Whole Foods redux

Anyone tracking my comments (here and in public) on the Whole Foods acquisition controversy know that I believe the following:

1. Whole Foods is a grocery store, and small one compared to Safeway, Kroger, Albertson's or even Wal-Mart.
2. Even with Wild Oats as part of Whole Foods, the organic supermarket is small -- er, um -- potatoes.
3. The notion that the acquisition is anti-competitive is ludicrous.
4. On the other hand, the fact that people THINK it might be anticompetitive is proof that Whole Foods blue-ocean differentiation model was successful. They've created a new "category" of supermarket by exploiting and increasing demand for a new way of looking at food and groceries.

At what point, pundits should ask, is a "niche" actually a new sector? I would argue that this happens only when the niche has so redefined the sector that customers of that niche would never view companies outside that niche as viable choices.

Do you think that Safeway, Kroger, Albertson's and so on want to be viewed as an alternative to Whole Foods? You bet. David Scheffman, who provided expert testimony said that Whole Food customers will also buy organic products from other grocery stores, "which are increasingly offering such alternatives," although, in my opinion, not yet substantially enough. (See here for a nice short article on the legal and market details of this story.)

The issue raised that the judge should review pricing information from markets where Whole Foods and Wild Oats compete I believe is ultimately a moot one. The market principal would appear to be that, absent any local competition in organic groceries, one of these two companies would raise prices, indicating that more competition is better for the consumer. Well, this is true, but if that's so, then every "region" dominated by a certain retailer is a market that is unfair to consumers (where "region" is fuzzy, defined perhaps by the radius of the market's willingness to travel for products). As a practical matter, this impossible to enforce through regulation. In fact, one of the functions of a marketing analytics consultant to is determine the effectiveness of pricing strategies for national and international chains based on the proximity of competitors.

In short, consumers do indeed have choices. We shouldn't punish Whole Foods or Wild Oats for choosing a niche that has gained meaningful traction with consumers, thereby building their resistance to the less thoughtfully prepared/distributed products at the major chains.

This is not just a US phenomenon. There has been interesting analysis recently (see the Economist) on Wal-Mart's struggles in the UK point to a similar trend, I should point out. Tesco, a legendary grocery chain in the UK, is selling more organic products. This skews well to older, less price-sensitive consumers, and to younger, more health-conscious consumers. Wal-Mart's UK presence is represented by ASDA, which has until recently been pushing its every day, low price strategy.

But it's not been working for them. Some say that ASDA will eventually try to compete by offering organic products, but the key issue is the ASDA brand positioning. They will have to run away from "every day, low prices" as the real estate they own in the UK brain. They will have to become a different kind of grocery retailer. And the question is, does the Wal-Mart operational advantage really work for this kind of market positioning? Isn't organic all about local produce, higher costs of sourcing, smaller purchase lots, and so on? Wal-Mart is not geared for that.

Plus, Wal-Mart isn't culturally focused on a localizable customer experience. My fellow blogger Arun Kottolli said last year, "ASDA competes in grocery segment and in this segment ASDA has got it wrong. ASDA stores are modeled after a big store format. I visited ASDA today at Burnt Oak and the greens were a bit old & withered. The fresh ready-to-eat sandwiches were placed far away from the cash counter - making it unattractive for a casual customer. The merchandize [sic] is no way near the range & quality that as in the US."

Note that the merchandising is counter to creating a positive, branded customer experience. First, ASDA should want people to instantly associate it with gorgeous, local and organically grown produce. Whole Foods' first 10 seconds is dramatically better than ASDA's. Second, it is a common strategy for retailers (IKEA, for example) to force consumers to take the longest reasonable (or unreasonable) path around the store to maximize their purchase on that visit. ASDA may have put its prepared sandwiches far from the register on purpose.

What message does that send?

Of course, it may well be that ASDA doesn't care to improve that particular component of its customer experience. After all, you cannot and should not maximize customer pleasure at every point. (You can't afford to, and if you did you would be, interestingly, much less memorable for the experience points you want to own.) So let's grant that they are not looking to be remembered as a "convenient" place to shop.

Then, what will they stand for? ASDA (and therefore Wal-Mart) will be one to watch in the next twelve months.

