Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore

I have recently reviewed the marketing-related book "Crossing the Chasm" on thecubelb.wordpress.com. 

The review is actually entitled: How to go about marketing a tech start-up, mainly because, well, that's what the book is about. If this sounds like a topic that might interest you, you can read more here http://thecubelb.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/how-to-go-about-marketing-a-tech-start-up/

For those of you who are not familiar with this initiative yet, here's a quick brief:

The Cube is the first online book club in Lebanon. We are a group of Tweeps (Twitter users, for those who are not familiar with this term) who are quite aware of the importance of reading and seek to communicate our enthusiasm.

If you are a book lover, I would encourage you to post your own reviews and subscribe to The Cube Blog.

... and don't forget to join in the conversation!

Le Mall Marketing Campaign - "Shopping Trip to Paris"

Apparently someone has paid more than $11, 000 for a chance to win a trip... worth about... LESS.

There's 555 coupons for a certain Juliane, each worth $20 according to the listings on stopjessica.com, stopjad.com, stopcarol.com, stopzeina.com, stopmaya.com (which by the way, all, just link to the Facebook application). 

 

Only about 3800 likes on Le Mall's Facebook page, a rather average interaction rate, and yet the top 50 "unstoppables" boast numbers that seem way up in the clouds... 

That part obviously reads "fishy" to me. Even more so that the full name of those "unstoppables" is not written. Oh, and their Facebook manager (with great writing skills - honestly -) needs to do something about those long status updates!

 

"Hasn't anyone told them yet that their advertising campaigns suck?" stated a very reputable friend in the advertising industry upon hearing LeMall's latest radio ad. 

I don't quite agree actually.

I was intending to praise this campaign... I should get back on track. I find it ingenious!

For once a campaign that aims to raise sales, engage with clients and above all reward them... and my favorite part? It's an integrated marketing campaign. 

I would calculate the success of this by measuring the amount of new sales generated, versus that of the previous month, minus the campaign costs. Uh, ok, I am making it impossible for it to be a "winner".

...But seriously, I do like it. At least they would have created themselves a Facebook fan base for future campaigns and got new people to interact with them! (Which could have been done with Facebook ads alone, with, at least, 20 times less the cost.)

ok, I give up! 

It's a good campaign, yet, likely to cost more than to generate. Although, the campaign seems so awesome and creative (ok, not creative, ...yet it's spot on the Lebanese female mall consumer). 

Let's call it ambitious.

...But hey! At least they did it all legally:

Did you know that it takes a permit from the ministry of Finance for any draw to take place? Even if they were just to win coupons! Moreover, such draws have to be governed by the Lebanese National Lottery... And Le Mall did it right. Yey for that! 

Google Search Insights: "Marketing" in Lebanon, VS "Marketing" Worldwide

Google has an interesting little tool, called Google Insights for Search. Aside from allowing Googlers to spot Google Search trends, it sorts keywords out by location, category and time.
Being obsessed with Marketing, I thought why not spot the trends... "Marketing" was my keyword, and here were my findings:

Google Search Term: "Marketing"
Filter: Worldwide, 2004-present


Google Search Term: "Marketing"
Filter: Lebanon, 2004-present

Why am I posting this? I thought the difference was staggering.
Worldwide, "Internet Marketing" and "Marketing Online" were common searches. In Lebanon? Not quite so... There were no sign of the digital marketing era in our top 10 searches.
Moreover, the fact that people were looking up "Marketing Mix" showed a basic knowledge of marketing on the global front. What about Lebanon? Well, the "what is Marketing" search is certainly not reassuring.
Yet, I am glad to see "marketing in Lebanon" is in number 7...

World Cup: Lebanon World Cup

Beirut, Lebanon- It's all about the World Cup, World Cup matches, World Cup teams, World Cup news. It's World Cup Fever in Lebanon.


Foreign flags in Lebanon signal the beginning of the World Cup. Restaurants and pubs display the World Cup games on big screens, and it's all over your friends' Facebook and Blackberry statuses.

You cannot really escape the World Cup. I even found a tv screen displaying a World Cup match in a Gemmayzeh parking lot! At work, people would take days off when their favorite World Cup team is playing, and otherwise the internet is put to good use to stay up-to-date with the World Cup results. It's nothing new in Lebanon, really. It's been said on ABC News that factions stopped fighting in Lebanon to watch the World Cup in 1990.

Public places and football stadiums are filled with big screens to offer Lebanon a spectacular World Cup feel... and as the big theatres in Lebanon anticipate the lack of spectators, they decided to participate in the World Cup craze: broadcasting all 64 games of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in Lebanon's 3 Grand Cinemas (ABC Ashrafieh, Concorde Verdun and Las Salinas Enfeh)!

