Business

Peeking behind the curtain at Google.

Phillip Nones Branding, Business, Employment, Human Resources, Manufacturing, Sales , , , , , , ,

A recently-departed Google engineer gives us the lowdown of what’s actually been happening at his former company.

Steve Yegge, a former engineer at Google who has recently joined Grab, a fast-growing ride-hailing and logistics services firm serving customers in Southeast Asia, has just gone public with an explanation of why he decided to part ways with Google after having been with the company for more than a dozen years.

His reasons are a near-indictment of the company for losing the innovative spark that Yegge thinks was the key to Google’s success — and which now appears to be slipping away.

In a recently published blog post, Yegge lays out what he considers to be Google’s fundamental flaws today:

  • Google has gone deep into protection-and-preservation mode. “Gatekeeping and risk aversion at Google are the norm rather than the exception,” Yegge writes.
  • Google has gotten way more political than it should be as an organization. “Politics is a cumbersome process, and it slows you down and leads to execution problems,” Yegge contends.
  • Google is arrogant. “It has taken me years to understand that a company full of humble individuals can still be an arrogant company. Google has the arrogance of “we”, not the “I”.
  • Google has become competitor-focused rather than customer-focused. “Their new internal slogan — ‘Focus on the user and all else will follow’ – unfortunately, it’s just lip service,” Yegge maintains. “A slogan isn’t good enough. It takes real effort to set aside time regularly for every employee to interact with your customers. Instead, [Google] play[s] the dangerous but easier game of using competitor activity as a proxy for what customers really need.”

Yegge goes on to note that nearly all of Google’s portfolio of product launches over the past 10 years can be traced to “me-too copying” of competitor moves. He cites Google Home (Amazon Echo), Google+ (Facebook) and Google Cloud (AWS) as just three examples — none of them particularly impressive introductions on Google’s part.

Yegge sums it all up with this rather damning conclusion:

“In short, Google just isn’t a very inspiring place to work anymore. I love being fired up by my work, but Google had gradually beaten it out of me.”

Steve Yegge

It isn’t as if the company’s considerable positive attributes aren’t acknowledged – Yegge still views Google as “one of the very best places to work on Earth.”

It’s just that for creative engineers like him, the spark is no longer there.

Where have we seen these dynamics at play before? Microsoft and Yahoo come to mind.

These days, Facebook might be trending in that direction too, a bit.

It seems as though issues of “invincibility” have a tendency to creep in and color how companies view their place in the world, which can eventually lead to complacency and a loss of touch with customers. Ineffective company strategies follow.

That’s a progression every company should try mightily to avoid.

What are your thoughts on Steve Yegge’s characterization of Google? Is he on point?  Or way wide of the mark?  Please share your perspectives with other readers here.

QR Codes Live!

Phillip Nones Business, Marketing, Marketing Communications, Sales , , , , ,

In marketing, QR codes have been the butt of jokes for years. The funky little splotches that showed up in advertising on everything from magazines to transit buses were supposed to revolutionize the way people find out information about products and services.

Except that … QR codes never lived up to the hype.

While a few advertisers stuck with QR codes doggedly, for the most part we saw fewer and fewer of them after their first initial years of splash.

But now, QR codes are making a comeback. It turns out that they’ve become central to mobile marketing tactics.

We’re talking about QR couponing, which is exploding.  Newly published estimates by Juniper Research, a digital marketing consulting firm, show that nearly 1.3 billion coded coupons were redeemed via mobile devices in 2017.

Moreover, Juniper is forecasting that the number of coupons with QR codes being redeemed via mobile devices will continue strong at least through 2022.

A big reason for the sharp increase in use is built-in QR functionality on smartphones – led by Apple which has begun including QR reader functionality as part of the camera application on its new iPhones.

This action takes away a huge barrier that once confronted users. The lack of in-built readers meant that consumers had to download a separate QR code scanner app.

We know from experience that one more action step like that is often the difference between market adoption and market avoidance.

But with that hurdle out of the way, major retailers are starting to take advantage of the more favorable playing field by finding more uses of QR code technology. Target for one has announced a new Q code-based payments system to scan offers directly to their device-stored payment cards, which can be scanned at checkout for instant payment.

Expect similar activity in loyalty cards, making their redemption easier for everyone.

The newly revived fortunes of QR codes remind us that sometimes there are second acts for MarComm tactics and technology – and maybe it happens more often than we expect.

