Marc H. Meyer is the Matthews Distinguished University Professor at
Northeastern University. Director of the High Technology MBA programs, he
runs Executive Education programs for IBM, EMC, and Mars, and serves as
chair of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Group at the University.
His new book, The Fast Path to Corporate Growth: Leveraging Knowledge and
Technologies to New Market Applications, shows how leading corporations
develop new product lines and services. Dr. Meyer is co-author (with Alvin P.
Lehnerd) of The Power of Product Platforms (The Free Press, NY, NY, 1997), a
book widely used throughout the product development community.
Marc was the 2002 recipient of the Maurice Holland Award from the Industrial
Research Institute. He also co-founded several software companies in the
Boston area and now helps companies venture into new markets. You may
reach Marc at mhm@neu.edu. Materials associated with The Fast Path to
Corporate Growth can be found at http://www.fastpathmanagement.com/.
Interview conducted by Doug Berger, INNOVATE LLC. doug@innovate1st.com
Marc: I would like to talk about my thinking on organic enterprise growth and the ways in which
companies generate new streams of revenue from new product lines and services. My thoughts
come from the careful study of several dozen companies that hold leadership positions in a
range of industries, including consumer products, computer and electronics, various software
categories, medical devices and defense/homeland security.
I came to observe a five-step process for fast and effective organic growth. Within each step,
there are clear roles for executives as well as specific activities for teams. These five steps are:
1. Segmenting markets for growth
2. Staffing teams to drive insights
3. Platform development with clear points of value added and variety for the user
4. Develop the business case
5. Test marketing and validation
#1 Market Segmentation
Market segmentation defines new users beyond the business unit’s core, but still leverages
assets in that core. The operational word for the line manager of a business unit, an R&D or
sales executive, is to select just a few worthy targets. If a billion-dollar business unit has two or
three new product lines or service developments underway, that should be more than enough to
produce significant growth. A reasonable degree of focus and concentrated effort is essential.
Too many projects lead to scattershot developments and little tangible growth.
Doug: Can you give us some examples?
Marc: The automotive industry is a good forum in which to see executives placing select bets. Toyota and Honda, among others, have identified the Gen Y’s as an important yet underserved target market that has its own tastes, preferences, and attitudes for new vehicles and services. A
November 2007 Conversations on the Cutting Edge
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“Gen Y” is defined as a first-time car buyer between the ages of 20 and 30. This category
includes kids still in college, as well as those working in their first professional jobs and perhaps
starting families. The Gen Y target has been a very elusive one for car manufacturers that have
understood and built great products for older users such as you and me.
Let’s take another example – this is one of my favorites. I have a chapter in my book on Mars
Incorporated – the worlds’ leading chocolate and pet food manufacturer. Mars has a brand that
lots of us love - Snickers. Several years ago, Mars launched a new product line for the energy
bar market called Snickers Marathon. The idea was to leverage the core brand and taste to the
energy bar segment. The ingredients are souped up for athletes and weekend warriors but the
great taste is still there. Both the Gen Y and the weekend warrior are examples of focused,
new, and robust target markets for these respective companies.
High tech companies also show that markets can be newly segmented for growth – primarily by
attacking new, emerging applications. Raytheon is one of my favorite examples. Look at what
the company has done in homeland security. Entering this space after 9/11, Raytheon now has
close to a one billion dollar per year business in homeland security. At the same time, its
homeland security applications still leverage sensors, software tools, and workflow processes
directly from Raytheon’s defense business. In addition, those defense SBU’s gain revenue
sharing from the homeland security deployments using their respective technologies. It’s a winwin scenario.
Doug: What is the role of executives at the front end of organic, enterprise growth?
Marc: Executives need to set up and support win-win approaches like those at Raytheon in order to minimize rivalry and create one-company solutions for customers, both old and new.
Executives also need to decide on those limited number of potential new market targets that will be pursued, and staff them with very good people. Then, executives need to give those teams the necessary financial resources to get new products and services to the test market phase. An
executive team needs to approach these new market applications with a sense of real urgency -
delay the effort, and rest assured that someone else will get there first. In six to nine months a
team should be able to present its consumer insight, product concepts, and business plan to
executives for the big green light. Again, this should take about six to nine months, not years.
This time horizon forces a team to use proven technology from either the company or its
partners.
