John Winsor

Tim(e)ing is Everything

In a bold move, Time Magazine has changed it's on-sale date from Mondays to Fridays. It sure seems to make sense to deliver a product when customers are more receptive. I'm certainly more inclined to sit down with a magazine over the weekend than try to deal with it at the beginning of a busy week.

What would happen if you shifted the delivery date for your product?

Johnny Cupcakes is Baking up Some Buzz

If you didn't catch the NPR interview with John Earle and his buzz generating store on Boston's Newbury Street check it out. I especially liked Johnny's Do's and Dont's of starting your own business:

Don't rush. First impressions are everything. Don't release any product unless you know for sure it's as good as you can get it to be.

Don't get bummed out if you go broke. You have to spend money to make money.

Travel, travel, travel.

Get a catchy domain name. Do something different, original, and memorable. Take your time coming up with a name.

Try to limit/not mass produce anything. Everyone wants what nobody has.

Be prepared to toss out any relationships or hobbies, if need be. You have to put 110 percent into building any company. You need to get your own act together before taking on a relationship.

Focus, focus! Living a drug-free, alcohol-free lifestyle my whole life has enabled me to save money, think straight, live healthy, focus more, and use my time wisely. I'm not saying do what I did, I'm just pointing out that you're going to have to make your company your first priority.

Personalize your online orders. Johnny Cupcakes shirts are wrapped in special cupcake tissue paper, and usually come with a Ninja Turtles or Garbage Pail Kids card. Taking a couple of extra minutes to do that puts a gigantic smile on someone's face!

Poketo!

Thanks to Rob for writing about Poketo, a wonderful example of giving commercial access to local artists that you should check out.

The 2007 Prius

I tapped into Kevin Salwen's post, How the Best Companies Stay on Top, on Worthwhile's blog and followed his link to a very cool video showing the new Prius. Here's what Kevin has to say:

If you want an education in how to run a major company in the new millenium, you could do worse than watching Apple and Toyota.  We've written before about Apple's constant efforts at innovation, particularly with the iPod, as well as truly anticipating what consumers will want.

So, I began to wonder what Toyota, the league leader in hybrid cars, was planning next. I googled 2007 Prius to see what they would be changing on the best-selling hybrid -- the only hybrid built from the ground up.  I came across this video from cNet's coverage of the Geneva Auto Show (sorry, but you have to live thru an annoying commercial before the clip runs). Smartly, the builders at Toyota have changed very little about the design and the operation of this young vehicle, which had a fairly radical egg-shaped design to begin with.  But lo and behold: They've come up with a car that parallel parks itself!! Check this out! It is so cool.

Smart companies stay smart by innovating and finding a whiz-bang approach to the next generation products. Go, Toyota!

Kevin, thanks for the great post! I couldn't agree more.

A Carnival of the Absurd

I awoke this morning with the sounds of helicopters buzzing my house. While having breakfast, the sounds of moving vehicles a few blocks away could be heard. What was all of the commotion?

As I rode my bike to work I turned the corner a couple of blocks from my house to see an incredible media circus at the Boulder County Justice Center. You see, a new suspect has been named in the ten-year-old Jon Benet Ramsey murder case.

The case held the attention of the media for years after the incident in 1996. But why has all of the media rushed back to resolve the story now?

Is it our societal need to finish a cultural narrative? Or, is it our unwillingness to pay attention to the issues that are currently playing out in our culture. Instead of obsessing over a ten-year-old case, what are we doing to make people safer, from Boulder to Baghdad? Couldn't we put more energy into saving lives?

Unfortunately, obsession makes the world go 'round.

Viral Marketing Rules

Props to Karl Long at Experience Curve for his post, 3 Rules For Managing Viral Marketing - What Every CMO Needs to Know. I especially like this thread:

So why is viral marketing different from traditional marketing? Let me throw out some ideas:

• Success bares no relation to investment - Traditional marketing there was generally a relationship between how much you spent and how many people saw your message, there is no such relationship in Viral Marketing
• Viral Marketing does not have a timeline - Traditional marketing calendars, and even the traditional marketing plan is irrelevant when executing and responding to viral marketing efforts. Viral marketing is just not that predictable, which calls for a different kind of planning
• Number of views bare little relation to reach or impact of Viral Marketing - As viral is something that is shared from person to person, you can be sure that many more people hear about it than view it (a little esoteric I know, but I talk about subserviantChicken constantly, and yet have only been to the site once)

Keep up the great work, Karl!

