Brand Marketing News

Teens Text 5x More than Adults

MarketingCharts — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:45:32 +0000

Teens ages 12-17 send and receive a median of five times more texts per day than adult texters, according to new data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Most Adults Send 1-10 Texts Per Day Slightly more than half (51%) of adults who text send one to 10 texts per day, compared to 22% of [...] READ MORE

- MarketingCharts

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Seven Issues to Consider When Leasing a Pop Up Shop

Promo Magazine Most Recent — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:45:11 +0000

Christina Norsig, the CEO of PopUpInsider, shares seven key issues that retailers should consider before inking any kind of temporary lease

- Promo Magazine Most Recent

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Mobile Gambling Has Good Chance for Growth

MarketingCharts — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:45:32 +0000

Global growth in mobile lottery and casino wagering, as well as convenience and privacy, will spur a substantial increase in mobile gambling revenues, according to a new white paper from Juniper Research. Global Wagering to Reach $48B 'Good Odds for Mobile Gambling' findings indicate total global wagers on mobile gambling services will reach about $48 billion USD [...] READ MORE

- MarketingCharts

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Tennis Players, Golfers Dominate Top-Earning Female Athletes

MarketingCharts — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:45:32 +0000

Eight of the 10 highest-paid global female athletes between June 2009 and June 2010 played either tennis or golf, according to research by Forbes. Top Earning Female Athletes 2009-2010 1. Maria Sharapova -- Tennis - $24.5 million 2. Serena Williams -- Tennis - $20.2 million 3. Venus Williams -- Tennis - $15.4 million 4. Danica Patrick -- Racing - $12 million 5. Kim Yu-Na -- Figure [...] READ MORE

- MarketingCharts

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'Behind the Curve:' Week Ending Sept. 3, 2010

MarketingCharts — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:45:32 +0000

Below are some links to recent research news, studies and lists from the collection of items that MarketingCharts didn't get to writing up this week, but still may be worth a peek: Global Consumer Strategies for Saving Money Americans View Job Market Negatively Re-employed Workers Feel Overqualified Mobile Advertisers to Spend $1.8B on Location-based Advertising Facebook Triples Size in Mexico Mobile [...] READ MORE

- MarketingCharts

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Timberland Offers 3D View of Earthkeepers

Brandweek - News and Features — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 08:49:00 +0000

Global effort employs 3D technology, social media to tout the brand's eco-friendly apparel.

- Brandweek - News and Features

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Who's That Talking?

MediaPost | Research Brief — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 08:15:46 +0000

According to a recent Nielsen analysis of mobile use, African-Americans use the most cellphone voice minutes every month, averaging more than 1,300. Hispanics are the next most talkative group, at 826 minutes a month. And, even Asians/Pacific Islanders, with 692 average monthly minutes, talk more than Whites, who use roughly 647 voice minutes a month. READ MORE

- MediaPost | Research Brief

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IT in the Age of the Empowered Employee

Harvard Business Publishing — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 08:06:00 +0000

Incremental innovation and process improvements have always come from those closest to the problem. It's the basis of kaizen, a system where employees continually improve manufacturing processes. It's also a founding principle of Six Sigma — tap employees' relentless, incremental quality improvements.

The same is true in the way employees are harnessing consumer technologies — social, mobile, video, and cloud. They're improving how they do their jobs and solving your customer and business problems. And it's not just a few employees; it's a critical mass of employees. In a survey of more than 4,000 U.S. information workers, we found that 37% are using do-it-yourself technologies without IT's permission. LinkedIn, Google Docs, Smartsheet.com, Facebook, iPads, YouTube, Dropbox, Flipboard — the list is long and growing. Many of these scenarios are do-it-yourself projects. For example, want to ask me business questions on Facebook? Piece of cake, I'll just friend you. Personal iPhones for email, apps, and Internet access outside my clients' door? Check. Google Sites and Docs to exchange documents with partners? Sure, I can spin up a free site or IT can spend the $50/user/year and make it secure. YouTube to post fix-it-yourself videos for tough service problems? My kid's good with a Flip camera. She can film me doing the fix myself.

In all of these real cases, an employee figured out a better way to solve a customer or business problem without IT's help. Call it the consumerization of IT; call it harnessing the groundswell; call it Technology Populism. It's all the same thing: individuals harnessing readily available social, mobile, video, and cloud technology to solve customer and business problems.

