Inbound Unwound - Marketing Insights : How Do I Know If Inbound Marketing Is Going To Work?

How do you know if any of your marketing is going to work?

Ever gone to a trade show and come home with much fewer leads than you expected? Ever run an ad and received no response? How about that direct mail postcard that was supposed to deliver 2% return and only did .2%?

Any of these scenarios sound familiar? I have hundreds of stories like these from clients who, despite our advice, ran traditional marketing campaigns – only to regret the cost and labor that went into their efforts.

Is inbound marketing any different?

Yes and no. Sorry, but that’s the truth. Yes, it’s different because it's 100% quantifiable, 100% optimizable and 100% built on a methodology that matches perfectly with today’s buyer behavior. No, it’s not different because every program at every company in every industry with every client performs a little differently. Until we know exactly how it's performing, we’re only using educated guesses to predict this.

Once we get into it, though, and see what’s performing, what’s underperforming and what’s overperforming – well, that's when the magic happens. Here’s how to ensure that you see some of that magic at your company.

Predict Based On Experience

Predicting inbound marketing results isn’t easy, but it’s possible. Once you have a set of experiences, you get to see what worked and how much each of those executed tactics contributed to performance. You get an idea of how a program might perform. This experience allows you to estimate performance based on a set of assumptions, such as the idea that you’ll be able to post 12 high-quality, search engine-optimized and socialized blog articles every month.

Over time, you’ll understand how those 12 new, indexable pages help your company rank for the keywords included in them. You’ll know that increased rankings mean increased visitors. You’ll also know that once those articles are shared on other social media networks, increased visitors will come from those social sites, too. While you won’t know everything exactly, you will find out over time the difference between visitor results when you blog 12 times a month and those when you blog 10 times a month. This is very important for predicting future performance and matching that performance to program management.

Make Sure You Start With Strategy

If you want to ensure that your inbound program works as expected, start with a marketing strategy. This gives you the foundation you need to build your inbound plan on solid footing. Once you know your personas, the messages prospects need to hear, the stories you want to tell, what connects with people emotionally, how to make people feel safe, what content is required to answer their questions before they connect with you personally and what makes your business remarkable, you’re ready for inbound tactics – but not before then.

Optimize Often, Based On Data

No other marketing methodology provides as much data on the performance of marketing tactics as inbound does. Finally, you see which keywords you rank for, which blog articles are shared, which are viewed, which content is downloaded, which CTA buttons are converting, which landing pages are most popular and how many leads come from organic searches, social media or referring websites.

This information needs to be analyzed, responded to and then acted on in a timely way – within a month so that you’re able to impact performance right away as opposed to waiting three more months to see what happened and then not being able to affect results immediately. The faster your team can act on performance data, the better your results from your inbound effort are going to be.

Set Goals, Reset Goals, Manage To Your Goals

Goal setting is important, but responding to actual performance data and then resetting goals is even more important. When you set goals, you're using the data that’s available to you. As you work through your inbound program, you’re going to get new, fresher and more relevant data. This demands that you reset your objectives. Forcing your team to hit old goals based on old data is a completely unconstructive exercise.

Reset your goals monthly, and make sure that your team is working within the month to hit them. Actively managing to those goals is possible with inbound. Website visitors lagging? Try a few extra guest blogs, content sourcing, influencer outreach or posting on private networks, like LinkedIn. Leads lagging? Try to improve top landing page performance, or launch a new educational content offer. Maybe redesign the CTA buttons on your site or add a new offer to the home page. This is all reasonable work to be done in days, not months. The result is attaining your lead goals month over month.

Nothing is definite. If we all knew what was going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month or next year, we’d be doing different jobs (most likely in Las Vegas). But, that doesn’t diminish what we do know about how inbound works.

We know that the longer you stick with it, the better your results are. We know that the more activity you put into it, the better your results are. We know that the faster you pulse, the better your results are. We know that the better you connect all of the different inbound tactics, the better your results are.

