January 19, 2010 by Justin Finnegan
Happy new year! By now – if you’re like me – you are fully out of holiday mode and charged up to tackle a lot of big things in 2010.
My guess is that if you’re a retailer one of those things is figuring out your mobile commerce strategy (and making it happen). After all mobile commerce grew at an average of 388% (!) for retailers in 2009. You know already that your customers got a lot of iPhones, Androids, Blackberries and other assorted goodies under the tree and you want to make sure your site is ready for them.
But what to do? Do you just need to make a mobile version of your site? Are people really going to shop on their phones or is the point to use mobile to drive them to an existing channel? What about apps? Which platforms? what should they do?
These are all good questions and we don’t pretend there is any one-size-fits-all answer (even the Snuggie comes in different sizes now!). There are a few principles we think are winners for mobile commerce, however, which can help you come to the right solution:
- Think “mobile,” not “miniature”: People don’t use mobile sites the same way they use a full site. They are more likely looking for a specific piece of information or an opportunity to see if there is something new. Remember that mobile sessions are shorter than traditional online sessions and design accordingly.
- Think of the funnel: Mobile experiences are more likely to succeed , whether or not they include the ability to purchase directly from the mobile device, if they are oriented towards driving customers through a buying process that often concludes in a traditional channel. Of course that means that tracking these cross-channel interactions is critically important so you can get the credit you deserve.
- Think about timing: There are a lot of great strategies out there for increasing customer engagement with your brand, special private sales, deals of the day, etc. These types of promotions lend themselves very well to mobile experiences.
- Think about a Swiss army knife: You need the right tools for a job; sometimes a knife, sometimes a screwdriver. Mobile commerce is the same. There are some tasks where a mobile website is the best thing for the consumer to use and others where a mobile website simply isn’t going to work. The same thing goes for mobile apps. A fully realized mobile strategy is going to include both a mobile website component and native apps.
How do these principles match with your thinking about mobile commerce in 2010? Let me know at justin.finnegan@acquitygroup.com.
Tags: ecommmerce, m-commerce, Mobile, mobile commerce, online retail, retail
Posted in Acquity Group, B2C, Cross-Channel Commerce, Digital Strategy, Mobile | Leave a Comment »
January 13, 2010 by Matthew Tarpy
I got a great offer the other day in the mail. Tailored to my lifestyle of constant travel, chock-a-block with a stellar value proposition, and a great call to action, it screamed “hey! Over here! Yeah, you! You ought to think about taking us up on this.”
The problem was I should never have received the offer in the first place!
It was a piece of direct mail from American Airlines and American Express extolling the virtue of AA’s Admiral’s Clubs. For those of you not familiar with the world of the road warrior, I first recommend to you “Up in the Air” which does a spot-on take of the Road Warrior’s solitary existence. Needless to say, that each major airline has a club that you pay a good amount of money to belong to (list price for AA’s is $500 USD/year) so you can have a semi-quiet place to cool your heels before your bus ride at 35,000 feet. The offer included a nice, four-color glossy, as well as complimentary one-day pass pre-printed with my name and my AAdvantage number.
The thing is, I’m already a member of the Admiral’s Club, have been since 2000, and will be for the foreseeable future. So it’s not as if my name ended up on the list betwixt between my new membership and them pulling the list to mail to…it’s that there was bad list management, which created a channel conflict that caused heads to be scratched.
When I showed the piece to my wife, she laughed and pointed out that I’d been a club member for as long as we’ve known each other (ten years in May), and other coworkers, who had also been members in good standing for years, also received the offer. This type of clear confusion between channels and partners causes their customers to question exactly what it is the marketers are trying to do. As best as any can figure out, it appears that the offer was triggered by anyone having both an AAdvantage account and an American Express card. Easy enough, I’ve got both, but that last, extra step of getting the negative list (what AAdvantage members are on this list that already have a club membership?) and backing out those names would have caused a little less egg to be on some direct marketer’s face.
