The first was this. Louis CK, another of my favourite stand up comedians, announced that he was going to offer downloads of one of his shows at USD 5 per download. There were no restrictions on what one did after the download. You could burn a DVD, upload it, share it whatever. He didn’t care. It was a bold experiment. A DVD of his show on Amazon could cost you about USD 15. Here he was offering it at 5.

In 10 days he had 1 million downloads.

His secret to success very simply speaking was, remove the middlemen and it’s associated costs and talk to the end customer directly.

So keep that fact in your mind for a minute or two while I move to the next development.

Apple announced the launch of iAuthor. Some details here and here. Keep aside all the rhetoric about Apple’s pricing mechanism but fundamentally what Apple has done is to place the ability to create your own books in your hands.

This has been the case in movies. If you have a handycam you can record your movies, edit it at home and voila you had a decent film. That was not the case with books. You could manipulate some software but never got a book like finish.

Now with iAuthor you do. And it’s free.

So bringing those 2, together imagine what it can do for aspiring, or even famous, book authors. They can write their books, publish them and sell them directly to readers.

No need for a publisher. No need for a book store. No need for Amazon. And it will cost much less.

I was doing some math for India.

Data suggests that an English bestseller, sells about 2000 copies. Megasellers of course go into millions, but a good sale is considered about 2000. Each book is priced at approximately 100 rupees. Total income is INR 200,000. Apparently the author gets about 20% of this which is INR 40,000.

2000 copies printed also brings in related distribution problems as there aren’t sufficient to spread around. Publishers are reluctant to publish more titles or more copies because of the huge costs of printing and distribution and the attendant risks.

Now imagine an author decided to a Louis CK to his book.

She writes her book, uses iAuthor to publish it. And when she does that she can create multiple versions wrt covers, inside pictures etc. Prices it at INR 25 ( 1/4th the current printed prices). Hosts it on her website, and through a combination of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube spreads the word. Given the price, which is extremely low risk, it is not going to take much to sell many thousands around the world. Even if she gives away 30% to Apple, which seems to be their price, she is going to be well ahead of the current situation where the challenges to get published, distributed, noticed and sold are significant.

I believe we may well see the return of bookstores as advisors with this trend.

Computers made book writing easy.

iAuthor will make book publishing easy.

There’s going to be a stack of books published in a few years. And there’ll be need for someone who can sort through that mass and recommend suitable books for the discerning reader. Perhaps that’s when the real value of bookstores will be realised. I just hope that the ‘store around the corner’ is there then.

The first is the solus store. This is a store that they either own or franchise and only has their own products. This is typically treated as their flagship store. Most big brands have this channel. Be it Nike, Calvin Klein, Apple and even some FMCG products.

Usually this is where the entire range of products is available. Latest and greatest products are displayed here. This channel is not just for selling products but also plays a big role in brand perceptions. We all know about Apple and its manic focus on retail, and it’s impact on, both, the bottom line, as well as the brand.

Clearly having solus stores is not enough to reach out to the consumers. This channel only addresses those already predisposed to the brand. Additionally, this channel is expensive to set up and maintain, so has limited reach.

To overcome this, brands also adopt the ‘shop in shop’ approach. This typically takes the path of having their own section within a larger department store. Anyone who’s been into a store anywhere in the world would have seen this in operation. On a floor catering to, say, clothes multiple brands have their own corners where their merchandise is displayed. Again, key here is not just sales, but also brand impact.

From my experience this weekend, in addition to several over the years, this is a very inward out approach and is extremely customer unfriendly.

This is the problem.

Say you want to buy a T shirt. Say you have also decided that what you wanted was a full sleeve, white T shirt. This should make for a simple purchase process. But this is the problem. You arrive at the men’s clothing section and will find that clothes are distributed by brand. So each brand will probably have their own white full sleeved T shirt. If you don’t have a brand in mind, this makes shopping very unpleasant. You are forced to go to each section, examine their selection and compare it to what you’ve seen previously. Perhaps, there is a brand you prefer and you make a beeline to it, and find their white full sleeves are out of stock. etc.

Not a happy experience.

Now I take you across the line to the World Wide Web. Go to the world’s favorite store amazon.com and type in white full sleeve T shirt and it throws up an array of options. You can then sort by brand, material, price etc till you get just what you want.

What If this experience can be transplanted to the real world?

In most modern stores, inventory management, billing, warehouses etc are all connected with a strong billing/ERP system. Stores know exactly what is in stock.