We know that when compared to traditional marketing tactics, inbound marketing is the only way to create a predictable, scalable, repeatable marketing machine that drives leads for your business.

source

6 Unusual Habits of Exceptionally Creative People

I expend a huge amount of my time and energy writing books and articles and working to keep my company innovative. I’ve developed an obsession with some of history’s most creative minds in the hope that I might learn some tricks to expand my own creative productivity.

Some of the things I’ve learned are more useful than others, and some are simply too weird to try.

Steve Jobs, for example, routinely sat on toilets, dangling his bare feet in the water while he came up with new ideas, and Yoshiro Nakamatsu (inventor of the floppy disc) would dive deep under water until his brain was deprived of oxygen, then write his ideas on an underwater sticky pad.

Weird ideas aside, I’ve developed a pretty good understanding of the habits of some of history’s most creative minds. There’s enough commonality between different people that I’ve distilled their habits into strategies that anyone can follow.

Six of these strategies stand out because they have the power to change the way you think about creativity. Give them a try, and you’ll reach new levels of creative productivity.

1. Wake Up Early

Not all creative minds are morning people. Franz Kafka routinely stayed up all night writing, and William Styron (author of Sophie’s Choice, among other best sellers) woke up at noon every day and considered his “morning” routine to be staying in bed for another hour to think.

However, early risers make up the clear majority of creative thinkers. The list of creative early risers ranges from Benjamin Franklin to Howard Schultz to Ernest Hemmingway, though they didn’t all wake up early for the same reasons. Ben Franklin woke up early to plan out his day, while Schultz uses the time to send motivational emails to his employees. For many creative people, waking up early is a way to avoid distractions. Ernest Hemingway woke up at 5 a.m. every day to begin writing. He said, “There is no one to disturb you and it is cool and cold and you come to your work and warm as you write.”

The trick to making getting up early stick is to do it every day and avoid naps—no matter how tired you feel. Eventually, you will start going to bed earlier to make up for the lost sleep. This can make for a couple of groggy days at first, but you’ll adjust quickly, and before you know it, you’ll join the ranks of creative early risers.

2. Exercise Frequently

There’s plenty of evidence pointing to the benefits of exercise for creativity. Feeling good physically gets you in the right mood to focus and be productive. Exercise also forces you to have disconnected time (it’s tough to text or email while working out), and this allows you to reflect on whatever it is you’re working on. In a Stanford study, 90% of people were more creative after they exercised.

It’s no surprise that so many creative and successful people built exercise into their daily routines. Kurt Vonnegut took walks into the nearby town, swam laps, and did push-ups and sit-ups, Richard Branson runs every morning, and composers Beethoven and Tchaikovsky both walked daily.

3. Stick to a Strict Schedule

It’s a common misconception that in order to be creative, one must live life on a whim with no structure and no sense of need to do anything, but the habits of highly successful and creative people suggest otherwise. In fact, most creative minds schedule their days rigorously. Psychologist William James described the impact of a schedule on creativity, saying that only by having a schedule can we “free our minds to advance to really interesting fields of action.”

4. Keep Your Day Job

Creativity flourishes when you’re creating for yourself and no one else. Creativity becomes more difficult when your livelihood depends upon what you create (and you begin to think too much about what your audience will think of your product). Perhaps this is why so many successful and creative people held on to their day jobs. Many of them, like Stephen King, who was a schoolteacher, produced their breakout (and, in King’s case, what many consider his very best) work while they still held a 9 to 5.

Day jobs provide more than the much-needed financial security to create freely. They also add structure to your day that can make your creative time a wonderful release. The list of successful, creative minds who kept their day jobs is a long one. Some notable individuals include Jacob Arabo, who started designing his own jewelry while working in a jewelry shop; William Faulkner, who worked in a power plant while writing As I Lay Dying; and musician Philip Glass, who worked as a plumber.

5. Learn to Work Anywhere, Anytime

A lot of people work in only one place, believing it’s practically impossible for them to get anything done anywhere else. Staying in one place is actually a crutch; studies show that changing environments is beneficial to productivity and creativity. E.B. White, author of Charlotte’s Web, said it well: “A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.” The same is true for any type of creative work. If you keep waiting until you are in the perfect place at the ideal time, the time will never come.

