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4 reasons why fashion retailer Forever 21 went bust

Fashion retailer Forever 21 has gone bust. The company filed for bankruptcy this September.

How did the 35-yr old fashion retailer giant with over 600 stores around the world fail?

In this article, I put together a list of 4 reasons Forever 21 failed according to retail experts.

The American fast-fashion retail chain was founded in 1984 by Korean-born husband and wife Do Won Chang and Jin Sook Chang. The stores sold designs similar to those seen in South Korea and were targeted at the Korean American community. The business was successful and totaled $4.4 billion in global sales at its peak in 2015. The couple’s combined net worth was estimated at $6 billion.

Looking to avoid Forever 21’s fate and become an innovative company? Join our masterclass!

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What is Forever 21?

Forever 21 is a fast-fashion retailer, offering trendy and inexpensively mass-produced clothing to mostly young shoppers who wanted the latest fashion but didn’t have much money to spend.

The business went well until 2017 when the retail apocalypse hit the industry, the term coined by Knowledge@Wharton to define “legacy retailers’ ongoing struggle to stay relevant in a landscape increasingly dominated by Amazon and online upstarts”.

Shoppers embraced digital and their shopping process changed dramatically. The retailers failing to switch from offline to online in an adapt-or-die strategy were forced to close up shop. Those that have been able to change their business model to embrace innovation, have transformed and became more able to suit the needs and expectations of their young customers.

Let’s see why Forever 21 failed to do the same.

4 reasons why fashion retailer Forever 21 went bust

1. Failed to see the trends

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The Changs didn’t see the retail apocalypse. Or they did but didn’t believe they would be affected by it.

Too big to fail is the mantra of some big corporations. Nokia believed in it, Kodak believed in it and they are now the subject of business failure cases students learn in business schools. Microsoft would have had the same fate had it not been for Satya Nadela’s leadership – he transformed the tech giant’s corporate culture from the ground up.

Failure stories: Nokia and Kodak

If Forever 21 has seen the digital trend, going for more physical space was a business mistake. When other fast-fashion retailers were cutting down on the number of physical stores, Forever 21 was renting more space, in big shopping malls. In 2018, sales dropped by 25% which meant the company was struggling to pay rent on very large therefore very expensive space.

2. Failed to redesign their stores around digital

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Going digital doesn’t mean retailers should exclude in-store experience from their shoppers’ experience overall.

Brands still need to provide their customers with a positive in-store experience and digital is the perfect tool to blend online with offline.

For retail chain stores, it’s not enough to display great products at discounted prices. During the 2018 holiday shopping season, Walmart provided its shoppers with in-aisle fun and entertainment powered by Augmented Reality tech.

Ray-ban, IKEA and Sephora built their own AR-based apps to ease the decision making of their customers.

In January last year, Amazon opened Amazon Go, the first automated in-store system where there are no checkout lines or cashiers.

Forever 21 opened an eCommerce site but still remained stuck in a mall mindset. Much like ToysRUs, another retailer giant whose failure story made the headlines, Forever 21 refused to update its store experience in a changing, digital-first landscape.

Each store looked mostly the same, and the retailer did not offer BOPUS (buy online, pickup in-store) services like many of its competitors. The result was an in-store experience that felt stagnant and outdated.

3. Delivered uninspired collections

H&M and Zara, long-time competitors of Forever 21 have felt the same pressure to adapt to online and digital as the family-owned brand.

H&M closed many of its physical stores around the world and still plans to close more in 2019. But at the same time, the Swedish fashion retailer has updated its story and brand purpose, increased its clothing quality and brand relevance and created various benefits for its online customers.

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Forever 21 Cheetos collection

While Forever 21 printed tacky slogans on its tops and launched a Cheetos inspired collection, H&M collaborated with high-fashion designers like Giambattista Valli, Pringle of Scotland, Moschino, Karl Lagerfeld, Balmain, Versace and Roberto Cavalli.

Forever 21 sold clothes that were unappealing and generic. Gen Z and Millennial shoppers are looking for clothes that help them express themselves and provide them with a sense of individuality which Forever 21 clothing lines failed to provide.

4. Failed to move toward sustainability

In 2011, Greenpeace launched its Detox My Fashion campaign which asked the textile and fashion industry to urgently take responsibility for their contribution to toxic pollution.

In 2015, fashion was the second most polluting industry in the world, next to oil. The fashion industry had a serious impact on our society and the planet: sweatshops in third-world countries, increased levels of pollution, high carbon footprint, use of great amount of natural resources, toxic dyes waste etc.

Fast fashion is bad for the environment and our society. Gen Zers and Millennials, who are targeted by clothing manufacturers like Forever 21 are environmentally conscious and actively support sustainable brands.

The 2018 State of Fashion found that 66% of global Millennials are willing to spend more on brands that are sustainable and that an ethical and sustainable business model is a powerful differentiator.

Spanish fashion company ECOALF created the Sea Yarn, a new 100% recycled filament made of the plastic bottle waste found on the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.

H&M pledged to use 100% recycled or sustainable materials by 2030. The company also took on another ambitious goal: becoming 100% climate positive by 2040 by using renewable energy and increasing energy efficiency in all its operations.

Although there is a web page dedicated to highlighting Forever 21’s efforts towards sustainability on its website, the information appears to have been updated in 2011. A few hundred words on a web page doesn’t count as being ethical and sustainable.

The 2019 Ethical Fashion ReportThe truth behind the barcode grades 130 companies from A+ to F, based on the strength of their systems to mitigate against the risks of forced labour, child labour, exploitation in their supply chains and environmental management. Forever 21 received -D while H&M was graded B+ and Zara – A.

Conclusion

Forever 21 failed because they didn’t keep up with the times.

The family-owned retailer went bust because it didn’t show up for their shoppers.

While their customers’ buying behaviours were changing, they sold clothes like it was still the 1990s.

Their target customers wanted to buy ethical and sustainable clothes, but Forever 21 offered them cheap clothes that were bad for the planet.

The company failed to cater to the needs of their shoppers – clothes valuable enough that they can repurpose, upcycle or re-sale.

Forever 21 sold clothes that had no value. The company went bust because no one wants to look cheap.

Emojis are the perfect tool to collect customer feedback

Are you looking for a way to collect customer feedback in a new and engaging way?

Throw away the traditional customer feedback form and tap into the ultimate tool to collect feedback: emojis.

Expressing emotions is difficult and not everyone is comfortable doing that, but it’s how we build human interaction.

That’s the reason emojis are so successful in the digital world of communication: instead of writing, it’s much easier to post the emoji which illustrates your state, may it be happy or sad.

Using emojis is also a creative way for a brand to shut down trolls. Remember the now famous emoji reply Samsung gave in 2017 to a troll on the launch of the Galaxy S8? The troll had attempted to put the smartphone manufacturer on the hot spot and made that joke as a reply to Samsung’s invitation addressed to its Twitter followers to share their first photo taken with S8? He got burnt instead! The emoji reply received +16k retweets and +30k likes and many people said this reply convinced them to go out and buy the S8. Talk about the power of social media!

The first set of emojis was created in 1999 by Japanese interface designer Shigetaka Kurita for a Japanese phone operator. According to Emojipedia, there are now 3,178 emojis in the Unicode Standard.

Today it is estimated that more than 700 million emojis are used every day in Facebook posts alone, with New Year’s Eve being the most popular day to use them, according to the social network.

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Here are the most popular emojis as of October 2019 via Emojipedia:

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We all know emojis are widely successful so using them to collect customer feedback was the next logical step for the creators of Emojics.

Emojics is a feedback management solution that provides user engagement through interactions and sentiment analysis.

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Emojics reinvents how companies collect users feedback online. It is a feedback & reactions tool which helps companies convert more visitors into customers.