Social Entrepreneurs

Should companies be built on socially conscientious values, or on a profit motive? What happens when the two converge? Calvert Venture Partners, a Washington DC-based fund manager offering 40 funds, believes a lot of money can be made investing in "green" companies, because the market is demanding them. See Calvert.com.

But the story is deeper, I think. Companies over time will need to consider how to appeal to the values of their markets, not just to the market's demand for a "unique selling proposition".

I've been doing a lot of research on this topic because it affects everything I do in the CRM and customer experience management area, especially in developing definitions of brand values and protecting companies from cultural and product liability risks.

Here' an interesting link you can check out on the topic, to see who's doing what, and why, in the area of socially responsible capitalism.

Whoa

"Seven blunders of the world that lead to violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principle."
-Mahatma Gandhi

Five Forces of CEM

Customer experience management is a misnomer, in the sense that a customer experiences your company or branded product within a context that you only partially control. But certainly it's worth looking at what creates these perception and decision-driving contexts.

Hence, I've developed a complement to Porter's Five Forces, which I call the Five Forces of CEM. (They are a cornerstone of CEM strategy that I teach in seminars around the world. Next up: London. Then Hong Kong.)

Among those five forces are networks of trusted opinion represented by friends, experts and -- to some extent -- bloggers. Another set of forces are trusted networks of FACTS -- libraries, ePinions (the pricing side), CNET and so on. Well, facts and opinion blur. And nowhere do they blur so mightily as on wikis, which support the editing and publishing of content from often anonymous and opposing authors.

Hence the recent controversy surrounding volunteers editors of Wikipedia content. These editors are not interested in facts. They want to change them, or hide them. And when these editors represent corporate interests, they obviously are trying to influence these forces that impact customer perceptions and decision making.

What they are forgetting is my rule of MIB. Manage what you can and should. Influence what you cannot manage -- or should not manage. And when bad things happen, balance what is said with an authentic response (based perhaps on facts, or contrition, for example. Sometime you have to "open the kimono" (as crisis communications experts call it) and show corporate details that have not been scrubbed clean.)

What corporations such as Diebold and Fox News have done is to leave fingerprints on edits that deleted or altered factual material on Wikipedia. Even if you dispute a fact on Wikipedia (or anywhere else), as a corporation your behavior, if detected, will tell your customers more about who you REALLY are than anything you claim otherwise. So, Diebold and Fox thought they could manage history. At best, they could only influence it, which they should have done by leaving alone battles they could not win, or posting opposing points of view on the online community-driven encyclopedia. Now that their manipulation of Wikipedia entries has been proven, they're left having to balance out the bad news.

Here is an interesting bit on the topic from Keith Oberman, who interviews a Wired editor about what all this means.

Diet Coke. Mostly water.

Excellent link at the NYTimes blog Freakonomics on Coke's new ad for Diet Coke: 99 Percent Water. 

Check out the link here.

That ad is oh-so-grist-for-my-mill.

Pepsi has been kicking Coke's proverbial heinie (sp?) over bottled water. Pepsi "gets" that bottled water can be branded and can sell at high prices but that it doesn't need to be PEPSI branded (in fact, better if it's not). Coke dragged its feet for years embracing bottled water because they felt they needed somehow to "Coke" brand anything they sold. 

The difference between the two companies: Coke thinks it controls its brand, and that it is the only one that creates brand equity; Pepsi realizes that brand equity is in the eyes of the beholder. That's you and me, and we want to put quality stuff in our bodies because of (name the top ten trendy reasons, pulled from anti-brand sentiment, natural food obsession, healthy/active self-image, hey-I'm-too-old-to-love-cola, etc.). Note: this is probably a cultural difference between the two companies, driven in part from Coke's long position as number one in the market, and Pepsi's long position as the challenger. The consequences of the cultures: Coke does things like New Coke, and Pepsi continues to erode Coke's marketshare by redefining the terms of engagement and looking for market preferences, not just how to sell more Pepsi.

Now, this article points out something really cool: the shift in what is acceptable advertising, driven by a shift in how people perceive WATER.

NOTE: Yelp shout-out to Chloe F (an elite Yelper), who tipped me off to this article. If you're not on Yelp and you're in the US, check it out.

