LEGO's fairytail

As this week’s main focus was on storytelling, we have tried to find further successful implementations of this very important marketing technique. In fact, the process of storytelling is also used to produce movies and theatre performance.

One example of successful storytelling can be found for LEGO.

The story they are telling to their customers about the history of the company follows all the rules of a successful storytelling. 

1. Act: At the beginning we get to know the founder of the LEGO Company, the grandfather of the current owner. The sad story of his declining business as a carpenter is told and we get a sense of the current situation. Then towards the end of the first act we learn about his tragic loss of his wife and that he is now fully responsible for his 4 children. This is the turning point in the first act. 

2. Act: After the death of his wife, Ole has to come up with an idea to keep his business running in order to take care of his 4 children. He first decides to change his business from carpentering to toy making in which he gets support from his son Godtfred. They have to go through many setbacks such as the work shed burning down and low sales.
These setbacks have an end as we reach the second turning point as Ole discovers a plastic molding machine. 

3. Act: with the discovery of the plastic modling machine Ole and Godtfred soon start producing the famous LEGO bricks and the huge success story starts. The video telling the family history ends surprisingly by revealing that Ole’s grandson Kjeld has been telling the whole story and therefore once again brings the close family touch of LEGO to the forefront. 

We think that this touching and fairytale-like story about the makings of LEGO and the family behind it involves all the storytelling characteristics. The hero who just wants to produce toys with the highest possible quality but is stroke by bad luck until he finds the ultimate solution. 

See the full LEGO story:

The Quest of the Blonde Salad

A "random" Italian girl starts posting her outfits on Pinterest and now is the most influential fashion blogger of the world. With millions of clicks to her fashion-blog each day, Chiara Ferragni has reached what many girls dream of. Not only is she the founder of her blog, but she also owns her own shoe line called the "Chiara Ferragni Shoes". She now owns a company, which she refers to as "TBS Crew" with twelve people working for her shoe line and her online fashion magazine.

The Blonde Salad Crew (http://www.theblondesalad.com/tbs-crew)

We have learned in class, that a extraordinary success in business usually has it's roots in a distinct product and a unforgettable story behind it. So what is the Holywood secret of The Blonde Salad?

Fashionable girl from Milan, posts pictures of herself and her distinct style on Pinterest and decides to create a blog in 2009. Together with her super cute boyfriend Riccardo Pozzoli they sell the perfect Italian fashion and love-story and soon banish thousands of followers. She seems to have the life many girls dream about. A walk-inn wardrobe full of shoes, handbags and couture from high-end brands like Chanel, Valentino and Hermès. Not to mention her cute little dog "Matilda" with whom she gains empathy from the animal lovers too. She travels the world with her Louis Vuitton luggage and gains international attention. Covers with VOGUE, cooperation with luxury-brands such as Cartier and invitations to the Cannes Film Festival follow.

Her now former boyfriend, business student Riccardo Pozzoli, is the Co-Founder and CEO of her fashion empire. They followed the distinct strategy to turn their blog into an online fashion magazine and focus on collaboration with high-end brands. They decided to work together with young talents and moved to Los Angeles. The city of young talents.

With a revenue of $8 million a year it's no wonder they gained Harvard Business Schools attention who wanted to create a case study for their MBA program. The case study is available under the following link:

http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=48520

What a wonderfully perfect example of successful self-marketing in the digital world we are living in.

Smelling the future

This week we discovered something very new to us: a device which makes it possible to send our friends different scents from our mobile phone!

The oPhone makes it possible. You first have to buy the oNotes device which can contain different oChips that carry the various scents in them and download the app oNotes on to your phone and you are ready to go.
The oChips work like ink cartridges for our printers, only that they carry different aromas instead of different colours. The first generation of oChips included three scent families: coffee, foodie, and memory. Once they are inside the oNotes device the scents can be mixed to over 300’000 unique aroma combinations.

You can now send pictures to your friends and tell them what the for example pizza on your picture smells like and they can receive this scent over their oNotes device. 

Thanks to this technology, we can enter a whole new world of sharing sensory experiences. This will also bring lots of new opportunities for digital marketing. For example we could imagine a perfumery that has an online shop can now add the scent of each perfume to the matching picture and the customers can smell the different scents at home and easily decide which perfume to buy.

Other online shops will also be more able to influence customer behaviour through scents and make their web sites more interactive by letting their customers test different scents.

We are both very excited to see where this invention will take us and what impacts it will exactly have on digital marketing. 

From autonomous cars and digital doctors

One very interesting topic of our first lecture in Digital Marketing was disruptive innovations.  

Disruptive innovations are inventions that, as the name suggests, disrupt or even destroy something. They can change the market they enter dramatically, by being for example better or cheaper than existing products. 

Let’s have a look at some products that will have such a great impact on us and change our lives in the near future. 