Brand Terrorism?

(An Apple Ad Remix from YouTube.)

In today's New York Times Advertising column entitled, "Agencies Are Watching as Ads Go By," Julie Bosman quotes Jeff Benjamin of CP+B as saying "To a degree, it's like brand terrorism on the Internet," when referring to the way customers have taken ads and creatively hacked them using sites like YouTube.

While I can see how brands and agencies might feel like they are being terrorized by people and their ability to creatively remix an ad it seems that technologies, like YouTube represents, has only served to amplify people's voices. It used to be that you could share your point of view with a few friends. Now people can share it with everyone.

Certainly, in this new era, it is the creative citizens of a community — the people and the brands — that will survive and thrive by co-creating from the street. Those brands and agencies that feel threatened will, in fact, be threatened.

A Hummer of a Summer?

When Charlie and Harry, my two five-year-old boys, walked in the door a couple of nights ago sporting new toy Hummers, they were excited. When I asked where they had gotten the cool trucks the boys replied that they had come in their McDonald's Happy Meals.

Right then I thought, "Ahhhh, Hummers aren't selling and gas prices are high so GM hooked up with McDonald's to seed a whole new generation of drivers." Talk about advertising to kids!

While this was an uninformed hunch, I wasn't surprised when Melanie Warner penned Would You Like a Gas Guzzler With That? in today's New York Times.

Melanie got in right when she said:

McDonald’s decision to include Hummers in its Happy Meals is surprising given that the fast-food chain has strived in recent years to bolster its image as an environmentally aware company. It has also promoted healthier menu choices and has avoided introducing indulgent 1,000-calorie-plus items, as some of its rivals have done. The company has also earned praise for its work with animal rights advocates. 

So what gives? Well, it seems McDonald's long-term partnership with Disney ended last year and they are in need of new toys.

But why Hummer? The Hummer brand has come to represent all of the problems with big cars and their sales figures seem to show it:

Consumers have turned away not just from Hummers, but also from other large, gas-hungry vehicles. “People used to never ask about fuel economy numbers,” said Jesse Toprak, an analyst at the car-buying site Edmunds.com. “Now, it’s one the primary factors for many people in making car purchase decisions.’’

Sales of the H2, which currently costs about $96 to fill up at the pump, are down 34 percent for the first seven months of this year versus the same period in 2005, and General Motors has sold only 229 H1’s this year, according to Autodata, an auto industry statistics firm in Woodcliff Lake, N.J.

229!

Can these new toys really be good for the McDonald's brand? Does this relationship have the ability to rub off some of the negative GM brand perception from being out of touch?

Customers are waiting for GM, and those companies it connects with, to act with courage and grace by helping them lead better lives by providing them with relevant products in the context of today's marketplace.

It is sad to see an historically great company, like GM, lack this courage and grace. As I said in a recent post: "These days it seems like Detroit resembles the La Brea tar pits, a place where dinosaurs go to die."

"Mammals", like Toyota, will inherit the market by adapting to the changing environment.

A Co-Creation Contest

Earlier this week I posted about a contest I was sponsoring under a deceptive title: Co-creation Charted. I'm sorry for the confusion. So, here are the details once again:

I was thinking about how much the idea of co-creation has becoming part of the cultural lexicon since I first wrote about it in Beyond the Brand two years ago. To quantify the change I found this nifty little chart from Technorati. While the base is small, there has certainly been explosive growth and a good trend line for co-creation.

Where will this chart be in one month, six months and a year? Let's have a "guess the jelly beans in the jar" contest. Now for the prize. Since I've given away books before, I thought that cash might be more fun. So, let's say $50 for the person who guesses closest to the number of posts on co-creation, as measured by Technorati, on September 1st, March 1st and August 1st, 2007.

My guesses are 65, 150 and 250!

Lev guessed 45, 100, 200.

Tribal Knowledge

If you haven't heard, John Moore of Brand Autopsy has a new book coming out called Tribal Knowledge: Business Knowledge from the Grounds of Sarbucks Coffee Culture. John floated me an early copy of the book. I've really enjoyed it. Now, he's got a blog for all things surroundingTribal Knowledge. Check it out!