Here’s a link to a compelling post about the concept of “Proximity Marketing” It is all about the capability for in-store, real time delivery of personalized offers. The premise is that a person with a cell phone walking in an aisle of a store can have a personalized offer show up on their phone right as they are passing by a specific product or brand or display.

With a nod to the film “Minority Report” — where display ads talk to passers-by, by name — the technology is now here to deliver offers and personalized messages directly to an individual’s cell phone as they shop. The Toronto-based digital signage company iSign has this technology installed in 1300 Canadian stores.

Smith speaks of using “the Bluetooth channel” where phones “talk” directly to a piece of digital signage and can download images, videos, coupons or apps.  While this is happening, every interaction is delivering data back to the retailer.

The upside?

This could be the most powerful capability invented to date to drive immediate purchase behavior. For instance, if you want to compel someone new to your brand to purchase, you can deliver a high value offer constructed so you know they’ll respond.

The challenge?

You’ll need to have a deep understanding of how to create just the right kind of offer — for the right kind of person — at just the right time in the purchase cycle. The data collection/processing and the marketing sophistication needed to use this capability will be enormous.

The wild card?

Will consumers be amendable to having this kind of intrusive sales messaging delivered to their very personal communications device? Will opt-in and permission tactics be employed to keep this practice “above board”? The privacy concerns are major.

The bottom line?

This is a technology to keep an eye on if you are involved in using offers to  motivate retail shoppers to increase their purchasing.

One of the areas I found especially compelling was video and animation. Here’s an excerpt:

The rise of online video has spurred a vivid new marketplace for video-production services, catering to companies that are looking for online ads, video content, and animations to populate their sites. Some marketplaces take the open-competition model from graphic design sites and apply it to video design: Sites like Wooshii and Userfarm promise fast results, big marketplaces, and low listing fees.

One other note of interest is this article comes from up north — the Globe and Mail from Canada. One little known fact is that over 90% of all the projects posted on contract job sites like elance.com, freelancer.com, guru.com come from English speaking countries including the U.S., Canada, U.K, and Australia.

One of the trends we’re fond of quoting is called “Pricing Pandemonium” (from the good people at trendwatching.com).

The flurry of special offers and socially-communicated price discounting is only going to increase. With more consumers constantly connected via mobile devices, the diversity of opportunities to distribute promotional offers will be explosive. Several related trends plug into this megatrend: Mobility, group buying, local-ness, flash sales, review sites, price comparison engines and dynamic pricing will all contribute to this discounting rage.

An interesting niche in the area of delivering purchase incentives is the use of gift cards. As a consumer transactional device, a gift card carries value and emotional drivers that don’t exist in traditional coupons or discount codes.

Here is an article that points out just how pervasive gift card usage is. We’ll be happy to provide advise and ideas to anyone interested in exploring the use of gift cards and promotional devices.

via

In addition, a handful of new businesses are being incubated in exciting fields, including consumer services, B2B consulting and the HR/talent acquisition.

To support all these diverse businesses, our intent is to uncover and develop insight that is compelling and enlightening. We intend to share that content on this site, with the hope that it can be an inspiration to broader audiences looking improve their overall marketing and business performance.

The new topics we’ll cover include:

The Bootstrap Economy – covering the trends and practices of those businesses that are launching and developing without the help of venture funding.  An amazing amount of professional work to support these businesses – be it website development, social media activity, sales, marketing, legal and analytical work – is being contracted for in workplace markets. Sites like elance.com, guru.com, odesk.com and freelancer.com are attracting hundreds of thousands of businesses looking to outsource professional work. They also are attracting millions of professionals from around the world who are competing for these freelance projects.

Offers Incorporated – addressing the outright pandemonium that exists today in the development of price and promotional offers. Manufacturers, retailers, online merchants and small businesses have recognized that generating impactful and meaningful purchase incentives is a requirement to stay competitive. We plan to offer help navigating the good, bad and ugly in this world. We’re also tracking the trends and best practices in the delivery of offers via mobile and social channels…something that marketers have said they are hungry to understand.

Unique Space – looking to help companies re-evaluate their markets and their position in them, to be sure they own a unique corner of the world. We are all operating in the world of the micro-specialties. Finding that unique space and then learning how to stake your claim and capitalize on the opportunities will be our ongoing focus.