#2 User-centered design
Marc: Here, a multi-functional team works together to understand what makes users tick in the new target market and how to drive those insights into new products. The team also has to
understand the most logical way to make money serving those customers. There is a real
difference between incremental development for core product lines and creating new product
lines. For incremental product line development, you often find teams outsourcing the
acquisition of market insight to their market research departments, advertising firms, or
consultants. The team members often don’t talk to users themselves. They let others do the
talking.
For the new product line developments that I have observed, there has to be a very different
approach. These teams have to immerse themselves in the world of the new target user. The
teams do in-depth observation of these target users in their situation of use. They look for
frustrations, pain points, and sometimes, how one product has to integrate with others within a
full use case scenario.
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Following that observation, which many call ethnography, good teams then do in depth one-onone interviews to get to the motivations behind behaviors, or beliefs, or frustrations - the ‘why’s and wherefore’s’ behind the expression of interest. From this field observation and these indepth interviews, concepts begin to emerge. Many of the best new product lines that I
observed, do this with less than 10 target users – this is so different from the shallow empirical
surveys asking thousands of users for reactions to specific product features and prices.
Industry leaders get passionate about this stuff. For example, a developer of a homeland
security application has to put itself into the shoes of terrorists, just as a home health care
systems developer mind-melds into the world of a cognitively impaired senior who is trying to
manage six or seven meds at the table. I mentioned Honda and Mars earlier. In the Mars' Pet
Care division, developers have an uncanny way of getting into the hearts and minds of not only
the owners, but the pets as well.
Honda sent a team to the X Games at the turn of the millennium, observing Gen Y users both
playing sports activities, as well as bringing all of their gear to the games and partying in their
vans. They observed before, during and after uses in the world of the target user. They
observed college students moving furniture in and out of dormitories, loading up all their sports
gear to go to the beach or out into the mountains. The team was trying to learn how Gen Y’s
used their vehicles as tools for “party, play, and move.” From this emerged the concept for an
SUV called the Element - a very flexible, functional and edgy sort of SUV.
Doug: So the Element was a deliberate attempt by Honda to go after the active Gen Y’s?
Marc: Yes, and specifically, the Gen Y male who was not well served by Honda’s prior SUVs. Honda has always been very proud of serving young women and families with its core brands.
Doug: At what point in this user centric design did Honda say, “We’ve got something here. We’ve got the concept.”
Marc: That is a very good question. Whether it’s Honda, a consumer products or a computer
company, teams start prototyping on paper, computers, or in some sort of physical dimension,
as soon as possible after talking to their users. Then, they bring sketches and models back to
these users for various types of feedback. At Honda, that might take the shape of styling or
flexible seating solutions. At Mars, it might take the shape of a pet food, or the taste of an
energy bar. At IBM, another great company, it might be software modeling for an improved
workflow process in a bank or hospital. What is important here is that while an idea might come
from an executive or a team member, the ruling authority for moving forward has to be
enthusiasm from a target user – and of course, a good business model that makes the company
money.
Getting executives to understand new markets can be a big challenge. Honda brought an
executive team to the beach to spend a weekend where Gen Ys were hanging out. Raytheon’s
homeland security executive went on sales calls to new customers, trying to understand their
needs and uncertainties. This is particularly important when your new target user and their
uses are different from your core business. The executive team has to get a feel for this, not
through PowerPoint, but by being on site, in-situ.
#3 Platform development with clear points of value added and variety for the user
Marc: The next step is to create a plan for building a product line. That means no onesies, but a fully featured, multi-item product line that can be the basis for a self-supporting business. To do this cost-effectively, a team needs to understand and implement modular platforms.
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Doug: How do the best companies that you work with define a modular platform?
Marc: Another important question. People often look at platforms in exactly the wrong way for
enterprise growth. A platform is a subsystem – a chunk of technology – that can be deployed
across multiple products. Honda has the same engine, for example, in certain Acuras, Accords,
CRVs, and Elements. The subsystem has to be modular so that it can be coupled easily with
other parts of these various products – it has to have good interface design, hence the term
‘modular platforms.’
Companies often crash when they define a platform as a customer might, not as an engineer
would. For example, we all view Microsoft Windows or Vista as a platform because we can use it
to run other software applications. However, if Microsoft tried to embed all of Windows into
Microsoft Excel, Word, or PowerPoint, it would never release new versions, and those that it did
release would be incredibly slow and monolithic. Instead, Microsoft developed a new layer of
technology, called .NET, which, when plugged into software applications, allows them to work in
distributed Internet environments. In this case, .NET is the product platform - plug it into Office
or your own applications, and they instantly become Internet enabled - pretty cool.
