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In the vein of previous articles on innovations spawned by science fiction and some specifically from the Star Trek TV series, here’s a quick roundup of the latest from the Sci Fi Tech blog:

The Star Trek Tricorder becomes a reality at last!

Potential earthbound uses for the real-life tricorder include detecting salmonella in food, disease markers in urine, and cocaine on a rolled-up bill.

Terminator Cyborg Army ready for all-out war

Israeli defense firm VIPeR has developed an army of small cyborgs that can enter combat zones and exchange fire with enemies. Fortunately for the survival of our species, the ‘bots need to be controlled by a human and don’t act and feel on their own. That must be for version 1.2.

Another Star Trek tech - the Translator

The Voxtec International Phraselator P2 is currently being used by the Prairie Island tribe in Minnesota to pass on the Dakota language to future generations. The translator easily and accurately translates English into their native language on the fly. The device is already in use heavily in Iraq and Afghanistan by troops communicating with locals.

R2D2 coming to your Post Office!
(OK, this is not quite the real thing just yet)

The US Postal Service has decided to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Star Wars by tricking out some mailboxes to look like R2D2. Think any other government agencies will be joining the anniversary celebration? Perhaps cops will start dressing like storm troopers, or maybe the people at the DMV will start issuing licenses to fly spaceships.

From Businessweek, an interview with Marty Neumeier, author of Zag. Neumeier spins one of the fundamental motherhood rules of brand management (differentiation) into this book, based on the simple idea that a statement such as “Our brand is the only _____ that ______.” is essential to building a strong brand.

A much more interesting part of the book is a a Good Versus Different graph, in which he plots products into four quadrants based on their performance along the two axes of good (high quality, workmanship, aesthetics, etc.) and different (surprising, fresh, offbeat, etc.). The surprise is that products in the Not Good and Not Different quadrant, obviously a bad place to be, tend to test well in market research, while products in the best quadrant of Good and Different tend to test poorly.

Unfortunately, despite the obvious danger spelled out above, a very common practice today seems to be to test new products in exactly this way, without stopping to think about when such testing might actually be useful.

Neumeier offers an alternative for those managers who are unable or unwilling to take the “leap of faith” or judgement required to solve the class of decision problems that Malcolm Gladwell would call Mysteries.

If you apply straight-line metrics to ideas like these, you get a resounding “no-go”. The trick is to evaluate ideas the way a designer would, by matching the customer reactions to previous success patterns. What you’re looking for is not an idea that everybody believes is terrific, but an idea that gives people pause, yet that has undeniable benefits over existing alternatives.

Two seemingly unrelated articles from MIT’s Adverlab point to the future of advertising.

 ”Sony Corp. has been granted a patent for beaming sensory information directly into the brain.”
– Reuters

Wired writes on emerging mind control ad technology that lots of people are dismissing as bogus science (a recent conference on neuromarketing had to be canceled due to lack of interest): “Scientists are scanning brain activity in the hopes of catching sight of the physical mechanisms that determine whether you prefer Coke over Pepsi. The nascent research, known as “neuromarketing,” could one day lead to new advertising strategies that directly stimulate hard-wired mental reflexes rather than appealing to fuzzy consumer attitudes.” It’s interesting that CalTech is already in the game.

Is another “creative art form” going to become a mechanistic, computer-driven science?

Malcolm Gladwell’s recent article on Enron puts the spotlight on a very useful framework, first described by Gregory Treverton, for addressing decision problems. It is easily and usefully applicable to most marketing problems.

Is it a Puzzle or a Mystery?
A puzzle is a problem or a question with a definitive answer. Its solution depends on finding all the relevant pieces of information.

Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large.

A mystery, on the other hand, is a problem or a question without a definitive answer.

The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much.

A Typical Case
Consider the case of a soft drinks company with a couple of familiar marketing problems. Why is the company losing market share to its rival? And what can it do to win back share?

The first question is a Puzzle. Solving it requires nothing more than finding all the pieces of information that explain the situation, such as competitor activity, distribution figures, promotional spends, and changes in consumer preferences. This calls for the rigorous application of traditional Marketing Research techniques and reports.

The second question, on the other hand, is a Mystery. No amount of Marketing Research can solve this problem. Its solution depends on the creative use of what Theodore Levitt famously described as the “Marketing Imagination“. (It’s one of my favourite books.)

Imagine treating this problem as though it were a Puzzle. The marketing manager at the soft drinks company would probably carry out a series of Marketing Research studies designed to find the solution, such as need-gap analysis, concept testing, product benchmarking and so on. The problem with this approach is that this kind of research is usually a rear-view mirror. It can tell us where consumers were and what they wanted when we carried out the research but it can’t tell us anything useful about how they might behave in the future.

(This is also known as the Sony Walkman conundrum, because in the world that existed before the Walkman was invented and marketed, all available research showed that consumers reacted negatively to the idea of a portable music device. Take that, iPod!)

I think that most marketing problems can be classified as Puzzles or Mysteries and this framework makes it easy to determine when to apply Marketing Research techniques and when not to do so.

What do you think? Do write a comment if you think this framework makes sense (or not).

Much of the past one year’s debate and discussion at various marketing fora, real and virtual, centres on “new media” or “digital media”, meaning the Internet and Mobile/Wireless media. This is my personal selection of some of the best uses to which it has been put:

1. BMW Films
Using the insight that 85% of their target consumers used the Internet before buying a BMW, a series of short films were created by some of the greatest action movie directors, aired only via the Internet (and widely distributed over e-mail). Read the entire story here.