Tag Cloud for a Global Non-Profit

One of my biggest clients, for which I did a comprehensive market analysis, is a global non-profit. We did a comprehensive perceived customer value survey that included free-form text to capture comments on any topic the respondent wanted to talk about.

Here's the tag-cloud for those free-form comments. Even though the organization thinks of itself as a "global non-profit", where do you think its members really want to get value? What kind of value? Interestingly, the weightings in this cloud confirm the survey results. The term "difficult" clues the client into challenges faced by respondents. The terms "meetings", "local", "training", and "education" show that a lot of value is created locally. This may also be an opportunity for the client to offer distance learning, but that would need to be investigated to make a solid business case.

Finally, as a side note, the word "survey" was accompanied mostly by comments such as "this survey was too long". The challenge with designing surveys that are strategic -- not tactical -- is that you often need a more complete view of each respondent. And you need far more respondents than normal, because you seek insight into an unknown number of value-driven segments. Other alternatives can include conjoint analysis.

activities (5) area (9) articles (4) attend (7) available (4) aware (4) become (4) better (4) career (6) certification (4) chapter (15) comments (6) committee (6) company (9) compliance (5) costs (4) courses (9) currently (4) development (9) difficult (6) educational (13) engineering (8) etc (5) events (9) expensive (7) expert (6) fda (4) focus (5) forward (5) full (4) general (5) helpful (4) important (4) increase (6) industry (18) information (11) involved (6) job (8) less (6) local (19) management (4) manufacture (6) meetings (11) member (11) membership (7) money (4) needs (5) networking (6) opportunities (5) organization (4) others (4) paper (4) participate (6) people (8) pharma (5) pharmaceutical (9) please (4) presentations (6) product (4) professionals (5) programs (6) provide (4) publications (5) quality (7) questions (7) really (4) regulatory (4) seminars (10) society (4) specific (4) start (6) support (11) survey (11) think (10) training (19) understand (5) useful (5) vendors (4) work (11) years (5)

created at TagCrowd.com

Customer Experience Management - Paris

Krygyzstan. Where the heck is that?

It abuts Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. That's where. Oh, and it shares a border with far western China.

This part of Eurasia has been independent of the USSR/Russia since the early 1990s and, according to the great CIA World Factbook, is about the size of South Dakota. Its gross domestic product is hovering around $10billion USD (that comes to just over $2000 USD per capita, PPP), and it exports cotton, tobacco and wool, as well as some harder goods for industry and a few things, like meat, that perish and so are used in the region.

There's no question that the Kyrgyz people and fashion are both solid and a bit exotic to many of us in the West. My wife visited there a while ago and witnessed a sixtieth anniversary celebration of the end of World War II, when Kyrgyzstan's citizens fought for the USSR against Nazi Germany. Old men of Russian and Eurasian descent, in tightly fitting military uniforms, proudly marched through downtown Bishkek. Their families, dressed mostly in clean, practical Western clothing, proudly lined the streets. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren, beatific, lovely, welcoming and joyful, dotted the parade route. (The photos Angela took are breathtaking.)

You can find Eurasian jewelry in many European countries at low prices. And you can find Eurasian wool caps and cotton clothing at low prices. So, whatever "exoticism" that might exist in their exports are getting discounted in the markets and therefore in the minds of buyers. They're just not going to pay a lot for stuff from Kyrgyzstan.

Then, there's "Kyrgyzstan in Paris." See the photo above. The styles in the shop window are definitely Eurasian. The materials, the patterns. They are exactly like the outfits worn in and out of Bishkek. That's why I stopped short when I saw the store in Paris -- the merchandise in the window was identical to what I'd seen in Angela's photos from her trip.

But there's a bit of a difference with these clothes. They're all made in France.

And the shop, A La Bonne Renomée, sells them for a pretty penny. (Un charmant centime-euro?)

So, what's the product? What's the brand? Is it enough to say on the tag that one of these beautiful items is "Made in France by French artisans," which is my best recollection of what the tags actually say? Even if these items are virtually identical in pattern and styling to actual Kyrgyz clothing?

This raises to me the very interesting fact that the value of a luxury brand is often tied to a designer or to a "fashion country" (most European luxury goods originate in France or Italy).

