Robi Ganguly’s Big Ideas

Hilarious video of what happens when a brand really dominates a consumer’s brain.

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An excellent presentation on what CEOs should be thinking about when it comes to design. Some excellent points in here about focusing on user flows, getting out in the field and “design thinking”. To quote from the preso, design thinking is:

The essential ability to combine empathy, creativity and rationality to meet user needs and drive business success.

Take a few moments and step through this, I guarantee you’ll find some helpful and thought-provoking nuggets.

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Some great humor, some snarky Jay Leno comments and some fantastic insights from a man who’s built a massive personal brand and now understands his ability to continue growing it online

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In the past few weeks we’ve seen something new from Steve Jobs: an interest in communicating with “the commoners” using digital communications channels like email and blogging. First, it was the email he sent in reply to a developer about the iPhone OS 4.0 release and then last week it was a letter on the corporate website, talking about Flash. Now, I haven’t looked into this extensively, but it seems to me that he’s taking a bit more of an open stance towards communicating with the world at large about Apple decision-making.

Importantly, the letter on the Adobe issue was indicative of his interest in communicating with developers about what’s going on behind the scenes. The Jobs who lost the PC developer war to Microsoft refused to do this. It looks like he might have learned a few things. I highly recommend reading the entire letter from Jobs, but in particular, this paragraph is highly informative. For those of you looking to understand the strategy Apple’s employing and how they think about their business, here it is, quite concisely (emphasis on the devices piece is mine):

Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.

And just for a bit of fun, if I was on the team at Apple really focused on the developer platform and its adoption, this might be my theme song right about now:

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I love it when investors, of any ilk, recognize that they have an area that makes sense to them and that they focus on it. Many investors try to be good at too many strategies and too many industries (I’ve been guilty of taking this approach, myself) and as a result, really dilute their efficacy and ultimately, their returs.

Mike Maples Jr., seems to have his approach well understood and in this video, from the Future of Funding event, he elaborates on why he looks for, “Thunder Lizards”, what they are and why the market matters more than the team.

Thunder Lizard by Mike Maples Jr. from Adeo Ressi on Vimeo.

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On the heels of their lead singer’s Op-Ed in the New York Times, Ok Go’s new video is predictably awesome. And look, it’s embeddable! I’m guessing there was some orchestration here on the part of the label and the band, but whatever the case may be, it’s damned entertaining, isn’t it?

UPDATE: Here’s a Wired piece on how the video and the “Rube Goldberg” machine came together. Tons of work, lots of planning.

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I know, I know, this is my second lengthy video in a row, but this is also a really great piece of video that I’ve been meaning to share out.

I’ve been following Gary V. for about a year now, seeing how he markets himself and his business. I’ve been impressed with his energy, enthusiasm and his really impressive grasp of how to use the Internet to communicate with people and build an audience. The theories in my head often play out, in the real world, through his actions. Watching him gets me fired up to go get more real shit done, so hopefully watching this interview might have the same impact on you

(PS: By the way, he’s not bullshitting about his work ethic and getting through his email. I emailed him recently and heard back within a day, it was pretty shocking.)

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Finally got around to watching this excellent Charlie Rose interview of Marc Andreessen from February and I highly recommend taking the time to watch it yourself. Shut off your TV and take in some thoughtful discussion about:

• Facebook/Twitter/Ning/LinkedIn and what it means to be socially connected in today’s digital environment
• Why Andy Grove and Jeff Bezos are alike
• Why Marc praises Bill Gates, rather than badmouthing him
• What it means for newspapers that they continue to get 90% of their revenues from print (hint, it’s a big obstacle)

Marc’s a very smart guy who’s been part of much of the Internet’s development and evolution. If you’re at all involved in online business and innovation, I highly recommend the 54 minutes.

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Windows support.

That’s right, they should support Windows – for developers.

What Apple is doing with its App Store and the iPhone OS revisions is creating the market for developers who create and sell mobile apps… on Apple’s platform of course. Learning from the PC battles, they’ve quite obviously focused on the idea that more apps = more ways to meet consumer needs and therefore, it should result in more revenue for Apple from their primary customers: Consumers.

Given that dynamic, it makes very little sense that only those with Apple machines (and yes, some folks on Unix/Linux..) can develop iPhone applications. Since the predominant operating system is Windows, doesn’t it make sense that you should support all of the developers who are on Windows? (I know, I know, since when does Apple make sense to anyone but themselves?)