Not to mention all the World Cup themed advertising in Lebanon...

Digital Marketing, Israel's Internet Marketing

This is as fun as internet marketing can get at messing with people's heads! I have been avid to write about Israel's government marketing for a while now. I know it's kind of an old story in Internet Marketing history, but it's still as interesting as digital marketing ever was. Here we go!

There's someone I would love for you to meet on mySpace: "The State of Israel". Israel is 62 years old (born in 1948, following the war with Palestine. Yep, makes sense, but I am not sure it helps their cause!).... 62 years old Israel, puts profile pictures of beautiful young people, from both genders (although the profile info points that it is female!... yes, yes Israel is a woman), the mySpace account holds all the specs of a fake account. Yet, it's far from the truth, it is an official account for Israel, created by a man called David Saranga, the head behind the Israeli internet campaign.

Operating from the Consulate General of Israel in New York, the Israeli mySpace account has friends. Check out the isrealli blog "the first official blog to ever be started by a government" according to wikipedia's isrealli page. Not enough? Check out the Israeli twitter account: israelconsulate which ridiculously held an official twitter Israeli press conference.... and I am not done! There's even a Youtube Israeli channel.

It all sure does serve the digital brainwashing initiative!

Gift Shop - Lebanon | Gifts Lebanon | Gadgets Lebanon

Beirut, Lebanon- Look out for the Captain and Captain gift shop in Lebanon advertising, currently running in Lebanon: radio ads on light FM, an sms campaign, e-mail shots, Facebook ads... You just have to check out their gift shop in Lebanon concept!!


The gift shop store located in Lebanon is divided by personality types to make your shopping easier.






With five amazing men personality categories, you are bound to fall in love with their original gifts offerings.
You will also find a personality type quiz to help you pick the most suiting gifts for men section for the men in your life: personality quiz. Enjoy!

The Timeliness of Profit

"Profit is a function of time" as simple as this phrase may sound, it holds inbound wisdom. Profit, like everything else in a business, is calculated periodically. While the balance sheet gives you a snapshot of your state of affairs, this image might be misguiding you.

Expenses, per say, are incurred directly, even if their benefits are to be depreciated over a long time. This does not appear in your "snapshot" as the costs will be directly registered and the income statement might display a loss for the period at hand.
Had you been talking about inventory, the "just-in-time" policy success might be credited to this profit and time relationship. Yet it only simplifies the process of monitoring losses. In reality, had you been a retailer, buying a bulk of items at once can significantly reduce costs. Yet it makes your balance sheet look like a total disaster, as expenses will certainly outweigh sales for that period of time.

Marketing is no different. Had you understood the advantage of investing at once to procure long-term sales as opposed to instant gratification, you would realize the advantages of big integrated marketing campaigns. Keep in mind that marketing goes under "expenses" in the income statement and that the profits will only be accrued in the future.

Buying inventory progressively, might well be a safe bet, but it makes you lose your bargaining edge and increases your costs. You would indeed be making profits, but you would not be operating with your full potential as initial costs of goods would be high. Likewise, investing in marketing progressively gets you "some" sales, yet you lose the crescendo effect of an integrated campaign.

My point? The same marketing expenses invested at once would generate much more sales than the same amount invested progressively. Take the plunge, even if in your periodical business management reasoning, it looks bad. In the long run, it will appear to be sound judgment.

Nivea "You WOW" Internet Marketing

Following the Crest White Pearl's internet campaign "My Crest Smile", Nivea launches yet another digital marketing campaign in Lebanon "You Wow" (more of a Middle-East campaign actually) targeting the superficial layer of the society.
Using the Middle East Nivea Facebook fan page, people are encouraged to upload pictures of themselves in order to be the new model for a Nivea promotion: Angel Star. The competition has 2 stages: the first, where a panel of judges picks 5 finalists, and the second where a voting among the finalists takes place.


This time, the implementation leaves me pondering.

First, the ads appear in Arabic on Facebook, which in Lebanon is often linked to the lower market segments. Not a smart choice, given that Facebook users in Lebanon are by default using the English interface and are rarely part of that segment.
Second, the campaign only relies on voting in the second part of the competition, not so bright. It looses the edge of word-of-mouth, social and viral marketing that the web 2.0 marketing campaigns tend to rely on. Moreover, no comments are enabled on the website, and there's very low interactivity.

All in all, "You WOW" might be a good casting tool, but quite a weak marketing one! ...I can guarantee that it is not operating with its full potential.