What I look for first in a product line strategy is the overall architecture, showing all of the
major parts of the product and how they connect. Next, I look at which of those parts are
common across all products, and which are tuned to specific users or application scenarios. This
draws the line between common parts and value added engineering. It forces teams to work
smart – to leverage assets – just as Raytheon leverages sensors and software, or Mars
leverages ingredients, recipes, and packaging. Lastly, I want to see a fairly robust roadmap
that shows anticipated improvements over five years at three levels:
1) changes to the architecture;
2) improvements to the underlying platforms;
3) expansion of the product offerings coming from all of this.
Doug: This sounds relatively basic.
Marc: Yes, it is, but someone must tell the engineers to do this, or else they will work on single
products, and then have to fight for resources later, to create follow-ons. That is so dangerous,
because immediately after first launch is precisely when a company needs to follow up with a
broader and even better offering set.
#4 Develop the Business Case
Doug: What do executives look for to have confidence that sales projections for a new product line or service are reasonable?
Marc: They need to see a granular projection of revenue. First, I would ask the team if its projections are based on estimated market share of a specific product or service category. If they say” Yes” then I know that the numbers might be right but, most likely, they are going to be way wrong.
Basing projections on the percentage of market share that you expect to gain over three to five
years, and then working backwards, is a bunch of phooey made all too easy with spreadsheets.
Instead, what I look for in a forecast is granularity. Granularity on units sold, sales per sales
rep or shelf velocity per store, and customers acquired for large systems such as enterprise
software. I want users, not market share. I want to see how the number of users begins to
scale from Year 1 to Year 2, and I want to see investment in channels and the manufacturing
needed to support that expansion. I would ask a team to show me the P&Ls for one or two
existing core product lines so that I can see if their numbers are overly optimistic.
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In my study of several dozen-industry leaders, once a new product line had successfully
launched and scaled, on average the revenues projected over the first three to five years were
about 10% of the revenues of the core businesses. If you had an established product line that
was selling 500,000 units per year and a new product line projected at 30,000 that would be
believable. If you delivered 50,000, that would be great - 100,000 would be a total delight.
You might sneeze at 10%, but if you had two or three good ones, and they were giving you
30% of your base revenue additive, were leveraging core technology, and were providing an
attractive business model – well, it doesn’t take too many hits to start seeing a major difference
in the business.
#5 Test Marketing and Validation
Marc: The key message for executives here is this - a test market is one in which you put out your beta product to a limited number of targeted users to get reaction to (A) how the product is
sold, and (B) to test the product itself - does it meet the users’ expectations in terms of
performance, price and quality? In some applications, a new channel is needed relative to the
core business. It is the channel itself that requires the greatest learning. Then, you might need
to test out a new business model.
Doug: Can you give us an example?
Marc: Mars introduced a new product where users can order M&M candies with customized printed messages on each individual piece. Ninety nine percent of the product is taken from the core business – the M&M itself – and the point of value added is the special printing on the shell, and of course, the packaging. Everything else is different, however. The target occasions of use are weddings, bar mitzvahs, corporate events, and so forth, as opposed to snacking after school.
The branding message is personalized gifting and celebrations. The channel is direct ship to
users and individuals order through the Web. The test market for all of this was a Web launch
with hardly any advertising for over a year - bringing in enough orders to learn more about the
target, to refine branding, and to get a handle on the new set of logistics – in other words, to
make the real business plan. Only then did management invest heavily into scaling the
business. Today, this product line is a juggernaut – mass customization for personalized gifting.
Doug: How does a company like Honda or Raytheon go about testing and then refining its design based on test market feedback when a huge capital scale-up is an unavoidable aspect of the business?
Marc: Well, you try to avoid large capital investments at first. A number of large-scale manufacturing companies have explicitly set up capital equipment plans for low volume runs of new product lines. They can flexibly switch from one new line for 12 hours to another new line for 12 hours.
Over the course of a month, for example, the capital cost of that flexible manufacturing line is
deferred across multiple new concepts or new product lines. A $50 million plant is amortized
across five lines for the first year of production, instead of a single new product line with initially
low sales somehow having to meet the requirements of a $50 million implementation on its
own.
