Kanye West is a walking controversy. The paparazzi and the public follow his every move and hang on to his every word. He was recently quoted in the New York Times comparing himself to Steve Jobs. He claimed he is the Steve of the internet, downtown fashion and culture. That’s a big statement. It seems Kanye is one gusty fellow.

I have Kanye West on my mind because I just returned from a trip to New York City where I attended Governor’s Ball, a three day music festival. There were many incredible musicians who blew me away and then there was Kanye West. Love him or hate him, he is a force to be reckoned with. When I hear the name Kanye, I paint a picture in my head. I can hear his voice, I can think of quotes, and I have a picture perfect brand associated with that name. I can’t say the same for other musicians. The minute Kanye West arrived on stage in electric red Nike ‘Yeezy’ sneakers (which he designed) and a slick leather studded jacket, the crowd went ballistic. How can we relate a famous musical icon to a startup trying to make their mark on the world? What exactly do Kanye and startups have in common? What can we learn from him? To my surprise, there is quite a bit we can learn from the not-s0-humble Mr. West. I managed to find some relevant takeaways while I reflected on his captivating performance I witnessed last week.  I compiled a list of 5 things any startup could learn from Kanye West.

1. Command the stage and give 100%

Whether it is on an industry panel at a major conference or teaching code to a bunch of young developers, you have to “own it”… no matter the size of the stage. If there is one thing Kanye knows how to do, it is demand audience attention. There is nothing more compelling than a captivating speaker. Regardless of whether or not the audience agrees with your content, if you really hook them, they will listen.

2. Deliver consistency and ‘on-brand’ moments 

Make sure you are consistent with your branding across all channels. This is so important. It doesn’t mean that you can’t have elements of surprise, it means you have to find certain ways of making your voice unique and relatable to your audience. If you give people something ‘juicy’ during your performance, they will talk about it. It is almost expected now that Kanye will interrupts his show (or someone else’s i.e. Taylor Swift’s) and states his point of view. Kanye West delighted us at Governor’s Ball with a classic Kanye ‘rant’. He went off for a few minutes about how he doesn’t want to drop singles for radio, how he wants to make ‘real music’ for people to enjoy.  Apparently, he doesn’t care about making a million records (sure thing, Kanye.) By now his audience expects this kind of interaction. They love when they get it and his performance always lives up to the hype. You have to give your audience  consistency and  something to look forward to. Your audience will learn to expect it and appreciate you for it because it gives them something to rely on.

3. Debut new material to your hungry audience

It is undeniable that people enjoy a sense of exclusivity. If you release something to a select, charter group of people it makes them feel included and it makes them feel special.  Early adopters love feeling like they had the first peek or listen. The Mailbox app did a great job of this by releasing reservation numbers to their users and a private code to unlock their app. Mailbox created buzz for themselves and made their product feel like an VIP section of a bar. Kanye made his audience feel exclusive by playing numerous songs off his unreleased album ‘Yeezus’ and the crowd went nuts for it. In fact, he really drilled his point home by opening with a new song and closing with that very same song. Redundant? Perhaps, but he made his mark. Guess which song I remember the most from the entire concert and am already searching for to download?

4. Allow your audience to be your advocates

People trust confident people. In The New York Times article where they profiled Kanye, he oozes confidence. Comparing yourself to Steve Jobs in an outlet like The New York Times is bound to spark controversy. He knew that. I imagine that’s why he did it. I don’t necessary think you have to boast about how incredible your startup is in order to gain trust but I do think you should let others do the talking for you. If you are confident in your product and truly are delivering something groundbreaking, your advocates will do the talking for you. Be confident in what you are offering and trust that the world needs it.

5. When in doubt, go big or go home

I’ll give the guy credit. I would never in a million years want to be as famous as Kanye. Thinking about the amount of pressure that would be weighing down on you at all times would be unbearable. Your confidence would have to be switched on 24 hours a day. I admit, he goes overboard consistently but, I have to hand it to him, his confidence is convincing. If he truly believes he is the golden boy of our age then all the power to him. At the end of the day, regardless of what he says, he almost has the whole world talking.

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Below is the article that was written on Forbes about how we stretched our thinking and went up against the big guys.

The CEO of Expertcity (creator of GoToMyPC and GoToMeeting, acquired by Citrix) was born in Germany and grew up in South Africa. Although his English was impeccable, he was occasionally tripped up by colloquialisms. One which he especially struggled with was “word-of-mouth marketing”, which he consistently referred to as “mouth-to-mouth marketing.” We adopted his phrasing and made it our mission to devise creative, mouth-to-mouth marketing initiatives.

Startups must economically counteract the pervasive drone of large incumbents’ messaging. One way to do so is to ensure that when your customers share their experiences with your products and solutions, they do so with the passion and intensity of a soulful kiss. Such mouth-to-mouth communications have sufficient intensity to cut through the confusion of the noisiest markets.

Over the years, I have documented a number of clever mouth-to-mouth stunts, from DoubleClick to TestFlight. These articles have inspired readers to experiment with their own mouth-to-mouth campaigns, including the one described below by Hubba’s Emma Nemtin.

**********

John,

After stumbling across your article on trade show guerrilla marketing, it inspired me to take a leap. A leap that got me on a flight from Toronto to Dallas to execute a serious 24-hour mission. I now realize why guerrilla marketing is not for the timid. Sometimes it takes a bold move to get noticed.

I work for Hubba, a Toronto startup that has built a sharing platform that takes a unique “big data” approach to data management for brands and retailers. We decided to shake things up and take a risk at the biggest data management summit, attended by multi-billion dollar corporations, including IBM, Oracle, and Informatica. We did not purchase tickets for the event. 

Our goal was to have the conference participants wake up in their suites to a flyer stealthily placed under their doors in the middle of the night. The flyer said “We wanted to be the first to welcome you to Data Management 2004“. At the bottom in small print it said “(if you would like to see your data could be managed in 2013, please visit us at www.hubba.com/TheNewWay)“. 

This seemed like an easy task to pull off, but when I arrived at the hotel I was in awe. The hotel had over 1,400 rooms and, after chatting with the front desk, I realized that the attendees were scattered all over the hotel. I had no idea how I was going to slip the flyers under the doors of conference attendees. I was beginning to feel that this brilliant idea of ours was going to be next to impossible to pull off.

Regardless, I settled in nicely to my grandiose Texan hotel and woke up at a cool 4:45am to begin my mission. I figured my best bet was just to sporadically place flyers under every 10th door and hope that an attendee would see it. But, when I opened my door I realized that the guerrilla angels were shining down on me.

A conference bag had been hung on my door handle, and every other attendee’s door handle as well. This white swag bag was my beacon of light. It was as if the conference organizers had placed a massive arrow saying, “Hey Emma, place it here.” I now knew exactly where to put the flyers and starting ninja-ing my way down the dark halls, only to be met right off the bat by a hotel manager who greeted me with a weary, “Good Morning Miss.”

My palms were sweating. I jumped down to the next floor where I ran into the same hotel manager (still holding a giant stack of flyers) who looked at me and said, “We just keep running into each other don’t we?” Yes. we sure do. I thought one more encounter and I’m definitely getting reported as the sketchy guest who snuck into the conference to distribute bootleg marketing materials. I booked it down the stairs and ran to another wing of the hotel to complete my mission. 

Next I went into the conference and placed the rest of the flyers in opportune locations around the keynote rooms. I acted calm, as if I belonged there. I poured myself some coffee, and did a lot of pretending to be on the phone, dig through my purse, while silently slipping a few flyers onto any surface I could find that was surrounded by attendees. I even went into the ladies washroom (which happened to be empty, thank goodness) and propped up a flyer on each bathroom stall. Hey, you never know.

Needless to say, the flyers caused quite a stir, as its message was a direct shot at the lack of innovation from the industry’s big vendors. Before lunch, we had received inbound inquiries from analysts, potential partners and prospects. Based on the hits to our website, our competitors took notice too.

We became a big part of the conversation at the conference at the cost of less than a tenth of one single registration ticket. Sometimes you knock on the door and sometimes you kick it down. 

**********

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The idea of wearable technology is not something new. It’s been around since the 80′s but, more often than not, each prototype was clunky, abrasive and not seamless with every day wear. The wearable tech that I am seeing pop up today including Google Glass and Nike FuelBand in my humble opinion have the same issues. I am yearning for fashion designers to collaborate with the companies that are developing these technologies and create something beautiful. Design something we would all want to wear. Something that is minimalist, yet striking.

I think there is an incredible amount of opportunity in the rapidly growing intersection between fashion and technology. Whether it is adding function to existing garments or adding some flavour to a garment just for an added cool factor, we are at an exciting time in the development of wearable tech. In the near future, everything we wear will become a part of a digital environment or network. At the end of the day, any product that can simplify my life without getting in the way I will jump to.

PBS released this short video on the future of wearable technology where they dive deep into how different technologies can be seamlessly integrated into our daily lives without disrupting social interaction.

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On the surface technology decisions look very different and unrelated to business decisions.  They are based on factors like  scalability, interoperability and extensibility.

Business decisions on the other hand are generally based on things like cost and revenue.  Reflecting on my 12 years as a software engineer, every single technology decision I have witnessed or made myself has had a business impact.

Technology decisions are simply business decisions in disguise.  Here is why.

Technology exists for the business not the other way around

Successful businesses recognize that technology is there to serve business goals.

Technology decisions that make Hubba more scalable, secure and extensible were made to benefit our customers, not our egos as engineers (although I admit that’s a positive side-effect).  I could explain every technology decision we’ve made at Hubba in technical terms but it is more helpful to look at them in business terms.

Our IxD is designed to be intuitive, efficient and beautiful but these factors only matter because it minimizes our onboarding and support costs and reduces customer churn.  Our security model is flexible and provides administrators with full audit history of data curation but these factors only matter because it meets our customer’s data management policies and is therefore critical to Hubba’s value proposition and sales strategy.

Never build tech that costs more than its lifetime value to the company.  And note that longevity does not guarantee a higher lifetime value.  For instance, a sales demo for an important customer might require short-lived, throw-away code that is extremely high-value while an unused feature that delivers no business value might be left in the system for years.

To ensure you are making good decisions, I recommend you map your planned and existing features to business objectives and metrics such as your sales strategy, customer acquisition costs and operations budget.  This is an audit I do on Hubba continuously.

Be able to justify the ROI of every technology decision you make to a business person in terms that they understand.

