Digital’s introduction to retail, be it a slow one, will accelerate as the understanding of the width of web and mobile broadens from being all about destinations, to integration into every aspect of business:

Find the presentation below or at slideshare.net/helgetenno.

As always find the individual slides under CC-license here: flickr.com/everythingnewisdangerous

I’ve included the part of the script describing the three areas of retail I’ve concentrated on; product, in-store and business opportunities:

Product opportunities
The product is not just a “brand” living on a shelf or being consumed by a member of the public. It is a character, which within the framework of a strong identity changes its characteristics to fit different roles through the stages of its own lifecycle; from the initial idea, the spark, to its realization (design), its distribution, shelf life, shared product experience and recycling (sustainability). Digital amplifies the characteristics, and helps the identity adapt at each stage.

In-store opportunities
The retail outlet is the most important arena for public choice. It is intense in its range of decisions, and numbing in its range of (similar) products. Inside this arena there are limited opportunities within frameworks. Frameworks put in place by the non-digital, non-organic world of cardboard and floor space. Digital transcends the limitations of the shop infrastructure, serving communication through personal devices controlled by a digital brain in “the cloud”.

In the advertising mindset the retail communication belongs to the “call-to-action” category. But this limits itself both in its expense on resources (financial and labor), scarcity of real estate and limited time span. In the design mindset the goal is rather strength through identity, creating a long lasting top-of-mind preference through establishing an interesting story, sharing values, creating memberships and avoiding the retail rock concerts of advertising.

Business opportunities
There are new business opportunities to be explored and discovered through the extension of digital and organic platforms. From engaging the crowds to taking the store to the world – not limiting access to it by physical destination. In categories where products follow patterns and become remarkably similar, it is digital and organic platforms that not only invite customers to explore and discover new, unique experiences. But also develop more layered identities, establishing thicker product relationships, and unwrap new business opportunities.

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A special thanks to PSFK which as with a stroke of coincidence launched their brilliant PSFK Future of Retail Report just last week, adding a whole section to my presentation – I’ve been extensively referencing the source.

PSFK Future of Retail Report

I would also ad these brilliant people and publications as they all helped in filtering the cases and surfacing the best ones:

springwise.com
popsop.com
mashable.com
rubbishcorp.com
adverblog.com
Ingmar de Lange
mobilemarketer.com
digitalbuzzblog.com
Zeus Jones
storefrontbacktalk.com
cpbgroup.com
techcrunch.com
Seth Godin
Richard Murray (for giving us the best insight on retail)
and for his brilliant and extensive posts, *Supercollider at geoffnorthcott.com.

A presentation on the future opportunities in media, turning threats into insights into opportunities.

The presentation future media – no more middle men, is an accumulation of a range of relevant thoughts from this blog, put into system.

It’s built as a master slide set (to pick and sort from), but I tried to ad some structure to it by identifying six major “forces” affecting media, and then a short final chapter summarizing a suggested future mindset.

I’ve also chosen to ad a lot of the explanatory text – not just the headlines – into the slides this time, hopefully this will create more context for the people reading the thing online.

Find individual slides available for download under a CC license on my flickr.com account everything new is dangerous.

Find the presentation below, or on my slideshare account slideshare.net/helgetenno.

A company’s ability to engage and connect with people has to do with its imagination and not the product or product category.

A couple of days back a quite popular and knowledgeable blog wrote, as a small part of their quite smart overview on social media, that some brands don’t belong in it.

I do agree with their statement, but disagree strongly with their reasoning:

” Some brands do not need to engage with their customers online, period. Products like bread or socks, for example, are not the kind of things that people want to have a social relationship with anywhere, forget online. It just makes them look silly.” – madebymany.co.uk

Now to me, both bread:
- Bakertweet
And socks:
- LittleMissMatched (mentioned on several occasions by mister Godin)
have a potential following too them.

In my mind it doesn’t come down to the category. It comes down to the company – if you are boring and uninteresting brand, and never even tried to create something remarkable or interesting in regards to your product. Then social media, as would be the case with advertising, is not a golden ticket, and will either fail or prove you wrong faster – or both.

And it comes down to our imagination. Just because we haven’t seen it done before it doesn’t mean there isn’t a possibility that it might happen – in a way we could never imagine. In fact, having NOT seen it before only proves that there is a market and that it is there for the taking (if my initial statement is correct that is :o).