Many companies use outside manufacturing partners (co-manufacturers as it’s often called) to
run the product for test markets, to do the packaging for the products, to ship it to warehouse,
and out to retail. This continues until senior management decides that yes, we have a winner in
all aspects, let’s bring it in-house, and lay in the capital now to scale the business and enjoy the
margins from in-house production. There are pitfalls. I’ve seen companies give away the store
to offshore manufacturers over whom they have little effective control, only to see their own
new product concepts end up as someone else’s brands four or five years down the road. If you
do this, have your best legal staff be part of the co-manufacturing discussions.
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Doug: What are some other common pitfalls that, while they may be avoidable, you see them
continuing to happen?
Marc: Let’s limit it to four, beginning with the fact that executives don’t spend time with the new
target users. They rely on PowerPoint and their own assumptions about what those users want.
This leads to all sorts of questionable decisions at the highest level.
Another pitfall is to run new ventures through the company’s traditional incremental, and very
complex, stage-gate system. This serves to delay progress, turn a six-month first phase into a
two-year first phase, and more importantly, impose decisions on a team that do not make sense
for the product line. For example, in a classic phase review system, the senior vice president of
manufacturing has veto power over where a product is made. The executive may say, “I have
excess capacity at a plant over in territory X.” So, a team goes over there. It must do that -
otherwise they don’t get the check-off for the stage-gate. When they get over to that plant
however, they get hit with staggering overheads and unit costs. So, even for a small run in a
limited test market, the cost per unit is four times what it would be if they had just gone across
the street and used a co-manufacturer. The new business is stillborn. It doesn’t stand a chance
of ever making money.
A third point has to do with teams. Many companies will take a very smart marketing or
technology manager from a core product line and say, “Joe, we also want you to explore this
new home market.” Well, it turns out that people running major product lines, or who have
major functional responsibility for a core product line, are very busy people. Asking them to do
something on the side just does not work.
A fourth pitfall is the failure to leverage existing company technology. Executives decide to
ignore the internal R&D function of the company, and they go off and work with an entirely new
set of suppliers and partners. They are inventing a new product line from the ground up. This
causes longer lead times, a lot of contractual issues, and resentment among the career
technologists in corporate R&D. At some point, many of these new ventures have to move back
into the mother ship, and this separatist approach just creates a lot of bad blood and inhibits reintegration.
Doug: In the book, you point to emerging opportunities in a number of companies that originally were not designated as opportunities by executives, but which surfaced through networks in the
company. What is it that executives need to do if they want emerging opportunities?
Marc: That takes inputs from both sides, and that is what makes for a great leadership. From the top down, it is the executive’s responsibility to understand and allocate resources to investigate major new user, demographic, and technology trends. It is then up to executives to empower teams of people to come up with specific product concepts that might fit that larger strategy opportunity.
Doug: Let me test out a generalization with you: regardless of how the opportunity surfaces, if early on the executives are not immersing themselves in that particular opportunity, I’d probably say to myself, “This is not going anywhere” at the end of the day?
Marc: You can take that one to the bank. We tend to see those wonderfully motivated lower-level employees who have all of these great ideas, simply get frustrated because nothing ever
happens. After awhile, they either leave or become non-creative.
Doug: What would you like to say in summary?
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Marc: There is not a lot of mystery here. Focus your company’s organic growth on two or three new target market applications. Get smart about these applications by investing your own personal time with customers in those new market spaces. If you are convinced that there is a need, then charter a dedicated team to dive deep into each target. After that, it is all about
empowering those teams …. giving them a clear budget as soon as possible … setting milestones
for them … having the wisdom to either invest heavily to scale a project, or ending it but
learning from the experience.
Perhaps most important is to give the internal venture teams a real sense of urgency. Unlike
longer tailed R&D projects, the type of organic growth that I focus on in the book needs to be
done fast and decisively. In order to do that, for the most part you need to rely on proven,
working technologies.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
The Thought Column with Marc Meyer, Professor, Author, Consultant
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Capturing the luster of Havana - in Switzerland
I thought you might be interested in the story of a Cuban/Swiss high-end watchmaker trying to leverage the historic associations of affluence and Cuba (pre-Castro) to grow a brand that has been in existence since 1882.