Technology is expensive

Building software is the most expensive task a start up will do in the beginning. Your total SLOC costs time and money to create, maintain and support.  And not surprisingly, the relationship between code volume and cost is exponential, not linear.  Unfortunately, at this point in a company’s history, time and money are both in short supply.  An established company like Apple can spend $3.6 billion on R&D and get away with mistakes like releasing a crappy map app.  Mistakes that  barely dent an established company’s bottom line could effectively kill a start up.

The software we have built at Hubba is game changing and our team is absolutely world-class but my focus is on fixing a problem, not building technology because its cool.  It just so happens that the most effective way to address this problem is through software.  I know this sounds strange coming from a CTO but if the business could gain the same benefit without the cost of custom technology I would always recommend that path.

In Hubba’s case, however, we had to build tech in order to disrupt our market.  We mitigate this costly risk by building just enough tech to deliver exactly the business value we need at exactly the moment we need it and not a feature more.

Technology is a game changer for better or worse

Programmers love to write code.  It’s what we do.  Unleash us on a problem and we will solve it.

Writing code is empowering and intoxicating.  Coding our way out of a problem is addictive because code has the power to change anything about a system with a few (or many) lines of typing.  However, we programmers are our own worst enemy.  Often we make technology decisions with little or no regard for the business impact.

Technology decisions affect everything – time to market, revenue channels, sales, operations, customer touchpoints, engineering culture and even team morale.  I cannot emphasize this enough.  There is no such thing as a technology decision only business decisions.

For better or worse, technology will be a game-changing factor in your business.  Give your business the best chance for success by recognizing that all technology decisions are business decisions in disguise.

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Nearly everyone was taught from their parents to be nice and friendly to others at a young age. Yet when it comes to retail, it seems like the majority of retailers are forgetting to be be nice and friendly to their consumers. We live in a digital world and consumer behaviour is drastically different than it was even last year. Consumers shop with their best friend, which in most cases is their smartphone. They want a nice, friendly mobile experience. So why aren’t you giving it to them?

There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach

It is pivotal for retailers to give today’s information-driven shopper interactions that are beneficial to them and create a memorable experience. Of course, there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach for reaching every shopper but you can kick start your digital strategy by getting to know how shoppers are engaging in-store and online.

Perceptions of experience differ in-store and online. Retailers should focus on easily navigate-able channels and showcasing a vibrant, engaging environment. Technology is now an enabler of the store experience. Research from Deloitte shows that 36% of consumers want access to rich product information via barcode scan with their smartphones and 14% would use their smartphone as a substitute for their credit card.

In-store technology can help retailers engage consumers to create a unique experience and allow consumers to interact with products on the store shelf. We crafted an infographic to break down how consumers are shopping with smartphones. We hope you enjoy and feel free to share it!

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Why do we have the innate desire to tell stories and what is it about a good story that makes us want to retell it to others? Essentially stories tap into human emotion. I recently watched a video called ‘Winning the Story Wars’ which  breaks down the components to telling a powerful story. Stories evolved from myths which provide symbolic thinking, story, explanation, meaning and ritual all wrapped up in one nice package.  By deconstructing the formula of a myth we can create stories that make our voice stand out in the post-broadcast era.

The most successful marketers have become myth makers 

Today, many of our stories come from marketers. Now, this could either be a terrifying or exciting, I’m not quite sure. Nearly every successful marketing campaign since the 1950s creates new myths. Take the Marlboro Man as an example.  The marketing campaign behind this iconic figure lead us to believe that if we smoke Marlboros we will take on this look and radiate this carefree, outdoorsy persona. Myths, of course, aren’t a literal representation of facts. The act of smoking Marlboros won’t actually turn us into this icon that the marketers have created. However, marketers are still telling myths this way by launching products and giving the audience a new explanation of how the world works and how we should live.

Marketing hasn’t shifted much from this paradigm. Typically, the consumer was seen as a helpless damsel in distress with the brand being the almighty hero who comes swooping in to save the day. This was a simple story, but this story doesn’t cut it anymore. Consumer’s have the choice to pick or skip over stories they want to take in. They are no longer passive. Now, the story you tell needs to be more complex and reshaped. Some iconic brands such as Under Armour, have begun to break these traditional stories and tell real-life stories instead. Under Armour’s tagline ‘I Will’ has shifted the spotlight onto the consumers. The brand tells a story of empowerment and encourages their audience to tackle their goals.

It’s survival of the fittest for ideas

Brands used to have guaranteed attention. They had their idea, put it into a commercial spot on television or radio, and it was nearly guaranteed their audience consumed it. Alas, times have changed and not all content soaks in anymore. What kind of ideas survive and get retold? Stories. Try thinking of your brand as a story. Establish characters, setting, and a conflict. Try telling a moral of a story, and dig deep to express your brands values. You will find that people tend to act on things that are aligned with their moral judgements. The most universal successfully stories call audiences to higher values like community, justice and self expression. Remember, it’s a competitive world out there and only the the best stories survive.

So brands, how do you tell your story? 

Going back to the example of Under Armour and their latest tagline “I Will”, they instill a sense of competency in their audience. They say their job is to make you better. They don’t focus on themselves or their products first, they let the audience be the hero. If you are stuck on how to tell your story begin by applying this formula:

1.) Start with a hero

Start with an outsider to your brand. Make your audience the hero, not your brand.

2.) Be the mentor

You as the brand are the character that reveals more is possible. You work to connect your audience to deeper values. Teach a truth, a moral of a story. Stop talking about how great you are and start talking about how great your audience can be.

3.) Have a differentiator

Think of this as your gift to the audience. What are you going to give them that has meaning and can be beneficial to them and their world? Any brand can become a story brand by finding relevance in its values. Be consistent around your morals and find resonance in your voice as the mentor, not the hero. You need to commit and live to your values. The brands that execute on this will  light up the digitoral landscape. 

Take a risk for your brand archetype

Jonah Sachs, author of the book ‘Winning The Story Wars’, says the world is a mess and we need more stories. Everyone knows that they need to stand out, but there is fear in taking risk. Don’t think of it as risk think of it as differentiating yourself. I urge you to get out there and tell your stories and tell a dang good story while you’re at it. Stories that empower are always better performers. Bare in mind, when we hear stories that speak to us it is more that we are remembering something then learning something. 

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There are a lot of things that categorize me as a nerd. Let me be the first to add another to that list: I love photography.  Having only picked up a camera (properly) 4 years ago, I am anything but a professional. It would be a stretch to even say that I am any good. I am ok with that.  The reason why I became so enthralled with this activity had nothing to do with creativity.  It was because of how technical I found it. As a former software developer, the concept of tweaking parameters incrementally to achieve a desired result resonated with me.

Like many over-enthusastic newbies, I rushed out and got some top of the line gear. I came home armed with a great camera, a range of high-end lenses, data storage units, packs, tripods and everything else you could name.  Only then did I decide to find somebody to show me how to actually use it. There was no way that I was going to be like the majority of people and use an automatic setting.  However, like the majority of people, once I found my style I only really utilized 10% of the available functionality.

Then a crazy thing happened: Instagram. Now, under no circumstances, am I going to argue that an Instagram picture compares in any way to a well crafted high shot from a high end camera.  However, it did change my thinking.  It made me realize that the value of photography is not the actual photograph but the experience created by sharing that picture. The interesting thing is that over 100 million people agree with me.

I am sure that you can see where I am going with this. The enterprise software industry on a whole (and specifically software related to data management) is very much like the high-end camera market. Companies buy bloated systems that are more expensive than they need or can afford. Then companies opt-in for all the add-ons that will never get used. All the while they spend an obscene amount more money getting the system set up and learning how to use it.  At the end of the day, the company ends up using just a small amount of the functionality they purchase.  More importantly, you need to remember that we are only talking about the top percentage of companies that can even afford these solutions.  Everyone else is out of luck.

Funny enough, this “overspend” is not what I have the biggest issue with. My issue is that  we are looking at things the wrong way.

It is 2013.  I am equipped with a device in my hand that is supposed to get me any information I need, whenever I need it. Yet why am I still struggling to find out if I am allergic to this ice cream, if my friend’s pregnant wife is able to eat a specific cheese, what this beverage producer has committed to donate back to the environment, which of my friends like this brand of tennis rackets, what people are saying about these shoes on twitter.  All of these things make a different at the moment of purchase decision. I know all the data is out there but why can’t we just bring it all together.  What good is all of this data if it never makes it out to the world to enhance experience?

“We need to stop spending so much time focusing on the foundational data and more time focusing on how that data can be shared”

As a whole, we need to stop spending so much time focusing on the foundational data and more time focusing on how that data can be shared and ultimately used.  Companies today are paralyzed by data management…so much so that it becomes a tactical loop of endless taxonomies, data quality audits and data governance.  All of that is important but the data is of no use to anyone stuck in the deepest regions of an MDM solution without seeing the light of day.

We started Hubba as a team of enterprise software and system integration experts.  We were not MDM people.  We came in with fresh eyes.  This problem of liberating data became glaringly obvious as did the reasons why this problem exists:

1) With so much data and content being produced across so many different channels, it is almost impossible to pull everything together into a single source of truth.

2) Even if you were able to pull it into a single source of truth, the amount of different targets in your supply chain that need this data is overwhelming (and growing all the time).

3) Even if you were able to get all the right data out to those targets, you have no control or visibility into how that data is being used.

Many big companies have developed behemoth systems to try to tackle all of the intricacies of data.  At Hubba, we just focused on fixing these three. You have all of this great data, you just need the tools to set it free.

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You know the saying “The customer is always right”? Well, it is only partially true. Companies have adopted this mantra over the years and spent considerable time and effort to ensure that their customers are satisfied.  More importantly, they develop and launch new products and services to address what they perceive to be the needs of the market. The thing is that customers are not right about everything.  In fact, they are really only right about one thing: how they feel.

Having spent the last decade implementing enterprise software, consulting to massive organizations and now working at Hubba, it is clear to me that the customer is “not right” more often than they are right. They misunderstand what their business problems are, they misrepresent their requirements, they misconstrue what it is they actually want, they are miscalibrated on what they think the solution is for their problem.  The thing is, in all my years doing this, I am yet to find a client who was wrong about how their problems make them feel.  It is for this reason, that to properly service a customer, you need to start with feelings.