Counter Offensive – finding the practices that are inherently anti-consumer and calling them out. But our goal is not about heaping shame on bad practices. Instead, our aim is to find those companies and services that are literally fighting back, providing valuable and forthright services that consumers can truly believe in. At the core of our belief is something we call “Help-o-nomics”…finding the virtuous companies that are offering “helping services” and managing to do it in a way that is customer centric. We’ll be featuring some of those companies over the coming months.

With the world of marketing and business evolving at such a rapid pace, we intend to help businesses of all sizes push “the reset button”…taking a step back and evaluating how they thrive and grow in changing times.

We look forward to sharing some of the research, insight and new discoveries we make in these exciting areas.

This is the first of a series of blog posts on a new, effectively hidden, but fast growing phenomenon in our current economy.

I call it “The Bootstrap Economy”.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 68% of hiring in 2010 was contract-based. According to the recent issue of Businessweek, independent workers now make up 31% of the nation’s workforce (over 40 million are self employed in the U.S).  The BLS predicts that this will rise to 40% by 2019.

Most of these businesses are NOT venture-funded. In fact, according to the BLS report on self employment, two thirds are not even incorporated.

The Kaufman Foundation tracks new business formation and reports that approximately 558,000 new businesses PER MONTH were created in 2009.

According to the most recent Non-Employer Statistics published by the U.S. Census Bureau, on average 2,356 people go into business for themselves EVERY DAY. Their firms account for 78 percent of U.S. businesses and $951 billion in receipts.

I’ll break down these numbers in a future article to dimensionalize this fundamental shift in our country’s labor force and business activity.

For this article, I want to point to one aspect of The Bootstrap Economy that has been creeping up on us for some time. It is the idea that professional work – consulting, creative, administrative and technical work – is now almost exclusively digital output and can be managed 100% remotely.

http://flic.kr/p/4DYDBh

What this means is that the people who do “professional work for hire” can do it from anywhere in the world. Skilled, experienced professionals can be recruited, hired, briefed, managed and paid without any physical meeting of any kind. And the output can be created and reviewed digitally as well. What this enables in a whole new kind of “e-channel of distribution” for the contracting and completion of professional project work.

This is the “e-tailization” of professional work…and it is moving from being an “underground economy” to an emerging trend driving business formation, innovation and the future of work as we know it. Millions of these professional projects are bought and sold in online marketplaces every year.

I’m talking about thousands of new web-based businesses being created this way. New software products are coming online…blogs, Facebook pages, legal opinions, data analyses, business plans, financial reports and marketing presentations are all being contracted for by strangers, meeting “virtually” for the first time.

On a daily basis, millions of independent business people are engaged in an electronic marketplace to get professional project work completed…work that might typically have been done by full time employees.

Let’s just take one snapshot of this emerging industry.

There are thousands of general and specialized “Work-Marts” that have been launched in the last 10 years. Here’s a look at three of the biggest and their economic impact.

Using numbers published by the sites elance.com, freelancer.com and odesk.com, I’ve attempted to normalize the data:

• Number of Contractors: 4.8 million +
• Number of projects completed annually: 2.3 million +
• Annualized value (in dollars) of contracts: $520 million +

The net effect is, for those who are bootstrapping their businesses – using their own means for funding their business – professional work can be completed for fixed and more affordable prices than ever before. Logos, business cards, brochures and social media campaigns that might not otherwise happen are being developed and launched.

There are more fascinating dynamics in The Bootstrap economy, around demographics of these business owners and the types of work they are contracting for and performing, just to name a few.

You’ll be hearing more on this market in the weeks and months to come. If you’d like to stay up on the activity and dynamics of the bootstrap economy, email me at blieber@originalthoughtllc.com and I’ll add you to our notifications list.

We’re going to focus here on five big, global, macro trends – the trends that will affect how and where people live and work. For this post, I’m not going to talk about the obvious trends like mobile and social media.

We’ll look at general business trends and general consumer trends. We’ll conclude each section with a probing, strategic question for you to ask your management team so you can integrate these trends into your own planning.

I’ve selected these five trends after reviewing the work and predictions of dozens of futurists, thought leaders and strategy organizations. You’ll find longer lists of trends that I’ve pulled from – lists that I’ve found particularly compelling — sprinkled throughout this article.

Why are macro trends such a crucial input into your company’s positioning strategy?

Once you’ve figured out who your customers are…their deep needs…what industry you operate in…and what you do best that’s unique, it is time to look “outside”. This means understanding the world your strategy will have to plug into.

