Andrew Lark

A Sad Day

Peter Drucker died today - he was the real deal. A remarkable thinker, leader and brilliant educator. I was lucky enough to spend time with him several years ago at a corporate offsite and was simply astounded at his smarts and ability to set the room alight with anecdotes and thinking.

In a 1999 Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Joan Magretta and Nan Stone wrote: "Before Peter Drucker, most people thought about their businesses with a manufacturing mindset, defining a business based on what it produced. Today, the marketing mindset prevails. It was Mr. Drucker's critical insight that instead of buying a 'product' the customer buys the satisfaction of a need." - WSJ

Stonyfield Farms

Great post on one of my blog heroes Stonyfield Farms. Here's a quote:

Stonyfield's sales have also increased 25 percent over the last year, and the company has just begun a major expansion that will double the size of its existing plant ... All that with almost no traditional advertising." Gary (CEO) comments: "The proof, first of all, is that on our website, we have 750,000 subscribers to our four 'Moos Letters.' Dannon doesn't have that, Yoplait doesn't have that, Kraft doesn't have that"

They get that its all about participation. And so, how does a company rationalize new marketing strategies and entering the blogosphere. Gary says it all here:

Underneath it all, Gary says, is the constant creation of new strategies. "We never knew what was really going to work because there were no models for us," he explains. "We led with the only things we really knew -- our yogurt and our causes."

What's your cause?

The Panel That Never Was

I was meant to be at Ad:Tech this week in New York. Unfortunately it wasn't to be - but the panel I was meant to lead looks like it went really well. Look at some of the things leaders had to say about podcasting:

“Reach is pretty limited right now, but you’re reaching an enthusiast audience,” Ms. Papadopoulos said. She said the Volvo sponsorship on Autoblog.com reached about 120,000 people a month. Ms. Pitcher’s (Citrix) reach ranges from 10,000 to 100,000 monthly.

“People like ads, they don’t like interruptions,” said David Goodman, president-marketing at Infinity Broadcasting. (I really agree with this - the rise of the participatory era is the death of the age of interruption)

IBM Says Blogging Marketing's Next Big Thing

From the folks at AdAge, blogging... "goes a long way in personalizing brands and creating one-to-one relationships with customers. While IBM says it does not want to use new media as traditional sales and marketing tools, it has succeeded in opening discussions in health care and video gaming with “outsiders,” which in turn could lead to new business relationships."

“This is a way to get our expertise out there, not by shoving it down people’s throats, but by just starting conversations,” Mr. Barger said. “It expands our reputation, perceptions and reach of IBM, at the same time expanding the number of people we can learn from.”

Where I am not on board with the AdAge story is that technology companies are more advantaged by social networking technologies. As GM and Stoneyfield Farms have demonstrated, the more you think about your customers as participants in your company's success - and as part of a community - the more participatory communications works for you. It's not about the technology, it is all about how you view marketing.

BW On The Best Of The New Web

BW has a great wrap-up of the best of the web, including one of my faves, Digg.com. And another, Basecamp.

So Much For The Long Tail...

I have a ridiculous number of channels available to me on DirectTV. And I pay a pretty price for them. Most I could care less about. The only thing I care about is rugby - which, to get, I need to subscribe to every petty, worthless piece of crap TV programming created in the last decade.

This weekend there is a really big game - the New Zealand All Blacks, the #1 ranked team in the world take on Ireland - who have never beaten them. There are normally two options for viewing. First, Pay Per View. Having paid a just ludicrous amount for the privilege of all that programming, I need to pay even more to watch the game under this scenario. The other option is Setanta Sports - an Irish sports channel way down the line-up at 617. Being an Irish-based channel you would think they'd cover the game. But no, instead we are going to get France vs. Canada - what is likely to be a boring and sad whitewash. What were they thinking?

Broadcasters don't get the long tail. Moreover, they don't get what customers want. They play to the masses, not to the long tail. But they have the bandwidth and technology to do it. What they are doing is driving people - like me - to companies that get the long tail. Companies like NetFlix and MediaZone.

So, instead of paying for DirectTV and Setanta Sports I'm going to subscribe to MediaZone and get the games in all their 60's Godzilla movie style. It'll suck. I'll listen to the games live on the radio at the same time to account for the buffering issues and shakes and jitters. But what I won't do is pay for lousy programming decisions and a complete lack of understanding of what the consumer wants. I don't want to pay for an entire season of sports but only get a fraction of the games being played. I want to get the season and the games.

This is the power afforded to me by the Web. Those that get the Long Tail will survive. Those that don't will die - slowly for sure, but eventually technology and smart marketers will catch them.

Kiwis Want Kiwis Back...

Seems that NZ wants their Kiwi expats back! A new site from the NZ Govt aims to further that goal. The TV ads from NZ beer Tui and soft-drink L&P are worth a look.

Handy Reference Site

Stumbled onto this handy style guide from O'Reilly. If you are writing for tech, it's pretty good.

The Last Word From Forbes

Being in China for a week meant that I very luckily avoided the Forbes fracas. Mike Malone, former editor at large for Forbes ASAP mag - the glamour rag Forbes sends subscribers to remind us all what it might be like to have lots of money - has the last word on that Forbes story.

"Let me make a prediction. Five years from now, the blogosphere will have developed into a powerful economic engine that has all but driven newspapers into oblivion, has morphed (thanks to cell phone cameras) into a video medium that challenges television news, and has created a whole new group of major companies and media superstars. Billions of dollars will be made by those prescient enough to either get on board or invest in these companies. At this point, the industry will then undergo its first shakeout, with the loss of perhaps several million blogs — though the overall industry will continue to grow at a steady pace.

 

And, at about that moment, Forbes will announce that the blogosphere is the Next Big Thing for investors."

CEOs Say Blogs Are Useful

C/Net reports on a study by PRWeek and BM that says about 59 percent of CEOs surveyed said they find Web logs, or blogs, useful for internal communications, while 47 percent see blogs as tools for communication with external audiences. Of the 131 CEOs surveyed, seven percent are actually blogging while many others say are unlikely to start a blog themselves. About 18 percent of these CEOs say they plan to host a company blog over the next two years.