Changing Cross-Currents in E-Mail Marketing

Phillip Nones Advertising, Business, Content Creation and Content Management, Direct Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Communications, Sales , , , ,

Many marketers find it one of the easiest marketing tactics to execute … but also one of the least effective in terms of results.

In the realm of digital marketing, e-mail marketing has to be one of the most mature choices of tactics these days. It’s been around for a long time, and its relatively small hard-dollar costs make it one a natural “go-to” marketing tactic for many companies.

But today, a declining percentage of marketers see e-mail as one of their most effective tactics in the digital marketing arsenal.

So, what’s the problem?  Many companies have the technology and skills in place to perform e-mail programs using in-house resources. That’s the good news.

The not-so-good news is that more companies are seeing their e-mail programs becoming less effective — for a variety of reasons. Among them are these:

  • E-mail filtering technology is making it more difficult to land e-mails into inboxes.
  • Privacy regulations are becoming more stringent.
  • Overuse of this marketing tactic means more e-mail messages than ever from more companies are being deployed – and with that, more of them are being ignored by recipients.
  • While e-mail used to be the only digital direct marketing game in town, today there are a bigger variety of ways to engage with customers and prospects.
  • Building a high-performing e-mail list that also conforms to regulatory stipulations is more challenging than ever.

This last point is particularly nettlesome for marketers: Data quality and data management are considered among the most difficult challenges for marketers – and also among the least effective in terms of their success.

So, in some ways the factors affecting the use of e-mail marketing are working at cross-purposes. E-mail marketing is easier to execute than other digital marketing endeavors … but as for its effectiveness, many marketers rate other tactics higher, including content marketing and search engine optimization.

In the coming years, it will be interesting to see how attitudes and behaviors regarding e-mail continue to evolve. Will this time-honored tactic decline in importance, or find new life?  Stay tuned …

New Car Technologies and their Persistently Bullish Prospects

Phillip Nones Business, Economics, Manufacturing, Social Commentary , , , ,

Let’s dip back a few years for a quick history lesson. It’s 2010, and various business prognosticators are confidently predicting that the number of electric cars sold in the United States in 2013 will be ~200,000 vehicles.

And in 2015, electric auto sales will reach ~280,000 units.

What really happened?

In 2013 total electric car sales in the United States were fewer than 97,000.  In 2015, the figure was higher – all of 119,000 units.

It’s worse than even these statistics show. The auto industry’s own expert predictions were off by miles.  In 2011, Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn predicted that his company would have more than 1.5 million Renault-Nissan electric vehicles on the road.

That forecast turned out to be about 80% too high.

More recent sales forecasts for electric cars are much more realistic. As has become quite clear, many consumers aren’t particularly interested in shifting to a newer technology of automobile if they have to pay substantially more for the technology up-front – despite the promise of lower vehicle operating expenses over time.

Even more telling, a recent McKinsey survey found that of today’s electric car owners, only about half of respondents indicated that they would purchase one again. Ouch.

So, what we now have are projections that electric vehicles won’t reach 4% of the U.S. automotive market until 2023 at the earliest. That’s about a decade later than those first forecasts envisioned reaching that penetration level.

Is it all that surprising, actually? If we’re being honest, we have to acknowledge that the most lucrative markets for electric vehicles are in highly prosperous, population-dense urban areas with strict gasoline emissions standards – the very definition of a “limited market” (think San Francisco or Boston).

Thinking about the next technological advancement in this sector, the industry’s newest “bright shiny thing” is self-driving cars – also referred to as the classier-sounding “autonomous vehicle.” But it appears that this sector may be facing similar dynamics that made electric vehicles the “fizzled sizzle” they turned out to be.

Consider the challenges that autonomous vehicles face that threaten to dampen marketplace acceptance of these products – at least in the short- and medium-term:

  • The regulatory and legal ramifications of autonomous vehicles are even more daunting than those affecting electric cars. For starters, try assigning liability for car crashes.
  • Autonomous vehicles require sophisticated mapping and data analytics to operate properly. The United States is a big country. Put those two factors together and it’s easy to see what kind of a challenge it will be to get these vehicles on the road in any major way.
  • How about resistance from powerful groups that have a vested interest in the status quo? Of the ~3.5 million commercial truck drivers in the United States, I wonder how many are in favor of self-driving vehicles?