Emojics benefits

  1. ENGAGE – Get more leads and feedback from your users based on their feelings
  2. CAPTURE – Reaction buttons makes giving and getting feedback fun for users and easy for companies
  3. ANALYZE – Analyze the users’ feelings, which contents or products are more successful among your audience
  4. IMPROVE – We provide you with fresh data that will help to improve your contents or products and increase your growth

The Emojics tool can help you if you are looking to achieve any of the following goals:

  • Generate more connections with customers;
  • Collect more feedback;
  • Collect feedback faster;
  • Make your customer feedback process more fun;
  • Make your newsletters more personal;
  • Reduce the number of unsubscribed users;
  • Generate leads;
  • Interact with your users based on their feelings;
  • See what content or product are liked most;
  • Transform users feedback into intelligent data to drive product strategy.

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Here are the tool’s main features you can use to achieve your goals:

  • Automation campaigns
  • Widget customization
  • Real-time analytics
  • Page ranking
  • Emotional analytics
  • Email widget
  • Geographical data
  • URL triggers
  • Zapier integration
  • Data history
  • Mobile responsive widget

What tools do you use to collect customer feedback?

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Source: emojics.com

Content Writer vs Content Marketer vs Content Strategist

In this article, I attempt to define and differentiate between three marketing roles: content writer, content marketer and content strategist.

It’s human nature to organize information in well-defined compartments. We like it like that because it helps us avoid confusion. Marketing is about human communication which is a complex process in itself. Digital communication adds an extra layer of challenges. That’s why you will find that these three roles sometimes overlap.

Without further ado, let’s dive in!

Content Writer vs Content Marketer vs Content Strategist

What is a content writer? What does the content writer do?

A content writer is a marketer trained in the art of writing. The content writer is part of the marketing team and his/her job is to write digital content that caters to the needs of customers.

Content writers wield their digital pen skillfully, writing content that answers customers’ questions.

They are brand’s ambassadors offering customers a solution to their problems and essentially helping them achieve their goals.

Their power resides in the words which they use to facilitate the communication between your brand and your customers. They are part journalists, part copywriters, part storytellers. Content writers are always looking for the best metaphor which helps readers become leads or customers. They are always looking for inspiration and Google is their ally. They write for customers but also pay attention to keywords. If you want to make a content writer happy, tell them how much you liked their article or how useful it was.

What do content writers write?

Content writers write blogs, articles, reviews, guides, customer stories or any other long-form usually in-depth content (above 800-1000 words) that is relevant to the brand and its customer base. The corporate blogger is a content writer specialized in writing for the company blog.

Whatever the form, the content must be engaging, easy to read and achieve one or all of the following goals: educate, inform, inspire, entertain. The overall goal of branded content is to build brand awareness, build trust with the customer and create a community.

Discover the 6 attributes of excellent content.

Content writer = Copywriter?

The content writer must have copywriting skills, but he/she is not a copywriter. Their skills overlap, but the jobs are not the same.

A copywriter writes copy to drive sales or lead generation, looking for the perfect 5 to 10 words which influence the customer into taking a specific action: download a paper, click a link, subscribe to a newsletter, read an article, join a Facebook Group. They write for emails, social media posts, Google and Facebook ads, product descriptions, websites. If the content writer writes to educate, inform, inspire or entertain, the copywriter writes to influence and sell.

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Image source: uxplanet.org

Copywriting – 4 Techniques to write persuasive copy

Why is content writing a vital part of your marketing efforts?

Here’s a short and simple example. To attract brand awareness, you need to get customers to your website. To get customers to your website, you need Google to show your webpages in search results for what your customers are looking for.

Your customers don’t search for your brand or your products/services, they search for a solution to their problems.

Your content needs to address these problems in a relevant and engaging way. That’s how you earn brand awareness and build trust. These pieces of content are part of your overall marketing efforts which drive leads and sales.

Latest stats show that corporate blogging supports the company’s marketing goals.

  • 434% more indexed pages which means more chances to appear in Google search results;
  • 55% more website visitors which means more opportunities for lead generation and remarketing;
  • Companies that blog generate 126% more leads than those that don’t;
  • 47% of customers have interacted with 3-5 pieces of content prior to contacting a sales agent;
  • 61% of consumers have made a purchase based on a blog post;
  • 70% of consumers learn about a company through their blog rather than ads (because nobody likes ads, but everyone likes a good story).

blogging-tactics

What is a content marketer? What does the content marketer do?

A content marketer is a professional who markets the brand’s product through content.

The content marketer plans, creates, and shares valuable content to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers. It’s also the content marketer’s job to analyze content-driven results and calculate ROI.

Together with the art director and the videographer, the content marketer creates content which takes various formats: images, infographics, videos, quizzes, memes, gifs, ads, blog posts etc. These pieces of content are then shared on social media or other mediums of communication to help the company achieve its marketing goals: leads, sales, downloads, views, subscribers to the newsletter etc.

There are so many content formats, which should your brand use? There are so many channels to share content, which are more appropriate to reach customers? The content strategist decides which content the content marketer should create, which format to use, which channel to publish to and how often.

Creating new content by repurposing blog content for social media

Corporate blogs are a rich source of content ideas for the content marketer.

The content marketer can repurpose blog content and turn articles in other formats which can be shared on social media.

Here’s how Gary Vaynerchuk repurposes one long-form piece of content into dozens of smaller pieces of content, contextual to the platforms that his team distributes them to.

The GaryVee Content Model from Gary Vaynerchuk

Did you know Gary Vaynerchuk is speaking at BRAND MINDS 2020?

What is a content strategist? What does the content strategist do?

According to Kristina Halvorson, CEO of Brain Traffic, a content strategy consultancy, the content strategist is a professional who connects the company’s content efforts with business goals and user needs.

Here are three definitions of content strategy written by Kristina:

  1. Content strategy guides the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content.
  2. Content strategy means getting the right content, to the right people, in the right place, at the right time.
  3. Content strategy is an integrated set of user-centred, goal-driven choices about content throughout its lifecycle.

Any of these definitions are correct.

Kristina also describes what content strategists do:

  • Create content strategy frameworks;
  • Establish metrics for success;
  • Gather information about the brand’s priority audiences (to include user interviews);
  • Help determine which organizational/business/functional goals will drive your content-related decisions;
  • Analyze existing content and content ecosystems;
  • Interview stakeholders about their roles, experience, needs, and expectations.

Robert Rose, the founder and chief strategy officer of The Content Advisory, writes in one of his articles for Content Marketing Institute how the content strategist is different than the content marketer:

The content marketer draws the story and plans the channels that will be used to develop the customer relationship with the brand. The content strategist ensures that story, language, and management processes work consistently and efficiently across multiple teams, languages, and every publication the brand leverages.

Robert Rose

Do you have content writers on your team?

How about content marketers or content strategists? 

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Leadership lessons from 3 of the 100 most influential people according to TIME

Founded in 1923, TIME has the world’s largest circulation for a weekly news magazine with a readership of 26 million for its print edition.

The magazine is also known for TIME 100, its annual list of the 100 most influential people of the year.

In this article, I talk about three of them and their leadership lessons: Zhang Yiming, Bob Iger and Tara Westover.

Leadership lessons from 3 of the 100 most influential people according to TIME

ZHANG YIMING

Beijing ByteDance Technology Co. Founder Zhang Yiming

Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance. Photographer: Giulia Marchi/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Zhang Yiming founded ByteDance in 2012. The Chinese company is the parent company of popular apps Jinri Toutiao, a news aggregation platform and TikTok, a popular short-form video sharing platform.

TikTok is the most downloaded app on Apple devices for the first quarter of 2019 with over 1 billion downloads to date according to SensorTower.

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ByteDance’s founder started out as an ordinary tech engineer at Microsoft. Today, the 36-year-old is among the richest in China with an estimated $16.2 billion net worth.

