Innovative Product Mashups
Inc.com

Sometimes innovation is as simple as turning a ketchup bottle upside down. But what about putting bug repellent in clothing or carbonation in milk? It's convergence culture gone wild.

How exactly do we define innovation? While it's probably the most overused term in business today, innovation is not a fad. It's not even new. What differentiates a smart innovation—and makes it worth writing about—is that it has the capability of moving a business forward in ways that can result in more customers, more sales, more brand loyalty, more good will, or some combination of those effects. Smart innovation is capable of providing a company with competitive advantage. Innovations are smart when they are not just inventions for innovation's sake, just to be new and different; rather they provide a strategic benefit.

Innovation has always been relevant because it aims to satisfy unmet consumer and business needs; as the new-product development time-to-market continues to shrink and product life cycles get shorter and shorter, the term will become even more relevant. What qualifies as an innovation, in my mind, is a product, service, aspect, or feature that is new, different, surprising, clever, fresh, attention-getting, challenging of conventional ways things are done, and is an obvious improvement on "what's out there" in that particular product category and geographical area.

Got all that? Keep in mind, innovations don't have to be complicated, or technically advanced—though surely they can be. What qualifies to me as an innovation can be as simple as putting a fourth ball in a tennis ball can (which had always just held three), thereby fulfilling the consumer need for more balls to play with and increasing each purchase by 33 percent. It can be as simple as turning a ketchup bottle upside down so consumers don't have to wait for the ketchup to drip down in a partially empty bottle, so people use more ketchup as a result of bigger squirts each time, and so the face panel at the top of the package is wider, making it easier to communicate the brand message at the point of sale.

Consumer Power Shifts to Developing Markets
AdAge

Speak of the consumer to executives from a global company, and the image is no longer likely to be a mother in some Midwestern suburb, but more likely one in China, India or Brazil.

The combination of more rapid economic and population growth and the emergence of rising middle classes in developing markets stands in stark contrast to the stagnation of the U.S. economy and erosion of the middle class.

Trouble is, many companies are still focused by business footprint and management structure squarely in the U.S. But that's starting to change as marketers adapt to the market.

Kraft Foods addressed the issue squarely earlier this year with its plan to break into two companies—one focused primarily on the U.S. and slower-growing food categories, the other focused primarily on a global snack business with far more potential in fast-growing developing markets.

Now some expect Procter & Gamble Co., if not taking a step quite so drastic, to reconfigure similarly for the growth of its consumer base outside the U.S. Chairman-CEO Bob McDonald helped fuel restructuring speculation when, during the company's August earnings conference call, he mused about P&G's shifting "center of gravity."

"I don't think there's any question, if someone looks back at our company 10 years from now, they'll wonder if the leadership of the company at this time took the right steps to move the center of gravity of the company more toward Asia, more toward Africa, where the babies are being born, where the new households are being formed, and certainly we've been in the midst of that," Mr. McDonald said.

That statement was among the factors that led Sanford C. Bernstein to upgrade P&G on the belief that the company is preparing to slim down a North American-heavy organization that's grown too big for the relative size and importance of the North American consumer market. Analyst Ali Dibadj wrote that the restructuring could reach $2 billion to $5 billion and involve thousands of layoffs.

Trends: Social Media Advertising
AdWeek

While social networks amass huge audiences and are the most dynamic sector in digital advertising, they tend not to bring in revenues to match. Luckily for brands, that’s beginning to change—and we have the four reasons why.

More metrics. For advertisers wondering whether their efforts are paying off, new social analytics services seem to be launching every week. Facebook, for instance, recently unveiled a new measurement tool called Insights, which has stats like “Friends of Fans.” The social networking company also says advertisers will soon be able to aim their messages at users even more carefully using data from Facebook’s integration with media services like Spotify and Hulu.

Content is advertising is content. Facebook and Twitter have both emphasized turning regular user content into ads—Facebook through its Sponsored Stories unit and Twitter through its Sponsored Tweets. But that doesn’t mean the death of traditional advertising copy. In fact, Facebook has a new ad unit that blends a friend’s activity (e.g., “Anthony likes Movie X”) with a message from the advertiser.