Not every new technology operates in a similar environment, and for this reason some new-fangled products don’t have such a long gestation and ramp-up period.  Take the smartphone, which took all of ten years to go from “what’s that?” to “who doesn’t own one?”

But there’s quite a difference, actually.  Smartphones were a sea change from what people typically considered a mobile phone, with oodles of added utility and capabilities that were never even part of the equation before.

By contrast, consumers know what it’s like to have a car, and even self-driving cars won’t be doing anything particularly “new.” Just doing it differently.

At this juncture, McKinsey is predicting that autonomous cars will reach ~15% of U.S. automobile sales by the year 2030.

Maybe that’s correct … maybe not. But my guess is, if McKinsey’s prediction turns out to be off, it’ll be because it was too robust.

Changing Buying Behaviors: Clues from Thanksgiving Weekend 2017

Phillip Nones Advertising, Business, Direct Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Research , , , , , , ,

If there was any doubt that we’re in the midst of fundamental changes in consumer buying behaviors, the results from the opening days of the 2017 holiday season have put such questions to rest.

Movable Ink, a firm that enables content personalization within e-mails, has just published some insightful statistics it compiled from Thanksgiving weekend last month.  Movable Ink logged nearly 438 million e-mail opens between the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and the following Cyber Monday. What did it find?

To start with, it found that recipients engaged with them.

Of the e-mails sent on Black Friday, nearly 50% achieved read lengths of at least 15 seconds. On Cyber Monday, the results were nearly the same (~46%).

Fifteen seconds may not seem like a long time to engage with an e-mail, but it’s light years compared to what is often experienced in consumer e-retail.

Movable Ink also found that the majority of the e-mails were opened on smartphones — far outstripping desktops and tablets:

  • Smartphones: ~53% of e-mail opens
  • Desktop computers: ~25%
  • Tablet opens: ~16%

An equal 53% of conversion actions happened on smartphones … but desktop conversions proved to be higher than their open stats, and e-mails opened on tablets were much less likely to experience conversions:

  • Smartphone: ~53% of e-mail conversions
  • Desktop computers: ~38%
  • Tablets: ~8%

Consumers were certainly in a buying mood over the holiday weekend, with purchases averaging between $120 and $140 on each of the four days of the long weekend:

  • Black Friday: An average of $124 spent
  • Saturday: $120
  • Sunday: $119
  • Cyber Monday: $141

However, while smartphones led in terms of e-mail engagement, when it comes to actual dollar sales smartphones come in last – by a country mile:

  • Desktop computers: ~$162 average holiday weekend total spend
  • Tablets: ~$107
  • Smartphones: ~$85

We can acknowledge that smartphones have become the most important method for reaching consumers with product content, coupons and special offers.  And yet, significantly more purchasing continues to happen on desktops.

One takeaway is that for all of the convenience smartphones purport to provide, the purchasing experience on mobile devices doesn’t yet match the experience on desktop computers.

It would also help if there was more similarity between the purchasing process sellers are delivering across all platforms. That continues to be a missing ingredient with some sellers, and it’s likely explaining at least some of the dampening effect on mobile sales revenues.

Smartphones go mainstream with all age groups.

Phillip Nones Business, Demographics, Economics, Marketing Research, Social Commentary, Social Media , , , , , ,

Today, behaviors across the board are far more “similar” than they are “different.”

Over the past few years, smartphones have clawed their way into becoming a pervasive presence among consumers in all age groups.

That’s one key takeaway message from Deloitte’s 2017 Mobile Consumer Survey covering U.S. adults.

According to the recently-released results from this year’s research, ~82% of American adults age 18 or older own a smartphone or have ready access to one. It’s a significant jump from the ~70% who reported the same thing just two years ago.

While smartphone penetration is highest among consumers age 18-44, the biggest increases in adoption are coming in older demographic categories.  To illustrate, ~67% of Deloitte survey respondents in the age 55-75 category own or have ready access to smartphones, which is big increase from the ~53% who reported so in 2015.

It represents an annual rate of around 8% for this age category.

The Deloitte research also found that three’s little if any difference in the behaviors of age groups in terms of how they interact with their smartphones. Daily smartphone usage is reported by 9 in 10 respondents regardless of the age bracket.

Similarly-consistent across all age groups is the frequency that users check their phones during any given day. For the typical consumer, it happens 47 times daily on average.  Fully 9 in 10 report looking at their phones within an hour of getting up, while 8 in 10 do the same just before going to sleep.