Being the only real thing that a customer is sure about, these feeling need to be the anchor on which you build out your plan to address the problem.  The best companies in the world all take a similar approach to developing and enhancing their products and services.

Step 1: Drill down to understand the problem

Customers are annoyed. Customers are frustrated.  Customers are pissed off.  These are strong feelings. That is good.  That is the type of market you want to address.  It means there is a real problem.  Unfortunately, these emotions don’t help to indicate the cause of why these feelings are out there.

When we started Hubba, it was clear that the life of brand manager was difficult.  They are constantly playing catch up and trying to stay on top of things. When we started digging deeper into the market we would often hear things like “I feel overwhelmed”, “I am discouraged because it is impossible be good at my job in today’s world”, “It is aggravating to deal with this mess”.

Our first task was to figure out why these brand managers felt this way. I am generally not one for formal methodologies but I have always found the “5 Whys” to be a great way to drill down to the root cause.  Developed by Toyota as a quality assurance technique for manufacturing, we use it all the time for getting to the core of a problem whether it is related to understanding a client or resolving software bugs.

It goes something like this…

Brand Manager: I feel overwhelmed

Why?

Brand Manager: Because there is too much to do

Why?

Brand Manager: Because in addition to being strategic there is more and more tactical work to do.

Why?

Brand Manager: Our retail partners are constantly begging for rich marketing data for their websites, eCommerce sites and apps but I can’t get it to them.

Why?

Brand Manager: Because are data sits in a million different systems that I don’t have access to.

Why?

Brand Manager: Because there is no single source of truth for our products that within our organization that I can share with our partners.

Bingo. Now we have come to the problem behind the feeling. This is the leaping off point for the next step.

Step 2: Identify a solution

It would be impossible to identify a solution to make a brand manager feel less overwhelmed.  However, it is significantly easier to identify a solution to create a single source of truth for rich product information that can be shared with partners.

We decided to isolate the problem from all of the other noise and focus on developing a product that addressed  just this problem.  This is the scary part. Imagine your business as a super tanker crossing the ocean.  If your trajectory is off even by a small amount in the beginning, you will be completely off by the time you reach your destination.  If you are wrong about the problem, the entire chain reaction afterwards will be off.

“Figuring out the fix to a problem is one thing.  Designing the mechanism that will fix it is something completely different.”

Step 3: Design the solution 

Figuring out the fix to a problem is one thing.  Designing the mechanism that will fix it is something completely different.  There are two main aspects of the design that you always need to keep in mind: The builders and the users.

Having the right design is superfluous if it can’t be built.  Every architect knows this.  Your blueprints for your beautiful skyscraper can be amazing but if the structural engineers tell you that it will crumble under its own weight, it will take 15 years to build or will cost you $20 billion dollars, it does not matter how beautiful it is.

On the flip side, you can identify the perfect solution to a problem but if the design is terrible and people hate using it, it doesn’t matter how good the solution is. You still won’t be able to effectively solve the problem and ultimately make the customer or market feel any better.

Step 4: Execution

Finally, once the problem has been identified, the solution has been agreed upon, the design has been nailed, you actually need to build it/develop it and launch.

The interesting thing about this process is that every single one of these steps needs to be done perfectly to be successful.  It is all or nothing. This is a tall order considering that each one of them requires wildly different skills.

• Understanding how your customer/market feels (Emotional)
• Understanding the problem (Analytical)
• Developing the solution (Problem solving)
• Designing the solution (Creative)
• Execution (Operational)

You can look at companies like Apple and BMW to really see this process in action.  They are geniuses at every stage.  Conversely, you can look at Blackberry who understood the problem (debatable) but failed at design. If there is a misstep at any point in the process the entire thing falls apart.

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Yes. I am fully aware that I am about to suffer the wrath of every hoodie-wearing, comp-sci grad who has started a company within the last 5 years and sleeps with an Eric Reis book under their pillow. But let me fill you in on a little secret, you are focused on the wrong things.

With the glut of startups today and the lightning speed at which the industry is evolving, we have begun to  commit two huge errors that will prove to be the fatal flaw for many promising companies. First, we are starting to deviate from sound, fundamental business practices. Second, we are using these mutated principles as scorecard to measure our success.

This is not a rant against the Lean movement or other philosophies. In fact, I am fully aligned with most of their core principles. This, however, is a rant on how we, in our haste, have begun to interpret these principles.

Below are a few of the things that I feel have been misconstrued:

Failing Fast

Embracing failure and celebrating failure are two very different things. When did it become so cool to fail?  Failure sucks. Failure costs. Failure hurts. I am not saying that failure should be absent at a startup…quite the opposite.  I love to hire people who have failed (and failed miserably).  They are far more likely to take calculated risks because they are not as scared about ramifications of missing the mark.  A beekeeper who has never been stung, is going to be limited by fear and be wildly ineffective compared to one who has felt the sting and overcome it. Unfortunately, for some reason, we as an industry have taken this celebration of failure to such an extreme that we seem to stand around applauding the guy who strips naked and runs head first into the bee colony. At Hubba, we embrace taking chances; it is embedded in our culture. We celebrate the action (the DOING and MAKING). We also celebrate the win if it works and the lesson if it doesn’t. We don’t ever celebrate the failure.

There is an extremely fine line between making the right decision to fail fast or to hold on and persevere.  This line is almost always drawn retroactively based on the success of the company. A good outcome and the team is lauded for sticking with it. A bad outcome and everyone will point to the moment that the company “should have pivoted”.

So f*ck failing fast.  Focus on failing smart. The winning companies will be the ones who have the experience, instruments and agility to identify they have made a wrong turn and take corrective action before their competitors and before they expend resources going down the wrong path.

“We as an industry have taken this celebration of failure to such an extreme that we seem to stand around applauding the guy who strips naked and runs head first into the bee colony”

Running Lean

Let’s get one thing clear, Lean does not refer to your burn rate. Although it has financial ramifications, it is not a financial term. Businesses need to spend money. As all startup founders know, money is like oxygen. It sustains your business and keeps you alive. Far too often, Lean has been misinterpreted as lowest possible burn and success is measured on the duration that you can make your capital stretch. The real metric of success is the value that you get for the money you have spent. As a business, identify what your goals are for the upcoming phase of your company and aggressively go after them. Your ability to succeed will be based on your actions and ability to execute, not on your ability to tread water for a longer period of time.  Repeat after me, “Spending is OK”.  I am not sure when spending became a bad thing but it is pretty clear to me that the winners will be the ones who master the ability to maximize the impact on every dollar they spend, not the ones that simply try to make it last longer.

Getting To Market

At what point did Minimum Viable Product mean piece of crap?  There is a huge focus on the MINIMUM part. It seems as if there is a race to the bottom where companies are doing all they can to ship a product that is just good enough to prevent major backlash.  A Minimum Viable Product is not about shipping shallow product. To the contrary, depending on the market you are going after, a Minimum Viable Product may be quite mature and sophisticated. “Minimum” refers to doing the smallest amount possible to get the feedback and data you need to make the right decisions about the business. A consumer shopping app and an enterprise software suite are going to have two very different thresholds of an MVP with each varying maturity, feature set and capital investment.

The winning companies will be those who are able to surgically align the product with the business proof points they are looking for.  If the product is too immature, it will not be used and therefore not produce the validating data. If the product is too mature, you have likely wasted valuable financial and development resources that are also at risk of being thrown away and redesigned.

Product/Market Fit

All companies, in particular early-stage fundable startups, face pressure to demonstrate a good story to the outside world. This helps with raising brand awareness, attracting talent but, more than most care to admit, it helps with securing the next round of funding. The key element that anyone is looking for is whether or not there is a product/market fit.  Unfortunately, the most popular way (and in my humble opinion one of the worst ways) to determine this fit seems to be the number of users.  This approach may work for the dozen companies that show explosive growth early in their life-cycle (read: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter). For the other 99.99% of companies, number of users doesn’t necessarily confirm that there is a product/market fit.  At an early stage, more detailed user metrics like growth rate, churn, lifetime customer value and customer acquisition costs are going to be skewed and not necessarily tell the real story (for example, I think churn is a good thing for many early stage consumer companies but I will save that for another blog).

I have to admit, I fell into this trap at Hubba.  It took a lot of very persuasive and knowledgeable advisors and VCs to convince me to stop focusing on user numbers and start focusing on proving the use case.  The feeling was that, for my business particularly, it was more impressive to see a handful of good companies using the system, seeing value and becoming advocates than it was to show growth.  It took me a while to come around but, looking back at our go-to-market strategy, I would have been able to bring on a lot of smaller businesses in various industries but as a whole it would have been a skewed audience. I would have a great vanity metric but I would not a solid foundation for data on which I was making my future assumptions.

“We are going down a dangerous path”

So the way I see it, we as an industry are going down a dangerous path. We have established some great frameworks to run our businesses but they  have taken on a life of their own. We seem to be in world where the fundamentals of business have changed. It is leading us down a path of shipping sub-par products to the wrong audiences and celebrating failure while being petrified to invest our capital.

At what point do we look back at this time and say “what the hell were we thinking?” How have we deviated so far?

Even worse, we have begun to use this warped framework to measure the success of a company. “You started the company 4 days ago and you haven’t launched yet? I would have thought you would be on version 8 with 16 pivots by now. What is wrong with you?”

Many of the startups that I work with confuse operating approach with business principles.  When I ask the objectives of the business they tell me that they want to be lean or agile or some other flavour of the week.  How backwards is that? These are simply approaches on how you as a company are going to meet your business objectives, not the objectives themselves.

So what can you do?  There is a simply recipe.  Let’s get back to fundamentals: Understand Your Customers Problem, Solve Your Customers Problem, Create An Ecosystem, Cultivate An Amazing Team.  Once you have these locked down, you can determine the optimal methodology for your business to ensure that you accomplish these goals.

The post F*ck Failing Fast appeared first on Hubba.

We are fortunate to be working closely with the innovative team at Ladies Learning Code.  When the opportunity arose to help them acquire a MakerBot 3D printer to add to their workshop space, we jumped on board. If you haven’t had the opportunity to see a 3D printer live in action, I highly recommend it. The Hubba team had the pleasure of heading to the Ladies Learning Code headquarters at CSI Annex to be there as we unboxed their very first MakerBot 3D printer. Once we set it up, plugged it in, and calibrated the printing platform we were able to print off our first 3D object in a snap. The potential that this technology has to change consumerism is something that gets us really fired up. I can’t wait to see consumers turn into creators, 3D printing out their own door handles, plate sets, jewelry, toys, you name it. This will be a truly disruptive technology.

