Social media: IBM and Dell

96% of Generation Y has joined a social media

Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months

If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 4^th largest: China-India-USA-Facebook!

Wiki has over 13 million articles

There are over  200 000 000 blogs, 54% of bloggers post everyday content

25% of search results for the World’s top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content…

 As explained in the movie “The social network”: “Social media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate”.

Nowadays more and more companies are exploiting new technologies, which allow them to connect with their customers and employees in an effective way. Blogs, wikis, virtual worlds, forums, RSS and tags represent the new frontier to convey information.

Social media enable firms to get instant feedback, which can be measured by membership, clicks on a website, or mailing lists. It is important to incorporate social media into a marketing strategy not only to increase sales, but to keep customers engaged through company trends.

IBM is an example of how blogs can be used to improve the relationship with employees and share information with them.

When IBM decided they to start using blogs, they didn’t just create one, they established an entire network. IBM originated a way and allowed their employees to write about their experiences, what they’re working on, or any other topic of choice.

IBM capitalizes on the intelligence of their employees to give consumers insight into what happens behind the scenes. By giving the industry experts they’ve hired a voice, IBM is able to highlight the people behind their products. Users get to see how IBM operates, and are given a direct connection with IBM staff. Leveraging the employees to write about what they love conveys the corporate dedication to the industry. At the same time it adds in a great personality and it is a recipe for social success. Ingraining social media into the culture of a corporation means that every consumer interaction is personal.

IBM uses both blogs and RSS. An RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed is simply a subscription to updates from a Web site or Web page. RSS can subscribe to more blogs, monitor more social networking pages and allows you to be automatically notified as soon as updates are made.

 

Like IBM, also Dell thinks that social networking should be part of marketing mix for small and medium businesses. Dell considers social networking as a very accessible marketing tool. It’s easy to do internet searches and identify blogs or forums where your products or issues pertaining to your business are being discussed. Moreover, it’s a very cost effective way to carry out market research and engage directly with the customers ensuring to be as responsive as possible to their needs.

The innovation introduced by Dell is IdeaStorm. IdeaStorm is the company’s own open community platform designed to solicit ideas and feedback, and let customers determine what’s most important to them. Dell has a strong track record of responding to issues and ideas that have been suggested on IdeaStorm. One well publicised example was the suggestion to preinstall Linux on Dell desktops and laptops, something Dell now offers customers.

IBM and Dell improved the relationship with their stakeholders simply listening to them. As a consequence, they transformed the one way communication into a network of interactions aimed at increasing the level of satisfaction both of customers and of employees. This strategy benefits the companies’ reputation and represents a positive word of mouth.

Going back to the beginning of this paper, now it is easier to understand why social media cannot be defined a fad.

Creativity: utility+novelty=book+bottle

When I first read the topic of this post I thought it would have been very difficult to come up with creative solutions to combine two inanimate objects, but after some time of brainstorming, ideas started to come up on their own. Here is the outcome:

First word: BOOK

 Pages, cover, study, homework, school, desk, pen, words, characters, plot, author, pictures, scrapbook,  novel, literature, history, relax, time, boring, exciting, library, title, hobby, collection, paper, shelf, bookcase, e-book, newspaper, magazine, journal, print, ink, writing, computer, thick, encyclopedia, detective story, children, Feltrinelli, Mondadori, Barnes & Noble…

The word “book” makes me immediately think about school. Reading has never been my favorite hobby unfortunately, then many of the books I read when I was a child or a teenager had been suggested by my teachers for specific school subjects. Maybe that’s the reason of my negative bias against books. Every time that I’ve to start a new one, I look at the number of pages to calculate how much time I need to finish it.

Although I’ve always preferred to hang out with friends than to lay on the bed and read a book, I’m fascinated by libraries. The amount of different books that you can find there, the smell that you perceive when you go inside, the faces of people concentrated on the reading activity…has an indescribable effect on me.

The same happens when you enter a bookstore: you feel it! You feel the wooden shelves, the bright colors of hundred different book covers, the soft music in the background, the signs indicating the sections (children, novels, best-sellers…), it can be defined a customer experience and personally I don’t think that the modern e-book would replace it so fast.