Steve Jobs started Apple in his mom’s garage, and JK Rowling wrote the first ideas for Harry Potter on a napkin on a train. When you have a creative idea, don’t wait—put it into action as soon as you can. Recording that spark of creativity may very well be the foundation of something great.

6. Learn That Creative Blocks Are Just Procrastination

As long as your heart is still beating, you have the ability to come up with new ideas and execute them. They may not always be great ones, but the greatest enemy of creativity is inactivity.

Author Jodi Picoult summarized creative blocks perfectly: “I don’t believe in writer’s block. Think about it—when you were blocked in college and had to write a paper, didn’t it always manage to fix itself the night before the paper was due? Writer’s block is having too much time on your hands. If you have a limited amount of time to write, you just sit down and do it. You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”

Picoult’s comment describes all creative activity—the only way to stay creative is to keep moving forward.

Bringing It All Together

In my experience, you must get intentional about your creativity if you want it to flourish. Give these six strategies a try to see what they can do for you.

What habits improve your creativity? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below as I learn just as much from you as you do from me.

source

Apple I discarded as junk sells for $200,000; mystery woman stands to get half

MILPITAS -- It turns out that one person's junk is indeed someone else's treasure.

A South Bay recycling firm is looking for a woman who, in early April, dropped off boxes of electronics that she had cleaned out from her house after her husband died. About two weeks later, the firm, Clean Bay Area, discovered inside one of the boxes a rare find: a vintage Apple I, one of only about 200 first-generation desktop computers put together by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ron Wayne in 1976.

The recycling firm sold the Apple I this month for $200,000 to a private collection, Vice President Victor Gichun said. And now, because company policy is to split proceeds 50-50 with the donor, he's looking for the mystery woman who refused to get a receipt or leave her name.

File: Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, stands behind five Apple 1 computers for a photo op on June 18, 2013 at History San Jose. (Dai Sugano)

"We are looking for her to give her $100,000," Gichun said.

She had stopped by on a Friday just before closing time.

"She said, 'I want to get rid of this stuff and clean up my garage,' " Gichun said. "I said, 'Do you need a tax receipt?' and she said, 'No, I don't need anything.' "

The company had a backup of donations, and didn't immediately go through her boxes. He feels badly because the woman said her husband had died a couple of months earlier. Gichun's own mother died at age 54, and he remembers how his father suffered afterward.

Maybe, Gichun said, having some extra cash might help the woman.

Clean Bay Area recycles computers, lab equipment, test equipment and semiconductors. It deals mostly with businesses, but about five times a week individuals stop by with donations. The company doesn't pick up from individual donors.

"I remember her," Gichun said.

He said she was driving an SUV. He's not divulging any other descriptive information about the woman or her car. In the future, he said, he'll be more insistent about getting donors' contact information.

"To prove who she is," Gichun said, "I just need to look at her."To get her $100,000 check, the mystery woman just needs to show up at the company's warehouse at 1310 Piper Drive in Milpitas.

source

The Moment I Realized I Hate My Job

Dear Liz,

I'm an avid follower of yours although I admit that the first time I read one of your stories, I thought "That's a pie in the sky outlook." Now that I've read at least fifty of your columns, my viewpoint has shifted. Now I know what you mean when you say that we can take control of our own careers, if we are willing to. 

I work for a large consumer packaged goods company. I've been here for five years, since I finished my MBA. I work incredibly long hours. The work is fine. It's very quantitative - we are a food company but our conversations revolve around market segments, launch schedules and pricing models.

Our group is on the hook to increase sales and margins every quarter. We fight our competitors every day for market share. It is a brutal business but I have done well in it. I've been promoted twice in five years.

My wife has been asking me if I'm happy working so hard and with so little time off. I've been saying "Yes, yes, I'm fine" for two or three years. Last Friday I had an "Aha!" that woke me up. We just launched a new snack food line that is going to be very popular but that requires a special fixture in retail stores.