So What If stores had Search enabled terminals where customers can key in what they are looking for. The terminal throws up same options as an on-line store would. Customers whittle down their choice and are told which brand, in which area of the store has the T shirt they are looking for. It makes shopping easier. And doesn’t interfere with any existing merchandising plans.

This also doesn’t affect customers who come in to browse. So impulse purchases will continue to occur.

In much the same way many book stores allow you to search for books and tell you if they are in stock and where they are. We still buy more books than we intend to.

Retailers can be creative with the Search options they put on the terminals. While it can have simple ‘store stock’ based searches they can also enable search by occasion (birthday suggestions), ‘what’s new’, ‘special offers’ etc to incentivise customers to explore more parts of the store.

What If the line between off and on-line shopping could be blurred, if not removed?

We have seen 2 explosions in the cyber world in 2011.

e-commerce : This has hit stratospheric levels this year. From when the term made its debut a few years ago, some data I have seen suggests that this year over 1 bn$ worth of goods and services were traded just on cyber Monday.

Social Media : This year we saw Google make a huge push on to this space with G+ and they are pulling all their punches to make it a big success. Facebook’s responding with updates, modifications etc to stave them off.

An advantage Google has is their search engine. From what I understand, G+ data will be added to Google search results and perhaps end up giving brands better results with them ending up higher on search results.

There’s also growing research that suggests that consumers shopping on-line use social media to enquire of their friends before shopping. I have myself seen friends enquiring of others wrt brands they are in the market for.

Today Facebook’s Search function is completely under utilised. You can use it only to search for Names of pages..be it of people or brands. ie Your search result will only show you names of those who have pages.

My suggestion to the Bergs is to use that Search to search through people’s status updates as well. That way if I am looking for a specific brand the results will throw up updates of my friends who have mentioned that brand and I can see what they have to say.

This way my search in Facebook tells me what my friends are saying about something I am interested in.

It could be a product I want to buy, it could be a holiday spot I am scouting or even an ongoing event. My results get me immediately to what the opinions already out there are, and I can follow up with specific targeted Qs to the friend who’s said something useful.

The social media community is more trusted, richer etc and the search results are immediately useful and relevant.

So the next level of Search is to find out what my friends are saying about something I am searching.

Facebook knows what my friends are saying. They just need to add Search to it and they have immediately got to the next level of Search. And takes on Google in its weak spot as Google searches in the ‘white spaces’.

If I am a brand I want to be present when friends are talking about me or my category. Where better than when a Search is taking place amongst conversations and status updates.

Facebook looking for additional revenues has these Search results to be sold using targeted key words ads like Adwords.

So that’s my Santa present to Mark and Sheryl, if they are not thinking along those lines already..

May also solve the Yahoo problem..just saying.

Apparently a brand manager got a letter from a distributor that they had picked up a complaint from a customer that the sanitary napkin was giving her a rash.

Being a large MNC this was seen a serious enough to fly someone down to meet the affected customer. Many hours of discussion later it emerged that the lady was using the sanitary napkin exactly opposite to the way it was intended!!

Problem identified, customer educated, all left happy.

Fast forward 20 years and examine the media situation around.

Today a problem with the brand doesn’t get translated into a letter to a distributor. It shows up in Tweets and Facebook updates. This then gets retweeted and shared and before you know it, it’s become a full blown crisis. At that point in time, it doesn’t matter that the problem lies with the consumer and not the brand.

Given the perceived credibility of much of the on-line reporting, even social media reporting, such challenges can blow up enough to damage the brand.

Witness Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter experience when he tweeted about the sexual harassment scandal in Penn State U. For those who may have missed it, an assistant coach was accused of sexual abuse of a few boys in his care. This was reported to the head coach, who basically did nothing. When the news broke out the University fired the head coach, Joe Paterno.

Ashton saw the news on TV and tweeted ‘ How do you fire Jo Pa? as a hawkeye fan I find it in poor taste.” He has a few million followers and the uproar that followed that tweet, forced him to apologise and he has basically handed over his Twitter account to a professional firm to manage, to avoid other faux pas.

The reason I mention the Kutcher episode is that his clarification was that he saw a bit of the news that talked about Paterno being fired. He missed out the whole other bit that gave the reason why. Based on that little bit of information he went out and committed the blunder that he did.

He was wrong. He remedied it.

However, when a consumer tweets or updates an erroneous bit of information she/he is not overly concerned with the real truth of it. She/he is not intentionally lying, but is reporting based on her/his experience.

For no real ‘fault’ of the brand in question it is the one at the receiving end.