Second word: BOTTLE

 Water, full, empty, wine, shape, caps, cork, glass, plastic, container, recycling, beverage, supermarket, shelves, lunch, sport, thirsty, hot, ice, mountain, perfume, sugar, cellar, alcohol, vending machine, bottle neck, jar, liquid, sodium, pieces of glass, drinking, eating, family, friend, fun, coca cola…

A bottle is something that we bring with us without even realize it: when we have breakfast, there is the bottle of milk or juice on the table, when we go to university, we take a bottle of water with us, at lunch we need a bottle of coke and when we work out, a bottle of water is necessary.

Each product has a different shape: water, wine, milk and some of them are the symbol of specific brands (Coca Cola, Dasani, Absolut Vodka…).

A bottle can serve several functions: it can be used to satisfy a basic need (I’m thirsty and I drink something), but can also be a design object (a particular uncommon shape can be used as fancy ornament).

Combination Ideas of the Two Objects:

1. A book about bottles
2. A bottle with a book inside, like a kaleidoscope, you can read it from the hole
3. A lamp with a book as base and a bottle as support for the light bulb
4. Light bulb with the shape of a bottle and a book as lampshade
5. Book used as saucer to gather the water that ooze with when the bottle is ice-cold
6. Pages of a book used to wrap a bottle (intsead of normal wrapping paper for gifts) or wrapping paper decorated with bottles for a book to be given as a gift
7. Box shaped as book with a bottle inside (usually wine bottles of value have fancy boxes that reflect the quality of what they contain)
8. Rigid cover of a book used to hid the flask of alcoholics
9. Book with the shape of a bottle (i.e. for a wine guide)
10. Bottle print on the cover of the book
11. Bookcase made of books and bottles: many books glued together form the shelf, glass bottles glued together form the support (I watched a tv show in the US where a man made a coffee table gluing together some of books and a wooden base, then I guess it's possible to build a bookcase in the same way, but in that case I don’t want to be the mover!)
12. Weight for weight-lifting: it can be made gluing together 2 books at the ends of a bottle
13. Books vending machine… instead of bottles!
14. Bottle used as book end on a shelf
15. Bottle caps used as bookmarks
16. Bottle used as lower vase with book at the base
17. Percentage of the water price used to buy books to people in developing countries
18. Book made of plastic bottles
19. Book-bottle necklace
20. Bug Book and Bottle (looking for pictures to insert in this post I discovered that a thing called “Bug Book & Bottle” exists: http://www.overstock.com/Books-Movies-Music-Games/Bug-Book-and-Bottle/2735312/product.html?cid=123620&fp=F&mr:trackingCode=24F98E2D-52C1-DF11-98FF-0019B9C043EB&mr:referralID=NA)

Reading this post again it seems that I’m crazy and that most of these products are simply unuseful, but some of them could be viable.

-          A glass bottle used as flower vase can be a fashionable ornament if designed with a particular shape or materials.

-          A lamp with the book as base and a bottle as light bulb support can function as ornament too

-          A book-bottle necklace exists already: http://blujay.com/?page=ad&adid=3358513&cat=20060000

-         A percentage of the price of water bottles used to buy books for the developing countries isn’t exactly a product but maybe can be a good idea too..

If creativity means to combine utility and novelty, well, some of these products could be viable, appropriate and original innovations.

Chocolate: From Mass Production to Custom-Made Bars

There is something that everybody likes, a temptation that nobody can resist to, a pleasure that involves all senses: Chocolate! 

It probably seems weird to choose this topic for my report; the reason is not only that  I am a chocolate Enthusiast (with capital E of course!), but also because chocolate offers different kinds of experiences, it evokes several feelings and reveals insights.

I don’t think people realize how much chocolate can effect emotions. I love chocolate because every time I eat my favourite piece of chocolate it’s like returning back to my childhood, it’s connected with carelessness and happiness.