Garnier PureActive Internet Marketing

Garnier recently initiated a digital marketing campaign in Lebanon... And as the competition draws to an end, I am lead to congratulate Garnier for executing a successful, highly interactive internet marketing campaign in Lebanon. As Garnier adopts the Facebook social interface to promote the launching of their PureActive line of products in Lebanon, more than 6,000 fans join in...


Description: Using a Facebook Fan page, Garnier chooses themes for people to upload pictures, and thus, become candidates. Voting takes place on Garnier's Facebook Application. The candidate with the highest number of votes wins.
Target: teenagers in Lebanon
Promotion: internet ads
Execution: Facebook Application (voting interface)
Rewards: Mac & iPod
The beauty of it all is the high interaction taking place between the moderator of the group and the fans.
It is great to witness that brands are becoming so easily accessible to their customers...

Google Adds a Virtual Keyboard

Google has launched a virtual keyboard (previously found under code.google.com) allowing you to type foreign characters into Google searches using a QWERTY keyboard... 35 languages are activated so far... Including Arabic. Check the http://www.google.com.lb for the Lebanese version. Cheers.

Internet Privacy: Google and Facebook

While Google protects its users, Facebook might not be as concerned with their privacy.

After all the issues Google has had with governments, it finally fights back! April 20th, Google presents the Government Requests tool : displaying the amount of requests for data or content removal received from government agencies. The data shown were gathered between July and December 2009 and will be updated every 6 months.


What about Facebook? Well the news are not as reassuring. The Electronic Frontiere Foundation has recently posted information on how law enforcement agencies use social networking sites to gain access to data.. and Facebook seems very cooperative. Check this out: http://www.search-internetmarketing.com/2010/03/how-us-government-spies-use-facebook/

Lebanon: Internet Censorship?

Is Lebanon's internet subject to censorship practices? "The Middle East and North Africa is one of the most heavily censored regions in the world" states a report conducted by the OpenNet Initiative report on the MENA region.
What about Lebanon? Well, "Lebanon is one of very few countries in the Middle East where ONI found no evidence of technical filtering" - OpenNet's Lebanon Profile.
Opennet.net also provides maps that display the countries censoring each of Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Orkut and Youtube. Interesting stuff, check it out: Filtering Maps

"My Crest Smile" Internet Marketing

www.mycrestsmile.com hits a home run. As Crest and Oral-B in partnership with Femme, manage to"place a finger" into the wound of our Lebanese society, shallowness caves in ...and ALTHOUGH what I feel like doing is mourn our superficial society, I am driven to congratulate them for understanding the population and conducting a great marketing campaign.

The internet marketing campaign relies on content generated by its visitors and their votes. It has gained monumental popularity by piggybacking on the power of Facebook (the number one website in Lebanon, according to Alexa). Thumbs-up to e-comLebanon for a phenomenal success.

"Become a Star", "get ready to be on the July cover of Femme" are what the website states to encourage female visitors to upload their pictures and ask their friends to vote for them.

While, the voting mechanism seems hard to hack, the terms and conditions of the contest only give voting the power to affect 40% of the results... Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't it make the votes kind of worthless?

Lucky for them, Lebanese tend to dive in without reading instructions.

Social Voting Marketing

Social Voting Marketing has taken off with websites like Digg and StumbleUpon and Reddit. However, Social Voting Marketing is not only about "link baiting" even Youtube with the 5 stars rating has a type of social voting established. The concept helps the visitors get worthy content, and gives them a say in the standing of the subject.

SVM might have started with bookmarking. Nonetheless, the digital marketing world has learnt a valuable lesson from this trend.

After the success of voting websites in driving traffic and getting visitors hooked to their "cause", the trend spread over the internet. One of the initial broad successes, the new 7 wonders of the world, stem traffic by capitalizing on the feeling of Patriotism.

It relied on its participants' marketing efforts in their respective countries, thanks to which, it got promoted in offline media around the world and its results were publicized on news-worthy channels. The success of their first campaign was so prominent that they soon introduced the new 7 wonders of nature allowing the visitors to nominate the participants first and go through the voting process next. Eventually, the concept evolved to a ridiculous "open source" contests, where the visitors contribute to the competition creation as well as the voting under "vote 7 campaigns".

Social CRM, the Future of CRM

Social CRM is the future.

Social media and CRM combined, social CRM has a lot to offer.

While most CRM tools work on cross-tabbing the CRM data the company introduces to generate new CRM insights, the future of CRM will come once social media will start contributing data: Once the CRM systems will automatically excavate the web 2.0 social profiles to find additional profile data about our customers.

