The Power Of Small Ideas

Ask any young person being interviewed to join advertising and s/he will tell you how s/he is attracted by the possibility of producing big, world-changing ideas. Managers and planners have often tried to inspire their creative teams to go after big branding ideas. Yes, our business has been built around the possibility of producing something big and special.

Maybe all that is beginning to change. Anyone who got a chance to read David Weinberger’s new book Everything Is Miscellaneous will understand that the large silos into which the world used to be categorized earlier are beginning to fall apart and the tiny little section, almost an afterthought, called miscellaneous is beginning to grow. There are many more tiny fragments out there that are managing to co-exist nice and sweet.

Fragments are not new. We have been talking about media fragmentation for a while now. Exploding choices are making it difficult, even impossible, for traditional yardsticks of measurement like GRPs to be applied accurately.

Another problem with fragmentation is that when an agency has a big idea and needs to execute it across multiple channels, many a times these ideas refuse to scale. More often than not, what is spreading across touch points are the style and tone of the execution and not the so called big idea. This is only one of the smaller problems.

New thinking by people like Mark Earls points out that the way we looked at how people interpreted communication and made their choices may not be as transparent as it seems. Very often people made a switch once and then went back and did their own thing. Here is a video where Mark and Duncan Watts of Yahoo Social Research speak at the recent Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) word of mouth seminar.

Other thinkers, notably John Grant, have spoken about Brand Molecules and the new way of building brands. Gareth Kay, from whose post we stole most of the thoughts for this story, writes here “Doing the same thing at every point of contact will bore people. And success does not come through being boring. Our focus on doing one thing makes marketing communication more often than not one of the most boring forms of culture there is today.”

Which brings us to this little innovation that makes WellsFargo continue to be one of America’s most innovative banks. They have just launched VSafe. A secure online safe deposit box where you can store your valuable documents. At $185 a year for a 6GB account, it’s an expensive way store stuff, when you can do it for free on a free email account. Imagine the small talk that would have erupted in most conference rooms when an idea like this came up. But it is getting talked about all over.

Going back to Gareth’s story once again. Place a lot of small bets, he says, see which seem to be gaining traction and then scale up. We need to act like a banker investing in the futures market, making many small bets, rather putting all our monies behind one spectacular idea we think will work.

Ikea’s Instore Hotel

A bit late reporting this one, interesting nonetheless, IKEA has opened its doors to shoppers who want to spend a night in one of their Oslo warehouses. From Guardian.

Doom Days For Traditional Direct Marketing

Reports from UK suggest that direct marketing seems to be the worst hit in the time of the downturn. “Direct marketing budgets have seen the largest fall in eight years in the first three months of 2008, according to the Bellwether report, the quarterly measure of health of the marketing industry.” . Wonder if all this talk of green marketing is having an impact.

Japan Reads More Newsletters Than You Do.

A cheap, shameless plug, trying to promote the readership of this newsletter. Here guys take a leaf out of what most Japanese do. Most Japanese (67%) subscribe to between two and ten newsletters. Go figure.

Inventions And Banking

Dynamic changes in the banking sector are happening ever too often now. But what has steered the route of this business over time? At Finextra, Dean Procter lists nine inventions over the last millennium that have contributed most to the evolution of Retail Banking. The author also invites you to add your own.

Make Way For Cash

Finextra reports that in Great Britain, the economic slowdown is resulting in a shift from plastic to physical money. Customers are reluctant to spend money that they may or may not have the month after, through a credit card. Interestingly, one may come to the conclusion that people are now taking charge of their finances and are budgeting more seriously. This also be a result of the worldwide understanding of credit card debt and its grievances. With a staggering credit card debt of $735 billion in April 2005, America has led the debt race for a while now, with UK catching up at second place. With card companies making money out of high APRs, late fees and various other hidden charges, customers are now becoming wearier and possibly more intelligent spenders. Getting back to the basics of cash might just be the beginning of returning to complete the full circle.

Lending Hands

Check out these five services that allow you to lend money online. Some of these have been talked about in detail in our previous posts, like Kiva and Prosper. Whether it is helping out family or an unknown person in need in another corner of the world, web technology today allows people to reach out and make a difference.

The New Direct Bank

While most banks are still struggling to woo customers to their internet divisions; M&T Bank Corporation, one of the largest commercial bank holding companies in America has come up with a unique idea – OnBank. OnBank is their online-only banking division which operates almost as a separate bank. To open an account, customers can apply on any of the product pages and then witness a quick 10 minute application process. OnBank boasts of a complete and tight security technology that includes 128-bit encryption. Upon signing on for access, customers are asked for their User ID and Password, in addition to a random piece of information that they may have provided at the time of application. Customers can access their accounts anywhere the find an internet connection. Of course, for withdrawals and deposits funds need to be transferred to and from other bank accounts. So till the world doesn’t become totally independent of physical forms of money, having only an OnBank account may not be feasible. But then again, since OnBank is the product of M&T Bank, some kind of coalition may soon be formed if OnBank has enough takers. Time will tell. So then who is OnBank really useful for? Mostly, for people who do not have the time to go to the bank themselves at a regular basis, people who travel often. Netbanker adds that OnBank passes their strict 25-word homepage standard and joins an exclusive list of financial institutions that exhibit Google-like clarity on their homepage. Read more on this here.

Partnership Marketing

This is not a new idea. Really. It’s been around for decades in some form or the other. Affiliate Marketing Programs abound on the web making focussed targeting possible. In the physical world, there have been many great partnerships.

From simple relationships, like when Mini Cooper and Apple iPod came together to create iPod compatible cars. To more elaborate relationships in the form of the LG Prada Phone. Or this new one, where Samsung and Armani have come together to design a range of HDTV sets.

But there is a new wave of Partnership Marketing taking root around the world. One where the relationships are closer and more transparent. The Economist calls this partnership cooperation. In their report Companies Without Boundaries, the authors say that the best corporations of the future will be cooperations.

Today the key area of partnership is sales and marketing. To provide products they are unable to deliver alone, to keep up with competitors or to expand their global reach, among others. These relationships are not just one-off connections as in the past, where a company hired out a database to do some mailing or bundling products or product literature with another company’s service. The most visible of such a partnership in the past was between AOL and Microsoft.

But these relationships are growing deeper. Like the one between Apple and Nike to create Nike+. While there have been reports of a cooling off between the two companies, the recent news is that Nike+ will soon be seen on iPhones.

Another interesting example of cooperation is one where a UK based design firm Artomatic and Royal Mail have come together to make people want to receive direct mail. At a time where the direct marketing industry is going through strife having seen the biggest fall in spending in the first three months of 2008, Artomatic tells us that people like to receive stuff and showed us their belief through their wonderfully designed Matter boxes. If you would like to receive a Matter box, you can go here and sign up for one. They sent us a box down here in India, so the mail outs are not restricted to the UK alone.

Partnership Marketing. In the future it will not be only about bringing two companies with mutual goals to work together for a while and disengage once the job is done. These relationships will have to be far more transparent and deep helping to create true cooperations from within corporations.

The Green Issue

With the environment taking centrestage, companies are hopping on to the bandwagon hoping to show off their green credentials. Is it real or a bit of Greenwashing asks Rob Walker in NY Times.