Social blindness less blind. The bad news: Some, like Altimeter Group principal analyst Brian Solis, believe “blindness or deafness” to brand messages is going to increase on social networks as they’re flooded with promotional content. But there’s good news, too: Some companies are working on ways to fight the clutter. Facebook, for instance, announced that it’s starting to organize user newsfeeds based on an algorithm that it calls Graph Rank—so brand activity that’s actually generating user interest won’t get buried.

It’s not just about Facebook. Yes, Facebook claims the majority of social ad spending, but other services are starting to make progress, too. For example, an advertiser survey conducted by The Pivot Conference found that 16 percent of respondents had run campaigns with Foursquare, and another 26 percent planned to do so in the next year. And eMarketer is projecting that LinkedIn’s ad revenue will grow from $79 million last year to $250 million in 2013.

Welcome to the Stream
AdWeek

The future of the Internet has a branding problem: It’s here, but no one knows what to call it.

Eight years ago, the future had a name—Web 2.0—but what that meant remains vague to this day. John Battelle (the chairman of Federated Media) and Tim O’Reilly (founder of O’Reilly Media), who have gone on to make a great deal of money from the Web 2.0™ conference they launched in 2003, took a stab at it when they said it would be about the Web becoming a “platform” for software and services. A serviceable enough definition at the time—and for eight years since then everyone has nodded their heads in agreement and said, “Yes, a platform,” as if they understood, while simultaneously shelling out thousands of dollars in conference fees to find out why they were nodding.

Many no doubt will go with the flow again this week, when Battelle’s and O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Summit (latecomer’s walk-up cost: an extravagant $4,695) takes place in San Francisco. Only they won’t be hearing about the “Web as platform” anymore. Conferences like this are trafficking in a whole new set of terms—from “the social graph,” to the “real-time Web,” to the “semantic Web,” to (of course) “Web 3.0,” to “the Data Frame”—the theme of this year’s Web 2.0 event.

It’s all an attempt to describe the ongoing shift to a “live” Web experience—where a stream of media (not to be confused with streaming media), constructed on the fly out of databases, will be tailored uniquely to each consumer. That shift has profound implications for both content providers and advertisers—no matter what it ends up being labeled.

The man who invented the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, recognizing the growing importance of data, coined the term Giant Global Graph in 2007 to describe what was going to subsume his WWW. (It has yet to be widely adopted.) Indeed, there’s so much talk about databases and the Web these days that the people writing conference materials find themselves reaching for ever more breathless rhetoric to emphasize its importance.

Social Media Influences Brand Reputation
MarketingDaily

Social media plays an important role in how consumers discover, research, and share information about brands and products, according to research from Nielsen/McKinsey’s NM Incite.

Consumers are very much part of the decision funnel for other consumers, says Radha Subramanyam, SVP of media and advertising analytics, NM Incite.
“What is really surprising is not how many people are reading consumer-generated reviews today, but the vast swaths of people who are actively creating such content,” Subramanyam tells Marketing Daily. “And the number one motivation for consumers is not criticism, but praise -- consumers want to commend brands and companies for a job well done.”

Females are more likely to tell others about products they like, with 81% of females vs. 72% of males relating their experience to others. Fifty-eight percent of social media users (both male and female) say they write product reviews to protect others from bad experiences, with nearly 1 in 4 saying they share their negative experiences to “punish companies.”

Sixty percent of consumers researching products through multiple online sources learned about a specific brand or retailer through social networking sites. Active social media users are more likely to read product reviews online, and three out of five create their own reviews of products and services. Consumer-generated reviews and product ratings are the most preferred sources of product information among social media users (vs. professional reviews such as those created by journalists) with recommendations of friends and family counting the most.

Results from Nielsen’s Global Online Survey indicate that 2 out of 3 said they were either highly or somewhat influenced by an ad with social context. Review writers want to be rewarded for their efforts. Among those who share their brand experiences through social media, at least 41% say they do so to receive discounts.

Consumers are more than willing to act as ambassadors and advocates for brands through social media. A majority of active social networkers (53%) follow brands. These brands are increasingly recruiting their fans and followers to spread word-of-mouth recommendations about their products and services, and among consumers who write product reviews online, a majority say they share their experiences to “give recognition for a job well done” by the company.

Social media users are also interested in collaborating with their favorite brands, with 60% of users ages 18-34 saying they want to give product improvement recommendations, and another 64% who want to customize their products.