This reinforces the need to crisply execute any cross-channel initiative and to make sure that everyone involved is clear on what the objectives are, and how to best accomplish them by causing the least amount of channel conflict.
Oh, and AMEX and AA in case you’re wondering, yes, I’m planning on re-upping, but thanks for the one-day pass anyway!
Posted in Acquity Group, B2C, Branding, Channels, Content, Cross-Channel Commerce, User Experience | Leave a Comment »
December 18, 2009 by Maria Seimenis-Stojan
We’re in a time when CIOs are saying all the right things about fiscal responsibility, yet remarkably few of them actually measure ROI from their IT projects. Research indicates that only about 40% of companies calculate the ROI of their IT investments once projects are complete. And I’ve seen this at clients repeatedly. It seems logical to me that if companies are going to spend considerable time and effort in justifying an IT investment upfront (determining whether or not it is going to produce a worthwhile ROI), they would want to find out whether they actually realized it when the project is over. I’d think that the average executive would want to know:
- Did the system cost more than expected?
- Is the system delivering the anticipated benefits?
- How can I use this information to learn and make decisions about future investments?
- How can I use this to my advantage to boost my credibility?
So why don’t they?
- Fear is one reason. It’s illogical but it’s true. Many are afraid that they’ll be embarrassed or put at risk if they have missed their ROI targets. So they don’t follow up.
- Another reason is the challenges that are associated with calculating the actual ROI. Some say they don’t have the time to do a post-implementation analysis, or that they only do it for the most visible, expensive, or important systems. Others say that their IT staff lacks discipline and know-how, or the information needed to calculate ROI is too difficult or costly to obtain.
- The incentives and hence the motivation aren’t there. ROI accountability isn’t a high priority for CEOs and it doesn’t factor into how CIOs are rewarded. CIOs are typically measured on cost, not performance. They just want to make sure the system works, and that there weren’t significant cost overruns.
- Some don’t believe the original ROI analysis projections. As Beta Group’s Bob Benson puts it: “Not every senior manager really believes the details of the pre-implementation business case ROI anyway, especially for projects with ’strategic’ or ‘innovative’ content. They certainly will not believe the post-implementation ROI any more than they did the pre-implementation ROI.” And sometimes, an ROI analysis hasn’t been done to begin with. You have to do the analysis at the beginning if you’re going to follow up later.
Whether the above obstacles are genuine or a cover for avoiding professional embarrassment, IT executives must learn to use ROI. Why? Without ROI, there is a risk that IT is going to been solely as a cost center and may face increasing difficulty in obtaining executive support. While it might have been acceptable to be a cost center in the 1980s and the ’90s, it’s a dangerous position to be in now, as the economy remains uncertain and IT matures as an industry.
Posted in Acquity Group, Corporate Alignment, Corporate Strategy, IT Planning and Transformation, Project Portfolio Management, project and operational management | Leave a Comment »
December 8, 2009 by Tony Bailey
There has been quite a bit of discussion online over the past few weeks on the “Future of Web Content Management”, whether or not WCM is broken and where it is headed. Last week’s Gilbane Boston conference helped keep the dialog going with a number of interesting sessions and conversations on the exhibition floor. What stuck in my mind, however, is not so much about what the future will be – as much as who is going to lead it?
To an attendee, it was clear from both the vendors on the exhibition floor and the presenters at the sessions that there has been a changing of the guard in the Web Content Management vendor community. Open Source Software (OSS) made a blockbuster showing with domestic and international vendors both sponsoring and leading panels in numbers far greater than years past. Additionally, vendors previously known for their position in the “challenger” or “visionary” quadrants were in pole position and leading the discussion on important topics such as customer engagement and social publishing.
