May 10, 2010
Business summaries.com Branding Unbound The Future of Advertising, Sales, and the Brand Experience in the Wireless Age
About the Author
By Rick Mathieson, Amacom Books, 2005
I Rick Mathieson is an awardwinning writer, author, speaker and frequent media commentator on the converging worlds of marketing, media and technology. His research into nextgeneration business models has earned praise from USA Today and Dow Jones Interactive. Mathieson has also been a featured speaker at industry events such as Digital Hollywood, The Global Retail Executive Council, The Microsoft Leadership Forum, Yahoo’s “Branducation” lecture series and The American Management Association’s “Corporate Branding” series, among others. Branding Unbound | Rick Mathieson
f you’re in marketing, advertising, or branding, consider this: While it used to take three television spots for a product to register with its intended audience, it can now take as many as seventy. Are people simply tuning out marketing messages? No. They’re simply choosing which messages to tune in. Thanks to wireless technology, customers now have the luxury of responding (or not responding) to advertising when, where, and however they like. Leading companies such as WalMart, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Kellogg’s, MTV, Procter & Gamble, and others are already reaching millions of customers, one at a time, wirelessly. The technology gives these companies
What’s Inside: WHY YOU NEED THIS BOOK TALKING ‘BOUT A REVOLUTION
an unprecedented view of buying patterns, and the ability to identify and market specifically to the most likely customers. In the wireless marketing era, your brand can enjoy whole new levels of differentiation and customer recognition, while consumers benefit from on-thespot convenience and a message individually tailored to their needs. Branding Unbound shows just how to harness the virtually limitless power of this amazing convergence of advanced technology and progressive business strategy to create the truly remarkable experience that will keep customers’ attention and win their loyalty.
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The Nutshell WHY YOU NEED THIS BOOK This book reveals how your business can emulate some of the most powerful and successful branding strategies in the world. TALKING ‘BOUT A REVOLUTION Wireless. It’s not just for nerds anymore. Here is a cheat sheet: 3G Stands for the “Third Generation” of mobile phone technology. Fifty times faster than present-day cellular phone networks, delivers data at 144 kilobits per second – which is essential for video, music, Internet access, and richer content which can be transmitted through air waves. Wi-Fi Stands for “Wireless Fidelity.” An increasingly popular way to connect devices – PCs, printers, TVs – to the Net, and to each other, within a range of up to 300 feet.
Branding Unbound | Rick Mathieson
Hot Spot An area where Wi-Fi service is available so you can wirelessly connect to the Internet; frequently offered in cafes, airports, and hotels. Mobile-Fi Next-generation technology that extends highspeed wireless access to moving vehicles.
About the Book
Author: Rick Mathieson Publisher: Amacom Books, 2005 ISBN: 0 8144 7287 7 243 pages
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Bluetooth With a range of about thirty feet, used to directly connect PCs to mobile phones or printers, and earpieces to phones. WiMax Long-distance Wi-Fi; can blanket areas more than a mile in radius to bring high-speed Internet access to homes and buildings too remote for traditional access. Ultra-Wideband Connects your favorite toys – PCs, video cameras, stereos, TV sets, TiVo – at speeds 500 times faster than Bluetooth, and fifty times faster than Wi-Fi. GPS The Global Positioning System, a constellation of twenty-four satellites that provide highly accurate data on a device’s location; used extensively in car navigation solutions, and increasingly, for monitoring the location of children and elderly parents. It has long been used by ships and airplanes to track their movement.
RFID Radio Frequency Identification. Small RFID “smart tags” are tiny silicon chips that store data and a miniature antenna that enables the tag to communicate with networks. Could one day enable milk cartons that tell the store (or your refrigerator) that they’re about to expire or that your supplies are running low; lost TV remote controls that can reach you through your Web browser to tell you where to din them, and much more. ZigBee “Smart dust” technology that coordinates communications among thousands of tiny sensors, each about the size of a coin. Could one day be used for managing a home, store, or office environment based on the occupants’ preferences, for monitoring the toxicity of drinking water, and for controlling remote diagnostics of home appliances, cars and even humans. Java/Brew Technologies for delivering and displaying content to mobile phones.
But that last word – trust – is indeed the operative word. Branding Unbound | Rick Mathieson
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“ What principles will prove most profitable over the near term. ” SMS Stands for Short Message Service; basically e-mail for mobile phones. Synonymous with “texting’ and “text messaging.” Mobile IM Instant messaging, which offers real-time messaging with buddy lists, is increasingly being extended from the desktop Internet to the mobile world. MMS Multimedia Messaging. The successor of SMS; enables messages with text, pictures, graphics, sounds and video. WAP Wireless Application Protocol; a standard for accessing the Web from mobile devices. A WAP site is a wireless Web site.
Branding Unbound | Rick Mathieson
THE RISE OF mBRANDING What’s emerging is a glimpse at what’s working, what’s not, what’s coming, and what principles will prove most profitable over the near term. # 1 Size Matters The typical display screens on mobile devices are still quite small, occasionally still monochromatic, and, in some cases, textonly – hardly the ideal venue for delivering compelling advertising. # 2 No Pushing Allowed One of the biggest misconceptions about wireless is the idea that we’ll one day walk down the street and be bombarded with digital coupons for a cup of coffee at the nearest Starbucks, a sweater at Bloomies, or a burger at McDonald’s. That sort of practice is called “push advertising.” In the early part of this decade, it seemed everyone talked about this form of location-based advertising – call it the Latte Scenario – based on your physical whereabouts.