In all of the blogs and reporting covering the lead-up to today’s announcement, I’ve been pretty shocked that this issue hasn’t been turned into a larger piece of the conversation. Apple’s addressable developer market is MUCH smaller than it could be. Ultimately, the other players in the market are all going to be competing for developers alongside Apple.  Although Apple’s device and platform might be much better, if they’re not supporting Windows developers, they won’t be tapping into the largest pool of developers.

What’s really interesting about this glaring lack of Windows support is how easily we can draw parallels between this situation and previous Apple products and their associated growth. If we just pull up the unit sales charts for the iPod and for Mac computers over the past several years we can point to inflection points that coincided with providing support for Windows.

Here, take a look at the iPod sales chart:

On October 16, 2003, Apple announced the release of iTunes for Windows, which meant that Windows PC owners could now purchase and manage their iPods (http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/oct/16itms.html).  I’ve highlighted that quarter above and while I won’t say it was the ONLY thing that led to a change in the iPod’s sales trajectory, it certainly would appear to have coincided with a new sales trend. Up until that point in time, the iPod was really just a blip on the MP3 market radar.

Next, let’s take a look at the sale of Mac Computers:

During the first week of April, 2006, Apple announced that it would release a piece of software it called “Bootcamp” on its Intel-powered computers. Bootcamp was meant to enable the use of Microsoft Windows on Macs, a pretty wild idea at the time. I decided to purchase some Apple stock, based on that announcement, hypothesizing that it would increase the addressable market for Apple computers and boost their sales. Taking a look at the absolute growth in units sold, that hypothesis has been proven out nicely ☺ (note, I no longer own that stock).

I want to be clear: I don’t think it’s fair to attribute either iPod or Mac sales growth solely to Windows-related accessibility. Instead, I’d like to suggest that being accessible via Windows is clearly beneficial and could prove to be transformative to Apple’s ultimate goal: iPhone and iPhone-related sales.

As an investor, an iPhone owner and someone who’s working on mobile app development, I look forward to the day when Apple looks at these realities and agrees with me .

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Amazon has come a long way since its early days as “just” an online bookseller. Having been introduced to the company in its infancy (back when it was a plucky Seattle-area Internet business), I’ve followed the company fairly closely over the years and really come to admire it. Whether it was its early forays into personalization or the way it went about executing against its vision regardless of Wall Street’s fickle and unrealistic expectations, the company has convinced me that it has its head on straight and is building for the long run.

Given that I spent several years working on the advertising business of Yahoo!, it’s only natural that I would take some of that experience and apply it to my thoughts about Amazon. In doing so, I’ve developed a point of view on how Amazon could leave their mark on the online advertising space.

First things first, Amazon brings an existing set of strengths built on an understanding of the online customer that should shape any offering that comes from them. As I see it, that implies some core principles for Amazon advertising:

1. Personalization matters: Look across the landscape of online companies and ask yourself this: does any company do it as well as Amazon? If you’re an Amazon customer, you get recommendations from them while surfing the site that are generally quite good. More impressive though, is the fact that the times when they choose to email me a recommendation, they’re often right. This leads to us a second, and related point.
2. Be conservative with your recommendations: Many people see the advertising space as a question of ,“How do we get advertisers to buy against our inventory?” Amazon’s email recommendations come infrequently and, as a result, hold more weight in my inbox. I believe them to be conservative in choosing when to promote a product and if I’m right, it’s one of their great strengths. In approaching the advertising opportunity, they should be thinking about the question, “When are we justified in creating inventory and who gets to advertise against it?”
3. Your customers are your salespeople: Jeff Bezos said in an interview last year with Charlie Rose that, “The Internet is a word-of-mouth accelerator.” EXACTLY.  Amazon Associates is perhaps the web’s most popular and acceptable affiliate marketing program.  Amazon Web Services has grown up around enabling this activity in a very robust way, with a huge variety of endpoints that sell products for Amazon. There is huge power for the future of commercial communications (marketing, advertising, customer service etc.) in this model.