Originally located on Havana’s Quinta Avienda (Fifth Avenue), this family watch business flourished under the expert guidance of Armando Rio y Cuervo and successive generations of Cuervo family watchmakers. The boutique and its superb product were coveted by the international clientele that flocked to the Pearl of the Caribbean for romance and relaxation. So elegant were the products sold by this store, and so beautiful were its watches—many of which were co-branded with some of the world’s most prestigious brands—that Cuervo y Sobrinos quickly became known beyond the Caribbean. Stores opened in Germany, Paris and Switzerland. The guest books read like a Who’s Who of the times, filled with names such as Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway, Enrico Caruso, Winston Churchill, and Clark Gable. People all over the world associated the Cuervo y Sobrinos brand with fine watches and a fine lifestyle.
If you will be involved in any features of high-end men’s watches, I wanted to make you aware of Cuervo Y Sobrinos, a high-end Swiss watchmaker whose roots and heritage are in Cuba (see below). Their Cuban heritage has made them very popular in Spain. To commemorate the 125th anniversary of the brand, they are releasing new, limited edition versions of some of their most popular watches; one of the most limited is priced at over $100,000 (I’d be happy to send you specific information on each).
For decades, the family continued to operate its business and to create its own watches. In the late 1950s, however, with Cuba in turmoil, the family was forced to flee the island in the night, abandoning the boutique and the brand. The revival of Cuervo y Sobrinos began in the late 1990s when Marzio Villa (a European distributor of luxury brands) rescued the name from Cuba and restored the brand to its former glory. He traveled to Havana where he and his group were able to enter the old store and to recover a case of watch movements and sketches.
Based on this treasure trove and other historical findings, the current Cuervo y Sobrinos line captures the original spirit and essence of the brand. The timepieces are created in the brand’s workshops in Lugano, Switzerland, and are crafted in old-world tradition using only the finest materials and Swiss automatic movements. Today, just five years old, the new Cuervo y Sobrinos thrives.
Could Roger Be Charged With Perjury?
FROM ABCNEWS.COM
Clemens' lawyers denied that possibility in the strongest of terms and objected to Waxman's questions about whether Clemens had contacted a potential witness.
"Roger Clemens certainly did not commit perjury,'' Rusty Hardin told reporters yesterday. "No sane man would subject himself to that unless he was telling the truth."
Others disagree. "He did terribly -- what killed him was the fact that [Andy] Pettitte totally verified the credibility of McNamee," said Katherine Darmer, a former federal prosecutor and current law professor at Chapman University.
"Looking at it from a lawyer's perspective," she added, "they could go after him for perjury and witness tampering. When you can't pursue someone for the underlying bad thing, they fall back on perjury and witness tampering. Look at Barry Bonds, Scooter Libby, Martha Stewart."
Darmer said she thought that McNamee's reputation as a liar would not prevent federal prosecutors from using him as an effective witness.
"You get bad guys by using bad guys," she explained. "If you get a guy who shot someone in their basement, you have to find somebody else involved in the wrongdoing, not Mother Theresa. I was impressed with him as a corroborating witness."
To read this entire article, please visit: http://www.paradigmshiftpr.com/couldroger.htm
Do Web Sites Feed or Cannibalize Physical Store Sales?
FROM IT BUSINESS EDGE
Do Web Sites Feed or Cannibalize Physical Store Sales?
Posted by Ann All on April 8, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Last June, Forrester Research released an interesting study that found online retail sales were slowing after years of steady growth. As I often do, I managed to work in a reference to my previous life as an intrepid writer covering the financial services beat — and thus spending a fair amount of time talking to bankers about strategies for their Web sites.
These nearly always evolved from using sites as a way to migrate customers from expensive channels (branches) to less expensive ones into presenting sites as a value-added customer convenience that supplemented rather than replaced branches. Turns out that while there was lots of stuff folks felt comfortable doing themselves online, there was plenty of stuff they didn’t want to do there — and much of it involved some very lucrative business indeed, such as loans.
So I wasn’t surprised to see the idea of cannibalization — online sales displacing those that would otherwise take place in physical stores — played up in this year’s update of the research, conducted by Forrester for Shop.org, a division of the National Retail Federation. Forrester doesn’t have an answer, reports MercuryNews.com. “It’s a good question” as to whether retailers lose some in-store sales to their own Web sites, says Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru. Because physical stores account for the lion’s share of their business, many retailers would likely prefer for customers to do most of their shopping there, says Mulpuru.
