Penn State Webinar: Demand Generation Using Double Loop Marketing™

Institute for the Study of Business Markets (ISBM)
Smeal College of Business
The Pennsylvania State University

Webinar: Double Loop Marketing™: The New Online Strategy to Build Brand Awareness, Accelerate Demand & Generate Leads
Presenter: Christian Sarkar, Founder – Double Loop Marketing LLC
When: Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Time: 1:00pm EDT
Free One-Hour Web Event
Description: Double Loop Marketing™ is an emerging online strategy. The “Double Loop” approach requires a company to first develop “mind share” by building a company sponsored site that offers genuinely useful information and advice to consumers in the subject matter areas most relevant to their products. This is the first loop of the firm’s interaction with customers. Only after such a site achieves credibility among its community of visitors can the company, in the second loop of customer interaction, try to convert that “mind share” into “wallet share.”
Double Loop Marketing™ can yield surprising results – often 10 times the number of qualified sales leads generated by conventional advertising and marketing approaches.
In this webinar you’ll learn:
– Where to start: are you positioned in the right ecosystem?
– What is “Double Loop Marketing™?”
– Who is using it: surprise, it’s not just high-tech companies
– How it’s being used: case studies (B2B) from companies using “Double Loop Marketing™”
– The results: comparisons of effectiveness between traditional online advertising and double Double Loop Marketing™
– Barriers to execution: what separates success from failure?
– It’s not about technology: how blogs, RSS, and mobile applications play a role but are not the defining elements of Double Loop Marketing™
Sign up here >>

ExxonMobil: the Most Irresponsible Company on Earth?

– ExxonMobil is the world’s biggest publicly listed corporation – and one of the biggest polluters. A Friends of the Earth study found it responsible for 5% of all man-made carbon dioxide emitted over the past 120 years.
– In 2001 the White House thanked it for its ‘active involvement’ in crafting US global warming policy, describing it as ‘among the companies most actively … opposed to binding approaches to cut greenhouse gas emissions’.
– In 2005 a record 28.3% of its shareholders voted to recommend that ExxonMobil review how it will meet greenhouse gas reduction targets in countries participating in the Kyoto Protocol. Exxon’s board ignored the vote.
– When asked about global warming by the Wall Street Journal in March, outgoing ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson replied: ‘At a minimum, there’s an enormous amount of uncertainty around this whole question.’
This is brand suicide.
What is with these people? For a contrast between BP and Exxon, see here >>

How Software Platforms Revolutionize Business

From HBSWK
“You can’t see them, but we’ve all used “software platforms” over the last few decades, whether they are embedded in the Windows operating system, a cell phone, or game machine. In a new book, the authors term software platforms “invisible engines that have created, touched, or transformed nearly every major industry for the past quarter century.”
“Think of software platforms as ring leaders of ecosystems in which a few or many companies can participate to reach users. These core products, like Windows, for example, offer software services that can be used as the basis for independent developers to build new features. The cell phone has become a lucrative platform for more than handset makers—also in on the party are makers of digital cameras, music services, and organizer software.
“Not only are existing industries being transformed and sometimes toppled by software platforms, but new industries are also springing up around them; witness the multibillion-dollar ringtone business.”
Yup. Read the article here >>
It’s all about building digital business platforms

Von Hippel: Democratizing Innovation

I meant to do this quite some time ago, but it slipped my mind (like most things). So here it is: a free download of Democratizing Innovation by MIT’s Eric Von Hippel.
The table of contents:
1 Introduction and Overview
2 Development of Products by Lead Users
3 Why Many Users Want Custom Products
4 Users’ Innovate-or-Buy Decisions
5 Users’ Low-Cost Innovation Niches
6 Why Users Often Freely Reveal Their Innovations
7 Innovation Communities
8 Adapting Policy to User Innovation
9 Democratizing Innovation
10 Application: Searching for Lead User Innovations
11 Application: Toolkits for User Innovation and Custom Design
12 Linking User Innovation to Other Phenomena and Fields
Here’s why I keep going back to this book:
Firms can make a profitable business from identifying and mass producing user-developed innovations or developing and building new products based on ideas drawn from such innovations. They can gain advantages over competitors by learning to do this better than other manufacturers. They may, for example, learn to identify commercially promising user innovations more effectively that other firms. Firms using lead user search techniques … are beginning to do this systematically rather than accidentally—surely an improvement. Effectively transferring user-developed innovations to mass manufacture is seldom as simple as producing a product based on a design by a single lead user. Often, a manufacturer combines features developed by several independent lead users to create an attractive commercial offering. This is a skill that a company can learn better than others in order to gain a competitive advantage.”