I am thinking something like Google Buzz or Rapportive, a profile that combines all online information, to be automatically added to the MIS customer entries and matched to the company's CRM entries to generate new marketing synthesis.

Maybe in the future everyone will have a single internet web 2.0 CRM page where CRM data can be updated online to include all information from governmental to personal on the internet. The stored social CRM data could serve everything from VISA applications to user verification and save precious form-filling time. CRM privacy settings can be applied by type of visitor. Then all we would have to do is give a CRM reference code. The OpenID initiative is already a good step to a web identity creation.

...Just a globalized digital vision of the future.

BE STUPID.

Diesel's new campaign boldly states " Be Stupid". 

I don't know what this speaks to you, but to me, there's no turnarounds to the very definition of the word Stupid, try as they may with their campaign. 

The only message that does get through is Diesel proudly boasting that its clients are STUPID! I don't know about you, but if I had a Diesel jeans, you won't see me wearing it anymore! 

Never have I seen communication sink so low.  Whoever created this campaign, must indeed be stupid.

Try as they may to make stupid sound good... Stupid will forever be..well, STUPID!

Signage Evolution

Internet marketing is creating change in all aspects of marketing. Even retail signage evolved! 

I spotted a change in retail signage that to this date is not yet present in Lebanon: internet marketing through the signage.

Just got back from a trip to France and Belgium. Nothing better than a change of environment to get inspired!

Check out the web addresses on the signage of the retail stores.

I will let the pictures do the talking...

Alice in Wonderland - The Feminist!

Alice in Wonderland... is a real feminist!

I just saw the movie. Against all odds, after watching a Disney movie, I left the theater with thoughts on feminism, society and rebellion. The parallelism drawn between the real world and wonderland is too striking.

Alice refuses to wear a corset and stockings: "who's to say what's proper?", she revolts against her mother: "if they told you to wear a morgue on your head would you wear it?", lends a deaf ear to her conventional sister's advice "you don't want to remain a load on our mum.." and stands up against what society expects her to do (get engaged). Furthermore, our dear Alice publicly says no to her potential fiance, (what others perceived as a unique opportunity as he was rich with a good social standing) and carelessly talks back to her potential fiance's mother. Moreover, Alice threatens her sister's husband (twice) when she sees him cheating, and aggressively gives her unconventional opinion in business matters (a field that was not perceived as proper for girls).

In the other realm, Wonderland, Alice takes matters into her own hands "ever since I got here I was being told what to do!" she complains, she defies what she has been told (recklessly goes to the red queen's castle to save her friend), and finally does what she was destined to do, be the "champion" who saves the realm from evil. The long awaited savior... is a woman!

...And have you noticed? All positions of power are actually held by women in the movie! The mother heads Alice's home and the Fiance's mother seems to rule in his house. Whereas,  in the second realm, both the good and the bad kingdoms are ruled by.... queens! Men only play secondary roles.

This is the trend of movies and stories we were raised to. The same story boards the new generations are brought up watching. 

When a woman becomes a president, people applaud. When a woman heads an organization, people talk of her accomplishments. When a woman gets married, people make it sound as though her life was over "she could have done so much". Wouldn't that be the source of my feminist nature? I can't help but wonder whether I was brainwashed into becoming so ambitious.
 On the other hand, when a man cooks, people compliment him. When he does the cleaning, people say "what a catch". When he takes care of the kids, all women want him.

What does the future have in store for us, in light of all these gender roles reversing positive incentives? Media can be so powerful in transmitting thoughts and ethical perceptions. If it can sell the tangible goods, why not the intangible thoughts? I think the time will come when the roles of women and men will be completely reversed.

A bit extreme?

Solidarites Water Awareness Campaign

Another food for thought: good insights brought from abroad.
Water-related diseases are the leading cause of death - UN

Check out this communication for an awareness campaign by Association Solidarites International displayed in a public place in Paris.... This should get you inspired!

Marketing Analysis v/s Market Analysis

Marketing analysis is often confused with market analysis. Just like sales is often confused with marketing. Is there a difference? Yes, and an intrinsic one.

Marketing analysis is conducted to analyze your marketing processes (refer to the marketing mix). Whereas, market analysis is a study regarding a specific market, assessing the environment where the business operates or aims to conduct activities. 

Meaning? 

Marketing analysis is somewhat a self-prognostic internal assessment (evaluation conducted by using reference points such as sales results, brand awareness, etc.) whereas market analysis is an external environmental assessment (including studies like PEST analysis, SWOT analysis, and more).