NFC - Come closer!

NFC, Near Field Communication, is today’s topic which we were inspired to write about by the very interesting guest lecture of Mr Hirt from Swiss Digital AG. 
NFC is a technology that allows to transport information securely over short distances from one mobile device to another. By engaging in this mobile transmission of data with their smartphones, customers can take an interactive role by viewing customized rich media, receiving customized special offers, share experiences and of course commit direct purchases. 

This might sound familiar to some of you, as QR (Quick Response) codes work in a similar way. The difference is that to use QR codes an app has to be downloaded first which is no longer necessary for NFC, as users can connect directly by tapping or holding the smartphone close to another phone, a credit card reading device, or against a sticker code with NFC data. 

Sticker indicating availability of NFC

QR Code

For marketing NFC offers some advantages over QR, as besides providing more content it also serves as a tool to track consumer behaviour and preferences.
The most astonishing characteristic of NFC for a marketing purpose though, we thought, was that sales promotions could be directly sent to a smartphone of a customer standing right in front of the product. If we were standing in front of for example shoes, our smartphone might receive a special offer which lets us know that we will have a 20% price reduction on shoes in the next 30min. We will therefore be more indulged to make an instant purchase.
Another advantage of NFC is the quick payments we can make by using our phone. The process is easy, as it works the same way as using a credit card. Advantages of using our smartphone also as our wallet is that we always have an overview of our balance, get an electronic receipt, and can transfer money much easier and faster. 

Two good examples of using our smartphone as a wallet are google wallet and the Post Finance app which we were introduced to by our second guest lecturer Mr. Fuhrer. from Post Finance.
With all these advantages our smartphone can offer us, from using it as a credit card to getting immediate and customized advertisements, we are convinced it will replace our wallets very soon.

Blogging journalists

So far in our digital marketing course we have discussed various aspects of how companies can use the internet and social media to generate sales. Of course we have always looked at the possibilities of blogging in this matter. 

But Blogs are not only used by companies, they can also be used by customers who to an extent have some influence on our online marketing. Another group of Bloggers which we would like to focus our attention on this time are journalists.
The opinion of journalists influences customer behaviour and of course, if a journalist decided to write an article or a blog entry about a company or its products, it brings a lot of publicity. 

Therefore we thought it would be interesting to see how journalists use blogging to better understand how they function. We found a blog that summarizes the “7 Survival-Tips for journalists online” given by Richard Gutjahr. Richard Gutjahr, besides working as a freelance journalist for German Radio & Television (ARD), is a consultant for start-ups, journalists, and media companies to manage their presence on social media platforms.

The most striking tip from Richard Gutjahr that divers from what we learned is important for companies using social media is that journalists should give all social media platforms a try. No matter if this is Snapchat, Twitter, or Blogs. For journalists to be present on all these channels can be useful to generate a big contact databank. 

A lot of the other tips for journalist can also be applied to a company's online appearance, such as the tip that attention is in a way the money of the internet, the more attention you get the better. Another tip wich we find important is that the constant changes and advances of the internet require continious learning from the journalist and as we think also from the social media team of a company. 

Leave us a comment with what you think about these tips for journalists and how we can take advantage of them!

Migros subsidiaries Galaxus and Digitec threatened?

Swisscom and Coop have founded an E-Commerce start-up to launch an online retail platform next year. Is this threatening the platforms Galaxus and Digitec? What can we expect?

Experts from Inside-It.ch speculate that the new online platform will be somewhat like Galaxus. Other sources revealed that Swisscom and Coop are launching a platform like amazon, where Swiss customers and retailers will be connected. Fact is the new online platform has been approved by the competition committee (Weko) and will be launched in 2016.

For this joint-venture Coop has founded the company Eos Commerce AG.  Swisscom is contributing 50% to the project. According to the commercial register the board of director consists of the chief-retail and chief-fiancial officer from coop and the chief of Interndiscout, the electronic retailer in Switzerland that belongs to the coop group.

Coop and Swisscom chairman Hansueli Losli (Keystone/Georgios Kefalas, 2011)

How come Swisscom and Coop are now collaborating whereas Swisscom is also partnering with the biggest competitor Migros? Swisscom and Coop have a prominent connection: they share their chairman Hansueli Losli.

However the platform will be in detail, Migros is likely to lose some of its market share with its biggest competitor moving into the online retail market.

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?