Car Magazine tries out Augmented Reality
In an incredibly welcome bold and adventurous move; Car Magazine have started experimenting with the concept of Augmented Reality! This is excellent news for consumers and even for the ailing offline media industry who have been hit considerably hard by the recent recession.
Even though their foray into augmented reality is a small one; it is the start that is going to set Car Magazine apart from the rest of the magazines that play in this space.
Recap on Augmented Reality
Augmented Reality is simply put; using the digital world to enhance the real world through the combination of the two. In other words you can use the camera on your smart phone or tablet; combined with specific augmented reality software to overlay an enhanced image of what you are looking at. So if you are looking at a car through your smart phone and your augmented reality software is geared to “read” the image; it can overlay additional information about the car such as engine size, kilo wattage, price etc.
How have Car Magazine done it?
Car Magazine have inlaid a reference image on the cover of their May edition of their magazine. This image when viewed through the Car Augmented Reality Webpage; with your computers web cam activated, will display a video. Once you have watched this video, you can close it. This will then allow you the opportunity to click on any of the other feature stories on the cover of the May Car Magazine.
The downside to all of this is that if you are not using 2x screens, you are going to have to juggle rather frustratingly between holding the magazine up to the camera and trying to see the screen. In fact, even if you are using 2x screens; let’s hope that you are ready to exercise some upper body strength as you need to keep the magazine up to the camera the entire time that you are trying to play with Car Magazine’s Augmented Reality.
What will this do for Car Magazine?
This will undoubtedly earn Car Magazine some “cool points” with their techno savvy readers and also push them ahead of the competition in terms of ensuring that they are giving their readers something new all the time.
Whether this will get them some additional long terms subscribers is yet to be seen; but seeing this level of integration between offline and online marketing is truly excellent news for their current subscribers and even better news for the greater marketing industry.
I look forward to seeing a lot more augmented reality features from a lot more offline media and cannot wait to see how they try to out do each other - which is inevitable!
Value is just teaching them to use you!
Here’s a quick snap-shot overview of the evolution of Sales, from the dawn of time until now:
Floating amoebas – prostitution – goods and services – selling the benefits of goods and services – selling solutions; and then finally: selling value.
Congratulations. You are now qualified to talk knowledgeably about the complete history of Sales. You slugger, you!
Now let’s discuss the latest one, with particular emphasis on that sneaky little word: Value.
From buzzword to useful tool
When we hear terms like ‘value,’ we intrinsically feel that we should agree with their spirit and ethos. They just seem right. But then comes the tricky part. How do you actually do value? How do you go about providing it, practically speaking? Better still, how do you use it to sell more effectively than your competitors?
The simplest answer is: by providing useful education. Otherwise stated: don’t just preach to your customers, teach them. Teach them what? Well, teach them how to use you, and your organisation, to their benefit.
Let’s take a simple example. Say you’re selling for an events company. You can stand out from your competitors by teaching your customers how to host a successful event; all the in’s and out’s. After all, you know much more about events than they do. You know what can go wrong, what more they might consider, what opportunities are available to them, the little tips ‘n tricks that can help to set their event apart.
The simple act of pointing these things out – of guiding them through the whole process – of educating them, is the true essence of
Value.
In most cases, someone else also makes what your company makes. Someone else provides the same service. The best opportunity for distinction lies in how useful you are at guiding them toward their goals. That value is worth more to your clients than your actual product.
With that in mind, are you using Value as part of your USP? Is it built into your pitches? Do you have leave-behind materials with insightful tips for your customers on how to go about what they are trying to achieve (with the underlying message that you can help to get them there?).
PR practitioners do this all the time, and it works. Dispense knowledge for free. Teach your customers how to achieve their goals. Show them how best to use you. Be proactive and guide them through the whole process, like a caring host. That is value. And giving true value positions you as an expert within your industry.
- From the book ‘50 Ways to Position Yourself as an Expert.’ Meet the author and view his speeches at: www.douglaskruger.co.za
All strategy is about asking Questions, not about being an expert
I have a problem with many strategies that you see doing the rounds today. I feel that there are to many “experts” in their respective fields that seem to know all the answers and have all the solutions to everything.
There are experts in each and every field and many of them are worth their salt. When you look through a text book on strategy and you see names like Philip Kotler and Michael Porter you can very quickly come to understand what made these great names of strategy.
They asked questions!
Only once you have a true understanding of all of the aspects that are going to have an effect on your strategy can you really begin to actually put a strategy together. Putting a marketing strategy together or indeed a full business strategy demands no less of a questioning mind than learning how to do a job in the first place.
Some Aspects of Strategy formation
- Before you begin to put your strategy down on paper and suss out the how’s and when’s you first need to articulate what you are trying to achieve. What is the purpose of what you are doing.