Ladies Leaning Code is planning on hosting some 3D printing workshops sometime in April. Stay tuned to their twitter feed or website for details. In the mean time, we are off to 3D print our own customized hubba smartphone cases and from now on are going to be asking ourselves, “Should I buy this, or can I Makerbot it?”. Check out the photos of the Makerbot Replicator in action below, or watch this clip of us below creating our first 3D printed object.

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You Have Six Seconds

If you haven’t yet heard about the latest Twitter-owned  app called Vine, now is the time to perk your ears up. The app which has been dubbed as the ‘Instagram for video’, allows users to create and share six second looping videos. The constraint on time, letting users only have six seconds to spill their guts or capture a moment, falls within Twitters mandate of  believing constraint inspires creativity, whether it’s through a 140-character tweet or a six-second video. As a new Vine user myself let me tell you that this app is intuitive, it is simple,  and it is highly addictive. The ability that Vine has to showcase succinct snippets of information to the world will be a powerful tool in the digital space. Its near-instant popularity and mass on-boarding only further instils the importance of video and its powerful viral nature.

Video is undoubtedly hot right now

We can’t deny that. What is so exciting about the growth of video apps and video popularity is to be able to witness the storytelling pioneers doing what they do best: sharing brilliant, creative, infectious stories. When it comes to brand storytelling, there has never been a better opportunity to hop on board the storytelling train and create some magic. Videos resonate with people, and the brands that create memorable videos are the ones who are going to capture the attention and spark conversations with their audience.

Why short and sweet works

Does this mean we can bid adieu to the classic 30 second commercial? Maybe. The fact that you can tentatively capture your consumers attention in just seven seconds may just disrupt the video content world. Brands could use this concept of showcasing a new product or its features in under ten seconds, or they could record some newsworthy content at a company event – maybe unveiling a new service or giving consumers a sneak peak onto the runway at fashion week. There are numerous brands who are already on Vine including Toyota, MSNBC, and the licorice company Red Vines (smart move on their part). The opportunities are endless, but the shift here is being able to create something captivating in a very short amount of time and doing it well. The golden rule for content should always be keep it short and sweet.

Our diminishing attention span

As our content ADHD grows and grows, our ability to produce creative content in a snap will only become more difficult. Consumers are constantly engaging on the go either on a smartphone during a commute or at a desk before they zip for lunch. Living in a world where we are bombarded by information overload, we are more likely to be critical of content that comes our way and even more likely to only share the gold nuggets. It’s fair to say the quality content bar has officially been raised due to our fleeting nature of consumption. I’m very exciting about the future of video and what it has to offer.

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If you want to identify an effective leader forget about Jung’s and Brigg’s Myers Topology testing or your particular flavour of HR interview questions. The proof is in the pudding. To find effective leaders, look for effective teams.

Teams led by effective leaders exhibit loyalty, hard work, sincere enthusiasm and initiative.  Members of such teams are not afraid to take chances and innovate.  Perhaps the most important characteristic of such teams is their openness.  Sharing knowledge to help, educate and entertain one another forms the hallmarks of an effective team and by inference an effective leader. I am by no means the epitome of leadership but here is a short list of what I’ve learned over the years.

Be an Un-Manager 

By a show of hands, how many of you have done your best work under the supervision of a micro-manager? None of you? I don’t blame you.

It is no secret that good people are hard to find in every industry.  Yet, in many cases, they are fenced in by policies, ‘best-practices’, bureaucracy and managers who try to do their jobs for them. This obviously stifles creativity and innovation but also erodes your company culture making it less attractive to other good people.

Lesson 1: Trust your team.  Give them complete freedom in their specific domain of expertise.  Trust in their ability to do their jobs better than you ever could.  After all, that’s why you hired them.  Be an un-manager.

Be a Mover Not a Shaker

When you think back to a moment when you were in your best creative, productive, problem-solving state were you also experiencing fear?

When you experience fear your body undergoes General Adaptive Syndrome, commonly known as ‘Fight-Or-Flight’ response. During the initial phase of this syndrome (called ‘Shock Phase’) humans undergo a neurological change that resembles Addison’s Disease. The brain chemistry and behaviour during this phase strongly resembles that of a patient suffering from ADHD.  And yet, many organizations are filled with people in leadership roles who use fear as their primary motivator.

Fear-based leadership is as old-fashioned as horse-drawn carriages.  I propose an alternative.

Give your team the freedom to innovate and make mistakes but if its clear that the mistakes are due to negligence or incompetence, move them along to a different role or move them out of the organization.  Don’t use fear as a crutch to ‘brute-force’ productivity out of your team.  Using fear as a motivator is counter-productive.  It demoralizes your good people and delays the departure of bad ones.

Lesson 2: Trust yourself to hire the right people and quickly let go of the wrong ones. Don’t rule by fear. Be a mover not a shaker.

Be Humble 

The best leaders I have ever worked for were never afraid to ask a ‘dumb’ question, ask for help, or admit when they were wrong.  These characteristics are found in effective leaders because they allow them to become better over time with the full support of their colleagues.

People who are too arrogant to ask for help or admit when they are wrong must learn new skills and form new alliances in secret to keep up the charade.  This is by far the most idiotic and self-defeating strategy I have witnessed and yet I’ve witnessed it over and over in companies big and small.  Arrogant leaders are easily outpaced by humble leaders who learn, adapt and improve collaboratively and out in the open.

Lesson 3: Be humble. It is a scalable strategy for self-improvement.  To do this you have to trust the world not to judge you for not having all the answers.

My Journey as a Leader 

I feel blessed to be working with an amazing group of people at Hubba.  My role as a ‘leader’ is an honor I work to live up to every day.  For me, the most rewarding part of being a leader is being a dutiful servant to the team I lead.

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When you strip away all the hype surrounding keynote speakers, after parties and the endless “Top 10″ gadget lists, CES is a big Science Fair. And by big, I mean B-I-G.

There are 3,250+ exhibits showcasing 20,000+ products, occupying 1.92 million square feet of floor space, spread out across 3 separate convention centres. The conference is attended by 150,000 attendees from over 170 countries. It is loud. It is shoulder-to-shoulder crowded. There are long line ups for everything. And yet, as I walked the rows upon rows of exhibits interacting with the latest technology and their inventors, I felt like one of the luckiest people in the world.

Hubba attends CES because it helps us make the best possible decisions as a technology team. CES provides information, inspiration and relationships, all of which helps us execute our technology vision for the upcoming year most effectively.

I hope you reap similar benefits if you decide to attend CES next year.

Important Technology and Why

It took me a total of 24 hours, over a 3 day period but I did it. I visited every single booth in the conference.  It was fun playing with some of the tech and interacting with their inventors.

Every author of a ‘Best of CES’ list creates it from a specific perspective. And although I am tempted to include cool gadgets like the Inventist’s gyro-stabilized uni-cycle in the list, my perspective is that of a software developer. More specifically, content management and content delivery software. So based on this perspective, here is a list of what I think are the 3 most relevant groups of technologies and trends.

1) Augmented reality is poised to become consumer ready for two reasons. First, companies like Innovega have refined the user experience to be more immersive and useful. Second, the cost and difficulty associated with creating augmented reality applications is rapidly coming down with the release of SDKs like Vuforia. Qualcomm‘s demo of how they envision augmented reality playing out in a retail use-case made me a believer.

2) The internet of things will soon become a reality for two reasons. First, interoperability standards and SDKs abound and have gained wide adoption.  Ant+ allows wireless sensors to interoperate, Z-Wave allows home electronics and appliances to interoperate over wireless networks, AllJoyn allows proximity-based peer-to-peer ad hoc networks to form automatically between any network enabled device and Miracast allows peer-to-peer screencasting (think of it as an open-version of AirPlay).  These four standards alone represent wireless interoperability standards currently adopted by an alliance of over 500 companies including GE, Google, Intel, Ingersoll Rand, Microsoft, Samsung, Texas Instruments, Motorola, NEC, Nvidia, LG, Sharp, Sony Ericsson, Verizon and Qualcomm.

Second, the hardware components that allows anything to be a computer now exists. Paper thin and flexible OLED displays like Samsung’s Youm allows any surface to become a display.  Graphene-based printable electronics like the products from Vorbeck Materials allow machine washable fabrics that look and feel like Egyptian cotton to contain embedded micro-circuits and batteries, transforming everyday clothing into rechargeable computers.

In the near-future everything around us will be a computer.  You won’t need a ‘purpose-built-proxy’ like a mobile phone or a laptop or tablet. Identified by bio-metrics, you’ll simply tap any surface (including your clothes) to use as a phone or browser or gaming console or POS etc.

3) Or maybe you won’t have to tap anything at all. Maybe you’ll just ‘think’ it. The set of human-computer interfaces has grown beyond touch and gesture based systems to include thought and emotion based interfaces. Interaxon and Neurosky were the two brain-wave sensor companies showcasing thought-controlled devices ranging from mini-helicopters and video games to my personal favourite, robotic cat ears. And although the devices at the show were simple and the brain-wave sensors only turned things on or off based on thought, the exhibitor from Interaxon said they have a prototype in the lab that allows participants to also control flight and game direction based on thought.

Even though fully-functioning thought-controlled personal computers are not in our immediate future, a tech startup called Cube26 has developed a gesture recognition system that is intelligent enough to identify emotional state based on body movements, gestures and facial expressions. The added benefit of Cube26′s technology is that it can also act as instrumentation to gauge sentiment or engagement by simply capturing and logging the reaction of passersby to a billboard poster ad, for instance.

My CES 2013 Highlight 

Ironically, the highlight of this year’s CES for me was not a new technology. It was a surprise appearance by President Bill Clinton at the Samsung keynote. During his speech he went into great detail about how science and technology played a major role in his policy decisions when he was president. At the end of his talk President Clinton asked everyone in attendance to work diligently to make the world better through science and technology.

I for one intend on making that my life’s work.

The post CES Helps You Execute Your Technology Vision appeared first on Hubba.

Hubba’s CEO Ben Zifkin was featured on the front page of the Financial Post today for his involvement with an incredible startup charity called the Upside Foundation of Canada. The Upside Foundation allows startup entrepreneurs the opportunity to give back and donate a portion of their equity to charity.