Yet a spokeswoman for Shop.org disagreed, writing in an e-mail to the MercuryNews.com:
What we hear from multichannel retailers (i.e., ones with stores and Web sites) is that they truly do not care which channel you shop, as long as you shop with them. People who buy online are just as likely to make impulse purchases, become a loyal shopper, tell their friends about their experiences, etc., as those who buy in the store.
Much like the banks before them, the inherent challenge for multichannel retailers is in offering a seamless experience between their online and offline channels. Customers get frustrated with the lack of a common transaction history, for example. But it’s often difficult for retailers to port information from aging legacy systems to newer Web-based platforms.
Retailers must also realize that even if customers don’t buy online, they often do legwork there, scouting for the right product and price before venturing to a store to buy it. Thirty-six percent of consumers routinely do this, according to a JupiterResearch statistic I cited in a February blog about the tricky nature of Internet marketing. That figure may be considerably higher for big-ticket items. Steven Keith Platt, of Chicago consulting firm the Platt Retail Institute says he believes up to 70 percent of folks shopping for a car conduct research online before ever setting foot into a dealership. Suggests Platt:
Retailers need to translate that into a better shopping experience - say with handheld devices for the tech-savvy to continue using in the store - to close the sale.
In an interesting variation of what Platt describes, consumers could learn about BMW products at informational kiosks the automaker deployed at sites including airport terminals, malls and health clubs. Within hours of viewing the information, interested consumers would receive e-mails with invitations to take a test drive, according to the Self-Service & Kiosk Association.
To see the original version of this article, visit: http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/tve/?p=299
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
A loss for Roger Clemens
FROM THE SEATTLE TIMES
Clemens continues to deny McNamee's version, forcefully, but he lost considerable ground on Wednesday with Pettitte's damning testimony. Consider the opinion of Katherine Darmer, a specialist in criminal procedure and professor of law at Chapman University:
"It is true that McNamee has lied in the past," Darmer said. "But the type of lies he told — ones where he tended to minimize his own conduct and cover up for his former friends and clients — are quite typical of how people often initially behave when caught in wrongdoing.
"Had he made demonstrably false allegations implicating innocent ballplayers, then his testimony should be viewed skeptically. However, all the hearing established today was that it took him awhile to be willing to come clean.
"Almost no large-scale wrongdoing comes to light through choirboys, and McNamee is no angel. But his allegations have been substantiated by others whose integrity is solid, including Pettitte."
To read this entire article, please visit: http://www.paradigmshiftpr.com/aloss.htm
March Madness Not Only Thing Impeding Productivity
With last night's conclusion of the NCAA College Basketball tournament, the media has been filled with stories about the billions of dollars in productivity that are lost each year due to people managing their pools. Another area where work productivity suffers: the challenges of keeping a mobile workforce up-to-date while traveling.
Market indicators point to the growing opportunity for organizations to implement mobile workforce engagement initiatives. According to IDC, in 2007 over two-thirds of US workers were mobile. IDC also reports that the market for mobile enterprise applications reached $1.2 billion in 2005 and will grow to $3.5 billion in 2010, representing a compound annual growth rate of 23%. A recent Aberdeen Group study found that the top two mobile workforce issues companies face are keeping road warriors efficient at all times and servicing customers effectively regardless of where employees are.
LiquidTalk, Inc. (http://www.liquidtalk.com/) helps leading edge firms connect and engage mobile employees to spark productivity. Their application empowers sales, service and other remote workers to find, organize, create and distribute rich employer content (audio & video) to mobile devices including Blackberry and iPod/iPhone. The uses for mobile workforce engagement include sales, knowledge transfer, corporate and customer communication -- wherever and whenever. Similar to Blackberry mobilizing email, LiquidTalk now makes corporate content mobile-friendly and pushes it out proactively and automatically to mobile employees for:
·Turning those cracks-in-the-day into productivity;
·Better engagement and connection that will drive improved talent acquistion/retention; and
·Just-in-time, immediate access to that content for more sales impact while with Customers.
“Organizations lose revenue every day because they are ill-equipped to manage an increasingly disconnected mobile workforce,” said David Peak, LiquidTalk CEO. “Mobile workers are typically the customer-facing, revenue-generating engine for organizations, so there are financial implications to leaving this challenge unaddressed. We are thrilled to work with Research In Motion to address this opportunity on the BlackBerry platform.”