Getting the new fixtures from our supplier has been the biggest headache in launching the product. We still have thousands of fixtures on backorder. I was able to make some short-term adjustments to our standard vendor payment terms and make other adjustments to get our supplier to hurry up with our back-ordered fixtures.

Toward the end of the day Friday I came out of a meeting where we had been allocating the scarce supply of shippable fixtures. I got in the elevator. Our division president was in the elevator. I don't really know him. His name is Blake. He is my boss's boss's boss.

Blake doesn't know me personally but he knows I work for him. He knows my face. He asked "Got any good news on those fixtures?" and I said "Yes! We're already past the worst of it. We can ship half of the back-ordered fixtures this week and the other half next week." That was good news. It was a breakthrough. The day before we hadn't had any idea when the fixture crisis might be resolved.

Blake said "Make it happen. Your job depends on it." He didn't even look at me. He looked at the elevator doors. I was stunned. I thought "What an a**hole!" Blake threatened my job to motivate me, in case I need that kind of motivation. Then he didn't say another word until the elevator reached his floor. He got out of the elevator silently.

I went to see my boss, Rachel. I told her what Blake said. "Just ignore him," said Rachel. "He's all bluster. He doesn't even know your name. He's already forgotten the conversation. Besides, if he had it in for you I would protect you."

I just stared at her. I appreciated her concern for me, but I am a thirty-six-year-old adult with a child of my own. I don't need my boss's protection. I don't want to work in a place where people say "I'll protect you from our boss" or where they say "Your job depends on it." It's so sick and wrong. 

That was my wake-up call. I'm done giving every brain cell and waking minute to a company that doesn't value me in the slightest. I'm nothing to the people who make the decisions here. Blake showed me his true colors and Rachel did, too. They are both part of the problem.

Rachel is a sweetheart but a nice boss who offers to protect people from fearful bullies doesn't make the wrong company worth working for.

Now I don't know what to do. I know that I have to leave this job, and I have to decide what I want to do next. I want to branch out and work in a different industry. I'm not sure how to begin my research. I want to work in a place where the people care about something besides making more money.

I am tired of empty suits, back-stabbers and the Money First mentality. I feel like an idiot for wasting so much time on this hamster wheel. How do you recommend that I begin my career change process?

Thanks,

Noel

Dear Noel,

Congratulations on your great awakening! It can feel like a shock to the body when the message "You are wasting your time and your talents in this job" is delivered.

It can knock you for a loop in a big way, but as you have already discovered, the nudge you got in the elevator pushed you back on your path. It was a tough message to receive, but a blessing all the same.

Don't feel bad about your time on the hamster wheel. You learned a ton on the wheel and gained muscles and credibility that will give you lots of latitude as you make your next move. Lots of organizations and causes can benefit from what you know about audiences and market share and pricing models.

You have more to offer the world than a tasty new snack treat (not that there's anything wrong with snacks)! Your job now is to listen to your own heart and mind. What are your dreams? What do you love to do and know you're good at? Start with your mission and your passion. Then ask "Whose pain can I solve doing what I love to do?"

God Bless Blake, a great teacher, for showing you who he is. Don't waste your emotional energy holding any anger toward him. He isn't worthy of your anger, Noel. Poor Blake is mostly suit and hot air.

Who knows how far down below the surface the real guy is buried or whether he will ever emerge? Blake has nothing to do with you. He did his job. He reminded you that life is not forever and that you get to decide how to spend every second of it, and also must decide.

We all announce our priorities and re-commit to them every day. We demonstrate what we care about through our investment of our most precious resource -- our time. 

Now that you have zoomed up in altitude, don't put yourself in a new box too fast. Don't short-circuit your reinvention by deciding what your new career will be based on strictly practical factors or worse yet, the result of any test or equation. Listen to your body, and your friends.

Give your reinvention time. It is a physical process and it has its own pace. You are lucky because you're employed.

I predict that you'll find a lighter way to do your job now: still committed, but not lost in your job description. The real Noel is in the driver's seat now!