Last October, Zhang secured a $3 billion funding round that valued ByteDance at around $75 billion. His strategy for ByteDance is to diversify its portfolio from software to hardware. It is rumoured that a ByteDance smartphone will be released by the end of 2019.

Your sense of responsibility and your desire to do things well will drive you to do more things and to gain experience.

CEO ByteDance Zhang Yiming

Here’s what makes a better leader according to Zhang Yiming:

  • Use your own product/service. It’s the only way to understand users and what they experience;
  • Get yourself exposed to various people and experiences;
  • Develop a work ethic which transcends the boundaries of your responsibilities.

BOB IGER

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The Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger / Image source: abcnews.go.com

Bob Iger is Chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company, one of the world’s largest and most admired media and entertainment companies.

Since becoming CEO in 2005, he oversaw the acquisitions of Pixar (2006), Marvel (2009), Lucasfilm (2012) and 21st Century Fox (2019).

In 2016 Disney expanded its international footprint by opening its first theme park and resort in Mainland China, Shanghai Disney Resort.

He also took the company to the next level with the use of technology by creating an ambitious direct-to-consumer strategy that features the company’s various streaming services, including Disney+, which debuts on November 12.

His book, The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons learned from 15 years as CEO of The Walt Disney Company launched on September 23.

Here are 9 leadership lessons that he shared in a LinkedIn article where he tells the story of the Lucasfilm acquisition and the making of the first Disney produced Star Wars film.

9 leadership lessons from Bob Iger

  1. Talk to your team members to make sure everyone is on the same page and fully understand the stakes;
  2. Share the burden of what it means to be responsible with your team members;
  3. Communicate to your team members that you are their partner and not just a CEO putting pressure on them to deliver results;
  4. Be a resource and a collaborator, make them feel that they could call you at any moment to discuss any problem they might wrestling with;
  5. Remind your team that you believe in them and that there are no better minds to run your company’s projects;
  6. If you can’t make the deadline, it’s ok. Don’t rush to deliver your project on time even if this means taking a short-term hit to your bottom line. Sacrificing quality is never an option;
  7. Decide wisely when it’s worth engaging in any public discourse and when it’s not;
  8. When you run negotiations, let your partners know clearly about where you stand while allowing yourself to show empathy if the situation calls for it;
  9. A successful deal is a deal where you build trust with your partners and suppliers.

You have to try to recognize that when the stakes of a project are very high, there’s not much to be gained from putting additional pressure on the people working on it.

The Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger

TARA WESTOVER

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Tara Westover / Image source: newstatesman.com

Zhang Yiming and Bob Iger run two highly successful companies. Both men have over 10k employees and 200k respectively under their leadership.

Leading people is one of the most challenging and wonderful jobs in the world. But the first person you need to start with is yourself.

How could you possibly lead other people to achieve their dreams if you cannot change your life to achieve yours?

Tara Westover is one of the best examples of personal growth in recent times.

She is the author of Educated: A Memoir, which has been on Top 10 New York Times Bestsellers List for 86 weeks.

The book was published in 2018 and has been translated into 35 languages. It won many awards among which the 2018 Goodreads Choice Award for Memoir, the Audie Award for Autobiography/Memoir, Book of the Year by the American Booksellers Association as well as being featured on Bill Gates’s Holiday Reading List and President Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of the Year list.

Tara’s story is about how one fifteen-year-old girl has decided that her family’s values were not her own and didn’t allow her parents to shape her future.

It’s a story about grit, resilience and strength.

She went against her family’s wishes and that took courage. She suffered physical and emotional abuse.

Her parents didn’t give her wings to grow and become everything that she could like most parents wish for their children. They tried to put her in a dark cage where she would never see the light of knowledge and self-actualization. She fought back and escaped.

Leadership lessons from Tara:

  • Never give up on your dream;
  • Building your dream takes grit, resilience, courage and strength;
  • Learning is the stepping stone towards success;
  • Success is linked to personal growth.

We are thrilled to have Tara Westover on the stage at BRAND MINDS 2020, where she’ll deliver a speech about The Power of Education.

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Swisspod – Building the infrastructure and the pod for hyperloop

Our advancement as a society is supported by transportation. Being able to reach the various corners of our world has been beneficial to our economy and culture, but it had a negative impact on the environment.

Transportation is a source of noise and smog, it contaminates water and soil, influences biodiversity and produces carbon monoxide emissions which have direct harmful effects.

Climate change is the cumulative impact of several natural and anthropogenic factors. Transportation is responsible for a 22% share in global CO2 emissions.

Is there a better way to go from one place to another that is faster, more affordable but sustainable and green?

Yes, it is.

Hyperloop is the 5th mode of transportation

The transportation of the future is called Hyperloop, a term coined by Elon Musk, the brilliant entrepreneur and visionary owner of SpaceX and Tesla. Elon believes the hyperloop is the 5th mode of transportation.

In 2015 he launched the Hyperloop Pod Competition where a number of student and non-student teams are participating to design and build a subscale prototype transport vehicle to demonstrate the technical feasibility of various aspects of the Hyperloop concept.

The high-speed train is not a new concept in Europe, specifically Switzerland. Switzerland has a long tradition of designing and developing vacuum tubes trains going back to the 1970s. These designs were the work of Marcel Jufer, professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

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Prof Marcel Jufer / swisspod.ch

Prof Jufer envisioned Swissmetro, a futuristic Swiss national transportation project using vactrain technology. The trains would have significantly lowered the travel time between major cities in Switzerland. Unfortunately, the project failed to gain support and remained only on paper.

Marcel Jufer’s designs might have been seen as wishful thinking and lacking economic viability forty years ago, but now the technology allows them to translate into reality.

Swisspod – Building an eco-friendly high-speed hyperloop system

Swisspod is a Swiss company building the transportation of the future by leveraging the hyperloop concept.

Their mission is to fight for a fossil-fuel-free and zero-emissions transportation world.

To achieve the company’s goal, its team lead by co-founders Denis Tudor and Cyril Dénéréaz designed a pod that is 10x faster than an electrical car and 4x less polluting.

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From left to right: CTO and co-founder Cyril Dénéréaz, CEO and co-founder Denis Tudor and Gael Diridollou (finance and business), a member in the advisory board 

Both Denis and Cyril have experience in solving engineering problems related to the hyperloop concept.

Denis Tudor participated in every edition of the Hyperloop Pod Competition since Elon launched it in 2015 first as a member of team rLoop then he founded his own team, EPFLoop. As part of his teams, he won 1st prize four times (Innovation, Most Reliable System and twice for Best Design) and 3rd prize for Speed. He is now a PhD student in Electrical Energy of the Hyperloop System at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

Read my interview with Denis.

Cyril Dénéréaz is an engineer at Mechanical Metallurgy Laboratory at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. He also participated in the Hyperloop Pod Competition as an adviser in Denis’s team and came home with 1st prize for Most Reliable System and 3rd prize for Speed.

Also, esteemed professor Marcel Jufer is a member of the advisory board.

Swisspod capsule design

The pod utilizes active levitation, enabling the hover engines to produce optimal lift. Furthermore, the company’s network of underground depressurized tunnels will significantly mitigate structural degradation of the capsule caused by the thermal expansion that occurs in above ground, tube infrastructure.

The capsule is situated in a relatively low-pressure atmosphere with the main cabin being pressurized. It is an energy-autonomous driverless vehicle which works on batteries in order to reduce the cost of the infrastructure and maintenance.

Swisspod is also designing the batteries, the pods and the infrastructure. The team calculated that their solution is 70% more affordable than a Muglev infrastructure.

The team expects to launch its first hyperloop pod by 2035.

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The Swisspod capsule

Introducing a new era of passenger transportation. Sustainable. Eco-friendly. Efficient. Responsible. Safe. Supersonic.

