Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Beware the Digital Disruptors: They’re Coming for Your Industry

Beware the Digital Disruptors: They’re Coming for Your Industry

James L. McQuivey, Ph.D. is a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research serving Consumer Product Strategy professionals. Follow him on Twitter at @jmcquivey.

Growing up in the ’70s, I was the world’s biggest fan of The Bionic Man. Every Sunday night at 7 p.m. you could find me glued to our Trinitron TV to watch Steve Austin battle every villain from Bionic Sasquatch to the evil Dr. Dolenz. The appeal of the show was simple: Amplified by technology, the Bionic Man is better, stronger, and faster than his enemies.

It turns out to be a morality tale for our own day. But you are not the bionic man in the drama I’m unfolding — you are his target. Because while you were carefully planning your business strategy, hundreds — if not thousands — of individuals and competitors have been exploiting technology to make themselves better, stronger, and faster than you.

We call these people digital disruptors. And they’re coming right for you.

No matter what industry you are in, you are their target. Where you could once dismiss digital disruption as the sole province of the music or other media industries where it destroyed billions in value, digital disruption has now expanded. These disruptors employ technologies — and the platforms they enable — to build better products than you can, establish a stronger customer relationship than you have, and deliver it all to market faster than you ever thought possible.

Oh, and it doesn’t cost anywhere close to six million dollars for them to get started. I offer Lose It! as one of many case studies worth considering. Targeting the weight loss and fitness business — one of the most analog industries on the planet — Lose It! is disrupting the more than $40 billion Americans spend on weight loss each year. It’s a costly industry to enter — think of Jenny Craig’s marketing budget alone, then add its hundreds of physical locations, prepared meals, and all the infrastructure to support the entire enterprise. So while franchises like The Biggest Loser have succeeded in entering this business recently, they have done so at great cost.

Meanwhile, a single app that helps dieters keep track of the calories they consume on their smartphones has gone from 0 to 7 million downloads in just a few years. FitNow, the company behind the app, pulled this off with four employees, establishing an unheard of customer-per-employee metric of 1.75 million.

This is digital disruption at its finest: better, stronger, faster. The app got to market quickly, partly because as a digital disruptor, FitNow could afford to launch something that didn’t try to solve all the problems in the weight-loss world. As Charles Teague, CEO, told me recently, “Let’s not pretend that we know the endgame here. Let’s do the least amount of features to know if it will work. Then improve it if people use it.” And improve it they have, adding fitness tracking and more recently a robust social community of like-minded dieters.

Because it sounds so easy, a CEO I shared this with asked me why, if digital is so quick and dirty, his company’s website redesign was over time and over budget. I told him it was precisely because he staffed up his business under assumptions about design and functionality that were true in 2005 but are no longer the case. Digital disruption has even disrupted the digital businesses that preceded them.

While digital disruptors are better, stronger, and faster, they are not untouchable. Their ease of entry comes from the fact that traditional barriers have fallen to zero. That means your direct cost to emulate their practices can also be low.

That’s why I recommend you steal the digital disruptor’s handbook. Use the iPad, the Kinect, and whatever platform is next to build a digital bridge to your customers. Like with Lose It!, your bridge must engage customers more often than your current product can, packaging and delivering benefits that you didn’t realize were part of your consumer contract because before now, they weren’t. You have to change your understanding of your product so you can then change your customer’s understanding of it as well. This will require better thinking than you currently do – I previously explained how digital disruptors take advantage of a type of thinking called “innovating the adjacent possible.” It’s crucial to generating more ideas more quickly so that you can find the nearby opportunities that will succeed while quickly culling those that will fail.

There’s more to do, but before you can even begin, you have to know: Are you ready to do this? Does your company have the energy, skills, and policies to turn into a disruptor or are you more likely to be displaced by the digital disruptor nearest you?