A job that takes all our waking time is a smokescreen. We work ourselves to death as a hedge against having to look in the mirror. If we are always working we never have to stop and look. Most people don't dare ask "What do I want in my career?". Instead, they say:

• Why think about that? I have a job. I guess it's good enough.
• I can't think about change! I have a mortgage to pay.
• It's not important to do work I enjoy. It's just my job. So what?
• It's not my fault I have this stupid job. The deck is stacked against me.
• You don't understand what I'm up against. I don't have a lot of choices.

Deciding that you deserve to have the life and career you want is the biggest step, and that step is already behind you. Relax! Work in the garden and ride your bike. Dance to the radio and get a journal. Your reinvention will unfold. Enjoy the ride!

All the best,

Liz

Questions and Answers

Is Noel going to quit his job?

That's the plan, but Noel is going to launch a stealth (under-the-radar) job search while he's still got his current job. Noel is going to cast a wide net. He's going to explore lots of different options. This is his big chance to find the career path that will grow his flame!

I'm in the same situation as Noel. What should I do?

Get a journal and write in it every day or as often as you can. Get together with your  friends. Don't make a quick job change just to get away from your current situation -- that could take you from the frying pan straight into the fire.

source

Inbound Unwound - Marketing Insights

Inbound marketing metrics are fantastic – but only if you take action on your findings. If you simply track for the sake of tracking and never make any adjustments to your program, do anything different or try anything new, you’re never going to realize the full potential of your inbound program.

One of the major advantages of inbound marketing is that you're able to identify what is and isn't working right now, implement adjustments to the program today and see the results tomorrow.

It's not that you’ll be 100% sure your adjustments worked, as you might need a week or month to really let your experiments run their course. But, you should get at least an indication that the results are moving in the right direction.

Specifically, consider the following workflow:

1. Review your results daily, weekly and monthly.
2. Analyze the data and make sure that you understand exactly what’s working like you expected and what’s not.
3. Respond with a set of program improvements or adjustments and a set of experiments or tests designed to push the results up and to the right.
4. Take action by installing or implementing the responses you’ve created in the Respond stage.

Then, make sure you set up the rhythms you need to keep this process going on a monthly basis, at a minimum. Here are some other considerations to make sure you take action based onmarketing metrics.

Track High-Level Performance Daily

If you’re not looking at high-level performance data daily, you’re missing the opportunity to make more course corrections more frequently. Today’s inbound marketing optimization tools come with smartphone and tablet apps that make checking the data easy – no matter where you are in the world. A quick check on visitors, conversions and leads reveals how you’re tracking versus last month or versus your goals.

If this data is down and you don’t have tactical plans to increase the numbers, you need to get a plan up and running pretty quickly. Data without action is just data.

For instance, if visitor traffic is down, you have to step up your "get found" tactics, like blogging, guest blogging, social media, email marketing and influencer outreach. If leads are not doing well, you need to step up your on-site content creation or conversion optimization efforts, or you have to make a few website upgrades to turn those visitors into leads. Almost all of these tactics can be acted upon in a matter of days, not weeks or months like some of the old, traditional marketing tactics.

Spend An Hour Each Month Digging Into The Data

There are going to be some numbers that require more thought and analysis. Schedule time – at least an hour per month – to go deep into the numbers. Look at your social reach and landing page conversion rates. These are two areas where you can see which social sites are working and which ones are lagging.

Review all of your landing pages for those that are outperforming benchmarks and those that are not. If you find pages that are underperforming, get to work making minor adjustments. Tweak the copy, add a different image or shorten the number of form fields. All of these adjustments take mere minutes, and the impact can be significant. 

Always Create An Action Plan

Once you see what’s working and what could be working better, you should take action. The action plan is the most important aspect of inbound optimization. It's the key. Create a list of 5-10 action steps, assign them to key team members, set timelines and deadlines, make sure you get an update on when the changes have been implemented and keep an eye on the metrics in real time. You should see improvements in just a matter of days – assuming the adjustments are effective, of course.