- Once you have a vision, you then need to look at the macro environment and ask yourself who else is offering something similar. Who is a potential threat – are the barriers to enter particularly high. Who is a potential customer. Analyse the macro environment and ask all the questions that relate to how effective your strategy will be in the market. A SWOT analysis is always a very under-appreciated but hugely effective strategy planning tool.
- Look internally; based on all the data you have already received. Is your organisation ready to make a change. What kind of a change does your company need. What additional steps are you going to have to plan and map for when your strategy reaches the market and they take action.
- Nothing happens in isolation. Business decision making is like a Rubiks cube. This means that whatever you do today, will have multiple and continuous effects on every aspect of your business – both good and bad.
Question Everything
The basic lesson of this post is to say. When you think you have got all the answers; stop; and start again. Experts are experts because they ask the most questions and learn from them. Experts are not experts because they speak the most - those are politicians.
Strategy is about getting to the most simple answer and not the most complex. This does not mean you have to dilute your strategy, it simply means that when you have asked enough of the right kinds of questions, there is no need for anything complicated and there is no confusion.
Marketing Strategy is like solving a Rubik’s Cube
This is rather a weird thing to say when you look at it at face value. But the metaphor is really actually quite beautiful when you dig a little deeper in to it.
When trying to solve a Rubik’s cube, you cannot just look at the move you are about to make in isolation, but rather you need to be living a few moves in to the future and make sure that you know how each move affects the other blocks on the cube.
The same can be said about marketing strategy. Each and every marketing decision you make has a ripple on affect that can go in a few different directions. As a marketing strategist or a marketing planner you need to keep these possibilities at the very forefront of all your decision making.
Marketing connects everything!
The ripples that your marketing can make do not only change the way in which clients can interact with you, but they also change the way in which different departments within your business behave as well.
This means that if you are running a marketing campaign on a certain widget that your business makes then in your planning you need to be sure that you looked at :
- Can you supply if the demand picks up?
- Is there enough staff to process the orders?
- Can you meet the delivery times promised?
- Is the widget actually profitable at the marketed price if the uptake is low?
These are just some of the very simple questions that marketing strategists need to ask and again this is because everything that marketing does is connected to everything else.
Planning for success.
Back to the analogy.
The business goal is to solve the Rubik’s Cube. To have every colour neatly on its own side of the cube. The marketing strategy is getting the individual squares to play with and move where you need them to.
Careful thought and planning of your marketing initiatives is critical. But more important than how cool your marketing looks; is it moving you closer to your business objective of solving the Rubik’s Cube?
Target market selection : ensure they are worth it
When you look at this from the outset, it sounds like one of the simplest things to do. But very often when putting together any form of marketing campaign, both online or offline, very often this point gets lost.
Where does targeting go wrong?
On a micro level there are many places where the sight does not quite line up to the target.
Sometimes the creative execution gets in the way and the idea becomes unmanageable. The marketing is stunning and the creative is eye catching and incredibly compelling but somewhere along the way it becomes too complicated. The target market may not have all the technology available to even view the creative and so all of that hard work and creative brilliance is wasted.
Very often every creatives, marketing strategists, even copywriters forget that the target market might be completely different from them. The campaign then gets planned and executed for their point of view to meet and achieve their expectations of what would make the campaign successful. This means that we’d have huge complex multi-level campaigns involving smartphones and internet marketing being pitched at low income, low LSM demographics.
On a more macro level, there are further pitfalls that can be run into when a company is looking at their marketing initiatives. Again, targeting is an area that needs to be given a lot of thought. This time though; when looking at the target market, we are less concerned about the demographical breakdown of the target market, but rather the critical mass that makes up that target market. This is especially true when looking at a business-to-business marketing model.
(Can you tell, I’m NO graphic designer?) What the graphic is basically trying to illustrate is that in the blue pyramid there are a large number of companies at the bottom of the pyramid, this then progresses to fewer companies at the top. When you look at the proportion of revenue generated (orange triangle) by each company in the blue pyramid, proportionally each company at the bottom is making FAR less revenue that those at the top.
In a short easy to understand sentence… “There are a lot of companies that make very little money, while there are very few companies who are making absolute bucket loads of cash!”
This means it vitally important that you ensure that when choosing your target market you make sure that the segment you ar going to be going after is big enough to sustain your business into the future.
Something which certainly every business owner has learnt since the recession became a buzzword is that if you do not have a sustainable target market in tough times, your business is going to be on permanently shaky ground.
Finding your target market means making sure that you have a sweet spot. You can still market to the areas slightly above and below your core group. But you need a large enough potential group to ensure further success.
