Посты с тэгом: fabulous five

The Fabulous Five: Loyalty Factor

Published date: February 4, 2013 в 3:00 am

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Loyalty is defined as a strong feeling of support or allegiance. Companies fight for it because it correlates well to product sales. The Fabulous Five (Google, Amazon, Apple, Samsung, and Facebook) are waging a spectacular battle against each other to earn customer loyalty.

A key to winning is to understand the types of loyalty. Professor Christie Nordhielm describes three types as part of her marketing strategy framework, The Big Picture:

Heart Loyalty is a strong emotional involvement with a particular brand. When a customer says, “I love my Macbook Pro,” they are exhibiting heart loyalty. We see this type of loyalty for “badge” or “neck-tie” products, products that are consumed in public and are thought to reflect something about the nature or identity of the person consuming them. This type of loyalty is very difficult for competitors to challenge because it is highly personal and emotional in nature and thus, resistant to rational appeals. Because a product choice based on heart loyalty is tied up with the consumers’ identity and ego, a competitive challenge to this choice can be perceived as a personal affront to the consumer. Heart loyal consumers don’t like to be told they should switch.

The Fabulous Five and the Scramble for Territory

Published date: January 21, 2013 в 3:00 am

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Google, Apple, Facebook, Samsung, and Amazon are in a mad scramble to enter new territory and cover gaps in their strategies.  The one that gets ahead and stays ahead will earn bragging rights in what may be the most significant business battle of all time. These companies are the Fabulous Five.

Let's look at how each company is placed in the following domains: hardware design and manufacturing, software development and integration, consumer retailing, mobile, voice and digital communications, social, search, and entertainment.  Why these?  I believe the company that covers the biggest footprint across these domains and integrates them in a way that touches the most consumers will become the dominant lifestyle company.  Notice I did not call it B2B, B2C, or even the dominant tech company.  The battle being fought here is to become a part of the consumer's life in a way that allows the company to learn key insights that can be monetized.  It is the battle for the consumer subconscious in a way.

Here is where I see them today:

Slide1

No one should be surprised to see Google and Apple covering more territory than the others.  But notice the lack of coverage by Facebook. More than the others, the pressure on Facebook to enter new territories must be enormous.  That might explain its most recent announcement about Graph Search, a capability that will rival Google.  Here is an excerpt from CNET:

After nine years of colonizing the globe and corralling a billion people, Facebook has found a way to unlock the potential of its massive data collection — a basic semantic search engine that will let it build smarter services for travel, food, recruitment, dating and other verticals that will generate revenue that could rival Google's.  Graph Search is the beginning of the Enlightenment, the next major phase in Facebook's history, in which people gain the "power and tools to take any cut of the graph and make any query they want," as CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the product launch event at Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters earlier this week.

Graph Search is about providing answers, extracted from the data your friends feed into Facebook. It's not Web search, which typically generates a series of links for a query, with the exception of current stock prices, weather  and many other standard queries. But Graph Search is limited in scope and usefulness at this stage. It is in a beta phase that will last for many months.

Facebook will no doubt continue to enter new domains.  Its move into Communications with a Skype-like app is hardly enough, and one wonders whether it will make a move to acquire Blackberry.

Also notice the thin coverage in territory by Amazon.  Don't count them out just yet.  Amazon is also a viable contender for a Blackberry deal, and it has the resources to enter more domains.  The areas of Social and Search seem to be the most glarring ommissions.

Samsung has gaps, too.  It desparately needs its own operating system so it can break the chains with Google.  They are certainly headed in that direction given the announcment at CES about Tizen.

Pound for pound, Google has the others beat in terms of collecting monetizable insights.  But the price point for that data is low (for now) especially when you compare it to the premium prices (and margins) of Apple products.  High margins fund future projects.

The battle is far from over.

The Fabulous Five

Published date: January 7, 2013 в 3:00 am

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Five

companies are slugging it out in what may be the most competitive and
unique business battle of all time. It is larger in scale with more at
stake than battles in other industries including transportation, energy,
and finance.

More
remarkable is how different the combatants are from one another.
Instead of similar companies competing (Toyota versus General Motors,
for example), these companies hail from different business bases: an electronics manufacturer, a lifestyle computing company, an
online
retailer, a search engine, and a social network.  In order: Samsung,
Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook.  I call them the Fabulous Five.

What
are they fighting for? They are fighting for the right to define what
they are fighting
for. It is a category yet to emerge.  The battle is about who can get
the largest numbers of customers that generate deep
and meaningful insights.  Each company wants a massive following of
human beings using their products
and services in a way that generates monetizable information twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.  Each of the
Fabulous Five has a strong and growing foothold to do exactly that.

What
about traditional powerhouses like Microsoft?  Microsoft fell behind and is trying desperately to catch up with acquisitions
(think $8.5 billion for Skype).  Microsoft will regress into a word
processing, server, and gaming company.  Blackberry?  RIM lost one million
customers in the last three months of 2012.  Motorola? Sony? HP? Yahoo?  They
are watching the battle from the sidelines. PC’s
are becoming irrelevant as the tablet and smartphone takes hold.

That
said, there are some potential challengers to the Fabulous Five.
Twitter, for example, has an impressive subscriber base generating 500
million tweets a day that are being archived
by the US Library of Congress.  Despite the enormity of Twitter, it has
a serious gap.  Twitter (the company) lacks a way to own the insights
being generated.  Twitter is just an advertising portal.  More
concerning is the Fabulous Five can encroach this space fairly easily.
Some already have.

Which of the Fabulous Five will win is not a matter of financial resources.  What matters is their core competencies and their ability to stretch those into other domains.  More important is what each company learns about consumers to stretch further.

Who has the advantage?  Let’s look at sheer size and scope of each.

Google averages
nearly five billion searches per day.  Insights about keywords used to
search the Internet are extremely valuable.  Google learns what it takes
to make websites search engine friendly.  It sells that to companies
who want their websites optimized.  Google’s Droid operating system
gives it presence in smartphones.  Now they seek ways to stretch into
consumer electronics.

Amazon leads the nearly $300 billion online retail space.  It had nearly 8 million unique visitors on one day
(Black Friday).  Amazon learns how people shop, how they compare, and
what they are willing to pay across a wide range of consumer products.
It is stretching itself into the smartphone arena.  Amazon will continue to make bold moves.

Facebook
has over one billion users.  Despite all the criticism about its
privacy policies, Facebook has an enormous advantage in learning how
people socialize, communicate, and visualize their relationships.  But
it lacks a smartphone, entertainment platform, and shopping presence
that others have.

Samsung leads in technology development the way that Apple leads in design.  Samsung is well managed and aggressive.  It has massive resources
to put hundreds of millions of handheld units into any region of the
world.  The question is what they do with it – how much of the
information stream will come from the unit versus the operating system
within that unit.  Samsung knows it needs its own smartphone operating system to compete with Google.

Apple
is the most valuable company on the planet with a fiercely loyal base of
customers across every demographic.  It wins on design, integration,
and service.  More than the other combatants, Apple cuts across a wider
swath of a person’s daily life. Its next strategic move will likely set
the tone for the next wave of battles.  Fierce patent skirmishes with Samsung and others will subside so they can all focus on with the real battle – earning loyalty and staying relevant.

The
common theme for all five is innovation – the ability to stretch
into other domains and create new value systematically.  The choices they make to compete will be topics of future blog posts here.  2013 is
sure to be a milestone for this epic battle.

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