If you walk into this shop, set on a fashionable corner in Paris' bustling Marais district (at 26 rue Vieille du Temple), you'll find all the offerings beautiful, exotic, suggestive of Eurasia. The merchandising is gorgeous -- hardwood blond floors, airy high ceilings, warm but clear spotlighthing. It is a Paris boutique. But you'll definitely "feel" as though most of these products are just Eurasia put through a Paris fashion filter.

What aspects of fashion designers or "luxury countries" create value in the products? In A La Bonne Renomée, the only significant difference between Kyrgyz clothing and what it sells is that they made them in France. Hence, we learn, you can charge a heck of a lot more. (More than would be expected from the differential in labor costs.)

I'm obsessed with the topic and have done a lot of research, on the ground and in journal articles, about the role that country origin plays in product and pricing perceptions. (The recent TRIUM/NYU events in Florence focused in part on the luxury market. It was a feast of ideas.)

As the world goes increasingly global (Kyrgyzstan was the first Eurasian country admitted to the World Trade Organization), and borders become more fluid, a product in one country will have its "country of origin" effect diminished. In fact, many products are so replete with parts pulled from all over the world that it's hard to say which country is really the originator.

Nevertheless, nevertheless. Country branding has a value that will persist beyond any reasonable analysis of a product's parts. This is good, particularly when that value is real (see my article on Camembert below). If your county's wines really ARE better, or at least unique and noteworthy, being able to charge more can have a measurable affect on your balance of trade, and the value of your currency, and bond prices.



LEFT IMAGE: A bargain-priced bijouterie on the Right Bank in Paris, selling authentic Eurasian jewelry.

And so, over time, I predict countries will spend more and more money branding themselves. And, I hope, they will also look inside their borders for what is truly special, and will preserve it.

As for A La Bonne Renomée, I love their stuff, and their vision for making Central Asian clothing fashionable. After all, part of what makes fashion so pricey is that it says something about YOU -- it's classier than wearing a bumper sticker on your car that says, "Uzbekistan ROCKS", and more comfortable than a tattoo that says, "This land is Eurasia, this lands is my Asia."

You can check out the boutique's site (in English) here. [Si vous etes francophone, voila un lien pour un blog avec une article en archive selon le magasin. C'est un blog tres sympa et intelligent, mail l'auteur a installé des plug-ins pour les pop-ups sexuel, donc fait attention.]

McKinsey on CRM Success Factors

Here's a snippet from that addictive ITfacts.biz site. (Well, addictive to me.)

McKinsey Consulting conducted a survey of companies boasting successful CRM implementation with the goal to define the factors of CRM success. Correct timing led the ranking of the top reasons for successful CRM implementation. Modules launched at intervals that promoted adoption by users - 79%. All affected business units provided input during planning - 69%. Users appropriately trained to use the new system - 67%. Cultural shift addressed - 59%.

More here. You'll have to be a subscriber to McKinsey Quarterly to read the article. What? You're not a subscriber? Then why have I had that link down on the right for a year??? :)

A good number of my clients, and at least two companies I consult for, have had a hard time convincing folks that CRM is more than contact management on steroids. For a globally-active, enterprise level CRM consultant, this is just shocking. CRM is where the rubber ought to meet the road in creating a competitive value proposition and executing it operationally, strategically, analytically -- at every touch point. Everyone at your organization should be involved in the CRM strategy and implementation. Unless you're just doing salesforce automation, in which case all of your competitors will eat your lunch.

If CRM is just contact management on steroids, then why are the best implementations correlated with a culture shift? Why would everyone need to provide input? If you're beginning to think that CRM is necessary, you should also be thinking that it is transformative. Or that it ought to be.

One quick example: Have you mapped the moments of truth your customers experience with you? No? Then how can you develop processes, technology and training to make sure you meet or exceed their expectations at those moments? Isn't that really where your organization's value is created or destroyed?

And what do these considerations have to do with contact management? I suppose you are starting to see that CRM is a not just important, but that it's a very big deal in creating market value. Or that it ought to be.

Now, please feel free to go ahead and use CRM software as a sales automation tool -- or to communicate to prospects. Just make sure that, when you bring in new customers, you aren't putting them into a meat grinder made up of poor processes, misaligned incentives, and garbage technology. Or else you're just annoying a larger group of people who will happily talk ill of you and then go to your competitors the next time.