In our new book, Empowered, we call these covert innovators HEROes — highly empowered and resourceful operatives. HEROes are those employees who feel empowered to solve customer problems and act resourcefully by using whatever technology they need to use. HEROes comprise 20% of the U.S. information workforce, but your industry may have many more or many fewer highly empowered and resourceful operatives.

It's all well and good to have employees solving customer problems. But chaos and rogue behavior is not okay. To identify the employee initiatives that are worth pursuing and figure out how to make them safe and enterprise-grade, your IT organization needs to get involved.

Peter Hambling, the CIO of Lloyd's of London, recently shared a story with us about Facebook and iPhone. A sales person wanted to use Facebook to talk to a client. An underwriter wanted to use a smartphone to access key account and policy information while away from their computer. The business manager and IT security professional feared the unknown and shut down both solutions.

As a CIO with business acumen, Hambling understood that he and his IT organization needed a new contract with business managers and employees that allowed him to help with technology solutions while sharing the responsibility for business risk with employees and managers. To get it done, he took the business case to the board of directors and got permission to proceed with caution and with a clear eye on the tradeoff between business value and business risk.

They didn't stop with Facebook and iPhone. They've also embedded IT staff directly into the cubicle farms of business employees; they've built innovative solutions with teams comprised of business and IT employees; they've created applications that empower employees to understand global risk through a familiar interactive map. They created a new contract with business managers and employees that gives IT professionals a place in the business.

Hambling exemplifies one of the key action items that we've discovered: Make new technology risk a business problem to be managed rather than an IT problem to be stifled. And that requires a new way of thinking and of working.

We spoke with hundreds of people when researching Empowered. In discovering their solutions to these thorny empowered technology problems, we identified a new contract that's emerging between IT, business managers, and employees. We call it the HERO Compact and it looks like this:

In the HERO Compact, there is a real give and take needed between employees, managers, and IT in this empowered era. Employees need to step up and behave responsibly (which means HR needs to be involved). Business managers need to roll up their sleeves and learn enough about the technology to understand the potential risks. (Managers also need to encourage and reward experimentation.) IT needs to assess and mitigate technology risk. And that means IT staff need to be much closer to business employees and activities so that they can help with technology platforms. And everybody must put technology-induced risk into its proper business context. It's a new set of priorities all the way around.

Are you building a new contract to empower employees to solve the problems of empowered customers? Are you running into barriers? Finding successes? In either case, I'd love to hear about it.

Ted Schadler is VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research and Coauthor of Empowered: Unleash your employees, energize your customers and transform your business.

- Harvard Business Publishing

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China's Great GDP Leap Forward

Harvard Business Publishing — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 08:06:00 +0000

I am Chinese and have been curiously watching the world react to how China's GDP has overtaken Japan's. It is now only second in size to that of the U.S. Since the Opium War in 1840, "catching up" has been a national dream of the Chinese people. In 1957, Chairman Mao called for the country to catch up with the U.K.'s steel output within 15 years. In 1995, China's steel output amounted to 95.36 million tons, beating that of the U.K. and the U.S. In 1996, China became the leading steel producer in the world, with annual output of 100 million tons. In 2005, China's GDP overtook that of the U.K.

Western countries might look at China's rise with mixed feelings. But we in China don't feel we have much reason to feel proud. Our per capita income in 2009 ranked 124th in the world at only $3,600, less than 1/10 of those in Japan and United States. China lags behind a number of countries in Latin America and Africa, not to mention the developed countries in Europe and America. And that is only the beginning of our worries.

Unhealthy Structure. GDP can be broken down into three parts: enterprises, residents, and government. From 1993 to 2007, share of government revenue in GDP has gone up from 11.68 percent to 14.81 percent and share of enterprise revenues in GDP has increased from 38.83 percent to 45.45 percent, while share of residents income in GDP has declined from 49.49 percent to 39.74 percent. Government and state-owned enterprises control huge resources in China, which reduces efficiency of resource allocation and easily leads to widespread corruption.

Widening Gap between Rich and Poor. China's Gini coefficient (a measure of income inequality) has risen to 0.49, much higher than in Europe and Japan (between 0.24 and 0.36). The combination of low per capita income and high Gini coefficient is dangerous and might cause social unrest. Furthermore, the relatively low consumption among the rich and the lack of strong middle class make it difficult for China to stimulate consumption demand as a replacement of export demand.