Swisspod

The Swisspod team is working on the following project: getting people from Geneva to Zürich in 17 minutes. Right now, it takes three hours by train. The capacity of Swisspod’s vehicle is 25-30 people and the ticket could cost up to 70 CHF.

How eco-friendly is their pod?

Their solution ranges between 35 and 55 Wh/passenger/kilometre (electrical energy) for the Geneva-Zürich route in a time range of 16-17 minutes. Nowadays, the alternative for this high-speed transportation system is 515 Wh/passenger/kilometre (fossil fuel energy) in a time range of 45 minutes + boarding procedures.

Building the pods could cost an estimate of $1.8 million per pod and developing the infrastructure between Geneva and Zürich could go up to $11 billion, said Swisspod CEO and co-founder Denis Tudor this year in an interview for CNNMoney Switzerland.

In the last decades, no major improvement in transportation has been made. We do believe that is the time to reconsider how we travel.

Swisspod

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How solving an internal problem gave rise to these successful companies: Slack, MailChimp and Basecamp

The usual path many successful companies have taken was building a product which solved a problem or catered to the needs of a specific customer base. In order to develop a good product, they did extensive market research, customer profiling, competitor analysis etc.

Other companies created a product as a side project to solve their own needs with no intention of selling it to anyone else. This product turned out to be of value to other businesses which allowed the said companies to pivot to a new business.

This is the case of Slack, MailChimp and Basecamp.

These are their stories.

How solving an internal problem gave rise to Slack, Basecamp and MailChimp

SLACK

In 2009, Stewart Butterfield and his team of forty-five people were working on Glitch, a browser-based massively multiplayer online game. Unfortunately, the game closed in 2012 due to accessibility and depth issues.

As sad as that was (Stewart had begun working on Glitch as early as 2002), something good came up from this failure.

While working on the game, the team has developed a workplace communication app. It was based on an old protocol built in the 1980s called the Internet Relay Chat which the team transformed to accommodate their needs for fast and relevant communication.

Stewart recognized the value of this communication tool and a year later following the demise of Glitch, Slack was born.

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Slack launched in 2013 and grew to 8 million subscribers in five years then 12 million subscribers in six years. 

Slack’s mission is to make work-life simpler, more pleasant and more productive. The app is the collaboration hub that brings the right people, information, and tools together to get work done. It is the preferred business communication tool of 65 Fortune 100 companies in more than 150 countries.

The app has over 100k paid customers and is valued at a reported $15.7 billion. The company has raised a total of $1.4 billion in funding over 11 rounds.

The company began 2019 with $400 million in revenue and is expected to bring in an estimated $600 million in revenue next year. Seeing that the company made its product available in Japanese in 2017 and this year it opened a new office in Tokyo and Melbourne, this estimation is likely to become real.

What does the future hold for Slack?

More investment in Asia.

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield speaks at his company’s Frontiers conference at Pier 27 & 29 on April 24, 2019, in San Francisco, California. Photo by NOAH BERGER/AFP/Getty Images

MAILCHIMP

In 2001, Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius were running the Rocket Science Group, a web design agency which focused on big, corporate clients.

While catering to the needs of big companies, they created an email service when their customers began asking for help with their email marketing.

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MailChimp co-founder Ben Chestnut / photo source: Techcrunch

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MailChimp co-founder Dan Kurzius / Photo source: Glassdoor

In the early 2000s, email software was expensive and available only to businesses with big resources. They created a little tool for small businesses because they were aware of the challenges these usually have to overcome to be successful.

While growing up, Ben’s mom ran a hair salon from her kitchen and Dan’s parents ran a bakery. Ben and Dan’s email service turned out to be highly successful so in 2007 they closed the web design agency and focused solely on their great product now called MailChimp.

Dan and I created Mailchimp for the love of small business. And over the past 18 years, we’ve always thought about what kinds of tools and services would have helped our families grow their businesses and weather the competition.

Ben Chestnut

During these past twelve years, MailChimp has come a long way. Although a tech company, MailChimp is not your average Silicon Valley startup growing fast only to get acquired by a tech giant corporation. Ben and Dan are not that kind of startup founders. They see themselves and their team as a band of misfits who despite everything was able to do something great.

This year, Mailchimp was named to FORTUNE’s 50 Best Workplaces in Technology list and named the #1 Email Marketing Tool in Newsweek’s Best Business Tools of 2019 list.

The company is closing in on $700 million in annual revenues for 2019 and up to date, it hasn’t raised as much as one dollar from outside funding.

MailChimp was bootstrapped all the way. Several companies tried to acquire it, one of them even offered the co-founders $1 billion in cash. Both Ben and Dan felt validated but they turned the offer down. They didn’t feel scared of the pain and suffering of growing a business. It’s just how life is supposed to feel.

As of this year, MailChimp has now grown to around 11 million active customers with a total audience of 4 billion contacts.

More than 1.25 million e-commerce orders are generated daily through MailChimp campaigns and its customers have sold over $250 million in goods through multivariate + A/B campaigns (source).

MailChimp is now more than an email service provider, it’s an all-in-one marketing platform which empowers its users to build landing pages, create digital campaigns and leverage powerful insights. It supports small businesses to reach their marketing goals faster.

We know what it means to pour every bit of yourself into your small business. We know the joy and satisfaction that comes when those businesses succeed, and we’ve felt the lasting sting of failure. But what’s baked into our DNA is that ambition all of our family members had: their aspiration to move “out of the kitchen” and build their businesses, to take a small seed of an idea and make it grow.

Ben Chestnut

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BASECAMP

A base camp is a camp providing supplies, shelter, and communications especially for people climbing a mountain.

In the same way, Basecamp, a web-based project management tool supports teams in their efforts to bring a project to conclusion.

The management platform was launched in 2004 but the company that created it was co-founded in 1999 by Jason Fried, Carlos Segura, and Ernest Kim as a web design company.

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Basecamp co-founders (from left to right) Jason Fried, Carlos Segura and Ernest Kim

Their company was named 37signals and businesses hired them to re-design and simplify their websites.

Business was doing great but soon the team experienced difficulties when running multiple projects. They used email which was not effective and it was taking a toll on their work and caused delivery delays.

Soon clients began to take notice they were disorganized. It’s when they knew it was time to choose a project management tool. They tried a few tools available on the market, but they didn’t fit their needs: they were complicated and too hard to use.

Frustrated the team at 37signals developed their own project management tool and business began to flow seamlessly once again. Clients started to pay attention to this new tool they were using to run projects and expressed the desire to adopt it for their own in-house projects. And that’s how Basecamp was born.

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Within a year, Basecamp was generating more income than their web design business.

Fifteen years later, Basecamp has 3 million accounts signed up, $25M in estimated revenue annually and only 55 people employed in 30 different cities around the world who work mostly remote.

In 2006, Basecamp received a Series A fund from Bezos Expeditions which manages Jeff Bezos’ personal venture capital investments.

The company hasn’t raised any more funding since then because Basecamp CEO Jason Fried wants to stay small.

He believes startups raising more money than they need is a sure way to kill the business.

“It’s like, look, you know, you plant a seed, it needs some water, but if you just pour a whole fucking bucket of water on it’s going to kill it,” he said in an interview for Vox.

It’s relevant to mention that Basecamp, unlike other famous tech companies, has been profitable every year since its launch back in 2004.

Conclusion

The path to success doesn’t unfold in one direction only.

As startup founder, you may choose to raise funds like Slack or go bootstrapped as MailChimp.

You may grow fast or take the slow lane. If you choose to take it slow, be prepared to strap in for a long journey which could develop over a period of almost twenty-year which is how MailChimp has decided to achieve success. And also commit to your mission and your team and turn down enticing offers which could set you up for life if this is what you were looking for.

Creating a product that solves your customers’ pain points is what most companies do. But as these companies have proved, sometimes you could strike gold in your own backyard so be aware and keep your eyes open.

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What is a Customer Experience (CX) Marketer?