So, it’s not the product or category that defines a companies ability to connect and grow with its audience and participants. It is its ability to imagine something remarkable inside what to others seems like a lifeless and boring category.

Mobile is at the forefront of representing a completely new way of thinking about marketing.

But in order to understand this we need to look beyond the SMS and the text voting, and start exploring the real potential of the platform.

Since the Mobile Abilities Map pdf, published two weeks ago, has received a great deal of interest. I thought it would be a good resource to readers if I collected and published my inspiration and ideas to each topic. Hopefully getting some inspirational juice flowing.

- I’ve added links to each resource on slides where this was possible.

I hope people appreciate the presentation, and continue sharing great links on their own blogs (and link back here) or in the comments section on this blog.

What are the challenges for FMCG brands in today’s post digital landscape? Especially, how does Digital Media facilitate good marketing opportunities in the Every Day Life?

The five ideas / suggestions presented are the following:

1. Marketing online has to impact how people feel about the brand. (it’s about ideas, not technology).
2. Build direct relations.
3. Be a conscious and active part of the every day life ecosystem – from at home, and out there, to in store.
4. It’s about them, not you – create contextual value.
5. Confusing social media with media.

…

It’s title and content is strongly influenced by the Brand Building in a Recession lecture by Richard Murray at D&AD earlier this year. A much recommended video.

Brand building in a recession: Richard Murray from D&AD on Vimeo.

If control is unattainable, what is the goal of our brand building efforts? The answer seems more related to adaptability and changeability than unanimity, let’s call it ability to multiply.

The lack of control is demonstrated to a grand scale by the traces people leave on social and recordable media. One brilliant example is Noah Briers brandtags.net, which quickly illustrates the illusory concept of a company representing a limited set of values. What is obvious, is that people have their own personal opinions of the brand (it is shaped by their daily exchange of ideas within their communities, but it is still personal).

Another example is brands’ fan pages on Facebook, full of peoples’ stories and descriptions of how they relate to it. Giving the impression that a brand is a PART of a person’s own story not a story in itself.

This should come to no surprise, and probably doesn’t. A brand is meaningless unless people can connect with it in the sense of relating it to their own identity and values. And they do this by transforming it so that it fits with a part of their world view. In other words, people make brands their own.

So, brands are absorbed by people, and to be successful at that they need to have the ability to mutate or transform in order to be meaningful. They need to have the ability to multiply. A concept inspired by Henry Jenkins who calls people multipliers.

A condensed and probably polarizing summary of “If it doesn’t spread it’s dead” by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf and Joshua Green makes it a bit clearer:

- People share stuff in order to have something to talk about, we know that, but Jenkins also states that content is introduced into a social network only if it inhabits characteristics that will help define the identity of the participants sharing the content and/or their relationship with this community.

- People share stuff to articulate their persona and their role in the network.

- Now to achieve this a brand needs to be designed to serve its multipliers (customers). Jenkins states that a brand’s original message is one of mass culture, a commodity. In its current form it has no worth within a social network as it is “sterile”. In order for it to become shareable it needs to be transformed, so that it enters what Jenkins calls the gift culture, something of social worth.

- In order for content to transform, and multiply, it has to have a certain characteristic that allows for people to make it their own. It needs to be “open ended” and “producerly”. It needs to allow people to take the brand and fit it into their existing world view, and help them tell a small story about themselves.

This is something people already do with brands, to a large extent. And it’s very interesting to see how little effort it takes to create a lot of participation: Coca Cola.

The question is, if we build stuff to be producerly and open ended. If we design brands not for control, but for the ability to multiply. Will they become better, more popular, more embraced and more shared?

Kevin Slavin of Area/Code states in this brilliant video from 5D Conference (previously published on this blog) that TV is an event, something millions of people gather around at the same moment in time, creating an experience where interaction, collaboration and synchronous action can occur.

Putting media into this context, where we create cross-platform experiences around a massive, congregating event, might also help us find new business models, new value and new context. As the activity surrounding the participatory part of the experience might be suited for establishing and growing direct relationships between companies and participants.

Now this isn’t only a TV mindset, every form of mass media is an event. As Seth Godin puts it while adding the same train of thought to newspapers, in one of his latest posts, “Everyone else reads it”:

“we need to read what everyone else is reading in order to have a sense of being in sync. If it’s in there, it matters, because everyone else read it.”