Ben Zifkin said, “I knew I wanted to continue to give back and when I launched Hubba, and the Upside Foundation made sense. From a startup perspective, there is no cash outlay so it is easy from a cash flow perspective. I appreciate it because it’s less donating to charity and more making an investment in the community. A healthy community benefits everyone.”

Hubba is thrilled to be involved with this foundation, read the full Financial Post article here.

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(Reading time: approx 4 minutes)

Are you  wondering what tricks the retail industry has up its sleeve for 2013? I recently listened in on a Google Hangout hosted by PSFK that had some really good takeaways applicable to the retail industry that I thought were very worthy of sharing. I know everyone and their dog are making their own ‘Top 20 trends of 2012’ or ‘Top 10 Predictions for 2013’ which makes it difficult to sift through and find informative content, but some of the predictions made in the PSFK hangout are actually bang on in my opinion.

So, without further adieu, I give to you what I perceive to be the top retail industry predictions for 2013:

Most experts are suggesting that no one wants to shop in brick and mortar stores these days and all commerce is moving online. The truth is, yes, e-commerce is a hot spot but stats show that consumers want both. Shoppers are researching online prior to buying in store and vice versa. Online brands are going to have physical environments as well. Bonobos, an online retailer, is currently doing this with real showrooms  where you can request ‘fit ninja’ to help you out. This is genius.  At the end of the day we live in real life. As long as we are living creatures we want to see, smell and touch things. Embrace all channels, online and offline.

As newer brands couple themselves with new emerging technologies to reach consumers, older, more traditional brands really need to step up their game and innovate their in-store experience in order to reach their omni-channel shoppers. The biggest luxury these days is time – price, quality and service isn’t enough for a brand to hold onto customer loyalty.  Oracle research showed that 81% of shoppers are willing to pay more for better customer experience. Consumers need more reasons to come into your store, otherwise they will just go online.

Our mobile devices are an extension of ourselves. It is our connected tissue yet it fails to deliver information when we want it. We carry them everywhere we go including in-store. One of the most common shopper frustration at physical stores is that they have this device that can get them product information, and the information lies in some silo online, yet they cannot access that product information even though we have the technology to do so. There is a huge opportunity for customized, personalized information that you can deliver directly to consumers.  This is the problem we are fixing  here at Hubba. Being able to gather information when we always want it is going to change the physical world for the better.

Consumers are very willing to connect with brands and retailers socially. The amount of people taking and sharing photos in-store, watching product videos, checking in and tagging friends, or writing reviews of products in-store has sky rocketed. Shoppers want to be social with your brand and most are comfortable with sharing information for savings and discounts.

Do something different. Tell a story around the making of your product or service and exchange ideas within your community. Consumers love to contribute more than you think and their ideas could very well be better than yours. Utilize the insight of your brands ambassadors. The brands that embrace the immersive world we are living in, and think in a community orientated way, will be the ones who can relate to us as individuals.

With the surge in popularity of 3D printing becoming more present, it is undeniable that people want to make things. Tangible, physical things. Things they can touch. There will hopefully be a rise in tangible objects that use current technologies to enhance our day to day lives. There will always be a desire for an artifact as we push digitally. There is a massive challenge to institutions to what the digital era is that we are now in and as a result the digital experience that we are all having has to be connected. We are looking for brands that help us optimize who we are as an individual and enrich our lives.

The Takeaway: All in all, it seems the overarching theme is that human knowledge wants to be free, mobile and social and in 2013 we are going to see a proliferation in the spreading of ideas, and content, and collaborations will spring up left, right and center. The successful brands or companies will be the ones who fuse the digital and real life experiences and encourage the expansion of ideas and knowledge. We can’t wait to see what 2013 has in store.

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Hubba was nominated for the Techvibes Canadian Startup Awards for Best New Canadian Startup of 2012 just last week and let me say we are absolutely blown away with the response we have been getting thus far. We’ve been seeing votes flying in left, right and center and could not be more grateful. We feel so lucky to be a part of the Canadian tech startup community and would just like to send our most sincerest thank you to everyone who has nominated Hubba for these awards.

As many of you may know, we are building something really special here at Hubba and are truly proud of our product.  If you haven’t voted for us yet and feel inclined, we would love you to do so by clicking here. Voting doesn’t end until December 31st, 21012.

Feel free to share this with your friends, families, and networks.  And who knows, if we win we might make our CTO streak City Hall.

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There is no doubt that there has been loads of buzz around “social”. Social this, social that. Social ninjas and social media gurus are popping up everywhere. Despite the overplay of the word “social” itself, this relatively new forum is having a profound impact on the way people and organizations interact. The instantaneous sharing of information across a magnitude of channels has incredible benefits. If you haven’t already jumped on the social bandwagon (which would be very hard to believe), hop on my friends, we are in for a wild ride.

At Hubba, one of our core focuses is the spreading of good data, clean data, and informative data across all channels. We encourage communication across the enterprise and communication between enterprises and consumers in real time. We have concocted an infographic based on a McKinsey report that highlights the power of social technologies and how they add business value. We hope you enjoy it, feel free to share it!

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Fast, exciting, creative, collaborative, inspirational … and loud. This sums up my experience at this past Startup Weekend Toronto (my second) held at the swanky new Toronto office of a leading digital agency ‘The Working Group’ and hosted by my new hero Chris Eben.

Startup Weekend is a well-funded, non-profit that operates worldwide to run weekend workshops where entrepreneurs meet and launch startups.  So why would I spend a weekend with a group of complete strangers?

Simple.  I love witnessing miracles.

The Miracle

I’m not sure what else to call it. On Friday evening, a group of complete strangers with different professional backgrounds, technical skills and levels of experience gather to hear an idea for the very first time. They form teams organically and spend the rest of the weekend developing the technology and business model to deliver it on Sunday afternoon. Those of you who have worked in enterprise software know that this is a miracle.

There are many challenges faced by each team and not all teams accomplish their goals but if you attend one of these events you are sure to witness at least one of these miracles.

Startup Weekend 101

If you’re curious enough to try it yourself, here are some things you can do to ensure you have a successful Startup Weekend.

Team Milk – Post Scrum Group Hug
(It’s a Hubba thing)

1. Make it personal. Get to know your team mates as people first and as professionals second. It’s paramount that every person on your team is personally invested in the project and each other. Ideas, startups and businesses will come and go. It’s the people who can execute them that really matter.

2. Participate. Commit to learning through doing. Only one team ‘officially’ wins at the end of the weekend but there are many unofficial winners. If you apply yourself correctly, win or lose, you will learn through experience what its like to start a business and really work with a team. This will only happen if you do the work. If you are passive and try to learn through observation you will be cheating yourself out of learning new skills and connecting with your team mates. Come to learn and you win, no matter what.

3. Build a community. Visit and interact with other teams to share ideas and build new relationships. The start up community is not a zero-sum game. A vibrant start up community benefits everyone. It becomes a gravitational force for talent and investment. Toronto has all the makings of a great tech community.

Sarah, sheds tears of joy upon hearing Kiran report our customer validation results.

4. Eat and sleep. Don’t fall into the trap of copying the overly romanticized stereo-type of startup life. Even the best of us turn into ‘someone else’ when we are deprived of food and sleep. Take care of yourself physically so that you are performing at your best when you are with your team. No doubt you will be working late into the night but don’t push yourself beyond your functional limits. A litmus test I use on myself is the time it takes me to read a document. If it is taking longer than usual, its time for some shut-eye or food or both.

Focus on Execution, Not the Idea.

Too many ‘would-be’ entrepreneurs fixate on the big-idea. It is a myth that successful start-ups depend on this one, big, untouchable idea. Focus instead on execution. Execution is about building and validating a business model. Loosely speaking, this is identifying a product or service people are willing to pay for at scale, that can be delivered at scale.

Ideas are about … well … ideas. Anyone can come up with them and they are meaningless until someone builds it and a customer pays for it. Treat ideas as disposable hypotheses. Implement a process to prove or disprove it as fast as you can. Come up with a better hypothesis. Rinse. Repeat. Sometimes this involves building tech, sometimes it doesn’t. If possible, validate your business model without building any tech. Its faster and cheaper. No idea is untouchable. Question and validate everything!

Be people focused. There are two groups that are most important to the viability of your business. Your customers and your team. Notice VC’s are not on this list (at least not yet). VC’s help you scale.  They don’t help you start. Don’t design your business to attract VC attention. You will fail at both. Just build the best possible business. The VC attention will naturally follow. In fact, it’s their job to find you.

Team Milk consisted of business professionals, software engineers and students. The key to our success was deploying the right team member to the right task at exactly the right time and sustaining a high-level of motivation and morale. The business model improved throughout the weekend because we stayed focused on identifying and serving our customers.

How do I know we did a good job?  A panel composed of Canada’s top VC’s, including Mantella, BDC, OMERS, Klass, PlazaCorp and Xtreme Startups ranked our team 3rd out of 20 very strong startup teams.

The ‘Real’ Key to a Successful Startup

A successful startup team is composed of ‘good’ people. Period. Full-stop. By ‘good’, I mean humble, collaborative, respectful, loyal and hard-working. Skills are important but remember, skills can be taught, character cannot.

I hope some day you witness the Startup Weekend miracle for yourself.  And if you do it in Toronto, I’ll see you there.

A big thank you to Khalid Smith, Chris Ebens and The Working Group, 1880 Productions and all of the participants.  You all helped make it great.  Special thanks to my team mates, Cathy, Jay, Padman, Allen, Sarah, Roxanne, Kiran, Brett, Dex, Mirvise, Ali and Iwona.  

Viva la team Milk : )

Come to learn and you win no matter what the outcome.

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They came, they coded, they conquered. The girls who participated in the Girls Learning Code “Take Your Kid to Work Day” were incredible. I was lucky enough to mentor these little superstars yesterday and am so inspired every time I leave a Girls Learning Code event.

Hubba sponsors this brilliant initiative brought to you by the team at Ladies Learning Code and we could not be more thrilled to do so. Girls Learning Code hosts various tech workshops which are less about simply learning how to code and more about changing the world – through teamwork, creativity, and, of course, technology.