SO.

Is CRM just contact management on steroids?

Five CRM Trends for 2007

Hey, want to save a lot of time investigating CRM systems? Want to know what's creating competitive advantage in customer strategies? You could ask me. Or you could go to this link and check out what Search CRM thinks. (Or, you could do that, and then ask me whether I agree.) Here's the top-of-mind summary from the link, but check out the link to explore more:

1. Top 15 CRM vendors, emerging trends revealed: ISM released its annual rankings of the top vendors for small and midsized business (SMB) and enterprise CRM in March, and while the names are familiar, the market is seeing change. According to the report by the Bethesda, Md.-based consultancy, analytical tools, mobile offerings and Software as a Service (SaaS) trends are driving changes.
2. CRM software rankings tell a familiar tale: Siebel and SAP remain the leading enterprise CRM products, but midmarket players like Salesforce.com, RightNow and Microsoft are gaining ground, Forrester Research found in a February report. The firm predicts the market for CRM software and services will reach $10.9 billion by 2010, up from $8.4 billion this year.

3. Gartner ranks customer service software: Gartner's April Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Service Contact Centers found a fragmented marketplace. Only Siebel made the leader's quadrant, while Microsoft and Salesforce.com were named as visionaries. There still isn't one vendor that has created a full suite for customer service needs.

4. Is SAP losing the CRM usability race?: At last year's Sapphire conference, SAP announced a revamped user interface, but it is still not widely available. Meanwhile, CRM competitors continue to focus on usability. SAP's CRM roadmap is still not clear to many users.

5. Improving the customer experience: Call centers making an emotional connection: An increasing focus on the customer experience is driving call centers to improve customer satisfaction by identifying and measuring customer emotions. Call center agent training and carefully crafted customer surveys can improve the emotional connection with customers, but the business and corresponding technology is still in its infancy.

I'd like to comment at least on Number 5. The biggest challenge for any company moving forward will be coming up with an integrated way to measure, monitor and improve their customers' perceptions of the company's brand. Analytics in CRM are big, but naturally their being driven by sales and/or decision support. They are not being used as effectively or comprehensively in true voice of the customer (VOC) initiatives.

I'm not depressed about this lack of tools and enterprise commitment to what is essentially the core function of a business, viz., to create and improve a relevant, profitable and sustainable value proposition -- using facts. First, it means a lot more work for me.

Second, my clients only have to do a little bit of this kind of work (customer strategy development, VOC initiatives including customer satisfaction programs, market research) to be incredibly successful. To say that customer analytics is a growth area is to say that early adopters can get a big lead. If you can create a great customer experience by aligning people, process, technology, communications and social network conversations, you're going to win, because so few companies have figured out the power of these tools and approaches. It's the Wild West, baby ... tighten your saddle and pull down your hat.

Turkish Lemons, Belgian Potatoes

Two big megatrends are going to battle with each other, but neither will win: bigger distribution systems within markets such as NAFTA and the EU; and a demand for quality, local, AUTHENTIC products. 

One of my favorite BBC bloggers talks a bit about the variations in produce quality across the EU (and almost-EU, i.e., Turkey). Click here for Mark Mardell's piece on lemons and potatoes.

Lots of research has been conducted lately on customer perceptions of the national and local character/provenance of products. Anyone for Chinese toothpaste? Maybe not for a while. Anyone for Chilean wine? Maybe so! 

Such perceptions directly affect pricing and marketing strategies. They will also affect policy. 

My wife talks about a story she read, which I haven't looked into, concerning the AOC (appelation d'origine controlée) requirements for Camembert cheese. AOC guidelines are used to determine whether a product can legitimately associate itself with a region in France -- the implication, of course, is that the guidelines define what is "authentically" French. 

Apparently, some Camembert makers want to broaden their distribution of the product, and they're concerned the cheese will spoil as it travels increasingly far from the source. So they want to pasteurize the product -- verboten, in France. (Well, I shouldn't say verboten, since that's German. Il est interdit. Defense de le faire. Vous etes fou. Etc.)

And there's the conflict: if Camembert becomes pasteurized, will it be the same cheese? Will it taste worse? Will it go the way of the ... dare I say it ... Belgian potato? A sad day, if so. After all, it was the Belgian potato that gave us French fries.

