July 2009

The future of media

What kinds of media to we have nowadays? Books, press, TV, Radio, Internet... It seems that the position of Internet is more and more pro-eminent.

More and more people listens to web radios. I think everybody is familiar with Deezer. On this website, you can listen to nearly any song that exists. And it's free! (By the way, they've just changed their lay-out, it's pretty good!).

Innovating is more and more important in companies. Our world is moving faster and faster, therefore it's important to move with it and to anticipate future markets.

Its is often said that to innovate you need to focus on two axises :

R&D: What can the technology do? Is it possible for our company to build that product?
Marketing : Is the product worth something to someone? What's the market situation? Is the customer value higher than the costs? Is their any competitors?

Your customers are a community

Not only are your customers a community, but so are your suppliers, your partners and even your competitors. Every company should use it smartly.

As long as you have a solid basis of customers, you might have access to all information you need. All you have to do is to let them interact with each other and with you and listen to them. For that you just need a good platform. Could be on-line, with all Web 2.0 tools (blogs, forums, networks...) or even off-line (fairs, focus groups...). The best being of course mixing all tools.

I just can't stand that word again. Crisis here, crisis there...

People uses this word without knowing what it could be about. "Buy your furniture now, because it's the crisis.", "Because of the crisis, investments are worthless", "It's a great time for investing, because of the crisis".

Say no more... Here is an explanation of what happened.

Microsoft is moving with its future OS, Windows 7. It seems that the giant is afraid of losing quasi-monopolistic position.

Linux is more and more user friendly. And the arrival of Google will make things even better! Apple is very successful with all its devices or softwares (iPhone, iPod, iTunes, Mac Books...).

So with Vista's flop, Windows 7 has to be successful. And as Microsoft is getting trouble for updating the OS from XP to 7 (it seems that in Europe it will also difficult to update from Vista...), Microsoft is trying to find ways to make its new product looks more attractive.

That's the credo of a very famous grocery stores brand. The point is to provide the cheapest goods to their customers.

How to do that? First, they reduce their costs. They optimize the supply chain, employees are little paid, ... But that's not too bad. It's the biggest employer in the US: could they afford to hire that many people with higher wages?

But what is really scary is how they manage to decrease the price of their goods with their suppliers. The strategy I will explain here is quite spread for huge companies...

Microsoft and Google are now in a quite open war. Google announced few days ago that they will compete with Windows 7 by designing a new OS (article). Microsoft is spreading Office 2010 to web applications where Google used to be the only competitor (Google Docs).

Microsoft is going more and more in the on-line business with its messenge, Windows Live first, and now with Office Web Apps and also with its beta search engine, Bing which is supposed to rival Google's. Google is moving to the software development with Chrome (Web browser and OS). Are they going to compete everywhere?

Watch out! You're spied...

... and that's a good thing!

Today companies take more and more their customers into consideration. The more they know the better: what we buy, what we want, our behavior under certain circumstances...
The firms collect data to know if we can use their devices easily, if there's a market for their new product or what are our needs.

This informations allow the companies to have a data oriented way of taking decisions. Provided that the metrics are chosen wisely, these are the best decisions firms can make.

Google just released the news: they are working on a new OS. Chrome OS is supposed to be the continuation of Google's web browser Chrome. The idea is to build an OS designed for web surfing.

Google's OS will have to compete against Microsoft Windows 7, Mac OS X and others linux OS (Google will base Chrome on a linux kernel).

That's brilliant news for us! The more competitors the better. Even if there are many OS running, there's definitely room for Google's. Windows crashes every time, Linux operating systems are much too complicated and Apple can't run all the softwares that are used.

About

The point of this blog is to share points of views on innovative marketing strategies.

As I work in the product marketing field, you'll find a lot of articles about new products or some good (or bad) ideas that have been developed. But I guess I will write about whatever strikes me or interests me. Could be user experience, brand management and so on...

I hope you won't mind if I don't stick to my vision!

Feel free to comment my posts to share your thoughts, to underline some points or to criticize!