At other times during the day, the incidence of smartphone usage quite high in numerous circumstances, the survey research found:

  • ~92% of respondents use smartphones when out shopping
  • ~89% while watching TV
  • ~85% while talking to friends or family members
  • ~81% while eating at restaurants
  • ~78% while eating at home
  • ~54% during meetings at work

As for the “legacy” use of cellphones, a smaller percentage of respondent’s report using their smartphones for making voice calls. More than 90% use their smartphone to send and receive text messages, whereas a somewhat smaller ~86% make voice calls.

As for other smartphone activities, ~81% are sending and receiving e-mail messages via their smartphone, ~72% are accessing social networks on their smartphones at least sometimes during the week, and ~30% report making video calls via their smartphones – which is nearly double the incidence Deloitte found in its survey two years ago.

As for the respondents in the survey who use smartwatches, daily usage among the oldest age cohort is the highest of all: Three-quarters of respondents age 55-75 reported using their smartwatches daily, while daily usage for younger consumers was 60% or even a little below.  So, in this one particular category, older Americans are actually ahead of their younger counterparts in adoption and usage.

The Deloitte survey shows pretty definitively that it’s no longer very valid to segregate older and younger generations. While there may be some slight variations among younger vs. older consumers, the reality is that market behaviors are far more the same than they are different.  That’s the first time we’ve seen this dynamic playing out in the mobile communications segment.

Additional findings from the Deloitte research can be found in an executive summary available here.

Does “generational marketing” really matter in the B-to-B world?

Phillip Nones Advertising, Business, Content Creation and Content Management, Demographics, Employment, Marketing, Marketing Communications, Sales , , , , , ,

For marketers working in certain industries, an interesting question is to what degree generational “dynamics” enter into the B-to-B buying decision-making process.

Traditionally, B-to-B market segmentation has been done along the lines of the size of the target company, its industry, where the company’s headquarters and offices are located, plus the job function or title of the most important audience targets within these other selection criteria.

By contrast, something like generational segmenting was deemed a far less significant factor in the B-to-B world.

But according to marketing and copywriting guru Bob Bly, things have changed with the growing importance of the millennial generation in B-to-B companies.

These are the people working in industrial/commercial enterprises who were born between 1980 and 2000, which places them roughly between the ages of 20 and 40 right now.

There are a lot of them. In fact, Google reports that there are more millennial-generation B-to-B buyers than any other single age group; they make up more than 45% of the overall employee base at these companies.

Even more significantly, one third of millennials working inside B-to-B firms represent the sole decision-makers for their company’s B-to-B purchases, while nearly three-fourths are involved in purchase decision-making or influencing to some degree.

But even with these shifts in employee makeup, is it really true that millennials in the B-to-B world go about evaluating and purchasing goods and services all that differently from their older counterparts?

Well, consider these common characteristics of millennials which set them apart:

  • Millennials consider relationships to be more important than the organization itself.
  • Millennials want to have a say in how work gets done.
  • Millennials value open, authentic and real-time information.

This last point in particular goes a long way towards explaining the rise in content marketing and why those types of promotional initiatives are often more effective than traditional advertising.

On the other hand … don’t let millennials’ stated preferences for text messaging over e-mail communications lead you down the wrong path. E-mail marketing continues to deliver one of the highest ROIs of any MarComm tactic – and it’s often the highest by a long stretch.

Underscoring this point, last year the Data & Marketing Association [aka Direct Marketing Association] published the results of a comparative analysis showing that e-mail marketing ROI outstripped social media and search engine marketing (SEM) ROI by a factor of 4-to-1.

So … it’s smart to be continually cognizant of changing trends and preferences. But never forget the famous French saying: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose …

Fewer brands are engaging in programmatic online advertising in 2017.

Phillip Nones Advertising, Business, Marketing, Marketing Communications, Media , , , , , , ,

How come we are not surprised?

The persistent “drip-drip-drip” of brand safety concerns with programmatic advertising – and the heightened perception that online advertising has been showing up in the most unseemly of places — has finally caught up with the once-steady growth of economically priced programmatic advertising versus higher-priced digital formats such as native advertising and video advertising.

In fact, ad tracking firm MediaRadar is now reporting that the number of major brands running programmatic ads through the first nine months of 2017 has actually dropped compared to the same period a year ago.

