Endlich haben die „Worldviews“ es auf die große Bühne des Marketings geschafft!
Eine Mischung aus Wirklichkeitskonstruktion, Weltanschauung und gesellschaftlichen Werten – mir fällt kein einzelnes, passendes deutsches Wort ein.
Im Zeitalter von Relationship Marketing, dem Long Tail und Communities rücken „Worldviews“ verstärkt ins Zentrum des Marketings. Wenn jetzt noch die Identitätskonstruktion von Einzelnen oder Zielgruppen dazu gepackt wird, wird Marketing eine spannende und erfolgversprechende Gradwanderung zwischen verschiedenen Wissensgebieten!
Besonders wichtig werden „Worldviews“, wenn es um die Vermarktung von Technologieprodukten geht. So zumindest meine Forschungsergebnisse 2009. Um diese Zusammenhänge zu verstehen, bietet Seth Godins Buch einen wunderbaren Einstieg.
So beschreibt Seth Godin sein Buch:
“This book is about worldviews—the biases and expectations and shortcuts we use to get through the world. Here's a punchline: when you try to change someone's worldview forcibly, they get a headache. People become defensive in the face of a frontal assault on their worldview. Cunning is far more effective. …“ Mehr dazu findet man in Seth Gordins Blog.
Wer einen Ursprung dieser Gedanken in gedruckter Form sucht:
Dieses Buch hilft, die oft missverstandenen, neuen Businessmodell-Ansätze von Grund auf zu verstehen, neue, eigene zu entwickeln oder einfach weiter zu denken.
Das Buchcover verspricht:
„Your holding a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmodeled business models and design tomorrow’s enterprises. It’s a book for the … Business Model Generation … by Alex Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur.”
An excellent reminder to an old marketing rule, offered by facebooks #2, Kevin Colleran:
Let's spend a day in your customers media mix and learn to understand what they experience, how they feel, and most of all, how they communicate and interact. A great reminder to this simple yet highly efficient marketing tool! It will give us the experience, what tools, channels, media we should use and how to do it.
.... I cut the beginning in order to keep the article somewhat short. If you want the full article, click the title ... ...
Kevin Colleran, the social media giant's No. 2 executive, believes in living a day in his customers' media mix
By Jeffrey F. Rayport
... In the midst of a useful, if tired, debate about "digital natives" and "digital immigrants," Kevin offered a compelling suggestion: Try living a day in your customers' media mix.
For example, if your target customer spends five hours a day on Facebook; sends 120 text messages and half a dozen tweets a day from a smartphone and posts photos, videos, and blogs around the clock; "checks in" regularly using Foursquare at favorite retail locations to become "mayor"; relies on a plethora of mobile apps like Google Maps to get from one place to another, RedLaser to check prices on SKUs at Kroger or Best Buy, and Fashism to crowd-source advice from others while shopping; goes online at RueLaLa and GILT for flash sales just when the boutiques open; and subscribes to Groupon or LivingSocial for alerts on local deals, there's a good chance you might want to know what it's like to live a life like that. There's an equally good chance that (and this was Kevin's point) knowing what it's like to live your customers' media might change the way you use marketing and media to reach, influence, and interact with your customers. It might even change what you do radically.
On its face, this may seem obvious. Sure, most of us target audiences 18-to-34 years of age or, if we're building fast-fashion or youth brands, we target audiences 14-to-24 years of age. Of course, we know these consumers use media and devices in new ways, be they Millennials or, very soon, members of Gen Z. But do we really have any idea what it's like to live as they do?
The Golden Rule ("do unto your customers...") is an old chestnut of the marketing world. Credit card issuer MBNA (now Bank of America) was known in the 1990s for its corporate mantra, "Think of yourself as the customer." That proved to be an effective guiding principle for a large-scale service organization, wherein boosting customer satisfaction and, in turn, lifetime value was strategically paramount.
A couple of generations of inspirational leaders made the Golden Rule, and its corollary "know thy customer," a staple of services. In the 1970s and 1980s, Herb Kelleher, founder and CEO of Southwest Airlines, personified it. He would serve drinks and what he called "filet of peanut" on short-haul flights to stay in touch with passengers. In the early 1990s, Scott Cook made every executive spend a day a year fielding customer calls about Quicken and QuickBooks. This year, Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, embraced the Rule in his best-selling Delivering Happiness, providing his vision of how to build a company insanely obsessed with service and satisfaction.
