Archive for June, 2009
Developing Your Online Reputation
If you were to type “social networking sites” into Google, you would get about 65,400,000 results. For business owners seeking to make an impact in the digital world, the strategies are seemingly endless. What online communities are best for your brand? How can your brand engage your customers within those communities? Is a company blog going to establish your credibility?
Top 5: Traits of Gen Y Leaders
Generation Y has been estimated to include around 70 million tweens, teens, and twentysomethings—far greater in number than Generation X. There are a select handful of influencers—leveraging new technologies coupled with profound compassion—sparking new product / service trends and political movements. They are highly aware and receptive to the messages constantly bombarding them. They know their place in the world, what they want and what they need to live up to. We have analyzed many Gen Y leaders and identified five distinctive traits.
Affordability: Key to the “Next Billion”
For most nations, the barrier to gaming is price. With each major gaming console well over the $200 mark, and games ranging from $20 to $80, game-play has been popularized of developed countries. But just as mobile technology has spread to emerging market countries, gaming will follow the same path.
Startup Strategy: Grow and Harvest Your Business
As business builders and brand developers, we enjoy learning from Seth Godin. I found his recent blog post on the importance of sowing a startup seed and harvesting the crop to be particularly on point (see below for an exerpt). Many entrepreneurs struggle to develop a great product, and even after building a great product the road to significant market share may be difficult and take longer than expected. When businesses finally start to clear hurdles and gain momentum, you must be prepared to maximize returns through harvesting.
The Next Portable Gaming Console: Small Size, Big Play
Fitting more into less is the guiding principle of the technology evolution. With accelerometer and multi-touch technology, users can have a multi-sensorial gaming experience. For example, bowling is not limited to physical A/B buttons. With iBowl, users hold a virtual button and release their figure as they would with a bowling ball. Depending on your hand movement, your ball with spin or curve down the ally.
Top 5 Guerilla Marketing Strategies
Brands are finding their loud, flashy messages are falling upon deaf ears—particularly with younger generations. Bigger, louder, flashier is simplistic, narrow-minded and an ineffective way of delivering your message. Smart, intelligent, different, catchy and honest are adjectives to describe campaigns that grab consumers’ attention. How many used car advertisements do you remember versus GE, Apple or Volkswagen campaigns?
Digital Marketing: The New Push / Pull Dynamic
Consumers are bombarded with more messages than ever before. Refining and clarifying your target segment is becoming evermore important as mass-messages are falling upon deaf ears. Specific, tailored and relevant messages, combined with consumer engagement and empowerment are elemental in the new marketing era. Less and less are market leaders dictating consumer needs through “push” advertising. By way of digital networking and publishing tools, consumers are creating consumer needs.
What the Iranian Government Can Learn from Social Media
Social media is a great platform for spreading information and sharing ideas across a far-reaching network of users. For those who suffer negative buzz from social media, the first instinct may be to exert control to eliminate the conversation. However, on passion point topics, such as the disputed Iranian election, empowered people stand up to share their voice.
How to Define Your Market Position
The goal of market positioning is to find the ideal opportunity in the market based on customer needs, market forces and financial and strategic considerations. Once you find that market opportunity, further develop your product and elevate your brand to deliver outstanding value.
Cloud 9: A Digital Gaming Heaven
Why does Google sit on Cloud 9? Cloud computing might have something to do with it. The cloud is the next generation of how we compute. The use of hard disk space is being pushed out by an increase in bandwidth and general web utility. Google Docs, Calendar, Notebook, Gmail and many more applications are examples of how Google is leading the shift from disc space to the cloud.
What’s in a Brand Name?
How much does a name really matter in branding? If you wanted to create a great pop culture brand today, would you name it MTV? Especially when MTV isn’t really music television anymore. Is Yahoo that much better a name than Excite or Lycos? And for that matter, is Google a 10x better name than Yahoo?
Top 5: Strategies for Creating a Brand Name
Here’s an obscure question for you: Who was Captain Ahab’s first mate in Herman Melville’s classic, Moby Dick? Here’s a hint: there isn’t a block in NYC without this warm, rich brew of Americana. If you were thinking Dunkin Donuts, sorry. Starbuck of course. The widespread coffee chain could have been called Pequod, the name of Ahab’s ship, if Gordon Bowker had it his way. Luckily, they settled on Starbucks.
Contextualizing: Getting in the Game
Now, if you’re even sitting on a couch, codes for special moves have been replaced by a completely engaging, first person experience such as a terrorist hunter (Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six) or as a builder (urban climber, Mirror’s Edge). The next major component in complete engaging game play is context—whether it’s your movements or cognition. We’ll explore the different applications for contextual play for traditional gamers and non-gamers that are expanding the user experience in fresh, interesting ways.
Real-Time Play: The Real Interaction in a Virtual World
As cameras and accelerometers (the tech that makes Wii a Wii) become ever-present in our gaming experience, expect to find increased connectivity as well. It’s not that hard to imagine playing tennis or doing yoga with someone five hundred miles away. Real-time play combined with Wii-like technology could create an entirely new marketplace where physical trainers could sell yoga lessons or players could compete in global boxing tournaments with thousands of ring-fighters for the world belt
Developing an On-Target Value Proposition
We live in a world of overcapacity, where consumers are empowered to choose. With a market-driven approach you can stay focused on delivering outstanding value to your consumers to weather the downturn and be in great position for the upturn. It all begins with an on-target value proposition.
Top 5 Video Game Trends
Before we look forward to the next evolution of gaming, let’s take a step back—20 years to be precise. April 1989, the gaming device that marked the beginning of our lifelong pursuit for the virtual entertainment, was born. We welcomed the hand-held (what we now call mobile) device, Nintendo’s Game Boy into this world. When I think back on my childhood, the Game Boy put an end to the tediousness and boring rides to my grandparents house or vacations the Adirondacks. Zelda, Tetris, Mario and a sleuth of other games entertained the second generation of gamers.
Customer Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs are essentially the price you pay for individual customer data. You make money from the careful use of this data. When you also know the identity of the customers in your (branded) community, you can…
Challenges of Segmentation
While segmentation is a pervasive marketing strategy, it is important to be aware of its shortcomings. To explore how you can avoid these pitfalls, we will discuss common challenges many companies face through segmenting their audience.
Marketing Behind Microsoft’s Bing
$100 million. That’s the marketing budget Microsoft has allotted to convince people buy into their new search engine. Google’s new e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, forums, blogs, mobile, SMS… and everything-else-under-the-sun aggregator, called the Google Wave, intends to spend zero.
Top 5 Unconventional Brand Campaigns
Biodegradable coffee cup sleeves, hybrid vehicles, consumer-friendly solar panels and many more products are ways in which we are collectively trying to quell human impact on the environment. What about advertising? Direct mail, business-to-business, print space add up to a lot of junk paper. SEA LIFE London Aquarium is doing the opposite of traditional advertising—they’re sea-tagging.