In fact, media, in and of itself is in the event industry, something everybody talks about, shares and spreads. Something we have to be a part of as it is a part of our culture and frame our conversations.

Thinking of media this way, not only as a source of information or entertainment, not only a social family event or as couch surfing. But an arena where people with shared interest and enthusiasm converge around a shared idea, might be very powerful. The trick is to find where brands can help extend the experiences with value adding marketing, not interrupt them with irrelevant advertising.

Our discussions, especially around media, should concentrate on how this new stuff ads to the old stuff, not how it kills it. How experiences spread across platforms, not fit into one.

New media models ia about combination, mixing the role, or the best of traditional media with the abilities of new, not go looking for brand new solutions.

If you want to know what the future might look like, start tuning your antennas to the ideas of Kevin Slavin of Area/Code. In this talk he explores some ideas on “the new livingroom”, where TV and online participation converge into a new experience, where viewers and participants reconnect.

In the talk, which Kevin is holding at the 5D Immersive Design Conference, he is as disruptive as in his last presentation at PSFK: “The mobile eco-system”.

Not to spoil it, but to give you a heads up, Kevin talks about games and the convergence of TV and Participation through simultaneous online activities. (The new Livingroom):

“Games with computers in them” (not the other way around)
“Televisions amazing, because it’s an event”
“Viewers and users are the same people, and the question is how to reconnect them again”

“We forgot what was so great about television, that it was something we all did at the same time, and it was kind of amazing. There was something that happened, something we all experienced that we could all talk about the next day. We had this kind of common conversation that was provided by it. And this goes away when you start time shifting, but it is actually really magic. And if you start thinking of television as something that we are all huddled around, for half an hour at a time, like all of us. It’s actually really magic. It’s something that only television could do.” (a tad rewritten :o)

Via offworld.

5D Conference : New Television Pt 4 – Kevin Slavin from Dave Blass on Vimeo.

There is a big difference between how the existing media business models work in the old landscape compared to how they will work in the new.

Blindly copying concept from platforms where content actually disappears removes us from the ability to create value in an updated reality where content is stored in the “long here”. Where it isn’t static, but grows, connects and augments.

If media is to take advantage of the opportunities in the Everyday Life marketing landscape we need to shred the idea of short term, Attention Web concepts like clicks, views or time.

Explanation of terms here..

As some of my readers know, I’ve tried the last week to digg up some hopefully interesting or inspiring thoughts on the challenges of the media industry. I believe in the industry, but I also believe it needs to break out of the limitations of their traditional mindset if they are to discover new and innovative opportunities. There is a lot of artificially constructed walls limiting their creativity when it comes to developing new ideas.

Understanding how the concept of time has changed, unlocks a few barriers:

1. There is no time. As I stated in my introduction. Content doesn’t disappear, it gets more valuable. We need to connect companies with this content, help it grown, and build mutual and extended value.

2. Time introduces an artificial constraint into the company / participant relationship that limits the participants opportunity to engage and connect with the companies brand values.

Now it’s artificial in the sense that it is not designed by the value proposition offered by the brand to the customer (summer, Easter or Christmas related products could have done that), but it’s limited by money. To be more correct, it’s limited by the cost of running messages in media.

Now in the Everyday Life marketing landscape the goal is to connect and share values with the participant. Constraints on time creates a problem, best articulated by Amanda Mooney back in January:

“If you’ve only budgeted 2 months to be available to our community, we’re only going to give you 2 seconds of our time … at best.” – Amanda Mooney

As I see it, if Media Companies are to have a role – or get value out of the Everyday Life Marketing potential they need to put aside this limitation, they need to develop products for companies and participants without the constraints of time attached. Not putting clicks or views or days as a business model – but shared value.

Our new digital abilities has opened up a whole new kind of marketing. I’ve previously called this both content marketing, situation marketing and even activity based advertising. But have after a rummage through my mac dictionary ended up with the slightly inexplanatory term Context marketing.

Context marketing is two directions of marketing: Collaboration and Utilities, and the convergence of them – which is where all the really juicy stuff happens :o)

I want to try to explain this by adding this slideshow, I find it incredibly difficult to not go into this mumbo jumbo kind of merry go round, so I kept it as short and precise as I could.

To sum it up in one sentence:

“it’s about earning ownership of the experience where your products are used and brands are shaped.”

Hopefully it it presents some valuable ideas, and inspire some new ones. Please let me know.