Fact-Free Reality

“Ask yourself what percentage of the ‘input’ — the information on which we must navigate our busy lives in this new world of markets — is fact-based? If the input comes from ‘news’, is the ‘news’ fact based? If the input comes from the Bush White House, is it ‘fact based’? If the input comes from TV programming (even ‘reality shows’), is it fact based? How about from your relgious leaders? What about schools? How about work?”
Doug Smith’s brilliant post is here >>

Manasco on “The Wisdom of Communities”

My friend Britton Manasco blogs about the “Wisdom of Communities” here.
His point is “the future is increasingly about the wisdom of crowds — or, at least, communities.”
So people, says Britton, especially in the B2B world, tend to trust their peers and not the experts.
Britton’s right to some extent. But what he forgets is that a community is a group of individuals, some more passionate than others, focused around a practice or interest. The leaders of the community are viewed as experts (perhaps not in the academic sense), but certainly in the role of the teacher helping the novices get up to speed.
These “experts” rise to the top naturally. And unlike senior management in most American companies, they rise to the top by virtue of merit – the knowledge they share with their fellow community members. The wisdom of communities is thus not the wisdom of crowds, but the wisdom of the expert-practitioner. Often they’re amateurs. Which makes them even more believable, because they’re in it for the love of the game, not necessarily for the money like the “professionals.”
Ask yourself: How can we get customers to collaborate with our company/companies to co-create products and services that benefit everyone involved?
To me, that’s the real power of communities, aside from double loop marketing.

The Self-Managing Employee

This innovative approach to team or group management comes to us from Taco Bell.
Yes, that Taco Bell.
Read all about it in HBSWK.
In my opinion, it is white-collar, Harvard-educated management types that won’t be able to adapt to this. Proof point – how many self managed teams are there at IBM Global Services or McKinsey, for that matter?

The Education Gap

“…turns out that families with incomes of at least $92,000 get more tax breaks for college than families making less than a third of that. Tax breaks simply don’t help the poor the way they do the rich. They often don’t make enough to qualify. And studies show that financial aid for college goes increasingly to wealthier students.
“That doesn’t bother institutions of higher learning. In fact, they’re skewing their dollars towards helping affluent children on purpose. They want to show that they’ve bet on horses that win instead of helping people equally at the starting gate. This way, the gap between the educated haves and have-nots keeps growing.”
Ouch. That’s Beth Shulman, author of “The Betrayal of Work.” Listen to her commentary here >>

Boeing, Boeing, Ford!

Why? Why appoint Alan Mulally, head of Boeing’s commercial airfcraft division, as Ford Motor’s new chief executive?
According to outgoing CEO Bill Ford: “Business skills by and large are transferable”…
Wait there’s more:
According to Billy-Boy, there are striking similarities between the car and aircraft industries. Just your everyday issues like:
– long development times
– complex manufacturing processes
– troublesome unions
– thousands of supplier relationships.
Wow.
One more industry similarity they forgot to mention – incompetence in senior management?
Update: BusinessWeek has an interesting angle

Another (Hot) Summer Gone

And what have we learned?
I took some time off the blog to focus on some off-line activities like working on my book on Double Loop Marketing. Must say I’m having fun working on it. And like all good research projects, I just have more questions.
I’ll be presenting some of my thoughts at a Penn State ISBM webinar on Double Loop Marketing later this year, so stay tuned.
I also did some travelling and learned that it’s time for Europe to get some basic summer necessities like A/C and ice.
Why is it that European restaurants give you two tiny cubes of ice when you ask them for ice in your drink?
I’m also learning that we are running out of snow-capped mountains – both in Europe and in the States. This global-warming stuff is going to eat our lunch. Which brings me back to air-conditioning. Why are the Europeans so averse to A/C? The Germans, and the French seem to be competing against each other: who can withstand higher temperatures without A/C?
There seems to be a perfect market for a low-cost, portable, one-room A/C unit, priced under € 200. Can it be done? And who’s going to do it? I’m betting an Eastern European immigrant will figure this out and become the next German (or French) billionaire.
Oh well. Thanks to everyone for the e-mails and inquiries while I was out. I will be getting back to you all over the next two weeks.
It’s good to be blogging again. And maybe I’ll even have something halfway intelligent to say in my next post!