If these adjustments don’t bring about the lift you’re looking for, just rinse and repeat. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, and don’t get discouraged if your planned improvements don’t deliver the first time. Making mistakes shows you what NOT to do again. You learn almost as much from what doesn’t work as you do from what does.

Once you get into the rhythm of Review, Analyze, Respond and Act, you’re going to start noticing a continual movement up and to the right for overall program performance. Even better, once you start to string together six, seven and eight months of this up-and-to-the-right motion, you’ll look back and see a 10x improvement in website visitors, a 5-6x improvement in leads generated and significant improvement in social reach, keyword performance and email marketing open/click-through rates.

This continuous-improvement approach is often undervalued until you look back six months and see where you were then compared to where you are today. The sooner you adopt this methodology, the sooner you start to see the results, which translates to more customers and higher revenue numbers.

source

7 Key Strategies That You Must Learn From Apple’s Marketing

Coming off the heels of yet another successful Apple launch debut, it’s increasingly clear that Apple is on top of their game in a way like no other. Which other company could turn an ordinary press conference into a live global event?

The secret lies beyond their product line and design standards; it lies beyond even Steve Jobs’ emphatic adherence to Apple’s core philosophy, which is that the user doesn’t always know what they want.

Looking at the company’s latest product lines and revenue models, I’d be a fool to call them anything less than what they are, which is:

• A design firm
• A media platform
• A publishing company
• A software powerhouse
• A computer builder
• A movement

Break down each of these bullets individually and you’ll find a company at the top of their respective industry, but combine them into a single entity and you’ve got the recipe for building one of the most influential businesses of all time.

So how did they do it?

Rather than tell you how I think they did it, I thought instead I’d turn to their fans on Twitter, who helped me uncover 7 of the greatest marketing lessons that Apple brings to the table.

1. Ignore Your Critics

As an entrepreneur, you’ll hear a lot of people tell you that you need to reach out and figure out what people want, which means listening to your critics, often times more patiently than you’d like.

Apple decides to flip the script and instead focus on building what they want to build, no matter the perceived cost. When Steve Jobs debuted the iPad, the critics stood in line, throwing every insult they could muster. The critics said that the iPad would fail. The numbers say otherwise.

Each and every time Apple decided to innovate, they were laughed at. They prevailed anyway.

“Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

- Albert Einstein

2. Turn the Ordinary into Something Beautiful

For quite some time, PC fans enjoyed the work of buying their own parts and building their own tower systems. At the same time, PC makers were building standard hardware for standard applications.

Apple would have none of that.

They’ve been pioneering not only the features of standard operating systems and computer systems, but simultaneously reinventing the design standards as well. As a result, we have the gorgeous iMac, the beautiful new Macbook Air, and who could forget, the amazing iPhone 4.

Where others focus on one aspect of the equation, Apple focuses on the entire product, and it shows.

3. Justify Your Price

We’re in a time when pricing strategies are all over the place. People don’t know what to charge, and in many cases, prefer to race to the bottom instead of pricing strategically to a market that can bear the cost.

Once more, Apple ignores the standard by not only pricing their technology more than 2x what their competitors charge, but doing so without blinking. How can they get away with it?

Well, the answer is twofold:

1. They build beautiful products for an audience that loves them passionately.
2. They justify their price with features and benefits that can’t be matched.

Since we’ve already hit point 1, let’s work on #2.

No other computer can match the display of a 27” iMac…it simply can’t be done.

No other software can match what iTunes brings to the table.

No laptop is as thin as the Macbook Air.

No software is more intuitive, no product more valuable than the Apple product. Any other smartphone looks like it was developed by rookies when compared to an iPhone 4. You simply cannot compare the two.

Critics will play on the fact that the core features are the same, and they might be, but that’s not the point. The point is that Apple is the Rolls Royce of the technology and design world, and their customers will gladly pay a premium because of it.

4. Communicate in the Language of Your Audience

It makes no sense to talk about things like megabytes, gigahertz, and processing power to customers that simply don’t care about technical jargon.

Take a look at any Apple product page and you’ll find that though they do discuss product specifications and technical information, it’s hidden behind the benefits that their audience is truly after.