Still, most companies don't operate by the Golden Rule. That fact supplies the lifeblood for shows like CBS' reality TV series, Undercover Boss. Why are so many CEOs out of touch? The show's answer is a little glib: CEOs just don't know the "real" work of their organizations. A more insightful answer is also more subtle: many CEOs have never taken time to learn how it feels to be their own customers. No episode illustrated this better than the Subway executive who confessed that, after 22 years at the company, he had never actually "built" a Subway sandwich. It doesn't take Tony Hsieh to tell you that guy's got a problem—and so might the "service" culture at Subway.
But Kevin's point was not simply a restating of the Golden Rule. His was a new conception of it. It could read: "Interact unto others as they would interact unto you." Or, to put a finer point on it: "Interact unto others as they would interact with others like themselves." Marketers who ignore Facebook's Golden Rule will do so at their peril. You'd better trying living your customers' lives and experiencing the immersive realities of their media mix. Then, and only then, determine yours.
An excellent – while ancient - marketing rule, offered by facebooks #2, Kevin Colleran. Let's spend a day in your customers media mix and learn to understand what they experience, how they feel, and most of all, how they communicate and interact. A great reminder to this simple yet highly efficient marketing tool! It will help remind us, what tools, channels, media should be used and how.
The future is a high-resolution game. Never before has humanity been able to explore the emerging landscape in such detail, to measure the forces of change at such vast scales, and to fill in the details with such fine grain. But this high-resolution grid is not complete. It challenges us to envision and build the future we want. As both gamers and creators of the game, we will fill in the grid over the coming decade.
This year's Ten-Year Forecast Map of the Decade is a map of this emergent game space. It starts by benchmarking the big forces that will shape the decade:
The Carbon Economy
The Water Ecology
Adaptive Power
Cities in Transition
Molecular Identity
Then it invites us to engage in a strategic contest with the future, using the grid as a gameboard. Each cell is a scenario where we could win or lose. Taken together, the cells add up to four over-arching alternative scenarios:
Growth: One Step Ahead of Disaster
Constraint: Sustainable Paths in a Low-Capital World
Collapse: Local Disaster, Regional Conflicts
Transformation: Superstructed Systems
The map highlights these scenarios and the signals that already point to each of them today. It also suggests ways to "play the game"—to engage your team, your organization, or your community in exploring strategies for resilience, legacy, and happiness over the next ten years.
For more details about the forecasts and scenarios that make up this year's Ten Year Forecast, please contact Sean Ness at 650-233-9517 or sness@iftf.org.
According to Steven, good ideas take a long time to grow and mature - we might want to keep that in mind when we - once again - rush for "the one and only solution". What we might need is some time to relax and think, think and relax ...if only these pressing issues that need to be solved would understand that it's just not their time yet ...
Empowered: Unleash your employees, energize your customers, and transform your business
Zusammengefasst sagt das Buch, wenn man mit selbstbestimmten Kunden zu tun hat, muss man auch seine Mitarbeitern ermöglichen, in einem gesetzten aber weiten Rahmen selbst zu agieren. Nur so können Kundenprobleme gelöst werden.
Anbei ein Auszug aus der Zusammenfassung:
We call these empowered employees HEROes (highly empowered and resourceful operatives) and they're the reason for the book. From working with many, many companies on social technology projects, we've found that the hard part is not just the strategy. The really hard part is running your organization in such a way that empowered employees can actually use technology to solve customer problems. Over and over again, we find these HEROes hamstrung by their own companies. No amount of shouting or idealism can solve this problem, since it goes to the heart of how companies run.
But you can't just let people in your company build whatever they want. You need a new way of managing to get creativity without chaos.
Three groups need to work together: the HEROes themselves, their management, and IT. All three must change their roles. At the center of the book is a new idea we call the HERO Compact.
HERO Compact If you work for a company bigger than about 30 people and you actually want to get stuff done, you and your company have to pay attention to this. Social and other technology projects challenge the status quo.
The HEROes themselves may be building mobile applications, creating a viral videos, or building a community. Regardless, they can't just go and do stuff -- they must do it in a way that benefits the corporation. So their job is to understand what their customers need, come up with solutions, and do it in such a way that they don't threaten corporate strategy or information security.
Management used to shut this "unauthorized" activity down, but were rewarded with worker that just did their jobs -- which is not good enough in the age of the groundswell. If you're a manager wondering how to get more creative solutions out of your staff, this post (and this book) is for you. You must constantly communicate that innovation is a priority and reward it, including things that fail. You need to run interference for your workers with groups like PR and IT. But you also need to assess and manage risks from these projects, and set clear corporate priorities that your HEROes can follow.
IT departments are in transition from managing big technology projects to, often, supporting projects created by HEROes in marketing, sales, customer service, or elsewhere. IT's new role must shift to being the trusted advisor to these folks. They need to help manage security risks and keep the HEROes safe. And when projects need to get up to IT-level scale, they need to help scale them up.