Lack of Transparency. According to Transparency International, China's Corruption Perception Index has declined sharply from 27th in the world in the early 1980s to 79th in 2009. But still, many companies are making profits by bribing rather than innovation and value creation.

High Environmental Cost. Pollution has become the top threat to China. The recent landslide in Zhouqu was due largely to overuse of natural resources. Most rivers in China are polluted by heavy metals or industrial wastewater. According to the National Environmental Protection Agency, the environmental pollution cost in China reached RMB512 billion in 2004, more than 3 percent of GDP. China needs to pay back for this kind of environment-destroying development.

As John K. Galbraith has put it, there are three different ways for developing countries to realize modernization:

to achieve symbolic modernization by creating superficial glory such as first-class airport, expressway, etc. This does not necessarily mean the improvement of economic welfare.
to achieve maximization of economic growth which highly depends on compulsory residential savings or exploitation of environment and resources. This will eventually lead to the polarization of wealth and income, as well as rapid environment deterioration, thus threatening the social stability.
to achieve selective economic growth which really cares for the poor, and chases only environment-friendly GDP. That's the right choice. GDP alone is very misleading. What China needs is green, reasonable, sustainable, and healthy GDP. Only if it achieves that can China claim to be second to none

Liu Shengjun (lgary@ceibs.edu) is the deputy director of the China Europe International Business School's Case Center and Lujiazui International Finance Research Center, based in Shanghai.

- Harvard Business Publishing

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Does Your Company Suffer from Process Attention Deficit Disorder?

Harvard Business Publishing — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 07:59:00 +0000

Does your organization suffer from subpar operational performance? Have your costs, response times, or reliability slipped relative to competitors or versus customer expectations?

Maybe your organization has Process Attention Deficit Disorder. If it has, symptoms will likely show up in three areas: incentives, behaviors, and organization.

Incentives. In organizations suffering from PADD, people aren't motivated financially to pay attention to process improvement. Process improvement isn't a role in the "C-Suite." It's not a path to the top. People are recognized for growing new markets, launching new products, or doing deals. The best and brightest go into marketing, sales, or finance, or they run a profit center. They don't go into process improvement. Process performance isn't measured, tied to financial results, or tied to compensation. Most measures are tactical or transactional. They do not capture the full needs of the customer or the relative health of a process. Resources are managed by functions, or markets, or products — not by processes.

Behaviors. Judging by what they spend time on and talk about, senior managers show they don't value process improvement. They don't make room for it in their communications, as they might for financial results, new product launches, deals, safety, or compliance. Senior executives don't spend time reviewing process performance, teaching about process improvement, or nurturing projects or individuals involved in it.

Organization. There is no organizational unit, or only a low-level unit, that manages processes. Without an organization, there is no power, no focal point for attention.

In my last post, I argued that many companies have tried process improvement approaches at times or in places in the organization. But few have built it into their DNA. I suggested that competing demands for executives' attention is one of five key factors that get in the way of sustained process improvement. For example, if a new leader comes to a company from GE and brings Six Sigma — as Jim McInerney did when he joined 3M — then the company may launch a process improvement program.

But the program may not outlive the leader's tenure. I told the story of Allied Signal, led by Larry Bossidy, which had great success in improving its performance through their Six Sigma program. Yet when Bossidy departed in 2000 and was replaced by Mike Bonsignore, the company dropped its Six Sigma attention to focus on a GE-Honeywell deal instead.

As the 3M and Allied Signal stories demonstrate, a leader can launch a process program and drive significant benefits. But executives can change or their attention can shift. There are always many competitors for an executive's attention. Only when process improvement is on the top management agenda can a company make the often large investments in process redesign, information technology, training and education that are required. Senior executive knowledge of his or her company's strategy is a key driver of the way that work should be designed or redesigned. Only senior management can resolve turf issues between departments and functions — issues which can torpedo cross-functional process improvement. Redesigning work from a customer's point-of-view and the ongoing pursuit of operational excellence implies changes not only in IT and processes, but also in organization, attitudes, and behaviors. The biggest execution challenge is shifting the mindsets of people within the organization. Therefore, any major process improvement program must have the active engagement of the top team.

In my research, I have found that one of the main causes of Process Attention Deficit Disorder is that the topic of "process" — how work is organized — is not part of the background, education, or career advancement of most executives. Senior managers don't know what process improvement is or don't believe it matters. Senior executives believe they are responsible for strategy and achieving quarterly (or monthly or weekly) financial results and growth. Middle managers, supervisors, and staff manage how work gets done.