The taste of chocolate is amazing, and so are things you can do with it. The purpose of this paper is to discover why people love it, what makes them so satisfied when eating and why we can speak about customer experience in this field. Chocobars, chocosweets, chocofestivals and chocoevents are not only products or services, but have been cleverly transformed into more involving goods.

More precisely I want to structure this report in a singular way trying to compare how customer behaviors and their responses change in different contests, from the big industry to the single person who likes to cook for him/herself.

The purpose is to observe the various attitudes when:

• a big company produces bars or candies and consumers purchase at the grocery store (all produce for all); 
• a medium company enters the market with a chain of stores (many people working for many customers);
• candy makers, who transform the simple ingredients into delicious pastries and sell them in small pastry-stores, where the customer can perceive the taste of an hand-made product (small group of workers produces for a restricted elite of consumers);
•  the individual as protagonist of an experiential environment (one to one);

In the first category I’d like to analyze companies like Hershey, Nestlé, Lindt. These are multinationals that produce a large amount of products, all with the same characteristics: ingredients, shape, taste and package. When a consumer decides to buy Hershey’s milk chocolate KitKat or Lindt’s Goldbunny he/she is already aware of what he is going to taste.

Of course quality and innovation are the number one priorities and the commitment to consumers.

Chocolate taste of  Lindt’s products for example, is beyond description, it’s my favorite, but what about the customer experience? Consumers perceive the same feeling every time they eat it and maybe the act of purchasing is mechanical, it has become habit.

Big corporations exploit ExPros to create ads that include communications, visual and verbal identity and specific features to differentiate their products from competitors’ ones. 

Going through the second group we find companies like Venchi, Valrhona, Cioccolati Italiani who detected an innovative format to attract clients, adding creativity to the common concept of palate satisfaction. Venchi for example opened “Cioccogelaterias” different from usual ice-cream shops: the idea was to make the company less “Company” and more within the reach of the public and the consumer. 

Candy makers are those people whose success is determined by customer loyalty: they cannot trust on “magic ingredients” and scale economies of a big company, therefore they have to be able to maximize the pleasure derived by enjoying a chocolate cake, while relaxing in a suggestive environment. It’s interesting to pinpoint how they segment consumers to fulfill them in the best way.

The last category is focused on the individual attitude when attending to events which involve the entire sensory system: the single person becomes the protagonist and the maker of his own experience. Some example can be the “Eurochocolate” in Perugia (famous for its Baci Perugina), where people can taste chocolate from all over the world, make sculptures and buy samples, or the School of Chocolate, where housewives can learn how to make chocolates.

The SEMS model is useful to identify the levels of consumer’s involvement in these situations.

Consumers’ involvement is also the matter in hand in the article “Jobless Grads Bet on Custom-Made Chocolate”, which tells the story of three guys, who decided to found “Chocomize”.

Chocomize is an online shop that allows chocolate lovers to customize their candy bars with several ingredients ranging from dried raspberries to bacon.

The idea came from a chocolate bar left in the back seat of the car, which melted with gummy bears and brought the company to produce around 4,000 bars a week.

What makes Chocomize different from competitors is their customized product, that can't go into" supermarkets or stores where consumers might pick up a bar while they're waiting in the checkout line”.

That’s exactly what I want to analyze in my paper: how do big and small companies reach the customers? Which means do they use? Which results do they obtain in terms of customer experience, involvement and attitude?

Click here to read the article: “Jobless Grads Bet on Custom-Made Chocolate” by Zachary Tracer

Products can’t give happiness, experiences can!

"Experiences are described as private events that occur in response to some stimulation and involve the entire living being. They often result from direct observation or participation in certain situations. They are usually induced and provide a different perception of the product or its environment."

 

It could seem weird to you, but the first time I went to the grocery store in the US was a real customer experience! My Italian provenance makes me thinking at the supermarket simply as a place where you can buy food or whatever you need for your house, health care, pet…then the American model was completely unfamiliar to me.

Don’t misunderstand me, there are stores created to offer the customer something more than foodstuffs, but they have been introduced only few years ago; most of them are located in shopping malls, where people go with a different attitude. 