This is a new way of running a company, folks. It values innovation over locked-down policies, and it threatens people who to keep doing things as they always have. But in a world where customers have so much power through social, mobile, and other technologies, it's the only way to survive. If you want to move at the speed of the groundswell, you have to support your HEROes.
Data Visualisation, using Twitter Data as a source... a revealing new way. Read more in this HBR Research Article
Data visualization is cool. It's also becoming ever more useful, as the vibrant online community of data visualizers (programmers, designers, artists, and statisticians %u2014 sometimes all in one person) grows and the tools to execute their visions improve.
Jeff Clark is part of this community. He, like many data visualization enthusiasts, fell into it after being inspired by pioneer Martin Wattenberg's landmark treemap that visualized the stock market.
Clark's latest work shows much promise. He's built four engines that visualize that giant pile of data known as Twitter. All four basically search words used in tweets, then look for relationships to other words or to other Tweeters. They function in almost real time.
"Twitter is an obvious data source for lots of text information," says Clark. "It's actually proven to be a great playground for testing out data visualization ideas." Clark readily admits not all the visualizations are the product of his design genius. It's his programming skills that allow him to build engines that drive the visualizations. "I spend a fair amount of time looking at what's out there. I'll take what someone did visually and use a different data source. Twitter Spectrum was based on things people search for on Google. Chris Harrison did interesting work that looks really great and I thought, I can do something like that that's based on live data. So I brought it to Twitter."
His tools are definitely early stages, but even now, it's easy to imagine where they could be taken.
Take TwitterVenn. You enter three search terms and the app returns a venn diagram showing frequency of use of each term and frequency of overlap of the terms in a single tweet. As a bonus, it shows a small word map of the most common terms related to each search term; tweets per day for each term by itself and each combination of terms; and a recent tweet. I entered "apple, google, microsoft." Here's what a got:
Right away I see Apple tweets are dominating, not surprisingly. But notice the high frequency of unexpected words like "win" "free" and "capacitive" used with the term "apple." That suggests marketing (spam?) of apple products via Twitter, i.e. "Win a free iPad...".
I was shocked at the relative infrequency of "google" tweets. In fact there were on average more tweets that included both "microsoft" and "google" than ones that just mentioned "google."
So then I went to Twitter Spectrum, a similar tool that compares two search terms and shows which words are most commonly associated with each term and which words are most commonly used in tweets with both terms. Here's the "google, microsoft" Twitter Spectrum:
I love that the word "ugh" is dead center between Google and Microsoft. But the prominence of social media terms on the blue side versus search terms on the red side is fascinating. It looks like two armies marching at each other ready to fight different wars.
Clark has also created TwitArcs. This one, I feel, is still a work in progress and Clark says "visually I like it but it might be the least useful so far." In this case, you type in a tweeter's handle and it returns a stream of that person's tweets with arcs that link common words between tweets (on the right) and common retweeters (on the left). Rolling your mouse over highlights the last tweet in the arc. Here's a TwitArc of @timoreilly:
Finally, the Stream Graph. Enter a search term and Clark's engine returns the frequency of the most common words found with your search term for the last 1,000 tweets. You see a literal flow of conversation. You can also highlight one term to see how its frequency changed over time and you'll see the most recent tweets that include both your search term and that highlighted term.
Sometimes 1,000 tweets with your term may span weeks. For my search term, "Tiger Woods" which I entered yesterday afternoon right after news that he'd speak publicly broke, 1,000 tweets covered about 20 minutes. Here's the "Tiger Woods" stream graph with "silence" highlighted:
It isn't hard to imagine how this may be applicable to business. I can already see eager marketers watching the stream flow by as their commercial debuts during next year's Super Bowl.
Clark, like many data visualizers, believes we're on the front end of a revolution in information presentation. "There's a lot of work done called scientific visualization or business intelligence graphics," he says. "And it's pragmatic, trying to solve practical problem. It's all standard, a bar chart or pie. But those standard ways are not adequate when you're trying to mine a richer data space. The world is full of complex data and we're just starting to get the tools to make sense of it. We're looking for new ways of presenting data."
is about creation spaces vs. knowledge management systems or as they put it...
"Knowledge management systems desperately try to persuade participants to invest time and effort to contribute existing knowledge with the vague and long-term promise that they themselves might eventually derive value from the contributions of others. In contrast, creation spaces focus on providing immediate value to participants in terms of helping them tackle difficult performance challenges while at the same time reducing the effort required to capture and disseminate the knowledge created."