Instead of display resolution, you’ll see phrases like “edge to edge glass,” “retina display,” and “LED backlighting.”

Sure, the jargon is there for those that need it, but it’s presented in a way that makes you want to learn about megapixels, rather than shy away from them. The art is in the copy, not in the features.

5. Extend the Experience

Have you ever heard of an unboxing? I hadn’t either until recently, when I learned that not only was I not the only one keeping Apple packaging post-sale, but that there are legions of people that record the actual process of unwrapping their newly purchased Apple products.

Do a search on YouTube and you’ll find hundreds of Apple unboxings, each from different users from across the globe. It’s pretty crazy right?

No one tells these people to video their experience, but they do it because the process is so Zen that you can’t help not to.

Apple does this by making sure that the experience doesn’t end at the cash register. They take great care in designing a user experience from browsing to unwrapping, which relies on incredible packaging and installation procedures.

By reducing installation to the lowest common denominator, they make buying new products a snap, and by spending as much time on designing packaging as they do on the products themselves, they’ve ensured that the box matches what’s inside.

As a result, they’ve built an experience that is nearly impossible to match.

6. Build a Tribe

It’s no secret that Apple has built one of the most hardcore fan bases of any product and of any time. There’s a reason they’re called “fanboys.”

But who cares, right? Most of the chatter is out of jealousy more than anything, but Apple doesn’t really care. They know that they serve an elite audience, and rather than back away from that fact, they embrace it.

7. Become “The Name”

You don’t buy tissues, you buy Kleenex.

You don’t buy MP3 players, you buy an iPod.

You don’t buy a smartphone, you buy an iPhone.

Have you noticed what they’re doing here? Apple isn’t content with being a leader in sales alone, they want to own the market itself, which explains why they’ve engineered iTunes as the major music provider that it is, and why the iPad, having the luxury of being the first, has now set the trend for future tablet devices.

From here on out, everything will be compared to the iPad, iPhone, iPod, and iTunes. Sadly, this sort of thing is tough to duplicate, but it’s not impossible. You need to have one of two things:

1. A clear head start in terms of being first to market.
2. A USP that differentiates your product in a way that makes people wish it were first.

The iPhone wasn’t the first phone, but they engineered it to be so unique that you couldn’t help but think it was. The iMac isn’t the first all in one, but it became the only one that mattered.

It’s not so much the marketing angle that matters as it is the way that people identify with that angle. Take a look at any Steve Jobs product release and you’ll watch as he tells you why every other product in the market pales in comparison to what he’s created.

You know what? We believe him.

About the Author: Nathan Hangen is the co-founder of Virtuous Giant, creator of IgnitionDeck, a crowdfunding plugin for WordPress. You can follow him on Twitter via @nhangen.

source

Why Sir Ken Robinson Is My Thought-Leader Spirit Animal: 7 Important Ideas on Innovation?

Sir Ken Robinson recently presented a video talk and Q&A at MarketingProfs on the nature of innovation at our own organizations.

Why is innovation critical to all companies? And are we all capable of the creativity and imagination required to fuel real innovation? (Spoiler alert on that last one: YES.)

I’m one of those people who gets antsy at webinars. But last week I was zero percent tempted during Sir Ken’s video talk to start scrolling through my email or to check Instagram.

Part of that was Sir Ken’s delivery – he’s hilarious and articulate. Which makes the big concepts he talks about feel accessible and real and suddenly relevant to all of our lives. 

I came away from Sir Ken’s talk feeling inspired to do things differently within my own organization as well as in the world itself. And when’s the last time that you had that reaction to a marketing webinar?

Here are 7 must-read highlights.

If you’re wanting more, you can watch the whole seminar here at MarketingProfs.

“Innovation has to become a habit…. Innovation needs to be systematic, deliberate; it is what defines you as an organization."

Innovation is simply a habit that should be nurtured, not an art or a gift. In that way, it reminds me of my philosophy toward writing as a habit, not an art.

“Make innovation part of the daily conversation,” Sir Ken said.