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:HSH

The Best-Kept Secrets Of Doing A Competitive Analysis

The Best-Kept Secrets Of Doing A Competitive Analysis


When recently asked about their best-kept secrets to performing a competitive analysis for their brands, YEC members had the following to say.
1. Have an undercover ambassador
Performing your own market research for a competitive analysis, especially when you are publicly known among your competition, just doesn't work. Identify people who can act as an undercover ambassador on your behalf and go into the market to get firsthand feedback on how your brand is perceived and insight on your competition and how they are doing. Organic data points provide the most value.
2. Look to product review sites
One thing that we commonly do is look to product review sites like Amazon.com or eBay and search for user reviews. What are customers saying about the product? What do they want to see? What did they like/dislike? Do this for both your product and that of your competition and you will be really surprised by what you see. Plus, it gives you an action list of things to do to make your products better.
3. Use compete.com
Competitor analysis is imperative to any business in order to improve products/services in order to gain an edge over the competition. Utilize a service like compete.com to understand how your competitors are driving traffic and acquiring customers online. This information will help you devise a more comprehensive marketing strategy.
4. Don't stare down the competition
While it's important to keep an eye on what other's in your field are up to, it's equally—if not more—important to ignore the competition. Don't let what everyone else is doing drive you to change your values and direction as a company. Focus not on being better than everyone else, but instead on being your very best.
5. Conduct a survey
When I was building the coaching arm of my business, I released a survey to my already-existing audience in order to get a feel for where my readers were hanging out, who loomed large in the industry, and what affected their purchasing decisions. It helped me pinpoint my primary competition and find ways to distinguish myself.
6. Do a mini analysis on social media
The best way to perform a competitive analysis for your brand is to do a mini social media analysis to see how you compare to your competition in terms of followers, fans and type of content posted. You also want to measure level of engagement with their fans versus your own fan base to see how you compare to the competition!
7. Use BoardReader
I use BoardReader whenever I'm doing market research, be it for a current project or a new idea. It's a nice way to assess the world of forums, specifically, which is often overlooked despite it being the original manifestation of niche communities online.
8. Test your customer loyalty
There are many companies that boast about massive mailing lists and thousands of users, but what makes a company valuable is the level of interest and loyalty your customers demonstrate towards your brand. This can be converted to monetary equity and rapid growth quite easily. Ask your customers for a favor and objectively track the number of customers who follow through. Then share your results.
9. Use an objective eye
Coming from the bar and restaurant industry, I can't go to my venues to conduct an analysis about my brand because my staff acts differently when I'm there. So instead I go to my competitors and simply act like a customer. I then send secret shoppers to my venues and compare my feedback of the competitors with the spotters' feedback of my venues.
10. Use OpenSiteExplorer.org
SEOMoz's tool, Opensiteexplorer.org, allows you to see links linking to your competitors, so you get a better idea of how they've been able to market their brand, which media outlets are talking about them and how much work you need to do to catch up and overtake them.
11. "SizeUp" your competition for free

SizeUp.com
 is a free business intelligence tool that will rock your entrepreneurial world. It instantly develops interactive charts to illustrate how your business compares to competitors, identifies best places to advertise and maps competitors, customers and suppliers. It's a great tool to utilize for investment pitches, business plan enhancements or overall business development tactics.
12. Buy from your competitors
It always amazes me how few people don't go beyond looking at what's publicly available on a competitors website; going through the entire sales process (and yes, that includes submitting credit card information) will give you much more useful information. We've even done usability studies which include our top three competitors to see how customers perceive our brand versus theirs.
13. Check out what YC and 500 Startups are investing in
Y Combinator, 500 Startups and Tech Stars are investment groups/incubators that are constantly carving out the tech landscape. If you are in the tech space and researching the competition in your space, you can be almost 100 percent sure that some of the most promising up-and-comers in your vertical are part of one of those groups

Monday, October 10, 2011

Avoid These Simple Grammar Goofs in Your Business Marketing

 Small Business Speaker, Consultant, and AuthorOctober 7th Many business owners did not pay attention in English class. After all, they were too busy dreaming about the company they wanted to start. But using poor grammar in your company’s marketing (or any e-mail) communication reflects poorly on our business.
It hurts our business because many customers reason that if the company can’t get the spelling correctly, how can they trust them to  solve their problem, right? And it’s a valid point. I am guilty of spelling and grammar mistakes in my communications—and sometimes in these articles.
Here's what you can do to ensure your spelling and grammar are correct in all our communications.
1. Let it age
We are in too much of a rush to get work out the door—but every type of marketing communication needs to age. Do the work and leave it for a few days. Go back and read it with a fresh set of eyes to see if it still makes sense. Better yet, have at least two people proof the information.
2. Turn spell check on
It's amazing how many people don't use this feature in their word processor. Turn it on and note the changes it suggests!
3. Read it out loud
Reading the material out loud (or whispering at your desk and yes, you must move your lips for this to work) will often point out parts that need to be improved that may not be apparent when things are read silently.
Additionally, here some of my top grammar problems and how to cure them.
The Problem: “He will send Sara or myself a message.”
The Cure: Practice deleting anyone else in the sentence and then read it aloud to get the right pronoun. “He will send Sara or me a message.”
The Problem: Well vs. good.
The Cure: Good describes things, places and people. Well describes an action.
The Problem: Affect vs. effect.
The Cure: The majority of the time use affect with an a as verb and effect with an e.
The Problem: Fewer vs. less.
The Cure: If you can’t count them, use less. Fewer hours. Less time.
The Problem: Loose vs. lose.
The Cure: Think about what the words mean. Loose is something not fixed in place. Lose is to not retaining something. Remember, you can’t be a “looser.”
The Problem: It’s vs. Its vs. Its’.
The Cure: It’s is a contraction short for It is. Its is a possessive pronoun referring to ownership. Its’ is just plain wrong.
The Problem: i.e. vs. e.g.
The Cure: i.e. means "that is" and e.g. means "for example." Don’t ask why.
The Problem: Your vs. you’re.
The Cure: Your is possessive and you’re is a contraction short for you are.
The Problem: Than vs. then.
The Cure: Than is a comparison while then is a description of time.
The Problem: Would vs. could.
The Cure: Would is definite—if certain things happen. Could is only a broad possibility.
Has grammar got your company in hot water? What are your top  pet peeves and how do you fix them?