The decline isn’t huge – 2% to be precise. But growing reports that leading brands’ ads have been mistakenly appearing next to ISIS or neo-Nazi content on YouTube and in other places on the web has shaken advertisers’ faith in programmatic platforms to be able to prevent such embarrassing actions from occurring.

For Procter & Gamble, for instance, it has meant that the number of product brands the company has shifted away from programmatic advertising and over to higher-priced formats jumped from 49 to 62 brands over the course of 2017.

For Unilever, the shift has been even greater – going from 25 product brands at the beginning of the year to 53 by the end of July.

The “flight to safety” by these and other brand leaders is easy to understand. Because they can be controlled, direct ad sales are viewed as far more brand-safe compared programmatic and other automated ad buy programs.

In the past, the substantial price differential between the two options was enough to convince many brands that the rewards of “going programmatic” outweighed the inherent risks.  No longer.

What this also means is that advertisers are looking at even more diverse media formats in an effort to find alternatives to programmatic advertising that can accomplish their marketing objectives without the attendant risks (and headaches).

We’ll see how that goes.

Diamonds in the rough: Retail jewelry stores take a hit.

Phillip Nones Branding, Business, Sales , , , , , ,

As disruption wends its way through the retail marketplace, jewelers are the latest sector being upended.

In the world of retail, it makes total sense that e-commerce would be making certain sectors such as traditional bookstores a thing of the past. After all, the products they sell are identical to what’s available online — even down to the UPC barcode.

The only difference is a higher price tag – along with a few other impediments like store hours, the hassles of parking and the like.

But as time’s gone on, it’s become clear that the impact of e-commerce is affecting shopping behaviors in retail segments that might never have been thought to be susceptible.

Consider retail fine jewelry. If ever there was a segment where consumers could be expected to want to “see and feel” the merchandise prior to purchasing, it would seem to be this one.

However, a recent analysis by gem and jewelry industry specialist Polygon has found that the U.S. retail jewelry industry is reeling from the triple phenomenon of falling diamond prices, store closures and a liquidity crunch that has persisted since 2016.

Super-competitive pricing offered by online-only retailers and their foreign suppliers has put relentless pressure on gem prices at every step in the supply chain, it turns out. Profit margins have slipped badly as a result.

Consequently, an increasing number of jewelry businesses in the United States have found that economics of maintaining physical stores just aren’t working out.  Since 2014. a raft of store closures has affected both independents and chain operations.

At the top of the supply chain, the biggest international producers of gems are responding to the industrywide pressures by cutting costs through mine closures, employee layoffs and assets sales. Probably the most prominent example of this is Anglo-American PLC, which laid off more than 85,000 workers at the beginning of this year, along with putting more than 60% of the company’s assets up for sale.

Par for the course, the relative bright spot in the overall picture is online jewelry sales. Online is taking up the slack of the other channels – but at lower sticker prices.  Online retail sales of fine jewelry continue to grow in the high single-digits, even as the rest of the industry struggles mightily to maintain a business model that has become precarious in the new “online everything” world of retail.

I have my doubts that jewelry stores will disappear completely from the shopping malls, like we’ve seen happen with retailers of movies and music. But the days of a jewelry store outlet anchoring every major crossroads intersection at the shopping mall are probably history.

More information on the Polygon report can be found here.

IoT’s Ticking Time Bomb

Phillip Nones Business, Manufacturing, Security , , ,

The Internet of Things is making major headway in consumer product categories — but it turns out it’s bringing its share of headaches along for the ride.

It shouldn’t be particularly surprising that security could be a potential issue around IoT, of course.  But recent evaluations point to the incidence being more significant than first thought.

That’s the conclusion of research conducted by management consulting firm Altman Vilandrie & Company. Its findings are based on a survey of ~400 IT decision-makers working at companies that have purchased some form of IoT security solutions.

According to the Vilandrie survey, approximately half of the respondents reported that they have experienced at least one IoT-related security intrusion or breach within the past two years.  The companies included in the research range across some 19 industry segments, so the issue of security doesn’t appear to be confined to one or two sectors alone.

What’s more, smaller firms experienced higher relative “pain” caused by a security breach. In the Vilandrie survey, companies with fewer than $5 million in annual revenues reported an average loss of $255,000 associated with IoT security breaches.

While that’s substantially lower in dollar amount to the average loss reported by large companies, the loss for small business as a percentage of total revenues is much greater.

More findings from the Altman Vilandrie research study can be accessed here.