Two points for brands to consider :

It is not for a brand to decide whether they need a social media strategy or not. If their consumers are using social media, then the brand better have a strategy. Brands don’t control these conversations any more. It’s already been decided for them.

Social media strategies are not like old world media strategies, which generally tend to be static. Plans are drawn for the year, or the quarter. They are optimised and off to execution. There may be some limited fine tuning of media based on effectiveness, but largely it is a sit back world. However, social media needs a lean forward mindset. Active listening and being prepared are the name of the game. There are many conversation monitoring tools out there. Pick an agency that has got a good understanding and able to monitor the chatter. Integrate them with the brand and PR agency.

That is the bare minimum that every brand needs to do to listen, learn and react to consumer on-line.

Remember the Scouts motto? ‘Be Prepared’!

That should also be the social media motto!!

It is a season of tizzy and many hours and resources are spent on creating the plan for the following year. It will go endless revisions as the first submission is never good enough. Margins could be better. Costs could be lower. etc.

Knowing that this dance will take place, most offices plan their initial submissions accordingly.

What I have found generally is that a large part of the discussion takes place around the numbers itself.

I get, that budgets should be largely about numbers. However, this is also the one time that senior managers of most companies get to together and discuss overall company plans for the next year. Set some objectives or goals.

I have done many a budget plan and done the objectives and goal setting as well. But somehow the discussions weigh heavily on the side of the numbers.

And it increases as the year goes by.

Let’s say for example a goal is to win a specific piece of business. And the investment required to make that win is a specific talent. In the goals we say that the win will happen, say, in Q2 of  the year and the talent will be secured around the same time.

Everyone agrees with this goal and the investment, and the green light is given.

The year starts and then come Q1 you find that some other client who was expected to spend $X in Q1 will now only do it in Q3 because their product launch got delayed.

Guess what..now the Q1 numbers will not look too good. So to ensure that the quarterly numbers are met, expenses are frozen which typically is new hires. And that talent required to win that other piece of business which is part of the goal gets pushed out and so on.

Clearly I simplify,(and talk service firms than all corporations), hugely to make the following points:

Quarterly focus. I think enough ink and pixels have been spent on this subject. Given that earnings need to be issued and the role analysts seems to play in company valuations the pressure to ensure quarterly numbers are met, even if it means that long term goals are sacrificed, or compromised, is significant. I was reading recently an article that some top companies have stopped issuing quarterly guidance or have amended what they issue in these reports. This article even gives evidence that the quarterly focus is bad for long term company health. Perhaps the time has come for all companies to have a uniform system of taking a long term view of the business and managing earnings accordingly.

Numbers or Product : Companies seldom get into business to make money. They get into business to provide a service or a product. By selling enough of that product they make money. As long as that sequence is always maintained money will flow. Being the best at something ensures you get the margins that deliver the profits that makes the company valuable. 2 examples of this come to mind. One is Apple. If you’ve read the Sculley/Jobs articles.. Very simply speaking Sculley wanted to cut the cost of the product to sell millions. Jobs wanted to get the perfect product that cost more and sell millions. The Apple success is there for all to see. I also want to talk about a company I worked with. Ogilvy in India. It was always a great agency and a financial powerhouse. Then a creative genius took over who had a maniacal focus on the product. Literally within a year the company was producing the best work in the country, if not the region/world. And guess what.. it became an even more powerful financial juggernaut. Focusing on the money leads to cost cutting, short cuts, delayed investments etc which seldom show up in the near term but start the slow slippery slope downwards.

I am not decrying the financial aspect of the business by any means. Having run businesses myself I know that all the great product on the world, without money to pay the rent is of no use at all.

I seek a better balance between Quarterly numbers and Annual numbers. Between Numbers and product.

In the festive season upon us that is a wish I have for all.

It is also unarguably one of the greatest bands that practically never gets played on the radio. (the reason is that radio stations prefer their songs under 3 minutes in length. Pink Floyd songs, or ballads as they are sometimes referred to, tend to be around the 4 minute mark with 2 even going over 20 minutes)

At a time that artists depend on air play for success Pink Floyd’s success can be attributed to only one thing: Social Media.

By Social Media I don’t mean things like Facebook (tho they have a good FB page) nor Twitter etc. Rather I mean Social Media as it is meant to be..interactions with like minded people.

I heard Pink Floyd at a friend’s house, got hooked and stayed that way.

My daughter, who is 12, first heard them at home a few years ago. And maybe she will pass on the love of their music to people she meets and knows.