Starting from the outside, the first thing I noticed was that the HEB store was surrounded by other shops and fast-foods, in order to give the consumer everything he/she needs in every moment of the day. It’s not just doing the shopping for the family, it’s taking a break from work, eating, having the hair cut. 
Second thing: you don’t have to put a coin for the trolley, 

HEB trusts you!

I perceived the same feeling of trust, kindness and safety when at the entrance an HEB’s staff member greeted me saying “welcome, how is it going?”

Once inside, I tried to follow my shopping list, but I’m in the habit of writing it following the order products are placed in the store where I usually go: fruit, bread, sliced meat, eggs, cheese, yogurt and milk, pasta and sauces, fish, meat, health care products, beverages. Don’t think I’m crazy, it’s just because I need less time, I’m the kind of person who buys always the same brands and once I’m satisfied with one, it’s difficult to make me try something new.

You can understand on your own that most of the brands here are different from those in Italy, then I had to find my new reference products on the shelves. Another piece of my new experience is the time: the usual 20-minutes-average are not sufficient…

But the best still has to come. To choose fruit you don’t need gloves and you can take bread and doughnut on your own. It doesn’t  sound special to you? Probably it isn’t, but the haptic sense is the most basic of our senses, we learn this before vision and smell and when we touch a product we are more likely to buy it because we establish a sort of attachment. Then choosing my doughnut for breakfast makes me feel satisfy when the following day I bite it: “Good choice, Linda!”.

Passing from the touch to the smell, there was a delicious scent of baked bread and cake. 

HEB involves the whole sensory system.

As for taste, it’s not common in Italy to find a plate with cheese, ham and pieces of toasted bread on the counter where sliced meat is sold. The possibility to taste flavours is particularly useful for those people, like me, who purchase repeatedly the same products, but that, while they are waiting for their salami, are curious to try new food.

I had the same perception also when I saw a bowl with warm tortillas: I’ve always associated tortillas with spicy food, and I don’t like spicy food, then I had never eaten tortillas before. But I tasted them and they were good, result: I had tortillas for dinner.

HEB was able to move me from my boring habits.

According to my list, it should be the time, or better the place, for fish or meat and what did I see?

There was a woman with a red t-shirt who cooked chicken nuggets and you could also taste them (note the red color both because of HEB logo and I think also because it attracts clients’ attention). If we analysed it with the SEMs, it would correspond to the ACT: although the customer doesn’t specifically do something, he/she can see how easily, quickly and simply he can prepare nuggets in the microwave. A perfect solution for busy, working mothers, who don’t have time to cook the meal…or for lazy students, who pretend not to have time to cook the meal.

I experienced a better example of “act” in Italy: I was in the grocery store of a shopping mall and a very elegant lady asked my mother to prepare a coffee. It was the old, famous Italian brand “Lavazza”, who had created a new mixture. She showed that everybody could make a good coffee, if the coffee itself was high-quality.

Do you want your life to be easier? HEB helps you!

The last main thing that differs from Italian grocery stores is the product position on the shelves. Apart from their bigger size, products are placed not only among their “peers”, but also on the basis of mental associations. What I’m trying to say is that I used to find all kinds of pasta in one aisle and all sauces in another, here there is also pasta near the sauce because people eat pasta with sauce! 

Moreover, always concerning the store “design” I was surprised by a pyramid built with Redbull cans that reminded me the message of energy and dynamism connected with a brand. Redbull is a brand that has always caught my attention for its product involvement. I remember the “Seifenkistenrennen” that I saw in Vienna; the participant had to build whatever with wheels (kistenrennen) that allowed them to go as far as possible in the track covered with soap (Seife). The HEB attempt to remind me this event and to connect it with the idea of power and strength through the pyramidal shape was successful.

Unfortunately my shopping list finished with beverages, then also my experience description at HEB comes to the end. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

To summerize:

- Time for doing the shopping: 1 hour-10 minutes

- Feeling after the shopping: surprise for such complete unexpected involvement

…Products can’t give happiness, experiences can!

