a difference – which is quite a few. It’s no longer enough to look at developed markets. Real innovation is happening in developing markets which could be said to be behind Europe in that they have not yet adopted some of our technologies, and yet they are leapfrogging us, and bypassing those technologies. Much of this is driven by telecommunications.

For a long time, development in many of the world’s poorest countries was inhibited not only by lack of natural resources, and/or corruption, but also by a lack of transport and communications infrastructure. Even those countries rich in natural resources found it difficult to build a national communications network. The information age seemed beyond the reach of the vast African countries in particular. Impossible to imagine installing the millions of miles of cable it would take to provide national connectivity. Then wireless comms came along.

For us in Europe, there was a natural progression. First we had wired telephony, then wireless telephony, then wired internet connectivity, then wireless everything. But who needs wired anything when you have wireless comms? Better still, wireless everything without the drag factor of having invested in other, more old-fashioned infrastructure. It gives the ability to create and promote new services without having to change consumer habits and behaviour from the old ways. Suddenly, the term “legacy systems” has a whole new meaning. Fixed line telephony and internet are simply not needed. Bank branches are legacy systems. Maybe, with remote learning, university campuses are too. In countries where these infrastructure assets are scarce, it’s no longer a barrier to progress. It may even be an enabler.

We tend to think of African use of tech as affordable or sustainable tech – low cost mobile phones, for example, with batteries rechargeable from the sun. This view suggests we can look there for inspiration for “bottom of the pyramid” ideas, ways to bring tech to the masses. I think that’s not even the half of it. The rapid spread of mobile comms, without the assumptions or costs that come with legacy infrastructure, is creating whole new ways to get things done. Retail banking is a prime example. It’s said that there are only six bank branches in Nairobi, a city of over 3 million people, as big as Manchester and Liverpool combined. The main reason is M-PESA, a mobile-phone based money transfer service run by the dominant mobile network operator, Safaricom, and now used by about two thirds of Kenya’s adult population.

Low tech businesses like farming can also benefit. WeFarm is a communication platform that runs on plain mobile phones, not smartphones, and enables farmers to find out the market price for their crops in different locations, so they can quickly sell their produce at the best price. It’s a simple idea that doesn’t need fancy hardware or software, and creates the classical economist?’s ideal situation for a free market: perfect information, available to all.

African mobile phone owners are also inspiring innovation in marketing services. Brandtone, for example, is helping Unilever, SAB Miller, and others, engage directly with a growing database of their consumers. Their use of SMS is much more subtle and rewarding for consumers than the spam we’ve grown used to in the UK. It’s making one-to-one marketing possible for fmcg brands, at scale.

So it’s true, the future is already here, but not always where you expect.

Previous posts on inspiration for innovation:

Keep dreaming

Desperately seeking dissatisfied customers

Getting customers to do it your way

Why be different when you could just be better?

What coat hangers teach us about business-to-business marketing

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