Table of contents

  • Definition of a CX (customer experience) Marketer
  • What does a CX Marketer do?
  • CX Marketers make data-driven marketing decisions

What is a Customer Experience (CX) Marketer?

A Customer Experience Marketer is a new kind of marketer, part creative and part data scientist says John Cosley, Director, Global Brand and Digital Marketing at Microsoft/Bing.

Customer Experience is the result of every interaction (touchpoint) a customer has with your business, online and offline, at any stage in their buyer journey.

[bctt tweet=”A customer experience marketer is part creative and part data scientist #cxmarketer #customerexperience” username=”brand_minds”]

Why is customer experience vital to your business?

In this day and age, when digital has levelled the field for any business, customer experience is a competitive differentiator.  

How a customer feels about your business is critical for customer growth, retention and advocacy. Long story short – your customer’s experience with your brand could potentially make or break your business.

HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan announced last year that his company replaced the traditional sales and marketing funnel with a new model, the Customer Flywheel. He believes the secret to building a great company is to provide a customer experience 10x lighter than the competition.

Positive customer experience can lead to turning your customers into brand ambassadors thus bringing in new customers & revenue which keeps the flywheel spinning.

Learn more: Goodbye, Marketing Funnel! Hello, Customer Flywheel!

In its 2019 Global Consumer Insights Survey, PricewaterhouseCoopers recommends brands and businesses to include another metric in addition to the traditional ROI – ROX or the Return on Experience. ROX is the metric with which marketers measure the purchase experience of their consumers.

Learn more: ROX is the new ROI 

What is the job of the Customer Experience Marketer’s job? What does he/she do?

The customer experience marketer’s job is to create a better experience for the customer at every touchpoint, online or offline, no matter the stage they’re at in the buying journey.

Here are some of the points your customer is interacting with and for which the customer marketer is expected to create a positive experience:

  • First contactWhat is the customer’s first contact with our brand? How do we want the customer to feel while interacting with our brand for the first time?
  • Social mediaWhat does the customer see on our social media? How does our social content make them feel and think? Are these reactions exactly what we want to achieve as a brand?
  • In-store – How do our customers feel like in our stores? What do they smell? It’s not a coincidence that the first thing customers smell when they come into any Lidl store is the amazing aroma of delicious pastry. This is a carefully designed customer experience!
  • App/WebsiteAre our customers interacting easily with our app or website? What’s their experience with our digital platforms? Do they get what they want on our app/website with reduced friction and increased speed?

Data is key to unlocking smarter customer journeys.

John Cosley, Director, Global Brand and Digital Marketing at Microsoft/Bing

To create successful experiences that market to the customer journey, the CX marketer has to go through this 3-step process:

  1. Collect, unify, and analyze 1st-party data;
  2. Augment their first-party data and close the gaps with 3rd-party data;
  3. Understand the customer journey and create a holistic view of the customer based on insights provided by data.

CX Marketers make data-driven marketing decisions

In July of 2019, Microsoft Advertising conducted research with marketers and agencies to gather insights on how marketers use data to engage with customers.

The report is called Creating smarter customer journeys: A blueprint for the successful application of data and Artificial Intelligence in improving the customer experience.

It shows that successful CX marketers have adopted a data-driven approach which allowed them to:

  • Have a better understanding of the customer decision journey (CDJ);
  • Make more informed decisions based on that understanding;
  • Improve customer engagement as a result;
  • Improve marketing strategy as a whole.

Sources of 1st and 3rd party data according to the Microsoft Advertising report

The following sources provide 1st party data:

  • Organic search data
  • Site analytics
  • Site visitor behaviour
  • Customer-relationship management (CRM)
  • Call centre data
  • Ad serving data

Applications of 1st party data:

  • Dynamic personalized creative
  • Custom BI reporting
  • Journey mapping
  • CRM
  • email/DR marketing
  • Site personalization

The following sources provide 3rd party data:

  • 3rd party data providers
  • Location data companies
  • Market research data (eMarketer, Gartner, Nielsen, HBR, Trendwatching etc)
  • Targeting segments from ad partners
  • DMP data marketplace (e.g. Oracle, Adobe)

Applications of 3rd party data:

  • Customer/segment targeting
  • Customer behavioural insights
  • Multi-dimension campaign segmentation
  • Campaign planning and forecasting

CX marketers who leverage the collected data, reach an in-depth understanding of their customers and their customer decision journey usually see a +45% incremental lift in ROI/ROAS for a typical campaign.

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Source: Microsoft Advertising

Here are other results and benefits:

  • More opportunities for customers to engage with brands
  • Campaigns that better speak to customer needs
  • Improved ad campaign impact
  • Improved shopping experiences
  • Better aligned purchasing processes to customer preferences
  • Offers aligned to customer personas
  • Personalized future customer decision journeys
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Source: Microsoft Advertising

Machine Learning (ML) is another great tool that CX Marketers can leverage to anticipate consumer behaviour and create smarter, more personalized advertising experiences.

Is a CX marketer part of your marketing team?

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Druid Chatbots Help Your Business Cut Costs and Increase Customer Satisfaction

According to the latest chatbot stats, by 2020 85% of customer interactions will be handled without a human agent.

By 2021, 50% of enterprises will spend more on chatbots than mobile apps.

Also, by 2022, they will have been saved $8 in costs from the use of chatbot conversations.

The global market size for chatbots will reach $1.3 billion by 2024.

The time to start using chatbots to cut down your operational costs and improve your customer experience is now.

Also, Millennials love chatbots.

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DRUID is an artificial intelligence company that develops a “no-code” chatbot design platform, which helps any organization plan, develop, and deploy chatbots capable of responding efficiently to all business stakeholders’ needs.

Evaluated at EUR 5 million after a new financing round raised in February, DRUID platform is a one-stop solution which provides a scalable, secure, configurable and extendable foundation to create chatbots.

These chatbots perform a wide range of intelligent tasks, communicate with people and systems, and leverage data to drive actionable employee and customer engagements across channels.

DRUID Chatbot Platform – Features

  • Powerful NLP engine which focuses on interpreting the user’s intent to provide information contextually based on their behaviour and preferences;
  • Over 30 languages available;
  • The platform’s Connector Designer allows admins to configure any type of connection to enterprise applications (Open APIs, REST/SOAP, SQL/Oracle, MS, ERP, CRM);
  • White-labelled, custom logo & avatars;
  • Druid & UiPath integration – DRUID Chatbots bring conversation capabilities to UiPath Robots while adding enhanced cognitive services to the RPA bots; UiPath is a global software company that develops a platform for robotic process automation valued at $7 billion;
  • Robust and flexible architecture which runs in the cloud using Microsoft Azure infrastructure;
  • The platform follows the strictest guidelines for security and compliance regardless of industry, from customer information to proprietary business data.

See improved KPIs today, not next quarter.

DRUID

DRUID Chatbot Platform – Benefits

  • Strong connector capabilities which allow easy get/push data to enterprise apps;
  • 100% customizable to easily deploy your brand’s style;
  • No language barriers;
  • Instant benefits without having to dedicate large developer teams or time;
  • 40 % decrease in time to contract;
  • 45 % increase in satisfaction;
  • 34 % reduction in costs.

How can DRUID chatbots help your organization?

DRUID chatbots are equipped with over 150 built-in skills for every industry and any role.

They can be programmed to:

  1. Reply to questions;
  2. Send notifications;
  3. Deliver reports;
  4. Track smart tasks;
  5. Fill in forms;
  6. Route to human.

Build DRUID chatbots for:

  • Your customers;
  • Your partners;
  • Your employees.

The DRUID platform provides lots of already built Chatbots and template (which can be tailored easily) in different industries:

  • financial services;
  • healthcare;
  • insurance;
  • online commerce;
  • marketing and sales campaigns;
  • self-services;
  • customer service;
  • virtual assistant for employees;
  • virtual assistant for flow documents.