[UPDATE: Here's a link to a blog posting on the issue, which quotes an archived New York Times article.]

Just a cool link!

It doesn't take much data to give you an idea of what's going on -- if you get the right data. I'm working on an article concerning CRM analytics. In the middle of doing that, I found this Very Cool Link. Using a visualization method remotely resembling Hollywood's motion capture, you can adjust how a series of dots move on the screen to make a man or a woman do something ... with variations you can control. 

Intrigued? Click!

(Safe for all ages.) 

WobbleFlix?

As part of the CEM certification course I help teach, we look at how channels have unique interaction characteristics that can create strategic advantage. Netflix offers DVD rentals online, with a rental queue. Blockbuster was traditionally a brick-and-mortar location. 

Netflix has more titles than your local Blockbuster. You don't have to leave your house to choose your next movie. Or to get it. Sure, there's a delay (but Amazon.com has gotten us used to this ... ).

Netflix as a result has been growing gangbusters, while Blockbuster was feeling the heat. Then they got into the online business. We go through very careful analysis of the site experiences and churn rates for online customers at each firm. Things were looking good for Blockbuster's strategy.

Except that the board, and the stockholders, felt that Blockbuster's investments were just too costly. Profits plummeted while they acted like a growth-obsessed startup instead of the cash cow they had been. CEO? Fired. New CEO has a Southland Corporation background, all retail and supply chain. 

Ah, now we come to today. 

Netflix, hot on the heels of Blockbuster's new CEO, is actually reeling a bit. But it's because they've lost some growth momentum to Blockbuster's combined online/retail model. Rent online, return to your local store (not all stores are participating.)

The saga continues. Will Blockbuster continue to pick away at Netflix? Or is the new CEO a signal that Blockbuster doesn't want to compete online?

Check out the Netflix earnings story here .

Mashups, no longer cutting edge?

I've actually been lecturing on Mashups lately -- did a gig at the World Bank, and it's part of my Customer Experience Management talks now. My argument is basically this. With AJAX at the front end allowing customers to see and interact with data stores from different sources, and with the enterprise's ability to aggregate, recombine and supplement its own data incrementally, all at low cost, then the only thing keeping a company from letting customers manage their own experiences is ... nothing. Mashups are here. The question is, what kind of access can you give your customers to your data -- crossed with things like Flickr, Google Maps, and so on -- that will build your brand?

If you don't think giving customers this level of control and transparent access to key data is a good idea, feel free to maintain that opinion, whilst your competitors beat the socks off of you in the market. :)

And, hey, here's a great link listing some new mashups. See if you can imagine something similar for your business.

Democratic Tag Clouds

This may seem off topic from global CRM issues, but bear with me.

Pollster.com posted an analysis recently of the language used by Democratic candidates in a Spring debate. The analysis was represented as tag clouds. (Janet Harris, a friend of Pollster.com, posted the analysis. I think but I'm not sure that this is the same Janet Harris who founded and runs Upstream Analysis, a consultancy that does media monitoring.) Tag clouds are most often used to represent the relative popularity of words on a given topic by making popular words larger and/or heavier in typeface. Common words such as "the" and "and" can be removed.

In fact, some services don't actually look at the words, but at the way people like you and me tag them. Britney Spears might be the phrase, but "doofus" might be the tag applied to her by some number of people. If you doubt that people would be so rude in tagging content, check out the user tags describing Britney Spears albums on Amazon.com. (When folks like you and me tag things, those tags make up a "folksonomy" -- not a taxonomy.)

Check out Janet's analysis here, and then come back for the global CRM point. [UPDATE: In the interests of bipartisanshipnessicity, here's a link to a Republican debate tag cloud.]

(fingers thrumming on the table)

OK, you back? Interesting, huh?

OK, the idea is this. When determining your value proposition in a given local market for your products and services, you had better get some savvy market intelligence, especially about how your target audiences will value/assess your offering. You can do focus groups, surveys ... and you can actually get prospects and customers to tag your offerings on your home page.

If you look at these tags across cultures, what do you think you'll discover? Will it matter? Will you be able to act on it?