In a magnified culture of personality, where senior leaders draw 500 times what front line workers earn, too many leaders see themselves, implicitly or explicitly, as superheroes. In the tension between the personal and the institutional, many leaders see themselves as personifying the organization, rather than serving as stewards. In this guise, they often don't see the value of investing in strengthening core capabilities, institutionalizing process competence, or building innovative cultures. Their egos get in the way of them seeing this. They focus on themselves and their strategy, not their company's operational capabilities. By thinking only of their results now, they pay less attention to their firm's outcomes later.

Please let me know what you have seen capture the attention of leaders. What is it about the nature of process improvement that turns off most senior executives?

Brad Power (bradfordpower@gmail.com) is a consultant and researcher in process innovation. His current research is on sustaining attention to process management — making improvement and adaptation a habit (even fun?). He is currently conducting research with the Lean Enterprise Institute.

- Harvard Business Publishing

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Managing Older Workers

Harvard Business Publishing — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 17:59:00 +0000

Featured Guest: Peter Cappelli, Wharton School professor and coauthor of Managing the Older Worker: How to Prepare for the New Organizational Order.

Download this podcast

- Harvard Business Publishing

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Epsilon hires Doubrava as VP-digital strategy

BtoB Magazine - News Feeds — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:25:00 +0000

Dallasand#8212;Epsilon, a marketing services company, has hired Michael Doubrava as VP-digital strategy. Doubrava was previously online solutions architect at DataLogix Inc. READ MORE

- BtoB Magazine - News Feeds

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Vanguard honored by BMA as Communicator of the Year

BtoB Magazine - News Feeds — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:23:00 +0000

New Yorkand#8212;Investment management company Vanguard Group is being recognized by the Business Marketing Association of New York City with that organizationand#8217;s Communicator of the Year award. READ MORE

- BtoB Magazine - News Feeds

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Xerox to launch largest brand campaign in decades

BtoB Magazine - News Feeds — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:21:00 +0000

Norwalk, Conn.and#8212;Xerox Corp. will introduce an integrated brand campaign on Sept. 7, designed to shift its positioning from a product company to more of a services-oriented company, said Xerox CMO Christa Carone. READ MORE

- BtoB Magazine - News Feeds

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Rubicon: Digital ad spending grows 47%

BtoB Magazine - News Feeds — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:21:00 +0000

Los Angelesand#8212;Online display advertising expenditures grew almost by half over the first six months of the year, compared with the same period in 2009, according to a new report from ad technology company Rubicon Project. READ MORE

- BtoB Magazine - News Feeds

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Allergan drops FDA lawsuit as part of off-label settlement

Latest articles from Medical Marketing and Media News — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:33:02 +0000

Before Allergan could begin settlement negotiations with the Department of Justice (DOJ) -- which ended with an agreement to pay $600 million on Wednesday -- DOJ required the Botox manufacturer to first withdraw a First Amendment lawsuit against the FDA filed last October.

- Latest articles from Medical Marketing and Media News

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Pharma (Slowly) Goes Digital

Brandweek - News and Features — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 10:43:00 +0000

Online spending is expected to increase 10 percent this year.

- Brandweek - News and Features

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Meetings offer reps a shot at 'no-see' docs: survey

Latest articles from Medical Marketing and Media News — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 09:42:14 +0000

While the number of physicians open to pharmaceutical sales calls is shrinking, a new survey suggests some venues are more hospitable to industry than others.

- Latest articles from Medical Marketing and Media News

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Landlines And Television Sets Losing Importance

MediaPost | Research Brief — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 08:15:12 +0000

According to a new nationwide survey from the Pew Research Center's Social and Demographic Trends project, reported by Paul Taylor and Wendy Wang with Lee Rainie and Aaron Smith, only 42% of Americans say they consider the television set to be a necessity. Last year, this figure was 52%, and in 2006, it was 64%. After occupying center stage in the American household for much of the 20th century, says the report, two of the grand old luminaries of consumer technology, the television set and the landline telephone, are suffering from a sharp decline in public perception that they are necessities of life. READ MORE

- MediaPost | Research Brief

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Apple Goes Social With Ping

Brandweek - News and Features — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 07:06:00 +0000

New social network serves as a promo platform for artists and a music discovery vehicle.

- Brandweek - News and Features

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