DRUID latest news

DRUID is the proud winner of the Best Connector App at the 2019 UiPath Power Up Automation Global Hackathon and overall Hackathon 2nd Place.

The company has also been selected as a national finalist for Best Newcomer, Best AI/ Machine Learning Startup and Startup of the Year in the 2019 Central European Startup Awards.

Are you using chatbots in your organisation?

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Source: druidai.com

900 digital professionals attended DIGITALIUM 2019

900 digital professionals have attended DIGITALIUM 2019, the second edition of The Hottest Digital Marketing Conference in Bucharest.

The conference room was packed full with brand builders, marketing managers, digital strategists and vloggers – all of them excited to receive insights on how to be successful on Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook and how to design email marketing campaigns with the highest ROI.

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DIGITALIUM 2019 / photo: Vitzmanphotography.com

Our amazing lineup of speakers rocked the stage at #digitalium2019!

Randi Zuckerberg, Dan Knowlton, Goldie Chan, Derral Eves, Kelvin Newman, Jessica Best, Andrew Pickering & Peter Gartland – they all delivered value by sharing with our audience what works and doesn’t work in digital today.

If you didn’t join our conference, we’re looking forward to seeing you next year.

Until then here are the key takeaways of this year’s edition.

Here’s what you’ve missed @DIGITALIUM 2019

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Randi Zuckerberg at DIGITALIUM 2019

Randi Zuckerberg @ DIGITALIUM 2019 – The impact of social media

Randi’s presentation was entertaining, uplifting and high on energy.

She shared her life story in digital marketing and how Facebook Live started as a wild idea that she had during a hackathon.

Three years later, there are over 3,500,000,000 Facebook Live broadcasts according to the latest stats.

Randi loved doing marketing for the biggest social network in the world but left Facebook when she realized she wanted to build her own dream, not her brother’s.

So she founded Zuckerberg Media to help create a world where there was more representation from women and keep the door open for girls in tech.

TV host, bestselling author and entrepreneur, Randi Zuckerberg surprised and delighted the audience when she ended her speech by singing a tech-inspired Little Mermaid song.

Every single one of us is a media company.

Randi Zuckerberg

Takeaway tips from Randi:

  • It’s complicated: We need technology to save us from our technology.
  • Bring your wildest dreams to the table.
  • To create scarcity, go live.
  • Have big bold ideas and not be afraid of being judged.
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Dan Knowlton at DIGITALIUM 2019

Dan Knowlton @ DIGITALIUM 2019 – Instagram advertainment: how to market on Instagram in 2019

Digital influencer and social media marketing expert, Dan Knowlton delivers creative marketing campaigns that outperform traditional marketing.

His agency – Knowlton has been selected as a finalist for Social Media Agency of The Year in the 2019 Social Media Marketing Awards.

Create ads that are entertaining, trigger emotion, are fun to consume and don’t look like ads.

Dan Knowlton

Takeaway tips from Dan:

  • Why should you create entertaining ads? Because they make us feel something.
  • Advertainment puts the consumer first and brands KPIs second.
  • Create authentic video content: no scripts, no actors, no non-skippable ads!
  • Identify and tap into a cultural relevant situation that your audience will understand.
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Goldie Chan at DIGITALIUM 2019

Goldie Chan @ DIGITALIUM 2019 – LinkedIn’s top rules

Known as the Oprah of LinkedIn, Goldie Chan is a top LinkedIn creator, digital strategist and personal branding expert.

She is an author and instructor at LinkedIn Learning, working with the creative team behind the learning platform at LinkedIn to create new courses like LinkedIn Video Marketing for Personal and Brand Pages.

Her video channel, #DailyGoldie, won LinkedIn Top Voice (the highest honour on the platform) and was the platform’s longest-running daily show with a global community and millions of views.

She is the founder & head of content and creative for Warm Robots, a B2B and B2C social media strategy agency specializing in getting big brands to the right audience.

Be incredibly focused with your content.

Goldie Chan

Takeaway tips from Goldie:

  • What is the keyword that you want to be known for the most? Create content to dominate that keyword!
  • Avoid being salesy! Say Hello instead of Buy this!
  • LinkedIn video is still in the wild, wild west stage of the platform. It’s time to take advantage of it now!
  • Use no more than 3 hashtags or 1 custom hashtag in your posts.
  • Don’t include links in your post! Place them in the first comment instead.
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Derral Eves at DIGITALIUM 2019

Derral Eves @ DIGITALIUM 2019 – YouTube superstars

As a highly respected video marketing strategist, Derral Eves has been on YouTube since its launch in 2005.

With 14 years of experience, you might think Derral doesn’t have anything more to learn, but you would be wrong. He says his most valuable skill is that he never stops learning.

When you understand how your audience interacts with your video, this will transform your business.

Derral Eves

Takeaway tips from Derral:

  • If you want to have success with video, you need to leverage the satisfaction feedback loop.
  • What does my brand stand for? What does my audience care about? The recipe for success is at the intersection of these answers.
  • If you want to scale, you need to go into pop culture.
  • Leverage these moments: I want to know, I want to learn, I want to buy, I want to go.
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Kelvin Newman at DIGITALIUM 2019

Kelvin Newman @ DIGITALIUM 2019 – How we can respond to the ever-changing face of Google Search Result Pages?

Kelvin Newman is one of the most influential professionals in SEO.

As the organizer of BrightonSEO, the biggest search marketing event in the world, Kelvin has a unique perspective of SEO with first-hand insights into current trends.

Don’t write for search engines. Write for what search engines think users want.

Kelvin Newman

Takeaway tips from Kelvin:

  • Getting featured in one of Google’s SERP results is an opportunity for brand awareness and sales.
  • This means you need to change how you present your content. It also changes your understanding of what success is for your business.
  • Start using Structured Data and schema.org to get the best of SERP results.
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Jessica Best at DIGITALIUM 2019

Jessica Best @ DIGITALIUM 2019 – The Good, The Bad & The Wow!

Jessica Best is one part massive email marketing nerd and one part permission-marketing evangelist.

After years of focusing on return on marketing investment (ROI or ROMI) and customer retention, she fell in love with email marketing for its immediacy and the complex possibilities of relationship marketing.

Get your email recipient on your journey: leverage togetherness.

Jessica Best

Takeaway tips from Jessica:

  • Have a content plan before you start your email marketing program. What goals are you looking to achieve?
  • Email’s average read rate is 22-26% while social is <10%.
  • Don’t ignore mobile users’ experience. People delete and/or unsubscribe from emails that provide a bad experience.
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Andrew and Pete at DIGITALIUM 2019

Andrew Pickering and Peter Gartland @ DIGITALIUM 2019 – How to be remarkable: the unusual yet proven path to marketing success

Andrew and Pete met on the first day of University and they became best friends. They shared the same passion for business and entrepreneurship and upon graduating, they set-up their own company.

They are committed to helping small business owners grow and scale their business online by creating content and training that actually helps people.

For their relentless and valuable work, Andrew and Pete won the ‘Digital and Social Media Company of the Year Award‘, and also ‘Business Personality of the Year Award‘.

People who spread themselves too thin, never win.

Andrew and Pete

Takeaway tips from Andrew and Pete:

  • To reach everyone, you don’t need to be on every platform.
  • To decide which platform to let go of, look at the data. That’s how you discover where to focus your marketing efforts.
  • Go by the 90/10 rule: use 90% of your marketing efforts to do something remarkably well and 10% experimenting.

More highlights on the event are on DIGITALIUM’s Facebook Page & Instagram Account.

Subscribe to digitalium.ro to catch the updates on the following event.

This article was originally published at www.digitalium.ro

How Shazam reached 1 billion downloads worldwide

This is the story of Shazam and how the company became successful and reached 1 billion downloads worldwide.