Noticeably absent from the conversation, and not just from this particular show, are the vendors from the infamous upper-right corner. The Social Media pulse (e.g. twitter feeds and blogs by vendor thought leaders and product marketing departments) from these legacy vendors in content management has been faint or undetectable for months. For many of these vendors, much of this is undoubtedly a function of being acquired by a larger organization with a much different focus. We’ve all seen this movie before where a market-leading WCM product is acquired to be part of another vendor’s elusive technology stack dream. Subsequently, all R&D essentially comes to a halt while it is absorbed into a different product strategy and potentially overlaps with other existing technologies.
While this may not be the case with every recently acquired company, the independents, niche-players and Open Source vendors left standing have wasted no time stepping into the void left by the former industry heavy-weights. There are a number of interesting themes I’ve heard from these New Leaders in their conversations around where Web Content Management is headed:
- Product innovation will be driven by customer needs and actual product usage: Sure, it seems simple enough, but hard to actually do when you have an 18-month product lifecycle to contend with. Open Source vendors tout that having a relationship between their developers and their users creates a feedback loop that allows them to respond quicker to needs in the marketplace
- WCM needs to be more flexible and a lot less complex: The flexibility and simplification needs to come from not just functionality, but from licensing as well. With many products, the amount of complexity in authoring interfaces, available features and their pricing models is completely overwhelming. Some of this can be addressed by re-focusing on User Experience and moving away from interaction models and user interfaces designed “by engineers, for engineers”
- Focus on truly globalized content: being able to switch the prompts in the authoring interface is no longer enough for the team that runs the digital channel in a global organization. Complex international workflows, multi-lingual content relationships and distinguishing between machine and cultural translations are all top-of-mind issues with fragmented solutions.
Overall, Gilbane provided a good forum for vendors and participants to bring many of these online dialogs together while seeing where supporting products fit in. We’ve definitely come a long way from talking about overcoming the “webmaster bottleneck” and seeing dazzling demos of publishing a press release at a specified time.
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Photo courtesy of Flickr
Tags: CMS, Content Management, FutureWCM, Gilbane, WCM, Web Content Management
Posted in Acquity Group, Content | Leave a Comment »
December 3, 2009 by Chris Hauca
If so, great! Stop reading.
If not, why not?
- We got more traffic than we expected.
- The traffic pattern was different from our load test.
- We had a hardware failure, the only single piece that could take out the site failed, what bad luck!
Those are the common excuses we see and none of them are acceptable answers when you consider the financial and customer damage outages can cause.
All too often we see organizations perform a technology load test of their site with little focus on recreating the real life conditions they will see when they open their online doors on Black Friday. This usually is a result of it being an IT driven test that does not take into account the wider business plan. The main reasons we hear for doing it this way: is that it is too hard, too much time, not enough resources, etc.
The math against those excuses is pretty simple. Most traffic based outages that we have seen last at least an hour and normally occur around the peak traffic period. If you are planning on doing $5 million during your peak hour and have a 40% margin you are losing $2,000,000 in that hour. It’s our experience that loss is substantially more than cost of effective planning and testing.
There are some less tangible factors that need to be considered like customer frustration, additional call volumes to call center, and employee fatigue if the outages are extended; a favorite is the Wall Street Journal factor. Think about the hit you would take by ending up in the Journal saying you were down during the holidays.
We have also found that teams that own the solutions are not the first in line to call out their own deficiencies. No one likes to criticize their own kid.
Teams will overlook issues that have been around a long time because “it’s never caused a problem before.” They will explain away minor glitches saying ‘that’s not a real problem’. The key point to remember is that EVERYTHING is different when you are at the holiday peak. The load is concentrated, there are more buyers than browsers, the marketing plan is rev’d up, and promotions are double or triple the normal average. All of these factors should force you to look at everything with a critical eye. This is where outside perspective becomes a real asset.
There are disasters, hurricanes and earthquakes that you can’t avoid, but unless one of those things happens on Black Friday your site being down isn’t one of them. It’s not easy, it’s not fun, but you need to do the work. It’s much better to read about someone else’s issues in the Journal than your own.