If you doubt that tag clouds, presented to your chief marketing and sales people, won't make an impact, take a look again at Janet's analysis, and pretend you are a campaign strategist for Chris Dodd (Senator from Connecticut, and a decent guy from all accounts, including from personal experience). You want to bet that Senator Dodd has already seen this information?

The trick always is to find out what your market thinks and feels about you. If you can, exploit the power of the Internet to give you that insight: consider tag clouds.

Hey, and here's something cool: a tag cloud for this blog posting:

analysis applied bear blogs candidates clouds com common crm debate democratic doofus fact fingers folks friend given global harris heavier http janet language larger making monitoring number ok people php pollster popular posted relative removed represent services spears spring sure table tag things think thrumming topic typeface upstream used words

created at TagCrowd.com

Seven Consumer Trends, and the Empowered Consumer

The megatrends I keep in mind are these:

1. The internet is empowering more people each day. They buy smarter, share more and redefine what matters in their online interactions.

2. The network effect that comes from connectedness makes the first trend non-linear and increasing.

3. Businesses that want to outperform the market will leverage the first two trends.

But ... these are three trends. Where are the seven trends promised in the header to this post? Here, in this incredibly great summary of consumer (read: internet user) trends that really matter, by Reinier Evers of trendwatching.com. Don't just read it, print it and tape it to your desktop.

Whole Foods and the FTC

Whole Foods in the United States is the leading "natural foods" grocer. (You can check its stock performance here.)

Its entire brand promise and experience have created a new kind of grocery store. In fact, their impending acquisition of Wild Oats may be blocked by the US Federal Trade Commissions because it might represent a monopoly of the organic grocery segment that Whole Foods helped define and grow.

To say that mega-grocery chains such as Safeway and Kroger do not pose a competitive force in this market is to say that Whole Foods has executed a blue ocean strategy very well by turning this segment into its own sector -- at least that's got to be what the FTC is assuming. Whole Foods' market cap is currently about 5.65 billion USD. Safeway's market cap is three times that. And Krogers' is four times bigger. So, lowly Whole Foods is a monopolistic threat ONLY if you consider it the dominant player in a whole new sector. (If you want to see graphically how much a non-threat Whole Foods really is, just compare it to Safeway, as in this Yahoo Finance chart.)

It's a problem they've created inadvertently by redefining the grocery store concept using superbly all the five forces of CEM – except one.

The current controversy with the FTC is partly driven by revelation about Whole Foods’ CEO John Mackey having used a pseudonym on a blog to trash his competition. Of course the Securities and Exchange Commission wants to know if this noise affects the acquisition materially. (UPDATE: Markey apologizes.)

But the big risk to Whole Foods is the sheer ineptness of the CEO in handling his blog strategy. He didn't realize that the blogosphere is a medium of influence, not control. (My acronym for how companies should strategically use the five forces of CEM is MIB: Manage what you can, influence everything you cannot manage, and balance any of the stuff that is totally out of your control.) Mr. Mackey did not take into account that everything put on a blog is subject to blogosphere rules, which generally skew to favor transparency and non-commercial communications. Oops.

(If you want my PDF on the five forces of CEM, just email me.)

NetSuite and the iPhone

It didn't take long for NetSuite to crack the iPhone ... any hip enterprise iPhone user can now access data from NetSuite 2007. Wait, not just data ... the iPhone user can employ NetSuite's user interface, because they have strong (although not perfect) support for Safari, the browser Apple has included in the iPhone. This includes the Javascript and XML support provided by Safari to enable AJAX applications.

The brilliance of the NetSuite/iPhone integration has yet to be truly appreciated, but think of the world about 12 months from now. Apple's complete Safari browser on its phone will lower the cost of developing rich Web 2.0 applications for both desktop and mobile deployment. Sophisticated users in the field, including front line service and sales personnel, won't need separate training. They'll be able to get full access to all the data they need, not just a subset offered by a specialized mobile application version of a CRM system.

Is this going to drive a lot of iPhone and NetSuite sales? Not in the short term. Probably not even in the medium term. But you'll start to see two things happening in the market. First, smart phone manufacturers are going to seriously reconsider their OS requirements, pushing innovation back up to mobile OS companies (listening, Redmond?). Second, NetSuite's brand will get a bit of polish. Any company doing business with Apple -- a hotter company today than ever -- is in great company. NetSuite's upcoming IPO isn't going to hurt. It will be able to tout its shoulder-to-shoulder "relationship" with Apple, even though, truth be told, any company doing AJAX development can get their apps in the pockets of iPhone users.