Given those principles and adding in my perspective that just copying existing ad models isn’t that interesting for Amazon, I believe that there are 2 initial areas where the company could focus its time:

1. Open up the recommendations process to paying advertisers, particularly those in the media space
2. Revamp the Amazon Associates program to more easily involve ALL of Amazon’s existing customers AND extend it to appeal to all digital consumers

In short, I believe that Amazon has an opportunity to really change Internet advertising by embracing the idea that personalization is a problem best solved en masse. Creating a marketplace around personalization, such that advertisers can influence it to make recommendations better and consumers can benefit from positive outcomes they’re already driving has the potential to change online commerce.

I’ll add some more detail to these ideas.

The first area of focus:

Open up the recommendations process to paying advertisers, particularly those in the media space.

As I mentioned above, Amazon is already routinely sending out product recommendations, notifications of forthcoming product releases and suggesting products I might like while surfing the site. To my knowledge, these recommendations are currently “pure”, generated algorithmically. I believe that with a very conservative approach to the opportunity, combined with a LOT of testing and the institution of robust feedback mechanisms (a customer should always be able to say NO and tell Amazon when it’s doing a bad job), Amazon could upgrade its accuracy by inviting advertisers to compete to show up in the recommendations.

An example of this: Say that you bought Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking a few weeks ago. Imagine that you had previously bought his book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference as well. Now, normally, the recommendations engine at Amazon would most likely notify you in a few weeks that Gladwell has a new book coming out Outliers: The Story of Success.

This is a pretty good process and does a lot for the consumer, but there’s an opportunity to improve the consumer’s knowledge about an author they probably like a good bit while making some money for Amazon. You see, Malcolm Gladwell isn’t just an author, he’s a writer for the New Yorker as well. The New Yorker, being a for-profit publication, is interested in having more subscribers and readers of its content, so it stands to reason that if they could work with Amazon to reach loyal purchasers of Gladwell’s books, they would take advantage of that opportunity. Again, it would be really important for Amazon, in creating this opportunity, to be conservative in its application and highly focused on soliciting feedback from its customers about the recommendations, but done well, it should add a whole new (and welcome) dimension to the Amazon customer experience.

Remember, this is but one example of how this could be applied. It should be noted that you can think about this with regards to other forms of media rather easily (digital music, video and television make perfect sense). From a process perspective, Amazon could experiment with this concept, refine the technology and the user experience and then reap the eventual rewards that would accumulate as the feedback loop on the recommendations makes Amazon’s database much more intelligent than competing systems.

Moving on…

The second area of focus:

Revamp the Amazon Associates program to more easily involve ALL of Amazon’s existing customers AND then extend it to appeal to all digital consumers

In the last year, Amazon has introduced some enhancements to its Associates program that makes the process of sharing links and recommendations far more easy and powerful. However, the opportunity to expand this program to every single one of Amazon’s customers strikes me as a no-brainer that’s not being fulfilled. Right now, in order to be an Amazon Associate, you have to be aware of the program, navigate to its location on the site and go through a sign-up process that is relatively intimidating for the average customer. The goal should be to make every Amazon customer an Associate at the outset.

Every time a customer shares a product, they should be given a unique link that attributes any sales to their account, at the very least giving them future purchase credit. Instead of focusing massive amounts of attention on just the developers, as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and others are doing, Amazon has the opportunity to expand past the developers to the end consumer. Of course the company should be enabling the developers and the Amazon Web Services offerings are exceptional.

BUT, the opportunity to enable others is much more larger than just  the development community:

In our emails, IMs, Twitters, Facebook messages, blog posts, comments and all other forms of digital communications, we are influencing others to take action and make purchases. Amazon’s Associates infrastructure could hold the key to really unlocking the value in these small moments of influence. In so doing, they stand a strong chance of mobilizing the world’s largest distributed sales force: the consumers. Implementing this idea certainly carries a great number of risks around fraud, spam and general abuse, but because Amazon has dealt with many of these issues already in releasing and maintaining their products, they have exceptional opportunity. This idea really deserves much more discussion on its own, but I think that you can ask yourself a few questions here to really think about Amazon’s opportunity here:

• Who else can successfully run the experiments in this arena that connect consumers and commercial action?
• Who else offers the infrastructure and support to developers that could quickly extend the compensation model for consumers to to other sites?
• Who else can work on this area without risking cannibalization of their existing lines of business?

This post has run pretty long already, so I’m going to draw it to a close so you all can digest. What I’d love to hear in the comments is how you react to these ideas and what you think needs to be fleshed out more for discussion. I’ve got a lot more to write about on this topic, so let’s get a discussion going.

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