Thus successful social media campaigns work.

Keeping aside the milieu against which the songs were written and the ups and downs of the bands, among many things there were a few engagement opportunities provided by Pink Floyd that made one want to learn more.

For instance there was the unmistakable sounds that they incorporated into their albums. It was unique, distinctive and unlike anything heard before. It made me, for one, to find out who did it, how they did it and there are enough videos out there that told you how.

Then there were their shows, which where just that..shows. Visual spectacles. Odd, stunning graphics, laser shows the works.. well before Michael Jackson, poppified the shows. Again, beyond the music itself here was something else for you to engage with the band and their story telling.

And so on..

I mention this only as it struck me, perhaps obviously so, that there’s a lot that brands can learn from Pink Floyd in the context of engagement platforms.

Most brands have recognised that they need to engage their customers/consumers. Tools such as Facebook and Twitter make it easier to do so too. Yet few brands have been able to create successful engagement platforms beyond ‘like’ and ‘follow’.

As with Pink Floyd the platform must attract the consumer and make her want to know more.

Free samples, games, promotions tend to be the oft used ones by most brands. However, they seldom create long term sustainable platforms.

If a band can engage and sustain itself decades after they last released a song, there is opportunity for brands to identify themes that are long running and bringing consumers in to their story.

Brands that invest time in identifying these themes and then using Social Media to promote them, rather than the other way around, have only long standing success to achieve.

I say themes, as I think as brands tell their story to its consumer it needs to be layered so as a Consumer she gets engaged, wants to know more and learns more as she engages more.

Relying on one platform can make it a uni dimensional story and not rich enough for a deep engagement.

Who would’ve thought one could use Pink Floyd to talk about Social Media engagement platforms.

As a token of my appreciation of your having read this far click here and listen to their magic.

Today I read someone comparing him to Edison and Einstein. Come to think of it, that is probably true, given the impact he’s had on our lives.

While I, and nearly any one can talk for hours or even days on the great things he did, I want to talk about a single thing.

Product nomenclature.

I want to buy a laptop.

I visit HP.com and select laptops as my choice.

I have to choose between mini, everyday computing, etc.

Having chosen ‘everyday computing’ here are my options

HP 2000z series

HP 2000t series

HP Pavillion g6x series

HP Pavillion g4t series

HP Pavillion g7t series

HP Pavillion g6s series

None of the numbers are of any help in deciding if a model is better than the other.

The numbers differentiate but don’t grade.

Besides there is no real logic apparent to the user.

Why are some Pavillion and some not.

The numbering looks like it was done on an engineering drawing somewhere, passed along to the shop floor and it just stayed with the brand for ever after that.

Actually HP is probably done a good job of it.

Have you tried buying a Nokia phone?

Their numbering makes no sense and till recently was not even visible on the phone.

Nokia n91 was launched in 2005. N8 in 2010.

Does that make any sense? Who spends time thinking of these brand names.

I’d like to believe that like for most normal folks 91 follows 8, so N8 should have preceded the N91 by many years.

To make matters interesting E6 came after the N8.

So if you walk into a store you have no way of knowing which is the ‘latest’ model.

In many cases I understand that when a brand is catering to multiple segments they need to have multiple sub brands.

That is exactly what BMW has. They have the 1, 3, 5, 6, 7 series which kind of makes sense. I wonder what they have against 2 and 4 though. Also 6 came before 7. Not as clean as it could be but some structure is visible and followed.

Now switch to Apple.

You want a laptop?

No problem Macbook, Macbook Pro, Macbook Air. The names tell you everything about what you can expect. Even the most un-genius person can figure out the hierarchy.

You want a phone ? Would you like the iPhone 3G, or the iPhone 3GS, or the iPhone 4G or the iPhone 4GS. Any confusion?

There is no doubt that Steve Jobs was a genius and he had fantastic team that created these products.

But he also got the basics right.

While the product is created in the factory, the brand is created in the mind of the consumer.

Make it easy for her to grasp, assimilate, understand and own it. And that doesn’t require genius.

I respect HP, some very good friends of mine work there.

I respect Nokia..have been a loyal customer from my first phone.

There are millions of people like me around.

But Apple evokes the passion, coz it made great products and even stronger brands, because finally it was about doing great things, simply.

The mailer was clear that if I called in advance and made a reservation I would be able to take a friend along to this posh place.

Accordingly I called Amex on Tuesday for a reservation on Thursday night. After the due verification Amex said they needed to call back with a confirmation, after talking to the club.

