Lola's Magnifsnt

Without any prompting or encouragement we found our 6 year old had put together a business plan.....we genuinely have no idea where it came from....

It looks like, having come up with the concept of a shell model business, she's planning to outsource the collection of the shells and the production to her own children, with the grandparents (presumably Rachel and I) managing the production....

She appears to have got the hang of management surprisingly early in life...

What's perhaps even more troubling is the quality of the plan and the succinctness of the communication, in many ways improves upon her fathers planning process....

MVE (Minimum viable experiment) not MVP in early stage innovation

The acronym MVP (standing for "Minimum Viable Product") has entered the innovation lexicon.

The principle it describes is sound but the word "product", in the early stages of innovation, is misleading.

The first few cycles of of innovation, when users get their hands on our new ideas for the first time, is all about testing desirability. Whether they see value too. It is experimental.

In the first throws of innovation then we should talk about a Minimum viable experiment rather than a product. 

The word "experiment" communicates the nature of the endeavor more accurately. It says its not ready. It needs time. Give it some space. Let it make mistakes.

The word "product" says ship it, cost it, give it a line in the P&L...and that is an innovation killer...

Product+ : meaningful digital innovation in the gap between a core product and marketing

Product+ is a term I started to use about 18 months ago to describe meaningful innovation in the gap between product and marketing.

The below is a first stab at a better definition....

.....

A Nike trainer is a product, a Nike Superbowl ad is marketing, the Nike+ running system (the website, the wearable technology, the content) – that's product+ (It may well also be where the "+" in Product+ came from).

For Ford, the car is the product, the press advert is the marketing, the mobile telemetrics insurance is the product+

For Barclays, the bank account is the product, the direct mail is the marketing, the data visualization which helps me compare ISA products - Product+

For Farrow and Ball, the paint is the product, the display ad is the marketing, the app which substituted a colour in a picture of the room you're about to paint, that might be Product+

For B&Q, the kitchen is the product, the marketing is the TV ad, Product+ will be virtual reality walk throughts of a potential customers' new kitchen.

For Benson’s Beds, Product+  might be about integrating sensors into their mattresses and partnering with apps like Sleep Cycle.

You get the idea...

Product+ is something that isn't the core product, but isn't marketing either.....

Product owners, marketing and IT can own it - anyone in the enterprise can fill the gap. This is specifically not innovation on the core product.

If you're the CMO of Farrow and Ball you probably don't know enough about how paint is made to come up with a new type of emulsion - but you doesn't need to. This gap is a digital one – its social, mobile and local. It is about new devices, data and technology which when used together, create a "sticky" ecosystems around a brands’ core products. An ecosystem which is revenue generating but has as its primary goal, the intention of driving the sales of the core product.

This is useful innovation. The concept is a great shortcut to enable us to focus on digital services customers actually want, not the fluffy cereal packet digital marketing a lot of brands churn out. We measure Product+ in revenue not Facebook likes.

The best thing of all about Product+ is its straightforward to achieve. Using lean as the principle by which we develop these new services, the process is simple, it energises teams, gets brands face to face with their customers again and most importantly of all - the results are tangible. The output isn't a powerpoint or a strategy piece - its a thing, a product, a service - in the hands of users.

Lastly - this work is also disproportionately focused on a younger user – true digital natives. Those under 30 who live entirely digital lives and to whom a brand without a digital, social and mobile context is simply invisible. For those brands struggling to engage a younger demographic - the development process itself is a great conversation starter.

Tim Minchin - on life - very good...

Google reader is more than a daily habit...its an extension of myself....I am truly fucked now

For 5+ years now, like millions of others, I've used Google reader every day.

It wouldn't be stretching the truth to say that the insight and ideas I glean from my daily trawl of my 150 feeds has helped me define my business, who I am even.

I coped when Delicious became a bit shit...I was pretty gutted when they culled iGoogle. Now I just feel my way of working is somehow not legitimate in the eyes of one of the few brands I genuinely trust and "believe" in.

I understand the priority Google have placed on G+. Presumably the 5 tags I put into Delicious a day as a direct result of using Reader, Google now want me to push into my social network. But this desire to force everyone, of all creeds, characters and persuasions to use social networking - to constantly shout, constantly share is.....dysfunctional.

I don't want to share the little things. Most of the value I add to my clients is noise reduction. I see it as my job to take all the thousands of little things, and find the larger patterns and shapes in them for my clients to more easily digest and exploit.

Yesterday I did share something with my social graph - a business we'd invested in had launched its first product - that's something significant I want to tell my social graph about.

But outside of significant thought pieces and news, I actually believe being so visible on the day to day damages my own brand - if thats not too pompous a thing to say.

As it is, since writing this post, I've discovered Feedly....which is much more friendly interface, has just the same swipe functionality as Reader on my phone and presumably, isn't going to abandon me on a commercial whim.

Bad luck Google. Net result. From now on I just spend an hour less with you a day....

Choice is toxic

Choice isn't something that the primal parts of our simple human brains understand very well.

Imagine its July 8th, 7:03am, 13,654 BC

You're cold, filthy and hungry. You’re being chased by an angry bear. You stumble across a blackberry bush. You desperately need food to sustain your flight but your favorite fruit is raspberries….

Do you have an existential issue about the "choice" on offer?

When I hear second rate NHS managers and socially awkward politicians talk about "choice" I get very nervous. "Choice" for technocrats has come to mean wiggle room. “Choice” allows many of those who choose to govern us to muddy the waters around adequacy of specific services. It allows the disingenuous in both private and public sectors to use the best, to obscure the worst.

