I’m very happy to announce we’ve finished our first round of videos which will help explain the concepts behind our little marketing project here. In true social media fashion, I’ve uploaded them to YouTube so we can share them at no additional cost to yourself. What a value prop.
In this first video we have our CEO, Chris Brown, talking about the basic concept of “market culture.” We made this word up, what does it mean? Here’s Chris’ answer:
Posted in Innovative Thought
Tagged ceo, chris brown, explanation, market culture, marketculture, video, what is
In reading a post on Viral Garden which spoke further about Facebook’s trials with Beacon ads. I was struck by Mack’s point that the problem was that Mark Zuckerberg went from Facebook member to Facebook CEO and that his focus shifted to monetizing the product.
In my opinion there is, first, nothing wrong with monetizing a good idea. But Zuckerberg and the Facebook team went about it in the wrong way. In our terminology, Market Culture is centered on the profitable provision of superior customer value. The value of Facebook was the opportunity to opt-in to a host of cool little apps and widgets and to let your friends know about what you wanted them to know about. The Beacon ads then, in an effort to realize profit, did so at the expense of those value propositions. Beacon took away your opt-in choice and dictated what was communicated to your friends. The problem was not the monetization of FB, but that customer value was stripped for that monetization. Fortunately the company has changed their ways, but the damage is done and the blogosphere is still talking about it!
I contrast that quickly to Skype. Recently Business Week said the eBay company is facing a make or break year. They’re not making enough money. Or, in more sophisticated terms, they’re not capturing all of the value they are producing. We here at MCS are huge fans of Skype as our weekly ops meetings connect people on 3 continents for up to 2 hours. I follow their forays into hardware and mobile phones and will be curious to see what they do with the social networking opportunity in front of them. I’d even be willing to pay more for some of these services, but so far, I haven’t been asked to. 
Posted in Market Culture Inaction, Market Culture in Action
Tagged facebook, profitability, skype, superior value
Last week, in the midst of the New England Patriots run for the second ever undefeated season in the National Football League, a player from the Pittsburgh Steelers (next opponent) guaranteed victory for his team. This guarantee, made on national television, raised a few eyebrows (and fists) within the New England fan and media sets.
Today I sat in my living room and watched the Patriots methodically dismantle the Steelers, offensively and defensively. As the final minutes of the game ticked away, a chant from the home field Patriot fans could be heard to grow: “guar-an-tee, Guar-an-tee, GUAR-AN-TEE!, GUAR-AN-TEE!!, GUAR-AN-TEE!!!.” It became so loud that we watching from home could clearly hear it through the TV and feel a tingling urge to join in.
As I sat there, marveling at the perfect timing and context of this rebuke, I began to think about how sports game chants work. Stadiums fill up with tens of thousands of cheering and shouting fans. Many of these individuals are eager to start cheers and when they do, other fans listen. If they like it, they pick up the cheer; if they don’t, they ignore the cheer. The favorite cheers build momentum and burst into the thundering “GUAR-AN-TEE” that was heard today. Cheers with poor conception, bad timing, or little relevance are lost in the shuffle.
Stadiums are big cheer-factories that combine the thought-power and judgment of thousands upon thousands of fans. With this massive level of collaboration, is it any wonder that they deliver without fail?
What’s the point you might ask? The point is that if Bob Craft (Patriots owner) wanted to produce great cheers that his fans liked, his best bet would be to access their knowledge and preferences. In stadiums, this process happens automatically, but in businesses it doesn’t. If you’re interested in having the best ideas and products (cheers) at your company (stadium), take the time to listen to and collaborate with your customers (fans).
I’m editing this on 12/11/07 to share that Embassy Suites finally handled this issue. Bo called me on behalf of general manager Luis Arellano and handled the issue very courteously, if not just a bit late. So I say “thank you” to them, but leave the post up regarding the general bad experience.
————–
In yet another example of customer service nightmares, I am very disgruntled by the Embassy Suites Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
We had some client work postponed until January of next year and so I canceled some hotel & car reservations a number of weeks ago. Everything has gone through except for the Embassy Suites. We have a reservation cancellation number which I’ve been told is ‘unaffiliated’ with any confirmation number. I’ve been calling about every other day now for a week and a half trying to get help on this. I’ve left 4 messages with accounting, 2 with managers on duty and no one has returned my call. I even gave our 1-800 number. C’mon guys, we’ll pay for the call! Worse yet, when I did catch one manager on duty I was promised Iaxa Berreos would return my call in the morning. No call from Iaxa. Thanks Irene, for making a promise you couldn’t come through on.