Wednesday night they called back to say they needed more time.

Thursday afternoon they confirmed.

So far the experience was great. And given that they needed 2 days to confirm this I am expecting this to be a really hallowed experience.

Accordingly last night we head off to this venue.

As quick background, this bar is on the top floor of Marina Bay Sands and boasts great views. They have a ‘check in’ door on level 1 to confirm that you have a reservation. Once you check in, you get a small card, which you show a hostess at the lift exit on the top floor. She will then take you to a reception desk, who will reconfirm and then you enter…

So that’s exactly what happened.

At reception the dainty lady said it was free seating and we could sit any where.

We enter and find…

One whole section on the side with great views is locked away for a private party.

The section along the balcony is littered with tables with people standing. Did I say it was packed? Well that area was. Not even standing room.

The other side had open air seating with about 10 sofas also blocked with some red satin rope. I walk up to the guy who stands guard who says I need to talk to the receptionist.

Which I dutifully do.

She looks at me and says the minimum order for those tables was 2 bottles of hard liquor. Thinking I heard wrong, I asked again and she reconfirmed. I asked her how a table that seated 4 could go through 2 bottles of hard liquor. No response.

So I requested if we could sit on the obviously empty spaces for just a drink and leave.

‘Sorry those are the rules.’

That left us with seating on some sort of long curved sofa, where people were already sitting like waiting to be called at a Returns Counter of Ikea, giving us a view of the empty dance floor.

Not quite what we expected.

So we left to go to another bar even higher than the one we left!

As we talked about our experience at the club, while we were not complimentary about it, some of the negativity rubbed off on Amex too.

We were not sure what the Privileged Access was. I thought it entitled you to something special. Turns out it was just entry. Not sure we need Amex for that.

All the ‘we need to check’, ‘let’s get back to you’ raises expectations of something special being arranged. Like a table reservation. Which it didn’t.

So Amex shoulders some of the blame for the negative experience.

Now some smart lawyer type will say that all offers that are fulfilled by a third party are the responsibility of that party and the provider of the offer cannot be held liable.

That is lawyer speak. Not marketing speak.

Guess who’s going to think less of American Express when something like this happens. The consumer. Good luck explaining to her Section 37 para i where it says quite clearly in 8 point size that Amex is not liable.

As more of these experiences pile up across (think broken windows) many offers the brand damaged is American Express, and I may just leave home without it.

The gist of it is that in a building if there is one broken window that is left unrepaired then pretty much soon all windows will be broken. Read full details here.

This concept was applied in real life policing in New York in the 1990s.

The logic is rather simple where if people find that a crime goes unpunished they commit more of it. Conversely sometimes there are little signs of things going wrong. If you move quickly to fix it then it sends a signal that you are serious about the big things too. Conversely if you let the little things slide then the perception that the big things get the same attention starts building.

So if you go to a restaurant the waiter’s uniform, the way the food is served all contribute to you impression of the restaurant. The Soup Nazi of Seinfeld is a rarity.

Looking back at that legend called Apple, one has read numerous stories of Steve Jobs’ obssessive attention to detail. Be it the fold in the packaging or the first product view when revealed. To him these were all Broken Windows moments and he understood that if he got these pieces wrong it would affect the impression of his brand.

We keep reading about how people’s impressions of brands are formed by their exposure to different aspects of it and it is critical that the 360 degree experience adds up to a positive synergestic whole.

Yet one often sees so many examples where marketing teams focus only on the big stuff. Perhaps it is ensuring the TV Commercial is right. Or that there is adequate supply of stock in an outlet. Or whatever is the next big thing.

With e commerce growing how do people receive their shopping? Does the laptop come in a dirty brown box with lots of stickers and looking like it went through a litter bin?

When the customer sees the bottle in the supermarket is there a layer of dust on it?

Is the POSM printing aligned?

We’ve all seen examples of this.

Last week I saw this pack and I wondered how deep the damage had gone.

What happened here? What does 3 Free 1 mean? Why is the kid chopped off?

As brands leap into social media and open new engagement platforms they are now offering far greater opportunities to present Broken Windows to their customers. Expectations are raised and must be met.

Yesterday a friend was talking about his ‘disappointment’ that a message he had left for a brand on its Facebook page had gone unanswered for 24 hours. For this person that was a Broken Window.

The theory of Broken Windows applies to brands as much as it does to society, and I guess there is no surprise there as brands live in a context of the society.

Marketers would do well to identify their windows and track if any are broken and prioritise fixing them soon. Before it’s too late