Co-authored by Chris Hauca and Justin Finnegan, Acquity Group
Tags: Black Friday, eCommerce
Posted in Acquity Group, B2C, Cross-Channel Commerce, Digital Intelligence, Digital Marketing, Digital Strategy, Experience Design, Front-End Development, Internet, Mobile, Rich Internet Applications, User Experience, Visual Design | Leave a Comment »
November 12, 2009 by Jon Borg-Breen
“So do you do benchmark studies or do you have access to any benchmark studies?”
It’s compound question that I dread. Obviously there is a significant consulting market out there that deals almost exclusively in benchmarks. Acquity Group has also done our fair share of studies to show everything from
- IT spending trends
- to headcount distributions across various parts of IT
- to the breakdown between strategic projects and keep the lights on activities.
Obviously there is value in understanding trends in these areas, but how is a company supposed to interpret this information?
The problem I constantly see is that most organizations believe that the sweet spot in a benchmark is the middle of the bell-curve. That belief is flat out wrong. What the middle of the bell curve shows is that you have no competitive advantage against your peer group. The middle of the pack typically have invested just enough to encourage a settling effect that neither harnesses the creativity required for IT organizations that have limited funding or the true ability to drive corporate innovation through information technology.
Does this mean that all underfunded organizations are able to succeed in with scrappy ingenuity or that all companies that make a significant investment in IT always see a solid return? Of course not. However, the organizations on the edges of the benchmark curve have made real choices on investments that will maximize corporate value.
As equally important to benchmarking statistics are five basic cultural factors of your company:
Process Orientation: Is the organization a sales-driven culture with a high tolerance for risk and variability? Does the organization emphasize structured discipline more similar to engineering or manufacturing environments?
Business Complexity: How sophisticated and variable is the nature of the organization’s business? Is business performed on an exception-basis or are business rules consistent and repeatable?
Market Conditions: Is the nature of the business market in a steady-state mode, is there market consolidation/retraction occurring or are there significant growth opportunities? How aggressively does the organization respond to new opportunities?
Technology Strategy: Does IT generate ideas to help the business or does business drive technology direction? Is technology seen as a critical element to business strategy or as a necessary cost of doing business? Is the organization an early-adopter of technology?
Organizational Change Behavior: How ready is the organization to adopt behavioral change? Are there preconceived ideas of how IT & business should engage? What are the current perceptions of IT by the business organization?
These factors along with a view into what peers are doing can help an organization decide if they want to use IT to activate the full power of their business or if IT should simply keep the lights on and funding should go elsewhere to create a competitive advantage.
Posted in Acquity Group, Corporate Alignment, Governance, IT Planning and Transformation, IT standards, project and operational management | Leave a Comment »
November 4, 2009 by Rizwan Ebrahim
There is a famous quote by John F. Kennedy – “Success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan.” It is no wonder that accountability is such a scarce resource in corporate world.
After every strategic planning cycle, there are several initiatives to align the organization and measure performance against corporate strategy. Many companies have recognized that they need a process to compare the merits of these competing initiatives. In addition, they have institutionalized processes to develop guidelines and rules for developing business cases so that all potential investments can be compared consistently for funding and approval decisions.
In a utopian society this process will work flawlessly, but due to human nature this process often breaks down. Managers quickly learn that if they want their projects funded/approved, the analysis and scoring need to look favorable to ensure higher ranking. There is an incentive to conservatively estimate costs and aggressively total benefits. They essentially start “gaming the system.” At this point, the Business Case process has failed to achieve its intended goal: to identify the most beneficial initiatives to the enterprise. Even worse, it causes and reinforces undesirable behaviors while, at the same time, consuming resources that could be deployed in more productive activities.
What’s missing is accountability for delivering the Business Value after the project completes. If the Business Case owners knew that their estimates are going to be reviewed again after the project – costs tallied and the actual benefits scheduled, measured and reported – they are more likely to develop more realistic and achievable estimates.