Linda's persona

Real vs. Ideal Self

When I read that for the second post of my blog I had to create a persona I immediately thought about “The Sims”.

The Sims is a computer game, that allows you to simulate the daily activities of one or more virtual people ("Sims") in a suburban household near SimCity. The player is encouraged to make choices and engage fully in an interactive environment.

The interesting element is that we can observe a parallelism between the lifecycle of a Sim character and the development of a persona as a target for a company and its products.

Of course there are some differences such as the presence of only three stages in protagonists’ growth: infant, child, and adult. While babies grow up into children, children and adults never age. That means that children and adults remain in their life stage indefinitely. Translated in marketers’ language, it would be like saying that the final stage, lifetime achievement and retirement, is not followed by a cyclical return to the first stage because different persona efforts culminate and restart in different ways.

In my opinion the Sims was so popular because people could project their ideal-self on the virtual character.

In the same way if I had to describe myself, I would distinguish between:

• my real self;

• my ideal self;

• me as the others feel me;

• my looking-glass self (me as I’d like to be felt);

My already complex persona, is becoming more and more difficult to be analyzed…

The question is: which is the side that most interests marketers while they design a product for a specific target?

Before hazarding an answer, I want to present my real self as valuable for marketers.

Age: 20

Gender: Female

Geographic location: USA (probably I should write Europe because of my background that can influence my purchasing decision in a different way compared to an American coetaneous)

Race/Ethnicity: European

Family structure: 4 people

Profession: Business student

Description: career-minded, stylish, fashion-conscious female who likes sports, traveling and hanging out with friends. Outgoing and fun-loving but also very practical, organized and hands-on.

I enjoy shopping, music and outdoors activities, such as swimming, skating, bicycling, jogging and I like health food. Technology is not the main interest and I don’t like to stay at home to read or watch television, except for cooking programs.

Not very skilled at computer and videogames.

Interested in cultural events, popular festivals and art expositions.

I like home accessories, furniture and gardening but my main passion is fashion clothes.

Home life: No pets, Do-it-yourself, home furnishing

Day schedule: 7.00: Breakfast (always the same)
                        8.00: Class or prep
                        1.00: Lunch
                        Afternoon: Class or prep
                                         Gym three times a week
                                         Meeting friends
                                         Household and shopping...
                        8.00: Dinner
                        Evening: Hanging out with friends, cinema, disco...
                        (as you can see I tend to organize my day accurately)
Manias: taking always the same way to go to university on exam days
              believing that some clothes are lucky
              entering many shops before buying something (also a pair of jeans!)
             

Fortunately my real self ties in with my ideal self, then I would be probably more interesting to consider the ideal self as my image in the future.

I’d like to meet “Felipe”(I mean the Cohorts character!), an educated, fitness-minded, work-oriented, technological inclined young man, who enjoys designer clothing(then shopping!), cars and high-tech gadgets. With him I could share the passion for outdoors activities. He could be the influencer of my purchasing decisions in the technology or electronics field.

Then some years later I foresee to be “Brett and Tracery”, a young, dual-income, educated couples, who enjoy careers, home lives, foreign travel, cooking…

In the meanwhile I’ll be the savvy career woman “Elizabeth”: affluent, working woman with sophisticated tastes, very active lifestyle and good investing habits.
In the future I’ll be coherent with my current interests in sport, art, communication, hanging out with friends, traveling and home furnishing. What I don’t share with Elizabeth is her avid book reading activity and the mail order purchase because I prefer to choose product after having seen and touched them, especially if they are expensive.

After the creation of Linda’s persona I try to answer to the previous question:

which is the side that most interests marketers while they design a product for a specific target?

I believe that our “real self” reflects our background, upbringing and the principal characteristics of our personality, therefore it strongly influences our purchasing decisions, above all in case of impulse buys or for everyday functional products.

The “ideal self” and the looking-glass self are the result of a throuthful, rational process, then it’s less decisive in impulse buying, but it can be more relevant in other situations, like for clothes or technology items, which are considered comparison standards for highly expressive social products…

Summarizing I think that it’s essential for marketers to recognize and understand both of them, it just depend on the item at issue.

