New Business Models - Week 4

It’s been a busy week and I’m catching a few minutes here while the kids and Mom rest from their Mother’s Day lunch to upload my final post and completed tasks. 

I read all of the required readings for the week: 

1. Business Model Generation Read the Section on Patterns
2. "Business Models on the Web
3. Warby Parker Taking Eyewear to the Web
4. Dollar Shave Club: Using old media to sell on the web.
5. Bonobos: From Clicks to Bricks.
6. The Mobile Internet is Changing Brick and Mortar Retail: "Hointer a New Way to Shop"

Including the Breeze session and “The Economics of Giving it Away”.

The two articles that stood out the most to me where Warby Parker and Hointers.

What found interesting about the Warby Parker article was the small redesigns that the store made to  better fit with customer shopping tastes. For instances have all open glass displays allowed customers to touch and try on glasses without having to ask for assistance. I would love it if every glasses place made this change, I hate asking for assistance whenever shopping. I think it’s interesting that just a little change in the customer shopping experience can make a huge difference. It makes me think on my own company and the services we provide. Is there anything my company might be doing that falls along the same lines? A change that wouldn’t cost me anything to make but that would greatly improve the customer experience.

I also found the Hointer video and article interesting. This new style of shopping, having everything see unfolded, displayed, and using your phone to complete the entire process is interesting. It definitely caters to the younger customer, I couldn’t image my Mom walking into that store. But, it plays into the mobile, connected, do it yourself type culture we live in. I think a lot of people are annoyed or don’t want to take the time to ask for in store assistance. We’ve all been that person standing in the shoe department waiting for someone to help us so we can find out if they have our size. Shopping at Hointer you’d never have this problem. It will be interesting to see if the Hointer model can be applied in larger retail stores or if it’s something that works better in small boutique settings with limited product mix.   

Creating a Viral Ad - Luck or Talent

One point that Mojo Media makes about the Dollar Shave Club and the formula they used for their ad is that the ad wasn’t about the product, it was about the Dollar Shave Club culture. A razor blade is only shown at one point in the video; in essence the product really doesn’t matter. In addition the ad isn’t directed at any particular customer segment, if you shave then the ad is directed at you.

Wouldn’t we all love to produce a fun video like the Dollar Shave Club one, receive a widespread viral following, and find ourselves with $10 in venture funding? I love seeing videos and success stories like the Dollar Shave Club, but at the same time they frustrate me because they make me realize just how hard it can be to make an impact with your marketing ventures. Most of the marketing dollars I’ve spent over the years have generated moderate returns but never anything on the scale of a viral video or ad. 

 

After seeing the Dollar Shave Club video and reading their story I searched the web for tips and advice on how one gets an ad to go viral. In general most of the tips were luck or right place at the right time. I did find one good website however that gave some good advice about the structure of a well-crafted ad. 

According to Mojo Media as well-crafted understands the internet culture and demographics. Typically the demographics are going to be skewed younger more tech savvy customer. The balance between a well-crafted ad with viral potential and an awful one is a fine line; it’s hard to communicate the value in your product while also entertaining your audience. I would make the argument that there is talent involved in making a viral ad, but at the same time there's luck. It's hard to know, as a small business person, how an ad will actually be received and what social networks it will spread through. 

I know it won’t be easy and there are no guarantees when trying to create a viral ad, but I plan to show the Dollar Shave Club video to my marketing team next week; I want to work on creating a number of similar ads. Since it's hard to guarantee success my best bet is probably to create several. 

A good example of another viral add, done on an even tighter budget than dollar shave club is Chuck Testa’s taxidermy Nope ad, check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJP1DphOWPs

Sources: http://mojomedialabs.com/dollar-shave-club-how-to-do-viral-video-marketing-correctly/

One More Comment on Twitter

In the video The Point of Twitter one really important point was made about how large corporations are having to adjust their customer service approach because of Twitter. The example of Toyota is given for a company that at one time received a lot of poor publicity about product recalls and so on. The speaker in the video says that Toyota didn't bother to respond to the customer complains through their twitter account. That responding to customers through twitter and on a one at a time rate is not something that large companies are used to doing or dealing with. Traditionally large companies have offset poor publicity or customer complaints by flooding the market with positive attributes about their company. The problem with this style of marketing, marketing features and attributes, is that it is become less effective as customer are now more interested in overall company sentiment.  It will be interesting to see how large companies respond to this change. My feeling is that some will be too large and slow to respond to the change.

Week 3 Completed Tasks and Review

It's already week 3. The topics I viewed this week were:

• Read The Origins of Social Media
• Read The Death of Segmentation
• Watched How to Get Ideas Spread
• Listed to the posted podcast
• Watched The Moment When Social Media Becomes News
• Read The Long Tail
• Listen to The Point of Twitter
• Completed Twitter Branding Assignment: @United

Interesting Points from This Week and Thoughts 

The main point that emerges from this week is that the speed with which information travels and spreads via resources like Twitter has changed the way we get our news and power it can have in forming opinions.  The Origins of Social Media touches on this phenomena with its blog swarm example and how AOL faced a firestorm of customer dissatisfaction due to news about their products via bloggers. I feel this is a good thing but also the scary part about the blogging and online community. In one sense it's great that information can travels fast and to thousands with the click of a button. But, on the flip side mis-information travels just as fast. Also, at least in my opinion negative comments and mis-information are far easier to dish out on a business or individual when hidden behind one's computer desk. As a business owner I know that sites like yelp, though not technically a blog, have given customer an unfair forum to post negative comments about my business from time to time.

The video The Point of Twitter also makes the same point in discussing how Twitter with its real-time impact and speed to can actually drive the stores that new outlets choose to pick up. In one part of the video the journalist mentions how often times he uses Twitter to find the beat on a new story as Twitter knows what's going on prior to the major news networks. 

In the video The Moment When Social Media Becomes News the speaker discusses how our news being formed twitter posts and various bloggers. He states that though one blogger may only have a small piece of the story, but when taken together with multiple blogs and combined a full story starts to form. He comments that this is a positive change and has improved the depth of the stories we receive as viewers. However, he also cautions that this phenomena leaves bloggers and the articles they product open to a follow the leader type of attitude even if the information turns out to be false. He uses the example of lost ant to better explain. One lost ant may find itself followed by a string of blindly following ants much the same way a blogger, reporting the wrong information, could develop a list of followers all reporting the wrong information.  

I agree that this is a possible downside to the blogosphere,  but if we're looking at the mainstream media I wouldn't say their reporting of the news anywhere close to 100% accurate. I read and hear stories all the time from the mainstream media that turn out to be false, misreported, or skewed. So I don't know that blogs should be seen as any less reliable than traditional sources. In fact I see blogging as possibly more accurate than the mainstream media because users can quickly and openly comment, re-post, revise, and view from different angles. The sheer size of the blogging community acts as a filter that gives use little slices of the news that we can then put together to form the full story.