This is the season for "year's best" lists — and even, this year, for "decade's best" lists — and who are we to resist the urge? A few of us HBR editors (Gardiner Morse and Steve Prokesch helped especially) took the opportunity to look back on the past ten years of management thinking and are ready to declare our choices for the — well, why not say it — most influential management ideas of the millennium (so far).
1. Shareholder Value as a Strategy.
The notion of producing attractive returns for investors is as old as investing, but this was a decade when the pursuit of shareholder value eclipsed too much else. Increasingly sophisticated tools and metrics for value-based managementpushed the consideration of stock price effects deep into operational decision-making, and made sure everything pointed toward bonus day. By 2009, even the man most known for focusing on value was saying it was a dumb idea. "Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy," Jack Welch proclaimed. "Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products."
2. IT as a Utility.
The current mania for cloud computing is the latest step in a long process by which enterprises have dispensed with their proprietary glass houses and begun buying computing capabilities as services. One impetus was the Y2K scare, which forced attention onto those onerous legacy systems as the new millennium dawned.
3. The Customer Chorus.
Through a range of technical and social developments, customers' voices grew louder (whether collectively in ratings systems like Amazon's, or individually through viral kvetches like Dave Carroll's "United Breaks Guitars") and companies found ways to listen. It's a true megatrend: the steps along the way have felt gradual and natural, but collectively they change everything.
4. Enterprise Risk Management.
Sounds crazy right now to say that the last decade was notable for risk management. But especially after 9/11, companies saw the sense of bringing the many and various pockets of it under the same umbrella. Newly empowered chief risk officers looked for trouble spots on a landscape ranging from financial hedging to pirates on the open sea.
5. The Creative Organization.
The decade saw a general revolution in the way many organizations came to view their source of competitive advantage, and a commitment to finding ways to produce creative output more reliably. Even before they embraced "design thinking," managers were encouraging collaboration, drawing on diverse perspectives, and engaging whole workforces in "ideation."
6. Open Source.
Purist geeks will be quick to point out that the term open source and some very substantial achievements came in the late 1990s, but here we pay homage to the spread of that model beyond software code. Was it only in 2001 that Wikipedia was born? And how many things have been wiki'ed since?
7. Going Private.
Cheap debt reignited the LBO scene just as post-Enron reforms created real disincentives to operate as a public company. As the decade wore on, private equity's playbook for turning around businesses was increasingly held up as best-practice management. Now, ideas like, ahem, leveraging up don't seem so wise, but private equity's devotion to strategic focus and demanding governance might endure.
8. Behavioral Economics.
Okay, by now, you're all shouting "that's definitely older than 10 years" and you're right. But talk about a set of ideas whose time has come. In the prior decade, can you remember when someone with Steven Levitt's profile had a breakout bestseller? Or when someone modifying the word economist with "rogue" (or "rock star") could keep a straight face?
9. High Potentials.
Consulting firms and other deeply knowledge-based businesses knew this all along, but in the past decade the rest of the corporate world woke up to the fact that some managers are more equal than others. Formal programs were established to identify, cultivate, and retain "hi-po's". Executive coaching, a perk often provided for the anointed, experienced explosive growth as an industry.
10. Competing on Analytics.
Decades of investment in systems capturing transactions and feedback finally yielded a toolkit for turning all that data into intelligence. Operations research types, long consigned to engineering realms like manufacturing scheduling, got involved in marketing decisions. Managers started learning from experiments that were worthy of the name.
11. Reverse Innovation.
The bigger story here is the maturation of the concept of globalization, particularly with regard to emerging economies. Most big corporations in 2000 saw them primarily as a source of natural resources and, increasingly, cheap labor. Then, as rising employment fueled the development of middle classes, cities in India and China came to represent valuable markets. Now, these non-US consumers are coming to the foreground. Firms like GE and Microsoft are doing R&D in emerging markets, optimizing on those preferences and constraints, and then bringing the results back home.
12. Sustainability.
More than anything, the first ten years of the 21st century will be remembered as the decade that businesses went green — if only in their marketing to a public highly attuned to Al Gore's inconvenient truth. We're not cynical on this point, however. The efforts we see by companies large and small to reduce their carbon footprints and other environmental impacts are sincere and effective, as far as they go. But ten years from now, as we revisit this exercise, forgive us if we declare 2010-2020 to be the decade of sustainability. "The idea was in the air before 2010," we can picture ourselves writing. "But this was the decade when it really took hold."
So there it is: our roundup of the management ideas that shaped the decade. Now, you tell us: Which ones don't belong on this list? And what did we miss?