It’s rough because we were planning to stay there when we go back in a few months, but I may have to strongly advise against that. This whole thing reminds me of the AOL customer service incident involving Vincent Ferrari. (Here’s the NBC video link if you haven’t already seen it.) Customer service wouldn’t help him cancel an account he wasn’t using anymore. His was a valid request. Sure, losing the account was bad for AOL, but the sunken consumer confidence and following class-action lawsuit were far worse than that $9.95/month. I haven’t been badgered on the phone yet by the folks in San Juan, but being ignored like this is pretty frustrating. Enough to blog about, and that’s where Vincent started.
This post is a slight diversion from what most of this blog will cover, but I feel it’s important. And, in so far as this site is about innovative ideas about meeting stated and unstated needs, this idea is right on the mark.
Today I attended a small showing for a video entitled Green Dragon. The premise was centered around the massive amounts of new buildings going up in China, the great migration of their population to urban zones and their impact on the worldwide environment. (Did you know around 25% of the smog over LA is from particles produced in the Middle Kingdom?) More importantly, however, the film spoke about the great opportunities there are to make this process “green.”
In many ways China is already more green than the United States. Nearly all lightbulbs in their urban centers are compact flourescent. (I’m only about halfway in my own house. The whole city of Shanghai has me beat.) They have an extremely effecient privatized recycling system in which private citizens peddle around neighborhoods buying recyclable trash and bringing it to processing centers. And they’re building the first carbon-neutral city in the world. Developer’s site. Consulatant’s site. Here’s a BBC excerpt on the city. The senior architect is one of the folks interviewed for this video.
In many more ways, however, China lags far behind the rest of the world in environmental awareness and activity. Rivers run brown, forests are cut down for chopsticks and nearly every urban center is surrounded in thick, horrible smog. The opportunity to do significant good exists there, and the people, government and builders are smart, educated of the problem and willing to be part of the solution — that was a major takeaway for me from this film.
This project was done by a friend of mine, Max Perelman (bio), with Caroline Campbell (bio) and River Lu (bio) both of whom I’ve also had the great pleasure of meeting. Cool cats. The video is currently being shopped to various distributors but I’ve been promised that a YouTube trailer would be available soon. I’ll be sure to make that available once I have access to it.
Posted in Affiliations, Innovative Thought
Tagged china, dongtan, film, green building, green dragon, innovation, sustainability
Last month our Chief Value Delivery Officer, Sean Gallagher, spoke at the CEO Club of Boston (another link) about how a Market Culture provides the blueprint for profitable companies. We call this the DNA of Profitable Businesses, and this lies at the core of the message we try to bring out.
Our message is simple: Corporate culture is important to business success. It is the core blueprint around which all other building blocks are placed. It is the framework under which company value get passed along. Exec to employee. Old hand to new recruit. Can’t overlook culture.
What we’re doing is bringing a new understanding to this. We have developed a measurement tool for this and will be rolling it out in the new year. (Ssshh, don’t tell anyone I told you!) Once you can measure it, you can compare it. If it’s low, you can improve it. (We offer training services for this.) If it’s high, you can demand more from your organization.
Knowledge is power and in 2008 we will be offering a kind of knowledge you never knew you could have!
Posted in Affiliations, Market Culture in Action
Tagged boston, ceo club, dna, measurement, profitable, public speaking, sean gallagher, training services
Lot of chatter on the Xbox malfunctioning with the Halo 3 game. Class-action lawsuit, cable news coverage and all over the blogosphere. It sounds like there are a few users out there who feel their new game is crashing their system. On the other hand, some feel it’s the fault of the user. They’ve had no problems themselves. (Good comments string on this post.)
The folks behind Xbox have a blog dedicated to fixing the problems associated with the machine. There’s been a lot of chatter about how Microsoft was aware of certain hardware problems and set aside $1 billion this past summer to deal with it. Now, in light of problems with new games (also including Call of Duty 4), that money appears to be an admission of guilt. My favorite submission was under this post which says toothpaste will help fix the discs the machine scratches. I would prefer they give me some idea what they’re doing to prevent their machines from scratching discs in the first place!
I’m also willing to throw MSFT under the bus a little on this one and ask how much research they did into consumer use patterns prior to launch? The first Xbox was fantastically popular and gamers are notoriously dedicated to their craft.
But in the mixed world that is Microsoft consumer value, it looks like they may be taking their game console to the social media realm with tomorrow’s fall update. So they miss on the hardware end, but make up for it with greater connectivity.
Posted in Market Culture Inaction
Tagged consumer use patterns, halo 3, microsoft, mistake, social media, xbox