It’s a Monday morning in the summer of 2000 and the warm light creeps through the windows of a small eight by six room in a building in the heart of Soho, London.

The room is shared by four people each working fervently on their computers. They are friends and co-founders of Shazam, the company that wants to help people identify songs via their mobile phones.

There’s one major problem. It’s 2000 and mobile phones are not capable of doing that.

In one corner of the room, Chris Barton who came up with the idea behind Shazam is on the phone talking with prospective investors and trying to raise money.

Crouched over a short coffee table with sheets of paper spread all over it, Dhiraj Mukherjee is writing the company’s business plan.

Philip Inghelbrecht is researching the problem sifting through the pages of a thick volume with due diligence. From time to time, he stops and shares his key findings with Avery Wang, who is supposed to create the technology which will allow Shazam to work. Avery looks concerned because four months have passed since he tackled the problem and he still had no idea how to solve it.

Don’t look at the market today but aim for what the market will look like in the future.

Dhiraj Mukherjee

Avery has previously looked to available known techniques for answers like hashing algorithms used in text search engines and speech recognition algorithms. He also did extensive research in content recognition technology. Unfortunately, all his efforts were to no avail. Avery is an optimistic person by nature but now he appears to be distraught.

brand-minds-shazam-success-founders

Shazam Founders: Philip Inghelbrecht, Avery Wang, Chris Barton, Dhiraj Mukherjee / Medium

Although right now things didn’t look very promising at Shazam, his co-founders were resilient and kept pushing forward. And their persistence finally paid off.

Avery, a brilliant inventor is successful in creating the algorithm that Shazam was built upon. He found a statistical indicator of a match by using, what he calls, landmarks and fingerprints within songs.

Firstly, look way ahead of your time, at the risk of launching a company with a slightly wacky idea or incomplete technology stack. Secondly, think big and shoot for the moon; plan for every person to use your product at some point in time. It’s much better to fall short on a lofty goal than to exceed a reasonable projection.

Philip Inghelbrecht

Two years later, Shazam launched in the UK market. What Avery invented was not actually a music recognition technology, but a “recorded sound identification technology”.

Chris knew that there were other companies on the market providing people with a solution to identify the music they heard. These companies have not been very successful because they were thinking too small: they only monitored the music that radio stations played and the user experience was terrible. He had seen an opportunity and took his idea further: how about identifying music played anywhere else not only on the radio?

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Avery’s algorithm tackled and solved many challenges:

  • Search a massive database of millions of songs;
  • Being able to search quickly;
  • It had a high recognition rate and a low false-positive rate;
  • It was tolerant of noise and distortion, room reverberation, as well as voice compression.

What is Shazam now?

Shazam is a mobile app that recognises music and TV around the user. It is also a platform for artists to connect with their fans.

Things don’t happen like that. The technology usually exists first before any company tries to commercialize it. Shazam invented the technology and earned revenue off of it at the same time.

Here are the challenges that Shazam’s four co-founders have striven to overcome to be successful:

  • Waiting for mobile phone technology to catch up with their vision;
  • Building technology from scratch and also commercialize on it;
  • Raising money;
  • Negotiating with mobile operators;
  • Building a large enough music database;
  • Creating the algorithm i.e. the core recognition service itself;
  • Managing 40+ employees and 50 or 60 temporary staff.

I wanted to build a business that was based on cutting-edge technology and had the aim to revolutionize the way we discover music by using the mobile phone.

Chris Burton

How Shazam worked on launch day in 2002:

  1. 95% of people with mobile phones in the UK could dial 2580 when they heard music in a bar, café, restaurant, club, or on the radio and hold their phone to music;
  2. 15 seconds later, the voice phone call would terminate and a text message would be sent to their phone with the name of the artist and song;
  3. There was no charge if Shazam could not identify the song;
  4. If it could, then they were charged 50 pence on their mobile phone bill.

The team went through difficult times in the years following the launch. The company was not profitable which required them to continue raising venture capital investment. Investors believed in Shazam but they were not jumping to invest because the company had not yet reached user or revenue growth. They had to lay people off.

What got Chris, Avery, Philip and Dhiraj through these rocky years?

They thought rationally, always looking to find a compromise and most importantly remained passionate about their dream. Their friendship was a vital element of their success. Each of them had a high level of integrity and trusted each other.

The most dangerous outcome for a startup during times like these can be a fallout between the founders, but we never had this issue because there was such a powerful bond between the four of us.

Chris Barton

It was not until the advent of the iPhone App Store that Shazam’s user base began to grow exponentially and reach astronomical heights.

Shazam timeline, stats in 2019 and business model

  • Chris Barton, Philip Inghelbrecht, Avery Wang and Dhiraj Mukherjee founded the company in 1999;
  • By 2000, they managed to raise $1 million from angel investors;
  • The service launched in 2002;
  • Shazam joined the brand new Apple App Store in 2008 as one of the first apps;
  • Introduced a new feature in 2011 – in addition to music, the app was extended to let users Shazam TV programs and ads to get special offers and more information on what they were watching;
  • In 2015 Shazam was valued at $1 billion;
  • The company was acquired by Apple in 2018 for a reported $400 million;
  • To date, the Shazam app has more than 1 billion downloads;
  • 150 million people use Shazam every month;
  • The app drives the download of 400,000 songs daily;
  • The company earns revenue by referring users to make media purchases: the platform provides users with links to purchase music, television programming, and more through content distributors.

My biggest piece of advice is to be careful about the assumption of “If I build it, they will come.”
A mobile entrepreneur should make sure that part of their innovation includes a path to acquiring users and driving usage. Getting these users through an innovative channel that is free will be the key to such a successful business.

Chris barton

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Sources: Medium, AppSamurai, ExpandedRamblings, Investopedia

6 Factors Influencing Customers’ Buying Decisions (2)

In the first part of this article, I talked about three factors that influence your customers’ buying decisions: reviews, brand familiarity and the customers’ emotional state of mind.

Let’s tackle the next three: brand purpose & social responsibility, convenience and the decoy effect.

4. Brand purpose & social responsibility

For almost fifty years, the purpose of a corporation used to be defined by Milton Friedman’s Shareholder Theory.

The theory stated that a company’s main responsibility is to maximize returns to its shareholders with no social responsibility to the public or society.

In August this year, 181 CEOs running billion-dollar companies amended the purpose of a corporation to match the changes our society is going through today. They didn’t eliminate a company’s responsibility to its shareholders but they downgraded as the last one on their list of commitments.

It’s an important shift in the business mindset which paves the way for positive societal changes.

Brands began to adopt this mindset after reports stated that a growing number of consumers expected brands to take a public stand on important social values. The same reports found that having a strong purpose and social responsibility was directly linked to sales and brand loyalty.

Barbie, the famous doll manufacturer has moved past designing slim blonde dolls with blue eyes and is now empowering girls through a series of dolls made in the likeness of extraordinary and inspirational women in their 2018 Close The Dream Gap campaign: Amelia Earhart, conservationist Bindi Irwin, boxing champion Nicola Adams Obe, NASA Mathematician and Physicist Katherine Johnson, filmmaker Patty Jenkins etc.

Although sixty years old, Barbie is the #1 fashion doll in America with $1.09 billion in sales according to Statista. The company is currently generating increased sales but that wasn’t always the case.

Starting with 2o13, Barbie reported big drops in sales year-on-year until 2016 when the company decided it was time to change if they wanted to avoid bankruptcy. The Barbie doll was not relevant anymore because she didn’t reflect the change that had happened in cultural attitudes.

The solution was right in front of them: go back to the original purpose of Ruth Handler, Barbie’s creator. Ruth created the doll to show girls all of the possibilities they could be when they grew up.

Juliana Chugg, Barbie Vice-president and Chief Brand Officer has lead the company’s transformation. Her team took the company in three new directions:

  1. Acknowledge the power of purpose and refocus on brand values
  2. Innovate and take risks
  3. Become culturally relevant

The brand challenges could not be addressed through marketing alone. We had to take the bold step of changing the features of a product that had been an icon.

