What happened to the Death Star? It seems like just yesterday that they were so unstoppable that they held a stranglehold on the global computer market and faced antitrust suits around the world.
What a difference a decade makes. Their stock is at 30, right where it was 5 years ago. Their price/earnings ratio is about 10, or roughly half the average of the S&P 500. Rumors are rampant that Steve Ballmer will be fired. Goliath has become David.
So what’s the future for Microsoft? Possibly very bright due to their new Windows 8 platform and that’s not because I love it. In fact, I wrote in an earlier post that it’s bound to piss PC users off. However, Microsoft has proven before that strategy can trump product and, in this case, their strategy is dead on. What’s more, it shoots straight at Apple’s Achilles heel.
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Marketing has no shortage of theories. Some say we should focus on rational benefits, others emphasize emotional bonds and still others insist that we stick to the numbers.
What we lack is any consensus or grounding. Unlike other professions, we don’t have well established principles. Someone clever says something clever, it sounds good and we run with it. That’s no way to run a trillion dollar industry.
Fortunately, it does have to be that way anymore. Neuroscientists have unlocked many of the brain’s secrets. Nobel prizes have been awarded for behavioral economics and a vast amount of research has documented cognitive bias. It’s time to apply to business what science already knows and break away from old myths and failed philosophies.
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What’s the next big thing in digital? Mobile? Social? Online video? Those are things moving fast but the trend with the most potential for significant economic impact is, in fact, retail.
The sleepy, boring business of selling things to consumers is pepping up and becoming a hotbed of innovation. Technology and consumer trends are combining to create a shopping experience entirely different from anything we’ve seen before.
As Darrel Rigby points out in his HBR article, every 50 years retail goes through a major disruption. The rise of urban centers brought us department stores. Automobiles created suburbs and shopping malls. Then category killers and discount stores like Kmart and Wal-Mart challenged that status quo. Now retail is being reinvented all over again.
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”Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore” wrote the French author Andre Gide. In very much the same way, we can’t manage strategy in the 21st century without discarding the comfortable dogmas of the 20th century.
Much of our strategic doctrine comes from an industrial age in which products were fairly uniform and success was highly contingent on the ability to move around men and materiel efficiently.
That’s still important, but not a source of sustainable competitive advantage. Today, we don’t produce products as much as we design them and that calls for a strategic shift. To embrace the future, we must, in a very conscious way, let go of the past and move from a planning mentality to one that integrates skills and information in an emergent context.
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Who wouldn’t like to be Apple? They make great products, consumers love them, competitors fear them and they make a ton of money.
Yet for all that’s been written about Apple, nobody’s been able to emulate them. What’s more, little more than a decade ago, they were on the ropes. At one point Michael Dell said he would just shut and give the money back to the investors.
Steve Jobs’ secret wasn’t that he saw what others could not, although he certainly had vision. What made Apple special was that he had the discipline to not do what others would. He limited himself to developing one new product at a time and focused his energies on building out existing products and platforms. That made all the difference.
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All of us want to know what the “Next Big Thing” will be, me as much as anybody. One of the best chances to do that is at CES, the Consumer Electronics Show
This year the show featured over 3000 exhibitors and 150,000 attendees. I had the opportunity to spend the past week at CES 2012 and toured the floor with Shelly Palmer, host of NBC’s Live Digital, so had a great vantage point to see what’s what.
While most of the action happened away from the convention center, in hotel suites and meeting rooms, the wares on display did reveal some important underlying trends. Most of the innovation wasn’t strictly with the technology itself, but how products interact with each other to enhance user experience. Here’s what I saw:
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“I got an iPad for Christmas and didn’t even ask for one.”
“My parents bought me a Kindle for some reason.”
Over the Christmas holidays, I got a lot of emails from friends asking for advice on their favorite unexpected Christmas gifts: tablets and e-readers.
My lucky friends represent an important trend taking place in digital marketing: the increased adoption of Post-PC devices like tablets and e-readers that are changing how people consume media and engage with brands.
Here at Moxie we conducted a survey in 2011 on Post-PC Marketing and gleaned some interesting insights (check it out here), but now that the holiday season has passed we can take another look at how tablets and e-readers will change the digital marketing landscape in 2012 and beyond.
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Do you feel lucky? Clint Eastwood immortalized the phrase back in 1971 as Dirty Harry (see video clip at the end). Despite the ridiculous ‘70’s fashion, the scene is still the epitome of cool.
It resonates not just because of Dirty Harry’s verve under pressure, but because we recognize that luck plays a large role in the fate of our hopes and dreams. Sometimes it seems like we can do no wrong, other times we just can’t get a break.
And that’s what makes luck so hard to deal with. We can’t count on it, but we can’t ignore it either. No matter how long or hard we struggle and strive, our destiny will often be decided by a chance encounter, a missed call or a fruitful trend. There are, however, some sensible ways of thinking about and dealing with luck.
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While most of the world is stumbling along, digital is moving so fast that it’s hard to keep track. Start-ups, incumbents and established firms from the analog age are all vying to develop something new and different that will resonate in the marketplace.
At my agency, Moxie, we publish a report each year that analyzes existing trends in order to gain insight into what will break over the next year. It’s an important and interesting exercise, which helps us focus our energies and filter out the noise.
It is also a working document. We apply ascendant trends to our clients digital marketing efforts and all year long we meet with innovative technology companies in order to get a jump the next big thing. This year, we identified ten trends that will drive digital over the next twelve months and I want to highlight three of the most salient here.
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Peter Drucker, the legendary management theorist, told us that we have to “accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer.”
In other words, we can’t just order people around and expect them to do what we want, we have to get them to want what we want. An entire industry of compensation consultants has emerged to answer that question, but nevertheless most employees feel unmotivated. Why is that?
We need to drastically change how we think about incentives. For years, compensation specialists have focused on rational benefits to employment, with poor results. We’ve known for a long time that people don’t behave rationally. Motivation is primarily an emotional business and at its root is not economic exchange, but human dignity.
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