Take your nearest A&E department. As a consumer of government services, you need the one closest to you to be up to scratch. A “choice” within some arbitrarily assigned perimeter of my home is meaningless. "Choice" helps politicians answer awkward questions on talk shows, not patients in blue lights speeding to be taken care of in failing hospitals.

There isn't much of a choice with Apple. Apple don't make the iPhone 4D and the iPhone 5TXd and iPhone 8PS14 extreme. They make the iPhone 4. That's it, that's the standard and as a consequence anything else looks rather second rate and flabby.

Blackberry - lots of choice..

And their respective shareprice....


The antidote to the toxicity of choice is simplicity, curation and trust.


The service of a tailor makes the  assumption that customers without the looks and figure of a supermodel are prepared to pay more, specifically not to be given a choice. To be free from its tyranny.

That is why I'm excited about one of the MVPs we released last week from Fluxx labs called www.ijustwantawhiteboard.com.

The end of CRM: how I learned to stop worrying and love networks

Which big brand CRM progammes are genuinely noteworthy? (the acronym alone speaks of a monosyllabic, begrudging acknowledgement of the people who pay our salaries).

Very few.....lets be honest, most of them, most of the time, are at best ok - many are horribly lame.

Any brand with a CRM progamme (as in 99% of the brands any of us tolerate on a day to day basis) are almost certainly already suck in the "relationship department". CRM is the equivalent of a bunch of service station flowers. The moment you hand over your debit card, you may as well hand in the towel.

The only good CRM is invisible - always on and which almost certainly isn't the subject of a corporate memo.You cannot socialise CRM, you cannot magic it, you cannot implement a CRM system in the same way as you deploy an ecommerce platform. CRM is either there in the DNA of a business and the psychological makeup of staff or it's not.

It is a peculiarly modern conundrum. We have been able to put a man on the moon, prove Einstein wrong and can slow the progress of some of the most vicious forms of cancer and yet, the vast majority of big brand customer relationship management programmes are toe curlingly clumsy.

The problem isn't of course a conundrum. It is not unsolvable. It has though, up until relatively recently, been am issue most organisations could ignore. The marketing managers of large corporates are, as it turns out, one of finances' few rational actors. Managing a relationship with customers in any sort of functional, meaningful way hasn't impacted profits as much as creating and maintain needs within them, so the problem has attracted (relatively speaking) little interest.

What we need to do, in this connected, new customer centric world of ours, is to step away from the expensive piece of new CRM software and all just take a deep breath and look at the problem afresh.

Lets take a for instance.

I've just bought a Canon DSLR (the user interface of which is truly abysmal btw - but that's for another post).

Anyways....I'm staring at form I've had to print twice (first time the embedded PDF didn't work) to claim £40 cash back.

It's 2012 and I'm printing a souless, cold, form that looks like a tax return - having to write my email address in BLOCK caps and black pen???

I am still hoping this is some sort of post modern ironic comment on the souless corporate world by Canon and that, having taken the pain of filling in this form, finding the serial number of my new camera and posting it back (freepost no less) I am going to get a link to some sort of secret, amazing online network which is going to make me an instant billionaire.

Of course what is much more likely to happen is I'll get a link to some eye sweatingly terrible corporate microsite (even though I've expressly asked not to be spammed), churned out by some above the line digital numpty who has precisely 0 understanding of customer, which will be proceeded by an email to a load of spammy brochure-ware for a product I've already bought.

Best case, whichever middle manager's Freudian nightmare I (and presumably 1,000s of other innocent victims have just stepped into - when all we wanted was our money back), will have been fired and my email will sit dormant, in some CRM silo, until its "mined" by the next poor bugger who picks up the recently departeds' job.

This is the extreme of course - but it broadly captures the day to day of CRM as we all know it in 2012. And it is depressing. I mean like properly, why do I bother to get up in the morning depressing. Who actually sanctions and orchestrates these things? Do you not love yourselves enough?

More importantly - is there an alternative?

Well, yes, the alternative, dear Canon, is don't try.

Don't try. Stop spending money.

I actually think your product is quite good despite the terrible UI. I was buying anyway.

I'll find you if I need you.

I'm a busy man. I don't want to fill in your poxy forms or join your crappy Facebook group.

Stop this mindless, awful excuse for trying to develop a relationship with me - and wait till I'm ready.

Instead invest in that moment. What we might call the "next moment of truth" to borrow a Googlism. But when you do, deploy the content without regard for platform or technology. Get it into the networks I might find it, and don't just horde it on your own media.

The moment  I need you post product purchase. The moment when all I'll want is a really good, genuine, detailed, understandable, useful answer to my (almost certainly) very specific question (and not some crap corporate micro-site with a load of spammy brochure-ware about a product I've already bought) why not think about being there then.

As a little for instance, lets say that query is about how modern sensor technology evolved and how it now relates to old skool ISO film speeds. What could you give me that would really help my understanding?

A little video clip of your chief engineer talking about sensor capacity in a human way, some 5 minute visual tutorials of how to relate old film speeds to the new world, some picture of examples maybe of how the technology has improved the world and what is now possible post physical film, maybe an IM chat with an expert?

Nothing excessive, nothing flash, nothing too expensive. But something visual, simple and findable.

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This is customer relationship management. Customer relationship management isn't an email programme. Its not a Facebook page, its not a piece of Lithium software - its all of this (maybe) - but most of all its understanding me. Doing your best to anticipate my needs. Taking your own brand ego out of the equation and putting my needs before your own.

That's a proper relationship.