One example of a disruptive innovation that we discussed in class were autonomous vehicles such as the google car that provides us with a vision of cars driving people from one place to another without any effort from their passengers. This car could be the trigger of a new business model, in which it will no longer be necessary to own a car. The only thing you will need is an App to order a car to the place you need it and let it drive you to where you want to go. Further, the driver saves valuable time by not having to concentrate on the road, which offers us various advantages.

Google car

Specialists assume that it will take no longer than one or two decades until we will be confronted with this technology in our day to day life. Until now, most of us have only seen the google car, which is the pioneer in this autonomous car industry, but not a very attractive looking model.
But we have many other well-known car manufacturers that are starting to create their own autonomous car. Audi, VW and Mercedes are just a few examples.  Considering the above mentioned advantages arising from not having to concentrate on the road. Mercedes has a car planned, with side panels that could display information, social media, or other applications on it.
If you can already picture yourself in such a futuristic car, what would you want to do with this additional time? 

Inside an autonomous mercedes

Autonomous mercedes

Another field that offers great potential for disruptive innovations is the health and fitness industry. There are already many Apps on the market that collect, report, and respond to information from the user’s own body and transfer them mostly to the user’s smartphone or tablet. The earliest type of applications could for example count our steps or recognize when we were asleep. Today’s technology makes it possible to go much further, by for example measuring our glucose level, emotional state, temperature, sleep patterns, pulse, alcohol level, weight, blood pressure, and much more.

There are even technologies that can help treat ADHD and autism by measuring attention and focus through eye tracking over the tablets’ camera or even stimulate the brain to block pain receptors for patients with chronic conditions. It is quite realistic that soon these technologies will lead to a revolution in the health care system, allowing patients to become active participants in diagnosis, treatment and preventive care. This kind of revolution could make it possible to live longer in our own houses without needing home care. Also we could push the need to move to a retirement home further away.  

Having just recently read the Interview with Mr Keen, these innovations once again leave us thinking. Are all these technological and digital innovations a blessing or a curse?  

Andrew Keen about the digital revolution

We've all heard it a million times, it's never the question if you use it, the question is how often you do so. We believe the interview with Andrew Keen is in many ways about this problem.

People only talk about how the internet is destroying businesses and jobs, but they often forget how it opens the world for others. Small shops are able to sell their products worldwide, people from all over the world can access knowledge, unknown people can show their talents on youtube and then get an offer for an audition, the housewife can create a cooking blog and start a career if she does really well. Of course these success stories are rare but the internet certainly plays an important role when it comes to education.

A disruptive innovation like airbnb brings new competition in the market of overnight-stays. However we also believe that it is another wonderful example of how synergies from people all over the world can be used. Including mid-income people, Mr Keen claims to be suffering so badly.

On the other hand it is the sad truth that technological developments replace human workforce. Let's just think of the Migros and Coop self check-out system. Why would a mother of three still be having that part-time job at Migros in a few years if her skills can be replaced by machines? Right, there is no reason. The problem however doesn't lie in the technological advantage. These companies give customers a choice to either queue and have a quick social interaction with the cashier or just operate a machine and leave. Sadly many people would choose the second. They are always short in time, stressed and certainly not willing to wait until their highness can pay - and that's the real problem. We could even go as far as calling it a social decease. People mostly just think about themselves and not about others. We hardly see people interacting on trains. Everyone seems to be to obsessed with their smartphones, checking e-mails, facebook news or the most recent instagram stream. We all forget to socialise properly: face-to-face.

The internet, social media and technological developments certainly enrich our world, if we use them responsibly. We believe it will take a while until people start to realise that not the technological advancement is the problem but their very own behaviour. And maybe, just maybe, before mankind realises we will create a robot so intelligent that will destroy the human race.

Digital Marketing

Hi there, we are Julia and Jenny and in the next few months we will actively be up-dating our blog on digital marketing for our course at the BFH. We hope that you will enjoy reading it and leave us some comments to have an interactive blog 

The first task that we were given in this module is to think about what we expect from it. As we all know the influence of the Internet has changed us in many ways, whether this is in our private lives or in the business world, it is important to learn how to effectively handle it. It is very important, to know how to treat social media and how it can be best put in to use in business and not only as a lunch-diary. 

Thanks to social media we are able to reach our customers through a very direct channel at any time and any place. We can get a better sense of how customers react to our offers, receive their immediate feedback and learn more about how to handle them in the future. Showing us a new way of customer relationship management.

Also we want to learn how enterprises can best handle their digital transformation and still comply with their corporate strategy. We all experienced how an interactive website or a great social media presence can build customer loyalty, the question is how-to.

We therefore expect from this course to guide us through the opportunities and threats digital marketing has to offer.

We hope you enjoy the small video that shows once again how present smartphones/ social media has become and say goodbye for now.