What about you?

Creating experiences, not just products

IDEO, Jeff Mulhausen, Italy 

“HCD surprised us because even people who didn’t know a lot about the topic were able to create so many solutions.”

“The reason this process is called “human-centered” is because it starts with the people we are designing for, examining their needs, dreams and behaviors.”

The nucleus of these quotations is the word “people”. People are the source, the medium and the recipient of IDEO projects, and people are even the real creators: 

“The right team has to be assembled by mixing different disciplinary and educational backgrounds, so that you will have a better chance of coming up with unexpected solutions and different points of view.”

As a matter of fact IDEO wants to teach us that one of the cornerstone of the whole system refers to the teamwork and its capability to develop a new approach for each project. The various project teams are assembled like Lego bricks, based on skills and needs.

Creating experiences, not just products could be the right way to summarize both HCD philosophy and Jeff Mulhausen speech. Let’s try to analyze the HCD plan with the key elements provided by Jeff Mulhausen:

- Does it design the system? Yes, through interviews and focus groups it considers all stakeholders and their environment.

- Does it design the majority? Yes, the process has been specially adapted for organizations that work with communities of need in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

- Does it design the empower? Yes, it originates tangible solutions to enhance living conditions in that places.

- Is it a universal design? Yes, its outputs are suitable to everyone.

- Does it design for simplicity? Yes, the result meets the needs of the organizations.

Then we can say that HCD is successful and moreover it represents where we are going to in the future through the Design Impact.

Focusing on IDEO and its working philosophy, I’d like to make a comparison with the Italian situation, given that I come from there.

This way of organizing the work, pointing out the importance of the team, is an American version of the traditional Italian production district, what we call “artificial industrial cluster”. In a country like Italy the typical industrial cluster result is generally only one specific kind of physical production (shoes in Marche, chairs in Udine, cars in Turin, furniture in Brianza, etc). The IDEO model is actually much stronger because is not directly related to physical production and it can range on a 360 degrees angle.

Another important element of IDEO process is making the whole creative process visible. It shows that there is no magic, no intuition, just hard work.

This is a formula that can be shared, communicated, thought and sold to all companies interested.

If I had to find an analogy between the traditional Italian system to produce goods and to make innovation and the IDEO one, I would say that they are two different approaches. In the American case the end result is the last step of an intentional group process, while in the Italian case we have outputs of planned manufacturing phases, linked through centuries of local experience.

The typical example of an Italian company able to emerge internationally is Benetton. In the Benetton production system the “factory” is actually a shipping hub where you collect the production made by thousands and thousand small family-based sweatshops. Benetton was smart to understand how the local system worked, and they developed a production mode perfectly fitting the local habits and social attitudes.

Isn’t it the same thing done by IDEO? IDEO invented a new reality made out of new social and productive systems and tools.

Compared to a world that seems more and more standardized, without other real options than the “big business” ones, here we are facing a different way to be active in the design world on a mass scale. HCD was able to overlap in a sensible and sensitive way the typical constraints of an organization with a set of values related to the welfare and well-being of the population and workers.

In my opinion IDEO has the peculiar characteristic to be very transparent and then easy to be copied, but yet no one is able to copy it. Paradoxically IDEO communicates in details what/how/why they do (as we read in our document), but no one is able to replicate the same model.

What is the hidden magic, if any?

Hey world!

I'm Linda Bezze, an exchange student from Italy.

You'll discover something more about me little by little, as the blog develops.

I just want to explain you why I decided to call my blog

"ABC:Attitudes, Behaviors, Customs":

- Attitudes because each of us perceives a product differently, according to our own preferences or the benefits we look for and usually we are affected by external factors;

- Behaviors because cognitions, expectations and influences determine how we react and what we buy;

- Customs because if we repeat our behavior constantly, it becomes habit;

As all of us are customers, all of us experience these three steps in everyday life.

I hope you will enjoy my work and walk with me through the customer experience.

Linda