Juliana Chugg, Barbie VP and CBO

This resulted in producing a new line of dolls with different body types and ethnicities, Barbie in a chair and Barbie with a prosthetic limb.

Barbie is once again the favourite doll of little girls everywhere and the company’s increasing sales clearly show that.

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Barbie lineup at the 2019 Toy Fair

5. Convenience

In its Quest for Convenience Report (2018), Nielsen found that consumers’ quest for convenience is one of the factors influencing their buying decisions.

According to this report, 31% of consumers say they seek out products which make life easier and are convenient to use, while around 1 in 5 consumers are looking for products suitable for small households (18%) and tailored to a specific need (15%).

So if you are looking for ways to influence your customers’ buying decisions, your product and the entire customer experience should check the following points:

  • Make it simple and easy;
  • Make it useful;
  • Help your customer make better use of their time;
  • Help your customer save time.
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2018 Quest for Convenience, Nielsen

Birchbox offers five customized beauty samples inside a monthly box. All you have to do is set up the personal preferences in your “beauty profile” which is used to curate your boxes with goodies from brands like Kiehl’s and Benefit.

Apart from its famous workout bike, Peloton provides fitness enthusiasts with streaming workout classes which they can access via a subscription. People have busy lives. Why struggle to include going to the gym in your hectic schedule when you can exercise in the comfort of your own home and whenever it’s most convenient for you?

6. The Decoy Effect

In marketing, the decoy effect is the phenomenon whereby consumers will tend to have a specific change in preference between two options when also presented with a third option.

This option is inferior in all respects when compared to the first option, but inferior in some respects and superior in other respects when compared to the second option.

Experts in behavioural economics call this option asymmetrically dominated which means it is completely dominated (i.e. inferior) by one option and only partially dominated by the other.

The presence of the asymmetrically dominated option serves one purpose: to influence the consumer into buying the dominating option.

That’s the decoy effect: when deciding between two options, an unattractive third option can change the perceived preference between the other two.

decoy-effect

 

I reached out to Calin Biris, online marketing expert and invited him to name 3 strategies that brands should adopt to influence their customers’ buying decisions in 2020.

Here are Calin’s recommendations:

We can see more and more big brands use the social responsibility card for brand awareness and influence. But this tactic should not be used only by big players.

Any company that has “soul” (and by that I mean: values, vision, leadership) should get involved and help the world out for the impact and also for getting to the consumer’s heart. There are so many problems to attack that a brand can help to resolve, that is not a hard job to find ideas for campaigns. Just take a look at the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals and find the one that works best for you.

There is no doubt that the first place for consumers to look for information about the choices they make when buying products and services is online. That is why all companies should have an integrated digital brand experience on all devices (mobile, desktop, tablet, TV, smartwatch) and channels (search, Social Media, website etc.). Every message the brand shares publicly with its consumers has to be well represented on all devices and channels for a coherent experience.

If a brand gets the interest and respect of my friends, it will make me curious and maybe will get my investment in what it has to offer. This social influence is more present nowadays than ever.

Millennials and the next generation of consumers get their news from Social Media. My recommendation for brand managers is to use this insight to their advantage.

Some things that you can do, if you are a brand manager:

a) use the social product reviews of the landing pages and why not, even on the packages;
b) offer referral incentives for consumers to promote your products and services;
c) create a community for your consumers to be part of;
d) have newsworthy campaigns that spread on Social Media.

How is your brand influencing your customers’ buying decisions?

Share your strategy in the comments.

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Denis Tudor (co-founder at Swisspod Technologies): Hyperloop is the future of transportation

Denis Tudor is CEO and Co-founder at Swisspod Technologies. His startup is building the most efficient and affordable Hyperloop solutions.

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CEO & co-founder Swisspod Technologies Denis Tudor

I reached out to Denis to learn more about the hyperloop and why he believes it is the future of transportation.

1. Speed is killing the planet. How does the hyperloop help stop the climate crisis?

Speed is killing the planet. I think it is time to focus on efficiency and sustainability. Our Hyperloop company, Swisspod, focuses to bring on the market the most affordable and efficient Hyperloop solutions, which means sustainability.

To fix ideas, for an average travelling speed 10x more than an electrical car, the CO2 emissions/km/passenger are 4x less.

We do need to stop the climate crisis and it is our duty (scientists and entrepreneurs) to convince the decision-makers to implement such solutions.

At the moment, we focus on reducing the CO2 footprint in Switzerland for a route between Geneva and Zurich (226 km). We propose a solution of 17 minutes for an energy consumption cost per passenger per journey of around 8 CHF.

2. What is the 5th mode?

5th mode is… the 5th mode of transportation. We have planes, trains, cars and boats.

Hyperloop will be the new mode of transportation which can be defined “as fast as a plane, as convenient as a train”.

It represents a transportation solution which can achieve sonic speed (1200 km/h) with lower CO2 emissions and energy consumption.

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The Swisspod hyperloop pod design / Swisspod.ch

3. Your team entered the SpaceX Hyperloop competition this year and was the third-fastest transport pod. Your pod also ranked 1st in safety. Congratulations!

Thank you. Actually, my experience in Hyperloop is much longer.

I started this adventure in 2015 when Elon Musk launched the first Hyperloop Competition ever. The first competition was held in 2 different stages: design weekend and competition weekend. Around 10k teams from the entire world registered in the competition. We got the first prize for the best design award from Elon Musk.

After we won the Design Weekend in January 2016, we had a crowdfunding campaign in the Silicon Valley where we managed to fundraise the money we wanted. We had different collaborations with companies in Silicon Valley, as well as with NASA Ames California.

In September 2016 we won the first prize for the best design at a Hyperloop competition in Dubai.

In January 2017, the competition weekend was organized and we were awarded the Best Innovation Award after we built what we proposed at the design weekend. This was the second first prize from Elon Musk. Due to some issues, in the second competition, we did not get any award and I left the team.

I arrived in Switzerland and I created my own team here. At the third competition, we were awarded the first prize for safety and third prize for speed.

As a conclusion, I was awarded 4 different prizes in the last 3 years with 3 different capsules from Elon Musk: 1st prize for the Best Hyperloop Design, 1st prize for Innovation, 1st prize for Safety, 3rd prize for speed.

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Denis Tudor at the biggest event in EPFL / LinkedIn

Now, I am retired from the competition and I opened my start-up with a Swiss person. I think it is time to let other young people push boundaries and have better results than us.

My only regret is that I did not win the 1st prize for speed, but yeah… speed is killing the planet.

At the moment, I focus on my start-up in Switzerland, Swisspod and on my PhD studies. I do a PhD in optimal sizing of the Hyperloop capsules in electrical energy. World-widely, this PhD is ranked second after Singapore. So, yes, pretty tough life… kidding. It is fun.

4. What was it like to meet Elon Musk? What did he like about your pod design?

Elon is a nice guy. I met him twice.

The last meeting was in the summer of 2018 where we had a meeting of about one hour. We had a very nice conversation and he inspired me to create the Swisspod Technologies company.

We also discussed the future of transportation and our pod design. He was especially impressed by our battery energy storage system which had a better performance than a Tesla.

Just to give you an idea, we created a vehicle whose power to mass ratio is 3x more than a Bugatti Veyron and 2x more than a Tesla.

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Denis Tudor and Elon Musk

5. Share your vision of the future.

I hope Hyperloop will represent one of the transportation solutions. I do believe in complementary transportation solutions which means that we need to interconnect the different modes of transportation.

I believe in a fossil-fuel-free world and very low CO2 emissions. This represents a very important issue that needs to be solved worldwide.

In my vision of the future, AI will play a vital role but it will be constrained by different boundaries created by humankind.

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