Their program objective is to help girls:

1. Discover a passion for learning about technology
2. Experience the satisfaction that comes from being a builder – not just consumer – of the web and technology
3. Become more confident and self-assured
4. Develop a willingness to try new things
5. Increase their knowledge of technology-related careers

They manage to leave the girls feeling empowered, inspired and motivated to work in the tech field, start projects of their own and become entrepreneurs. The girls who attended this Girls Learning Code were between the ages of 8-15, and let me tell you, I have no doubt in my mind that these girls will use technology to change the world.

The girls testing out Microsoft Surface at Nascent

Every attendee was so engaged as we visited numerous Toronto tech companies including Mozilla, Nascent, Playground, The Working Group and Pilot Interactive. We used Mozilla as our homebase where we dove right into a hacking activity getting the girls familiar with HTML and CSS using Mozilla Thimble. We then began our Toronto tech tour: first stop Nascent. We started off at Nascent with a bang. The girls were over the moon interacting with various Microsoft Surface tablets and light painting with the Light Bomber app developed by the Nascent team. Shawn Konopinsky, the CEO of Nascent, said it was the best user testing the Microsoft Surface has ever had considering there was about a million hands on it at once.  We proceeded on to Playground where we learned about web development and played around with Pixlr, a photo editing site. At The Working Group the girls heard from a female software developer speak about what it’s like to work in the industry and played a game where they matched various tech job titles to their descriptions. Our last stop was Pilot Interactive where the girls saw the ins and outs of a creative digital agengy. The girls were so enthused with a social video game platform created by Pilot, they continually asked when it was being released so they could put it in their ‘calendar’ and play it as soon as possible.

I feel so lucky to have shared this day with such talented, young females. As I sat with a grade 9 student and began to work with her on her laptop she casually told me that her school’s email server was down, then proceeded to tell me she personally installed both Windows and Mac OS on her latop, taught herself how to code, and inquired about the data sharing platform we are developing at Hubba.

If you know any girls between the ages of 9-13 I highly recommend checking out Girls Learning Code. And keep your eye out for these girls, they will for sure be the next big CEO’s and CTO’s.

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The Red Bull Space Jump: Why content is your business.

Red Bull’s content creation discipline is more than developing catchy slogans like ‘Red Bull gives you wings’, a lot more. Their idea of producing content is limitless and they proved so by sending dare devil Felix Baumgartner to the edge of space this past Sunday.  The whole hype around the prep, the angst, the live stream on YouTube, lead to a groundbreaking way for a brand to create and share content unlike ever before.

The lesson we can learn from Red Bull is that the company not only has ambassadors and a community that support its products, but it supports its community and ambassadors as well. This is a stand out business strategy and only reinforces that in order to stay afloat business must do just that: stand out.

The bar has been raised

Of course we don’t expect all brands to be setting up pop-up shops on Mars or sending a lucky fan to do the moon walk on the moon in Nike kicks, but let’s just say this: we are definitely entering a revolution where companies are really outdoing themselves and their competitors. The bar has officially been raised.

So what are some ways in which your brand can kick start a new way of doing business? The shift can be simple, give your audience something different and engage in a way that suits their lifestyle. The shift doesn’t have to be huge, think baby steps.

Worthy content spearheads sharing

Take the band The XX for example. They took a major leap of faith releasing their first song from their new album to one single super fan and left it in that fan’s hands to share it with others. If that fan had decided to not share it, well, they would of been hooped. Luckily, that fan did share the song and it went viral almost immediately. Consumers enjoy sharing content in new and exciting ways. The XX even created an interactive website  to showcase how the song was spread across the world.

So it appears that you really have to stretch your thinking in terms of what’s possible and how to grab your consumers attention. We are all well aware that consumers are mobile. They consume media on the go and they consumer content on the go. You can start by giving your consumer the ability to consume your content on the go. Mobile websites, mobile pages for your product information, and rich media are all a mandatory standard for reaching today’s digital consumer. All the content you create should be crafted with the intention for not only selling but also educating.

Once you have quality content you can then craft quality experiences that create lasting impressions. Your content is your business.

The post Red Bull Raising The Bar appeared first on Hubba.

It’s true. You suck at mobile.

You suck at mobile. You may not believe it but it is true, you do. I hate to be the one to break it to you but that’s what friends are for, right? “No, he can’t be talking about me. My mobile strategy is innovative, it is different”. No, it is not. You suck.

Do you know how I know? Because I suck at mobile too. The good news is that I am far better than I used to be. How did I improve? I admitted that I had a problem. It is a hard thing to do. In a world where the qualifications for being a mobile expert are generally nothing more than saying “Hi, I am a mobile expert”, it is very easy to delude ourselves into thinking that we have done anything more than just scratch the surface to unleash the power of this technology.

We all need to take off our rose-coloured Google glasses and just… slowly… step away… from the iPhone. It is only once we remove ourselves and look at the landscape holistically, that we can figure out how to really take advantage of everything mobile has to offer.

Still in denial? Let me prove it to you. Here are some sure-fire signs that you suck at mobile:

1) You think that you are good. Mobile is all about innovation. It is about experimentation, pushing the limits and figuring out how all of the pieces fit together.  Stability and security are killers of innovation.  If you think you are doing a good job, you will slow down your creativity. That is why you will lose.

2) You think that mobile is an extension of the desktop web.  That is like saying that the web is an extension of paper brochures. Granted in the beginning, it may have been.  However, the web evolved into its own entity. The way people interact with the web is different. The things that you can do on the web are different. How you can track behaviour is different.  The same goes for mobile.  It is its own thing. It can be part of a comprehensive digital strategy but it shouldn’t be used as merely an online strategy executed on a smaller screen.  The way people consume data on mobile is different, the type of data people consume is different, the expectations are different.

3) You think a QR code is a mobile strategy. I do not want to be yet another person who jumps on the QR code hating band wagon. But I do hate QR codes. I don’t hate the idea of them. To the contrary, I think it is a great concept.  I absolutely loathe the reality of them. Equating a QR code to a mobile strategy is like saying  that your plastic bank card is your financial strategy. It is nothing more than a trigger.  The same goes for short URLs, NFC, image recognition, augmented reality or any other up and coming technology along those lines.  How the experience is triggered is far less important than the actual experience that gets triggered.

 4) You don’t scan items so you don’t think that anybody else does. I am a stats junkie. I can spend the rest of this blog post just talking about all of the numbers on how a significant portion of the population scans items to get more information.  The problem is that you probably wouldn’t believe me.  Much like QR codes, scanning is just a trigger. You should be more concerned about the associated behaviour:  people want to interact with things to get more information. It is true, they do, even if you don’t (yet).

I am confronted with this argument a lot.  Before I get into the data with the naysayers, I usually approach the discussion with two main points. First, I ask them if they think that their 16 year old son or daughter growing up today would want  to get product data wherever they are, whenever they want it.  The response 100% of the time is ‘yes’. Not only do they feel that the younger generation want information but they believe they expect it.   The second point I bring up are reviews and social gaming.  I am a heavy internet user. I don’t believe that I have ever written a review nor do I think I ever will.  But I am pretty sure that with 20+ million reviews and a current market cap of $1.7B, Yelp’s Jeremy Stoppelman would argue that people do actually leave reviews, even if you don’t. I am also a heavy Facebook user yet I have never played Farmville. That being said, I am sure Mark Pincus’ $2B+ Zynga empire demonstrates that people do play, even if you don’t.

I am not evangelizing the amazing world of scanning. It needs a lot of improvement.  All I am saying is,  just because you do not do something, do not discount the behaviour of the other billions of people that are connected to the internet.

5) You believe that promotions are the best use for mobile.  I can’t tell you how many times I have got excited by what I thought was a great mobile strategy only to scan/pull up a lame promotion. Sure, I will concede that, in the industry’s nascent state, promotions are the easiest way to get eyes on your page,  but man is it short sighted. Mobile provides you with an amazing opportunity to build a relationship with your customer.  It is the voice that says “Hey, how’s it going?  I see that you have some questions about this product, how can I help you figure this out. I am right here with you”.  This is a long term strategy. It builds trust. It builds a partnership. Distilling your mobile strategy down to a simple promotion cheapens you and your brand.  Promotions do have their part in the mobile world but it is one aspect of a comprehensive strategy that incorporates social information, product data and brand content.

6) You think that you are giving your users what they want.  As a salesperson, you hone your pitch to your prospect. You consciously and subconsciously take in visual and audio cues to construct a message that you perceive would resonate best with your customer.  During the days of television, you crafted a message that would appeal to the largest market of a specific demographic watching a show. The internet gave you the ability to target your message at a much more granular level.  Mobile allows you to know a user more intimately than ever before.

Imagine being able to know things about your prospect like their location, other things they like, what they like about those things, what time they are most likely to purchase. A computer can have multiple users; however,  the information you get from a phone is primarily based  on a single individual that has their phone with them almost all the time.  As a business, you need to leverage this information.  On the same item, you should be able to deliver different content based on the consumer type.  Are they a price sensitive consumer, a convenience shopper, an eco-friendly shopper, are they based in a wealthy area, are they shopping during peak time or a slow time?  You need to tailor the message accordingly to give the user what they want.

7) You still lay awake at night worrying about Showrooming. I have written quite a bit about Showrooming (“How Retailers Can Combat Showrooming“) yet the amount of effort retailers spend  trying to put a stop to this still boggles my mind. You see things like retailers forcing suppliers to make unique products, limiting internet access within the store, implementing drastic pricing incentives, crazy SEO ambushing, and the list goes on and on.  Everyone is in search of the magic answer. Well here it is:  Put all that effort into increasing your value to the consumer. Simple.  There is a myth that everyone cares about price.  It is incorrect. They care about value.  People will pay for $5 for something they perceive is worth $10 rather than $3 for something they perceive is worth $1. You can actually use a mobile strategy to help with this.  You can educate your floor staff better, you can arm your staff and the consumer with rich media to understand the products, you can link directly to your supply chain to order out of stock items right on the spot. A more informed consumer is not the enemy, they are a massive opportunity.

When we started Hubba, we thought we had the all answers.  We didn’t. We had to take a step back, strip out all of our preconceived notions of the web and start from scratch.  We had to ask ourselves “If there was no paradigm of a desktop web to bias us, how would this mobile stuff really work?”.  That got us moving on the right track.  We still don’t have all the answers but are in a significantly better position to not only be apart of this new mobile world but to play an active role in improving it.

We all suck at mobile but together we can make it better. Keep moving forward, innovate, don’t limit your imagination. We are just at the start of something awesome. 

The post You Suck At Mobile appeared first on Hubba.