2. Dove Evolution
A 75-second film released only on the Internet, it showcases the typical make-over of a model into the unreal yet so-familiar beauty that we see in cosmetics advertising. Over a million views on Youtube, deep penetration of the blogosphere, and tremendous impact for the brand. Read here for the full story, including a very detailed analysis of the campaign and its impact.

3. Toyota Scion in Second Life
The first brand to enter the virtual world of Second Life, with a virtual dealership featuring customizable versions of the cars. All the details are here.

The marketing of good causes took a huge leap with the creation of Red by Bono and Bobby Shriver. Products and services will qualify for the “Red” stamp or appellation when they give some of their profit towards giving anti-AIDS medicines in Africa. The Red Manifesto explains:

You buy (Red) stuff. We get the money, buy the pills and distribute them. They take the pills, stay alive and continue to take care of their families and contribute socially and economically in their communities.

Essentially, Red offers ordinary people the opportunity to make a difference in a way that is easy and accessible. I think Bono is making a big difference with this creative approach, using his biggest resource - his fame - to mobilize resources from the wide audience that knows and trusts him.

If Bono’s key strength is his ability to reach out to millions of people, then Bill Gates key strength is his ruthless ability to strategically destroy his opponents. Thankfully, after years of doing this in business, he has turned his attention to the opponents of humanity - hunger and disease. The Gates Foundation is run like a business, with clear measurable objectives, intelligent strategies and high-quality execution, all backed by the Gates fortune.

For me, there is a strong personal lesson in this. I ask myself, what change do I want to make, what cause matters to me and what strength, ability or resource can I bring to bear on the problem? Most of us aren’t Bono or Gates, but we can make a difference too.

Theodore Levitt’s classic article”Marketing Myopia” spoke about how firms lost hold of markets because they were product-focused rather than customer-focused.

“The railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. That grew. The railroads are in trouble today not because that need was filled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes, and even telephones) but because it was not filled by the railroads themselves. They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business. The reason they defined their industry incorrectly was that they were railroad oriented instead of transportation oriented; they were product oriented instead of customer oriented.”

Professor Clayton Christensen, who wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma has offered a fresh perspective on the subject. He recommends that firms think of markets in terms of jobs that customers want done, rather than in tems of products and services.

VCMike has shared an example from Prof. Christensen:

A fast food chain that segmented the “milkshake” market according to the differenct types of customers who bought them, but then had much more success when it examined how and why people bought milkshakes. This company was able to market shakes much more effectively when it realized that the vast majority of milkshakes were bought either by people on their way to work who wanted an easy to consume quick breakfast that was filling and would distract them during a boring commute, or, on the other hand, tired parents later in the day who wanted to please whiny kids.

Net promoters are those customers who are likely to recommend a brand to others. This makes them especially valuable customers. They are also a very good reflection of overall customer preference and loyalty to a brand.

Martha Rogers at 121media writes:

In the high-tech space, Apple, Google, and Symantec have the most “Net Promoters,” according to a recent survey by Satmetrix Systems, which created the Net Promoter system with Reichheld. The survey was conducted in three high-tech sectors: computers, online services, and consumer software. Opt-in surveys were sent to end consumers who had direct experience with a given product or service. Replies were then ranked on a scale of 1-10. Only respondents giving a firm a 9 or 10 are classified as promoters.

I think this is a very useful metric, especially in categories such as search engines, where customers make several transactions every day, with each transaction offering the possibility of switching to a different brand. Net promoter scores (and the underlying drivers) can be a very useful diagnostic of the brand’s offering - that is, which parts are working and which ones need to be fixed.

Two articles at Cool News caught my attention recently, being about developments in advertising at opposite ends of the spectrum:

The first was about YouTube. Lee Gomes recently scraped it and discovered some interesting statistics:

• There are more than 6.1 million videos on YouTube now.
• The number is growing at about 20% per month.
• The most popular titles include the words ‘love’, ‘music’ and’girl’.
• Nearly 2000 videos have ‘Zidane‘ in the title.
• 70% of users are American.
• Nearly half are under 20 years of age.

The second was about advertising on the London Tube, which is a $3 billion, 8 year contract won by CBS, whose innovations include:

• A glue-less dust-free poster co-created with 3M.
• Cascading flat-panel TVs adjoining the escalators, which are capable of showing a series of rubber balls bouncing from one screen to another, following commuters as they ride down the escalator.
• Super-strong screens for the TVs which can withstand 5 blows from a sledgehammer.
• Lightboxes for the corridors leading to platforms.

All told, CBS has invested “about $136 million on new advertising equipment in the Tube, including 8,300 glueless poster sites, 150 projectors, about 2,000 video screens and 4,500 light boxes.” (From Reveries.com )

That’s a lot of money bet on the next 8 years. Clearly CBS expects the Tube to be generate a considerable return on this investment through advertising to the captive audience travelling to and from work. It’s a vision of the future that is quite different from the one over at YouTube. Which one do you think will come about?

Wired Magazine has an article on the most likely causes of death in the US which uses statistical analysis to show that one is 80 times more likely to die in a traffic accident than in a terrorist attack. Meanwhile, a recent poll shows that 59% of Americans expect another terrorist attack while the stats suggest they have more to fear from the flu.

I think this effectively demonstrates how people’s perceptions are different from factual reality. Somehow, politicians seem to understand this better than anyone else!