The Off-Line Impact of Online Ads
Magid Abraham is the president and CEO, and a cofounder, of comScore, an internet information provider based in Reston, Virginia.
The internet is widely considered the most measurable of advertising media, but those easily tracked click-throughs and e-commerce sales don’t tell the whole story. Far from it. Internet advertising stimulates off-line sales, too—in most cases, our firm finds that online campaigns increase sales more at advertisers’ retail cash registers than on their websites. Data like that should embolden executives to shift ever more dollars to online advertising.
Some two million people worldwide have installed our firm’s tracking software on their PCs and given us explicit permission to observe their online activities. In return, these research panelists get various rewards, such as free network backup or file encryption, and a chance to have their opinions and behavior influence the future development of the internet. We use their information—including data about sites visited, searches conducted, transactions made, and content viewed—to produce aggregated, anonymous, syndicated market-research reports and, when clients commission them, issue-specific studies.
Our tracking helped reveal how online advertising influences consumers’ behavior. Measuring the online sales impact of an online ad or a paid-search campaign—in which a company pays to have its link appear at the top of a page of search results—is straightforward: We determine who has viewed the ad, then compare online purchases made by those who have and those who have not seen it. Analyzing the off-line sales impact requires a variety of other techniques, such as conducting surveys or drawing on the panelists’ profiles in clients’ frequent-buyer databases.
A recent study we conducted for a retailer with more than $15 billion in annual revenues—the vast majority of which come from its physical stores—had notable results. Over a three-month period, U.S. sales increased by 40% online and by 50% off-line among people exposed to an online search- and display-ad holiday campaign promoting the entire company. Because its baseline sales volumes are greater in physical stores than on the internet, this retailer derived a great deal more revenue benefit off-line than the percentages suggest. Even in terms of raw increases, though, online ads had a bigger impact on off-line than on online sales in a majority of our studies.
People tend to respond—with their wallets—more to search ads than to display ads (see the exhibit “Web Ads Boost In-Store Sales, Too”). However, search ads, which appear only after a viewer has expressed interest in a subject by initiating a search, are generally more costly per impression than are display ads. Consistent with other kinds of advertising, using both types of ads in one campaign increases sales more than the two, added together, do in separate campaigns.
Web Ads Boost In-Store Sales, Too
Lawyer: Clemens' testimony not credible
FROM MLB.COM
WASHINGTON -- Roger Clemens was unconvincing in his testimony before Congress and may have opened himself up to federal perjury charges, a legal expert told MLB.com on Wednesday.
Katherine Darmer, a former assistant U.S. attorney in New York and an expert on criminal procedure, said that Clemens did not come across as credible and that it would not be surprising to see the former big league hurler experience more legal troubles in days to come.
"I thought Roger Clemens did not come across well," said Darmer, a professor of law at Chapman (Calif.) University. "Coming at it from pretty much an open mind, I just thought he was not credible. He's obviously got a lot to lose with his denials, but if I were his lawyer or his family, I'd be worried about perjury charges."
Darmer said that Clemens may have been ill-advised to testify before Congress, especially after Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said Wednesday that he was prepared to shy away from holding the hearing.
To read this entire story, please visit: http://www.paradigmshiftpr.com/lawyerclemens.htm
Merger could bring anything
FROM THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER
During the Bush administration, the Department of Justice has had a mixed record on its attitudes toward airline mergers.
Before merging with America West, US Airways applied to merge with United in 2001, only to learn that the move would face a regulatory challenge. The two airlines then withdrew their petition before it officially was rejected.
No official reasons were given by Justice for its decision, but speculation was the airlines' overlap at strategic airports - such as LaGuardia in New York, Washington National, and London's Heathrow - created anti-competitive concerns.
Yet the same set of regulators did approve the US Airways-America West merger two years later.
Prior to deregulation more than 29 years ago, the Civil Aeronautics Board had to approve such moves. And again, mergers were primarily larger carriers buying smaller, regional carriers - especially since only seven so-called "legacy carriers" could operate flights that crossed more than two states.
"Since then, it's been like reading tea leaves," said Northeastern University finance professor Harlan Platt, a long-time airline industry observer. "I would imagine that whatever happens with Delta and the others, there will be some forced divestiture of assets."
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