Brands that aren’t afraid of being naked get noticed

Turns out consumers want transparency. Brand transparency can be a scary thing and consumers are demanding transparency now more than ever before. Brands, so often placed on a pedestal, are now being placed glass box for the whole world to see. Customers are the ones who have the overpowering voice. People like to associate themselves with the products they buy; therefore, associating themselves with that company’s standards. Consumers want your brand to be see-through because being see-through leads to trust. Nowadays, consumers have the ability to see whatever information they want, whenever they want it. And if you think they might not be able to find it…they will.

Brands embracing their own flaws

We aren’t saying that brands should spill their guts and share every bit of information, however, there is a way to find the golden balance between giving just enough information to stir up emotional responses from consumers and hiding behind a corporate mask. Many brands are implementing transparency initiatives to help consumers better understand all the measures taken to produce their products or services. Recently, Johnson and Johnson launched a transparency website for their baby and beauty products. Their VP acknowledges that “there’s a public discussion underway about the ingredients in beauty care products, and we think it’s important to be part of that”.

You may believe that highlighting all the positive things about a brand will win consumers love but it turns out consumers also love it when brands show their true colors. There was a recent report released called “Flawsome” about why brands that behave more humanly including showing their flaws are more awesome. The report places huge emphasis on the fact that consumers embrace brands flaws and ones that show character. We are all human and we all make mistakes. Domino’s Pizza made a few mistakes and produced a month long promo campaign responding to customer feedback. Don’t be afraid to buck up and admit when you’ve done something wrong.

You can run but you can’t hide

It boils down to the fact that either you make the shift to becoming a more open and honest brand or there are apps and services that will do it for you. For example, Good Guide  rates brands on their supply chains, environmental commitments, and work conditions. A brand that is succeeding in terms of transparency is Patagonia. They provide information to encourage consumers to care for their clothes in a resource efficient matter, and they also encourage their shoppers to buy less. What a concept.

Be a part of the consumer discussion

The more information at hand, the more a purchase decision can be influenced. Get involved in that purchase decision. Give loads of product information. Give loads of information about how you made that product, where you sourced the materials, and where it was manufactured to avoid situations like this. Give them what they want, they are going to find it regardless. It doesn’t hurt to be relatable and give your brand a personality.

Social, social and a bit more social

Now this may be beating a dead horse but we are still going to say it one more time just to really drill it home: Consumers are social. They share, they read, they absorb info and regurgitate it to their peers. Word of mouth now travels at the speed of light. The consumer holds the megaphone and can connect to others on a massive scale. Withholding information or providing consumers with deceiving information can be disastrous. Better to embrace that glass box you are sitting in. Be open. Be honest. Then let your consumers share your story.

How to take action

These four steps outlined by author Gabe Trionfi gives brands a simple and effective way to connect with consumers through relevant and purposeful transparency.

1. Pinpoint relevance. Listening to your customers will ensure that you know the right “what” and “why” to share with them.

2. Promise what you can deliver. Design what transparency means for your business and deliver it to your consumer consistently.

3. Engender action. Information can only do so much. Encourage your consumer to do something with it. How will you support consumers taking action?

4. Start with small steps. Regardless of what you do, remember to do something. Even a little transparency can have a huge influence on the people you want to connect with.

The bottom line: Brands can’t hide behind walls anymore. Consumers demand transparency to make informed decisions. The more information available to a consumer the more they are aware of the value the brand has on issues they care about. Remember, shared values build relationships.

The post Dear Brands, Get Naked. appeared first on Hubba.

Big data is raw data generated by real-life activities. Each time you click around a web browser or talk on the phone or drive your car or get in an elevator, you are adding to the 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being generated in the wild every day. So why is big data such a big deal? Big data helps us see the world more clearly and act accordingly.

Let’s demystify this enigmatic term.

Forget the math.  Ask the right questions.

You will eventually need to know about neural networks, supervised | unsupervised machine learning, MapReduce, multivariate distributions, k-means clusters….. etc etc.  But for now, don’t get distracted. Stay focused on the one question that matters and ask yourself, ‘What is it about the world that I am trying to see more clearly?’.

The questions that are relevant to your situation should be the starting point and driving force behind your big data project. It is literally your compass. Invest some time and effort creating a list of the most important questions that need answering and validate them frequently to make sure you are asking the right ones.  Don’t be surprised if other relevant questions arise as you mine your data. After all, exploration and discovery is the whole point of data mining.

Small Data

To make sense of your big data, you first have to understand your ‘small’ data.  Small data is a single measurement or observation. It is the individual atomic units of data that collectively make up your data warehouse. Data at the atomic level is cardinal and ordinal. In plain english, this means that data organizes the world in 2 ways; naming (cardinality) and ordering (ordinality).

Names denote something’s uniqueness or membership in a group. Names give things an identity.  For instance, my social security number identifies me uniquely.  Any group I belong to, such as a customer segment, also identifies me (albeit not uniquely).  I belong to the ‘male, over 40 in Toronto’ customer segment along with every other male over 40 in Toronto.  Note that identity does not have a mathematical value, even when it is numeric.  Calculating the average social security number does not result in anything meaningful because this data is cardinal.

Ordering things denotes sequence, importance or magnitude. Customer ratings, such as 4 out of 5 stars, is an example of ordinality. The rating denotes the magnitude of a customer’s satisfaction with a product or service.  This value is mathematical and calculating the average customer rating on a product yields a meaningful result.  Ordinal values are anonymous and necessarily so. The math becomes awkward if you start treating one instance of the number 7 differently than another 7.

Thinking of data in the small sense will help you examine your big data with a keener eye.  You will have a better chance at asking the right questions.  Most importantly, you will see that your data has context.  Context is anything that gives data meaning.  Just as the number 125 is meaningless without a unit of measure such as 125 mph, 125 lbs, 125 centimeters, data is meaningless without context.

And this is where big data comes in.

Big Data

Big data is the mother-load of context.  Big data is simply lots and lots of small data.  And each atomic unit of small data has a relationship with all the other atomic units.  This relationship is what gives the data context and this context is the key to gaining insights. More context = more insight.

Figure 1: k-means clustering

To illustrate, let’s look at 3 types of insight; grouping, correlation and prediction.

Grouping is useful because it identifies a segment of data that has something relevant in common.  For example, in Figure 1, let’s assume the points on the graph represent customer locations and the ‘+’ symbols are store locations.  Each coloured area represents the customer groupings based on proximity to the store closest to them.  A customer segment that has geography as its common feature gives businesses insight into where their customer touchpoints are and has implications on things like new store locations, delivery territories and outdoor ad placement.  For you tech heads, grouping is accomplished using clustering algorithms such as k-means.

Correlation is useful in seeing how different factors relate.  Figure 2 is a scatter plot of individuals by income and age.  You can clearly see how closely the points follow the ‘line of best fit‘ showing a strong correlation between these two factors.

Figure 2: Income-Age Scatter Plot

Correlations are mathematically found using ‘frequent pattern’ algorithms such as Top K Parallel FPGrowth but they are also often found visually.

So please, LOOK at your data.  Find as many ways as is practical to visualize your data.  It’s an effective way to find patterns and its fun.

Predictions require you or a machine to find correlations first.  These correlations are used to teach a computer how certain factors relate.  The computer can then predict the value of a missing factor given the known value of the others.  If the points on the graph in Figure 2 were used as a training set to teach a computer how income and age relate, the computer could be taught to predict a person’s age based on their income or their income based on their age.  This is an example of supervised machine learning and is accomplished mathematically using regression algorithms.  Accuracy depends on the size of the training set (points on the graph).  The larger the training set the more accurate the predictions will be. Remember, more context = more insight.

Big Data in the real world

Now that you know some theory, lets take a look at how it all works in the real world. At Hubba, we apply data science to help businesses and their customers see each other more clearly. We do this by putting data in the proper context.

For customers, this means receiving accurate, useful and beautiful information about the products and services they care about when they ask for the information.  Hubba technology also gives customers a voice. For retailers and brands, this means seeing who their customers are, where their customers are, what customers think of their brand and what their customers care about in the world besides their product.

Grouping algorithms are used to identify the best customers so that brands and retailers can reward them to maximize loyalty.

Correlation algorithms are used to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time, at scale.

And most importantly, prediction algorithms are used to determine customer intent.

This last application of data science is my personal favourite.  By seeing what customers have browsed, reviewed or purchased, retailers and brands using Hubba can find correlations, predict customer behaviour and take effective action.  And by employing machine learning to the growing volume of customer data, a continuously improving prediction accuracy rate is a mathematical certainty.

Figure 3: Income Map

The map in figure 3 shows the average income by postal code within a 5 km radius of a shopping mall near my home.  What if brands could see what areas of the city their customers live or even better, where their competitor’s customers live?  What if brands and retailers could see which customers were most likely to make a purchase and know what incentives to trigger conversion?  I am excited to report that this technology exists today.

Hubba is built from the ground up to solve the formula: Data + Context = x Intent.  The holy-grail of retail.

So why is big data such a big deal?

Big data helps machines, systems and people operate more productively and with fewer errors.  And with so much new data being created daily, inefficiencies and errors will continuously shrink over time through machine learning.

Although I admit its convenient having Amazon make good book recommendations, I’m most excited about how big data will help us solve the really important problems like curing diseases, preventing crime and accurately predicting natural disasters.

Do you have any save-the-world, pie-in-the-sky, big data projects you would like to see built?  I’d love to hear from you.

The post Big Data Demystified appeared first on Hubba.

Sorry brands, the customer now wears the pants

The buying behavior has drastically shifted in the and there are a few evident digital trends that are dictating this shift. People are even throwing around terms such as ‘tectonic shift’ and ‘tsunami’ to describe the changes that are about to overcome the internet.

Within the last decade there has been a major trend that has led to huge changes in the overall consumer landscape: meet the new digital consumer. Now more than ever, the buyer holds the playing cards and has full control over accessing the information needed in order to complete their purchasing decision. No more calling up vendors and picking their brains to scrape together the information about the latest LCD flat screen. The new onmi-channel consumer has a plethora of information dangling in front of them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. What do we mean by omni-channel consumer? They are consumers who want it all. They demand a seamless, interactive, personalized cross-channel shopping experience.

The new retail reality

This new reality of digital retailing requires technology that changes customer’s behavior and expectations. But how does one pick up on these consumer’s digital behavior and expectations? This is where the concept of digital body language comes into play. As an advertiser or marketer being able to pick up on the digital nuances will be the key to staying ahead of the digital curve ball that’s being thrown at you.