Now to be fair to Managers, it’s a fact that business benefits do not automatically appear as soon as a project is completed. In addition, a forecast of benefits in business case is usually an estimate and rarely occurs according to plan. The potential value is realized in time as changes are integrated in business processes and organization.
What is needed is a Business Value Assurance (BVA) process that goes beyond delivery of conventional project management and ensures that organizations harvests the potential value of investments. Specifically it establishes:
» A process for planning and tracking benefits
» A timeline (plan) for expected value
» Ownership/Accountability to harness business value downstream from project completion
To manage in these uncertain times, it is imperative for organizations to transition from a passive, subtle and relatively unknown to an active, engaged BVA process to improve business performance.
Posted in Acquity Group, Corporate Alignment, Corporate Strategy | Leave a Comment »
October 22, 2009 by Tom Nawara
The Hype over Social Media
Social media is currently the darling of the online world and is well known for its ability to provide a platform for end-users to “micro-publish” content. The hype over sensational stories such as Ashton Kutcher’s race against CNN to be the first Twitter account to 1,000,000 followers focuses squarely on the consumer-facing (and, in that particular case, more vacuous) aspects of the medium, but can B2B marketers leverage this rapidly growing channel to deliver true value to clients and drive additional revenue? I believe the answer to that question is an absolute, “Yes.” Social media’s true promise lies in its ability to allow organizations to better listen and respond to its constituents and, if done right, can lead to tremendous gains in loyalty, decreased support costs and increased revenue.
The Hype Affects Your Brand
Most organizations (consumer-facing and B2B) are coming to the realization that they no longer own their brand. The digital channel has allowed anyone with a blog, Twitter account or Facebook page to be a globally-known critic capable of creating a viral meme that can significantly affect your organization’s reputation. While there’s no way to completely control every individual, many organizations are learning that providing an environment for open dialogue and the delivery of rapid, honest (read: no sales pitches) answers can win over reluctant, or sometimes hostile, customers.
B2B marketers need to understand that, although their target audience is most likely smaller than the typical B2C target market, the members of that group are consumers who utilize social media technologies every day. In other words, your B2B clients are also shopping at Amazon, posting their status on Facebook, or commenting on their latest experience via Twitter – and they have expectations for their relationship with you.
So, How Should B2B Organizations Get Started with Social Media?
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: B-to-B, B2B, Digital Strategy, Social Media, social media strategy
Posted in B2B, Digital Strategy, Social Media | 3 Comments »
October 20, 2009 by Matthew Manley
I believe the word “mobile” can be used to define the user just as much as the device being used.
What mobile users expect often depends on the mental mode they’re in while using the handset (i.e., how I use a handset on the train home Friday night may be vastly different than I how use that same handset running 20 minutes late to the airport), but in general mobile users expect some specific information to support a very particular need at/for a particular point in time. While there certainly are many cases for “open-ended” or “exploratory/entertainment-based” information browsing on a handset, many use cases fall under looking for a particular piece of information – the price of an item, the time of a movie, or the availability of a table at a restaurant, for example.
Add to this that a mobile user, by this definition, is often in the midst of mobility – meaning that this person is often doing “Something Else” while using the mobile handset – such as walking, or keeping a child by their side in line, or (sadly) driving. This limited attention span, coupled with device constraints, is key in influencing your information architecture – which, in turn, influences your visual design (which in turn influences your usability).
At Acquity Group we work hard to understand user behavior and needs in the context of interaction occasions. This is particularly important when dealing with the mobile space. Without a full understanding of the context of a mobile experience, it’s impossible to develop a truly effective solution.
What mobile solutions (apps, services, campaigns, etc.) have you used that work really well for you?
Tags: Mobile, Mobility, User Behavior, User Experience
Posted in Experience Design, Mobile, User Experience | 1 Comment »