And the world has never been more volatile or dynamic. Technology, socioeconomic, cultural and geopolitical events are creating great opportunities and significant risks to every one of us.

For this post, I’m not going to talk about the obvious trends like mobile and social media.

We’re going to focus here on five big, global, macro trends – the trends that will affect how and where people live and work. We’ll look at general business trends and general consumer trends. We’ll conclude each section with a probing, strategic question for you to ask your management team so you can integrate these trends into your own planning.

I’ve selected these five trends after reviewing the work and predictions of dozens of futurists, thought leaders and strategy organizations. You’ll find longer lists of trends that I’ve pulled from – lists that I’ve found particularly compelling — sprinkled throughout this article.

Trend #1: The Barbell Economy

Industries are moving to a barbell-like structure, with a few giant global corporations on one side and lots of smaller businesses in niches on the other end. The number of mid-sized businesses – in the middle of the barbell – will continue to decline, often acquired by the giants. The good news is that small businesses will flourish and grow in importance due to their ability to service niche markets. It will take little to no capital to enter these niche markets. Expect partnering with giant entities to be on the rise, helping little guys gain global reach.

Probing/Strategic Question: How can you envision partnering with the biggest companies, be they customers, suppliers or competitor…and are there related micro businesses you might enter now, as an “experiment”, costing little to no capital?

Trend #2: Data Insatiability

Technology, socioeconomic, cultural and geopolitical events are creating great opportunities and significant risks to every one of us.

We are in the era of data proliferation. Data will be (or arguably already is) critical for competitive advantage. Just in the world of marketing, there is almost a limitless amount of behavioral data close at hand. According to the World Future Society predictions, human knowledge capability will continue to double every year. “Human knowledge capability” is the quantity of available knowledge multiplied by the power of technology to process that knowledge. And with the popularity of cloud computing still expanding, access won’t be a problem. Statisticians and data analysts will be in strong demand.

Organizing data…helping to visualize it…and interpreting data’s meaning will be high value work. Anyone working in marketing services today has a platform to make the leap into data services. Also, if you find you have customers that cluster in specific industries, you can look to acquire databases and analytical tools to provide new services to those customers.

Probing/Strategic Question: How can you hone your company’s data skills, start to invest in databases and find a niche of expertise in data analysis and presentation?

Figure 1: The Intuit 2020 Report: Twenty Trends that Will Shape the Next Decade



Trend #3: Urbanomics

While this phrase was coined by trendwatching.com, most futurists and prognosticators forecast increased opportunities fueled by the growth of urban areas. Intuit forecasts that almost 60% of the world’s population will live in cities and suburbs by 2020, with more than 50 cities inhabited by over 5,000,000 people. This “new localism” will create a new way of life; people will have a reason to invest in the places they live. Futurists predict that people will be establishing stronger ties with family, friends and community, creating local economic development in new ways.

Urban consumers also tend to be more prone to trying out new products and services.

Probing/Strategic Question: How can you continue to invest in your local community in new and interesting and long-lasting ways?

Figure 2: Part one of Trendwatching.com’s (http://trendwatching.com/trends/11trends2011/) Top 11 Consumer Trends for 2011.

Trend #4: Owner-Less

You may already be feeling this, but we are rapidly moving from the “Ownership Society” to the “Rentership Society”. The key here is giving people maximum flexibility in their lives. There’s a great book that covers this and many other trends that emerged in a study of historical economic downturns. It is called “The Great Reset” http://www.harpercollins.com/books/Great-Reset/?isbn=9780061992995, by Richard Florida. If you are interested in big socio-economic shifts and how they have and will play out, I highly recommend this book.

The business opportunities that emerge from this trend include business models like fractional ownership and interesting leasing alternatives. For those of you familiar with Zipcar (http://www.zipcar.com/ — a membership service in big cities that give you access to vehicles for hourly or longer rentals — you have a sense for how this trend could play out.

This trend is also playing out via sharing websites that facilitate renting and sharing between consumers, with everything from homes to fashion, to cars (and car parking spaces).

Probing/Strategic Question: How can you streamline your business and become more nimble by owning less and sharing more?

Trend #5: Pricing Pandemonium

The flurry of special offers and socially-communicated price discounting is only going to increase. With more consumers constantly connected via mobile devices, the diversity of opportunities to distribute promotional offers will be explosive. Several related trends plug into this megatrend: Mobility, group buying, local-ness, flash sales, review sites, price comparison engines and dynamic pricing will all contribute to this discounting rage.