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# 3 Integration is the Name of the Game
# 6 It’s Time To Get Personal
Most experts agree that wireless advertising works best as part of an integrated multimedia campaign that includes any combination of print, outdoor, or broadcast advertising.
Over 90 percent of participants in one IDC study on “consumer tolerance of advertising in emerging media” say they’d be very interested in advertising if it were based on a presubmitted user profile that ensured ads are relevant to them. Makes sense. There’s no use selling Pampers to empty nesters.
# 4Entertainment Rocks Many experts agree that the most powerful advertising models are ones that facilitate communication, provide instant gratification, or offer some kind of entertaining diversion. As witnessed, polling and trivia are extremely popular motifs. # 5 Sponsorships Rule Harkening back to the golden age of television, sponsorships are expected to be a major model for marketers in every medium in coming years, as consumers continue to tune out advertising, and as brands demand alternative advertising opportunities. The idea: Advertisers sponsor content that may or may not have anything to do with what they sell, but nonetheless targets those who ft their customer profile.
# 7 Location is (Sometimes) Where It’s At While some media, such as television, profit from treating consumers as a single mass, the most tantalizing prospect of mobile advertising is the ability to send marketing messages not just to a specific user, but to a specific user in a specific location – the ultimate in contextual messaging. # 8 The Medium Is (Still) The Message It’s important to start exploring the use of other capabilities inherent in the wireless device. Smart marketers will find ways to integrate wirelessly transmitted communications with these built-in capabilities.
“It’s important to start exploring the use of other capabilities inherent in the wireless device. “ Branding Unbound | Rick Mathieson
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“ The marketers who master it first will be better positioned as more consumers venture into the mobile medium. ” # 9 Think Young – To A Point There is little doubt that consumers younger than twenty five years old are the first ones adopting wireless as much more than just a way to place phone calls. # 10 There’s No Time Like Now Will wireless make or break your marketing plans? Of course not. Will it give you a competitive advantage as a particularly powerful and uniquely personal touch point within your integrated marketing efforts? Absolutely. Like the early days of the wireline Internet, the marketers who master it first will be better positioned as more consumers venture into the mobile medium. THE CLUETRAIN MANIFESTO Not everyone believes mass-market advertising translates to the wireless world. Just ask renegade marketing strategist and dyspeptic malcontent Christopher Locke, coauthor of The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End Of Business As Usual, and author of Gonzo Marketing, Winning Through Worst Practices. Branding Unbound | Rick Mathieson
The problem says Locke, is that in an increasingly interconnected world of the wireline – and now, wireless – Internet, new communities of consumers are growing immune to corporate pitches and officially sanctioned marketing-speak, much less mainstream news and media. The Cluetrain Manifesto burst onto the scene as ninety-five theses on the Web, and became a bestselling book that challenged corporate assumptions about business in the digital world. As that world goes wireless, a little Cluetrain, revisited: • Marketers are conversations. • Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors. • Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice. • The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
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• As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally. • People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. • There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone. • Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, and literally inhuman. • In just a few more years, the current homogenized “voice” of business – the sound of mission statements and brochures – will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court. • Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves.
Branding Unbound | Rick Mathieson
• Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance. • Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them. MARKETING 2020 With such insights, Spielberg, Schwartz, McDowell and the rest of the great minds behind Minority Report could qualify as precogs themselves. Indeed, if there’s anything that makes the film especially prescient, it’s the timing. Though the movie was filmed well before September 11th, its riff on proactively stopping crime before it happens is strangely analogous to the “doctrine of preemption,” our government’s policy to preemptively strike against terrorists. And while the technologies shown in Minority Report may not all find their way into commercial applications anytime soon, the
“ Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. “
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world of ubiquitous computing has already arrived. And society – not to mention marketers – has a responsibility to make decisions about their deployment and use carefully. The power belongs to you. For all the dangers of the wireless age, says McDowell, the debate over the future is what good science fiction is all about. Consumer backlash will no doubt thwart many misuses of the technology, and regrettably, government regulation will be required to stem others. mBranding can be a tremendously powerful way to enhance the way consumers interact with and experience, the brands they know and trust. But that last word – trust – is indeed the operative word. The more we create compelling experiences that earn our customers’ trust and respect, the more success we will find as the wireless age progresses. mBranding is about brands empowering people to enhance the way they live, work, learn and play. It is not the subjugation of consumer interests to meet our own profit goals.
Branding Unbound | Rick Mathieson
The dire predictions made by prognosticators like Spielberg and company – and movies such as Minority Report – are not fait accompli, and they certainly should not frighten us. Instead, they should inspire us to make the right choices for both business and society. In other words, keeping the wireless world safe for both commerce and liberty means we must heed the warnings of the precogs already among us. *** 2010 BusinessSummaries.com
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