"Innovation feeds on itself."

When the iPhone came out, in 2007, there were a few hundred apps for it. Now, there are a ka-frickin-zillion. (That’s not Sir Ken’s word, it’s mine.)

“You can now download an app that turns your iPhone into a blues harmonica,” Ken said. “Why? I have a blues harmonica that’s smaller than the iPhone…” 

The bigger point is that tools and technologies allow us to channel creativity and innovation in new, unexpected ways. “Tools stretch our minds in new directions. They allow us to do things, but also tools extend our minds.”

“Innovation feeds on itself. It becomes pat of a multiplier effect” in which things are launched that were unanticipated by the original design or intent, Sir Ken said.

"Organizations are mortal."

Organizations are mortal – most last only 30 to 40 years. And they don’t survive if they don’t evolve.

“Companies are living organisms; if they don’t evolve, they simply don’t make it. Innovation isn’t an option,” Sir Ken said.

One good example is Kodak. They invented the brownie camera, which Sir Ken called “the iPad of its day.” The Brownie camera made photography accessible to everyone, and as a result Kodak went on to be the dominant force in photography.

Now the company is in receivership. Kodak didn’t fail because people stopped taking photographs – we take more photos, not less (“an irritating number,” said Sir Ken in a mock grouse). 

Rather, Kodak failed because it didn’t adapt to a digital culture and instead bet its future on film – “when things really went quite differently, of course,” he said.

Kodak was created by chemists and run by chemists, and Sir Ken speculated that that might’ve contributed to a kind of innovation blind spot.

“Kodak created a habit of mind, a culture that stopped them from innovating,” Sir Ken said.

"The second driver of innovation is the sheer number of people on the planet."

"There are currently 7 ½ billion people in the world – more than any other time in our history. By the middle of the century, there will be an estimated 9 billion. Much of the population growth is expected to come from emerging or developing economies.

That may affect the future of your own organization. But more broadly, it’s also likely to affect our collective futures.

More people means more need for food, fuel and water. Beyond the question of whether our planet can handle the growth is the question, “In what fashion?” Sir Ken said. If we all consumed resources as most people do in India, the earth could sustain 15 billion people, he said. But if we all consume fuel, food and water as we do in North America, the earth could sustain a mere 1.5 billion. 

“Which means that by the end of the century, we’re going to need another 4 or 5 planets to accommodate us all,” Sir Ken said.

"Creativity is the applied wing of imagination."

Innovation is the drive to find new ideas and new ways of doing things, to launch both new products and better processes. “But you can’t go straight to it,” he said, because the foundation for innovation are two things: Imagination and creativity.

Imagination gives you the freedom to consider alternative views. Creativity is about applying imagination to existing systems – to challenge what we take for granted. It’s the process of figuring out if your imagined, original ideas have value.

“Creativity is the applied wing of imagination,” Sir Ken said. And innovation comes from the application of that creativity in context in an organizational context.

"Creative does not equal artistic."

“A myth is that you’re either creative or you’re not,” Sir Ken said.

“Creative” does not equal “artistic.” You can be a creative team leader or a creative scientist or a creative marketer – which means only that you look for new ways of doing things.

We all have creative capacity. But most organizations don’t give people permission to be creative.

In an organization, he added, “Culture is about where you lay the lines of permission.”

I wrote a full post on this one alone here. 

"Great ideas aren't accidental."

“Creativity is a process, not an event,” Sir Ken said

Pixar bans no or but during company meetings. Great ideas aren’t accidental – rather, they come from a practiced point of view which encourages new ideas and innovation.

Support a “yes and…” brand of improvisation at your own organization, Sir Ken said. In comic improv, the actors accept what those around them suggest and work with it – you accept what you’ve been given and build on it, saying yes and instead of no orbut. 

Banning no and but might “sound trivial,” Sir Ken said. “It’s really not.”

If you’re a creative leader, he added, it’s not your job to have all the great ideas. Instead, it’s your job to allow those you lead to contribute as well.

“Take that weight off yourself,” he said.

source