If you haven’t used – or been sent – a “Groupon”, check out the website http://www.groupon.com/learn.

Also, check out figure 4, from a research study (http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2010/3882/facebook-users-like-brands-for-discounts-social-badging on why consumers choose to “like” a specific company or brand on Facebook. The number one reason? “To receive discounts and promotions.”

Probing/Strategic Question: Is there room to become an expert – for your customers — in this new arena of distributing offers and pricing promotions?

Figure 3: Why Consumers “Like” a Company or Brand

Figure 4: Part Two of Trendwatching.com’s (http://trendwatching.com/trends/11trends2011/) 11 Crucial Trends for 2011:

Summary

With the shifts going on in business models, in socioeconomic factors and in technology, now is a great time to ask yourself: “How well is your business positioned to be a net gainer – and to be a growth company — in the years to come?”

These questions are all designed to prompt reflection. And introspection. All are designed to get you thinking about positioning your business with more clarity… getting to a more successful path to the future. To plot a course… to stand apart from competitors… to find the growth opportunities that are perfect for your business.

Each of these questions has played a role in hundreds of successful positioning and repositioning assignments I’ve been involved with over the last twenty plus years. That includes companies’ large, medium, and small, or those just starting up.

There is a deeper dive for each of these questions, but here is a summary of what they are and how to answer them.

Question #1: What Business Are You In?

This sounds like a simple question, but has huge implications, depending on how you answer it. When people ask you, “what do you do”, how do you answer?

Are you in the consulting business?

Are you in the manufacturing business?

The communications management business?

The business services industry?

The “right answer” for you will:

• Create a perception for your customers, employees and vendors that determines what you are “eligible” to sell, make and buy;
• Determine who is most likely to be in your competitive set (and your customer’s consideration set);
• Determine whether you are the leading player, a top 3 player or an afterthought in your segment of that business;
• Guide how you configure your resources and where you make investments.

The most cited example in the history of business was asked this way: “Are you in the railroad business or the transportation business”? Apply this type of questioning to your current industry description and see where you land.

Question #2: Who is your Core Customer…Really?

When we say “core customer”, this isn’t necessarily a list of your customers today… or even your largest customers. This is a description of the customer who sits in your sweet spot. The ones who you serve incredibly well, who most appreciate your offering… and who provide the best opportunity for growth and profit long term.

Question #3: What is Your Unique Point of Difference?

For every successful business, there is that “one thing” for which you are most known. The one thing that you excel at, that others can’t match. Here is a great article I recently read that captures this sentiment. It is called “Real Unfair Advantages” and it describes how to find that one thing that makes you special and that competitors find nearly impossible to duplicate (think Google’s search algorithm).

Question #4: What are the Trends, What is “In the Air”?

In order to position yourself for the future, you should make a list of trends. What are thought leaders in the industry talking about? What are publishers writing about? What questions do your customers keep bringing up? This question is important to capture how you are positioned to deal with and take advantage of where business is headed.

Question #5: What are the Deep Needs of Your Customer?

When it comes to customer needs, it is easy to default to “lower prices, superior quality, or great service”. What will help you get to a more differentiated strategy is to look deeper. What are the internal issues your core customer faces when they to solve a big problem? What are the chronic problems they face in THEIR industry or lives? What problem would they pay dearly to solve, if you could solve it for them? If you just keep asking “so what does that do for them” after every question… you’ll get to a much more detailed and relevant list of deep needs.

Question #6: What Things Do You Do Really Well (what are your core competencies)?

This question, when dealt with honestly, can have a huge impact on your positioning.

Are you great at manufacturing? Or, do you and your team have outstanding selling skills? Do you get kudos for your creativity, your design and consultative skills?

In one industry where I’ve done a lot of work – the printing/graphic arts industry — there is a great deal of chatter about becoming a marketing services company. Some printing companies have “communications capabilities” in their DNA. Others are much better at “making things”. When thinking about your own business, be candid as opposed to optimistic. In the end, the place you land in positioning your business has to be anchored in credibility. You can’t expect the captain of an ocean liner to be a great pilot, just because he carries people over the ocean. But both are worthy professions.

Six questions. The answers — to any one of these questions — have big implications for where you decide to take your business. Here’s hoping you can devote some time to reflect…and react, in your path forward to future success.

For help in charting your path to differentiation and competitive success, please feel free to get in touch.