After Innovation and Marketing, Everything Else is Detail.

The great business educator Peter Drucker once said that business is about only two things: innovation and marketing.  Everything else, he said, is details.  

So when these two elements appear simultaneously, something magical happens.

Something...like the iPad?

The iPad was anticipated for at least six months ahead of its launch in April 2010, and 3 million of the devices were sold in the first 80 days. Yet, more than six months later, there is not one viable competitor in the market.  Despite volumes of media speculation and analyst forecasts, there still is no competitor to Apple in the hottest new segment of the personal computing and mobile markets. 

Apple expands its market around the globe, adds retail and partner channels and readies for an update to its OS, while its formidable competitors struggle with basic design for v 1.0.  They debate form factors, operating systems, interfaces, design, applications and battery life before they even tackle the harder of question of figuring out what is left of the market and how steep do they have to discount to win customers away from the iPad.

In the iPad, as in most things Steve Jobs creates, innovation and marketing aligned. A visionary and passionate leader, an incredible design, a Blue Ocean market opportunity and a product that exceeds the expectation of its customers have made the iPad a runaway success. That doesn't just happen one morning when someone wakes up and decides to find an innovation.  It happens when leaders are passionate about building cultures around innovation, design and usability and rigid about making sure it occurs at every level of the company and never stops.  

When that occurs, a product can be marketed with the deft subtlety of the iPad because the product speaks for itself.  I would ask you where, in the iPad does innovation stop and the marketing begin? That is what makes Apple great.  Peter Drucker would be pleased.

What Cloud Computing Means For Marketers

Cloud Computing has become one of the top trends in technology, with the business world buzzing about the potential and leading innovators like Microsoft to dedicate significant resources to be at the forefront of this trend.

The IT and operational benefits of the cloud are becoming well-known – increased efficiencies, lower barrier to entry for smaller companies, increased flexibility, etc. Even we at 3Point have embraced cloud computing operationally, leading to some nice efficiencies. However, what is the value the Cloud offers marketers? Often marketers turn a deaf ear to technology talk but this is a topic that has the potential to be hugely liberating for marketers, enabling great digital experiences for customers and enhanced revenues for companies.

What is cloud computing? Simply, all the computing infrastructure and intelligence (software, data and servers) is owned and managed remotely by a third party, and accessed via the internet using a web browser. Within cloud computing is software as a service (SaaS). Many of the innovative CRM, marketing automation and social software vendors operate via a SaaS model of delivery. But why is this important to a marketer focused on sales, brand value and customer experience, not how technology is delivered?

It matters because this approach can be hugely liberating for marketers, particularly in enterprises where the IT function is frustratingly slow for marketers trying to keep up with the breakneck speed of changing customer expectations online, and where putting together a business case in new areas of digital may be challenging. Among the primary benefits:

Cost. Cloud services are drastically less expensive than tradition hosting options, so marketers can do more and innovate more with their money. Cloud services enable some basic things such as faster time-to-market as solutions can be built in less time.

Faster scalability to better keep up with the variables of marketing campaigns and user traffic. In the past companies would have to prepare for an ad, email, keyword, or offline-online campaign and get resources ready on standby and have difficulties implementing mid-campaign course corrections. With cloud services campaigns can scale on demand with a lower cost and faster timeline.

Strategically, social services are enabled through cloud computing. New offerings like Facebook Connect, Twitter/delicious/reddit/digg/etc. apis, or even YouTube embed capabilities are all cloud services that enable you to drive traffic to your site without having to build your own social network. Facebook Connect is a cloud service that enables the portable social graph bringing users to your property. One user post back to a user’s Facebook wall results in three more users accessing the site. Customers tried to build social networks on sites like flip.com and other properties, now they can tie into the cloud service and get the same functionality in a fraction of time .

Most importantly, Cloud services allow us to think less in terms of technology architecture and more in terms of the marketing processes and workflow supporting the desired end-result. The Cloud smoothes a lot of technical complexity and assumes everything can be easily and integrated in real-time allowing marketers to focus on marketing and creativity. Blogger Adam Needles captures this idea well in this post and the situation has continued to evolve. We anticipate more and more company marketing departments will adopt the Cloud as a model and this will lead to new innovation in the design and implementation of campaigns.

If technology is becoming increasingly integrated into how you sell, manage relationships and build your brand's reputation, take a closer look at the Cloud. There are opportunities to increase simplicity, enhance control while at the same time lowering costs and increasing flexibility. And most important, providing marketers the opportunity to focus on marketing not IT.

Asia Social Media Evolution

The social media phenomenon is very much global with populations worldwide using technology to communicate and build communities. Marketers are faced with evolving variances from market to market as audiences gravitate to media channels most effective at providing the content they need and want. The challenge to marketers is determining the best communications channel to reach any particular audience to ensure the message is accessible and in the best context. Nowhere is this more so than Asia, with its vast variety of peoples, languages and cultures and a dynamic social media scene.To provide those interested in Asia a guide to the current state of digital marketing, the Asia Digital Marketing Association offers a free 2009 Yearbook , providing an indispensable resource in understanding the regions emerging social media scene.For marketers trying to grasp the regional differences in the use of digital marketing techniques, the 80-page Yearbook is full of facts and figures such as these summarized by ADMA Chairman, David Ketchum, whose day job is as CEO of leading regional consultancy UpstreamAsia.“Facebook, Twitter, Friendster, Bebo, MySpace and LinkedIn have built large-scale user bases in Asia Pacific but these global players don't dominate in every market. New patterns of usage and local behavior are emerging across the region, with clear distinctions from country to country where consumers spend time online, and how they behave.”China is number one in search, with 12.8 million searches performed in a month by nearly 150,000 searchers - that's 85 searches per searcher. Japan is the second largest search market, with 5.9 million searchers. However, Korea's searchers are most prolific, with 109 searches per searcher, Singapore not far behind with 106. Mobile continues to gain, both as a text messaging and voice call channel, but also for Internet access. Asia Pacific (ex Japan) has 97.6 million mobile online gamers, and 50% of them are in in China. There is 60% mobile phone penetration in the Philippines. Filipinos send the highest number of SMS messages per subscriber in the world. Mobile site page views grew 1120% YOY. 2008 Asia Pacificwide mobile data revenues topped US$65 billion, and an estimated 473 million handsets were sold.”Clearly 2009 presents an opportunity for marketers to explore and create new methods of interacting with their customers globally, along with the challenge of navigating the local dynamics of each individual market. By doing their homework and utilizing these evolving methods, marketers have the opportunity to deliver well thought out messages in ways that resonate most with their customers. The ADMA 2009 Yearbook is a great place to start.