UPDATE: Stuart Lauchlan, contributing editor at MyCustomer.com, just put out a nice piece on this topic. Check it out!

Back from San Fran, Italy, Paris

It's been a bit of a whirlwind for me lately ... helped teach a CEM certification course in San Francisco, where I was impressed with the commitment of corporate America to customer experience management -- many attendees actually had titles with "customer experience" in them!

After that, my wife and I flew off to Italy (after some transportation disasters thanks to a cancelled Delta flight), attending the NYU Stern Global Alumni Conference in Florence, held at Villa La Pietra. I'll probably do a blog entry on the future of luxury, which was one of the topics covered at the event. It was also an opportunity to meet up with my TRIUM alumni friends, who came in from Rome, Santa Barbara, Moscow, New York, Germany, Paris ... all over! TRIUM (a joint MBA put together by Stern in partnership with HEC-Paris and the London School of Economics) has an incredibly loyal bunch of alumni. Good folks, too. And fascinating. The group in Florence included an M&A expert from Cap Gemini, finance people from BP and Daimler, private equity, global HR, high tech startup, head of security for Deutsche Bank ...

I had a great time walking around Florence, and did a lot of thinking about brands, thoughts that continued while in Paris. I've got some pictures and some thoughts I want to share here, when I get a chance. In the meantime, I'm putting together a summary of the TRIUM Florence event for my TRIUM colleagues.

More later!

Web 2.0 - Update from San Francisco

Too bad I can't be in San Francisco covering the Web 2.0 reality mashup -- real leaders all blending their points of view and hawking their 2.0 wares. But, this link is the next best thing to being there!

Check it out.

BPT CRM Cert Program

Just finished sitting in on a morning session of BPT Partners' CRM 2.0 Certification program, and I have to say, they're doing a really good thing with this offering. I'd like to thank Paul Greenberg for letting me slip in.

OK, so the topic of the day was social networks, about which I've done a lot of writing, speaking and -- above all -- thinking. Chris Carfi of Cerado gave that part of the presentation, and did a fabulous job -- a great balance of describing the big sociological and technology shifts businesses should know about as well as specific examples of how social networks are expressed through current technology.

The best part was the hour he spent going through URLs of sites that showed the principles in action: UGC (user generated content), public tagging, mash-ups, FaceBook-style communities, and much more. It was a great example of how Web 2.0 technology combines with the power of social networks to create a new, more concentrated form of consumer and (shall I dare say it?) people power. After all, we're only consumers because businesses think of us that way. We're really people who, at some point, consume something.

Paul Greenberg then launched into the whys and hows of podcasting. He does a great podcast that really captures his personality and voice -- very conversational, and jam-packed with insight and opinion. I love Paul's sense of play and humor, too, and it all comes across in his podcasts. Check them out. The great thing about his presentation was his quick recap of how to set up a computer for audio production. I've got a long audio production background that goes way back to engineering on 2-inch analog tape at 30ips (I've got a multitrack tape in my closet still, and I'm afraid to open the box because I guarantee you it is shedding all my music). Paul did a great job of explaining why on earth you'd need compressor/limiters and aural exciters (yes, he told the requisite jokes about that).

The audience was filled with marketing professionals and not a few senior executives, and they were at the edge of their seats. The session today (which I'm missing) is the wrap-up, the big So What, in which participants get a chance to model how they'd apply CRM 2.0 principles to their market issues.

It's the big question in general: technology now enables the spontaneous creation of communities whose ideas, personalities and opinions can be expressed and REMEMBERED, and then, of course, found on Google. In a well-meshed network, news travels fast, ideas are iterated fast -- it's where innovation can happen, where mass opinion can turn from liquid gelatin to jello, or from wet concrete to the foundation of a really strong communal edifice. These opinions influence brand equity, affect reputations, and can therefore affect markets. That changes your ability to sell, to raise capital, and to manage crises.

Does CRM 2.0 matter?

You bet.