OgilvyOne CEO Brian Fetherstonhaugh recently said, “Our business has transformed in the past six years from 25% digital to 80% digital.” In this interview OgilvyOne CEO speaks to some other digital advertising trends that go hand in hand with picking up on digital body language cues. These are social CRM, catering to the mobile shopper and using search as an insight tool.

Understand your consumers’ digital ecosystem

Now that the buying cycle has moved online and there is less face time with consumers, there are ways in which you can combine social with customer relations and commerce. Fetherstonhaugh emphasizes how people are using social media to create actual commerce and how that shuffles people along the selling cycle. But how do you gauge customers’ interests and act accordingly? Being attentive to what is being said on your brands digital channels can give invaluable insight into a consumer conversation that may never have been heard in-store. Marketers have the ability to hone in on buyer’s pain points and motivations without having to lead discussion groups or having people fill out feedback cards. Understanding your customers’ digital ecosystem is the first step to uncovering their beliefs, motivations, frustrations and behavior.

The shopper is mobile, so be mobile with them

Now that mobile fits directly into the shopper’s journey, store owners are looking at people on their phones and panicking thinking about how they are comparing price with competitors. Instead they should be embracing the mobile shopper with open arms and curating a more engaging shopping experience for them. When you connect with a mobile shopper it’s an intimate connection with that individual. A Neilson study illustrated that consumers are more receptive to advertising than we thought. Nearly half of mobile connected device owners were okay with advertising if it meant they could access content for free. Advertisers and marketers have a huge potential to engage consumers rather than just scratch the surface of what is possible. It also never hurts to take notes from the ones who are doing it right. Check out this mobile campaign that turns a regular magazine ad into one you can step right into.

Search as an insight tool

Use search to your advantage. It’s easy, it’s free and it’s powerful. Using search not as a paid medium but as a research medium can help with consumer analysis and give fantastic insight into the language of a consumer. You can monitor the signals they are sending of what their intents are, what topics of interests they have, and it’s all in real time. Fetherstonhaugh says, “this is a great new weapon in the arsenal for anyone in the advertising and marketing field”.

When all is said and done

Assume that your consumers are quick, tech savvy, and connected on a variety of digital platforms. Think cross-platform integration. Hit all the channels and then some. Provide engaging material. Give your consumers something to talk about to their networks and make it worth their while.

Are there other digital campaigns that have blown you out of the water? Share them with us in your comments below!

The post How to Pick Up on What Consumers are Throwing Down appeared first on Hubba.

Technology is drastically changing the way we shop and mobile in particular is directing this shift. But just what does this mobile influence look like?

We recently came across the latest report from Deloitte Digital. They conducted a study asking consumers  how they’re currently using their smartphones for shopping, and how they are likely to use them in the future. We found the content so useful we decided to concoct an infographic pulling together the most informative stats found in the report.

We hope you enjoy and feel free to share!

The post Mobile Influence: The Future of Retail appeared first on Hubba.

You are standing in the aisle of your favourite hardware store deciding which drill to buy.  After making up your mind, you reach down into your pocket and get your trusty shopping buddy, your smartphone. In an instant, you are inundated with pricing information from other local retailers and online etailers.  You see that you can get the drill for 15% less at a store 10 blocks away.  What do you do?

There has been a lot of talk recently about the concept of “Showrooming”, the act of a consumer using real life retail locations to collect information only to purchase the item online or elsewhere at a discount. It is freaking out a lot of retailers.  Even the largest of retail chains are making drastic changes to their business to address the issue.

In January, Target sent its vendors a letter demanding that they either supply a specialised version of the product so that prices couldn’t be compared in store or the vendors would be required to dramatically reduce their prices to match competitors. Electronics giant Best Buy has recently announced at their Annual General Meeting that combatting showrooming is their #1 priority.  To do so, they are focusing on an extensive training program for their 50,000 employees. The largest of the retailers, Walmart, has revamped their online and real world business processes to make a strong push for in-store pick up for online purchases.  This significantly reduces the cost of shipping and makes their pricing more attractive. Almost half of the purchases transacted on Walmart.com are picked up in-store.

There is little doubt that the driving force behind some of this hysteria is Amazon.  As the world’s largest e-tailers, they have a distinct advantage over the retailers in terms of supply chain cost, partner network and overall operating costs. More importantly, they are growing like crazy.  Amazon earns more revenue in about 1 month than Walmart.com does in the entire year.

With all of these different retail dynamics, what is it that drives a consumer to showroom.  It generally comes down to the three fundamental principles of retail.

Cost – Would you drive down the street or order online to save $0.20 on a $1.99 tub of cream cheese? Probably not.  What if you could save 15% on a $699 flat screen TV?  Possibly.

Convenience – At what point is it more convenient to just take the item home with you right then and there without having to go to another location or wait several days for an order to be delivered?  Shopping is can be highly emotional and very much focused on instant gratification. That being said, there is a very clear line when the cost outweighs the convenience.

Care – In addition to the product itself, there can be a lot that goes along with the sale. Customer service, the sales experience, the easy return policy, the warranties or enhanced support.

Understanding these dynamics is critical to addressing the showrooming issue. You can analytically determine the types of purchases that are most susceptible to this type of showrooming behaviour (it is pretty obvious why Best Buy has been having such a difficult time).

So back to the original question, how can retailers combat showrooming?  The answer is simple: They can’t.

How can retailers combat showrooming?  The answer is simple: They can’t.

What they can do, however, is use their strengths to their advantage and compete in ways that they have not prioritized before.

Amazon and pure etailers will always have some advantages over brick and mortar locations. Retailers have to stop trying to compete head on with these advantages. Instead, they should focus on enhancing the things that make them unique.

Here are some ways for retailers to improve their chances of increasing sales in store with today’s educated consumer.

Partner with the customer – The word ‘salesperson’ should be taken out of the retail vernacular.  More than half of today’s consumers are coming to your store having researched the product that they want to buy.  In addition, they have a device in their pocket that can provide more detailed, rich and up to date information that your ‘salesperson’ ever could. It is great that Best Buy is going to enhance the training of their staff but they need to ensure that they do not fall into the trap of product training.  Train them how to problem solve. Train them how to read people. Train them how to help.  As a consumer today, I need somebody who will be able to direct me quickly to the product I think I need, identify if there is a better product to meet my requirements and then suggest complimentary products to enhance my experience.

Invest in technology – As great as it would be to have wonderful problem solving staff, it is only addressing 30% of the consumers. A recent study indicated that more than 70% of consumers would rather get information on their own via their smartphone than talk to a sales person.  70%!  That means that retailers need to get that information in the hands of consumers in a clean and expedited fashion (hence the drive to create Hubba). We all know that QR codes suck but the main issue is not the QR code itseld but the data it links to does not provide value.  It doesn’t really matter what the trigger is (Short URL, QR, NFC, image recognition, ultrasonics, etc) , what matters is the retailers ability to partner with their consumer and get great data in their hands so that they can make informed decisions.

Remember, these tactics also change the landscape of the retailer’s workforce.  Turning salespeople into problem solvers and having technology so customers can get information on their own means that the amount of people that you have supporting the operation can be far leaner.  When people are your largest controllable expense, this can have a dramatic effect on your operating cost.

In addition, it is imperative to invest in your supply chain technology.  Not only is it critical to ensure that items are in stock and ready for purchase in store, it is can help with overall pricing.  Some companies have nailed this.  Many have not.  Although retailers may not be able to compete on price, they can definitely make things a little closer.

The other enormous benefit to good in-store information and modern supply chain technology is the cross channel selling.  One thing Wal-Mart has done extremely well is the concept of the “Endless Aisle”.  They have blended their real world and online medium into a single value offering.  If products are not available at that location, you can order them at walmart.com immediately.  They have a removed yet another obstacle in the path to purchase that can lead to losing a sale to a competitor.

Enhance the offering – We have discussed the many advantages that etailers have over retailers; however, retailers have their own advantages.

Consumers have the ability to see, feel and compare products in real life when in a store.  Retailers need to maximize this as much as possible.  By creating a demonstration type of environment, they will be able to offer something that even the best etailers could never do.

Consumers have the ability to go home with the product immediately.  As we previously discussed, shopping can be very emotional.  The opportunity to have something immediately has value for most consumers.

Consumers have the benefit of  retailer warranties, guarantees and returns. As far as we have come in the web world, the majority of people are still more comfortable purchasing items in real life.  Although the gap is closing at a considerable pace, retailers can still give piece of mind that etailers can’t.

There is inherent value in the types of activities listed above.  Retailers need to exploit them as best as possible. Consumers will pay a premium for the real life experience, pending that premium is not too high.  But they will pay.

To all the retailers scrambling out there to combat showrooming, stop wasting time and money to prevent this.  It won’t work.  Protectionism like that has never worked. Ever.  Embrace the change and focus your efforts on building the best experience in this new reality.

The most important thing for brands, retailers and consumers to remember is that there is a significant difference between price and value.  It is not about the cheapest price.  It is about getting a product for a price that is in line (or cheaper) than the perceived value.  The majority of consumers would buy a product for $5.99 if they believed it was worth $7.99 over a similar product that was $3.99 but felt that it was worth $2.99. The highest priority for today’s brands and retailers is to properly convey the value of the transaction.  This includes the product itself, the service and the extras that they receive from buying in store. That is the way to win with today’s consumers.

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Words are powerful

Those who say actions speak louder than words probably didn’t study rhetoric – the art of using language effectively and persuasively.

Words are powerful. When you dive deep into the art of persuasion in language you begin to unveil some incredible tactics that can give your brand an advantage when it comes to storytelling.

I find  something extremely satisfying about reading a well crafted product description. When content combines succinct details with a dash of sass, I’m hooked. Apparently emotions are stirred by words (groundbreaking I know),  but winning over your audience is easier said than done.

These generic rules break down rhetoric into bite size pieces:

Rhetoric Rule #1:  Don`t try to change anybody`s mind. You will be more successful if you work with what you’ve got. People have their own sets of beliefs and values. The most effectively communications come by creating a complementary message to what people hold dear. Trying to change these principals is a sucker`s game. The goal is influence, not command.

Rhetoric Rule #2: Many hear the word persuasion and define it as manipulation or getting someone to do something against their will. Persuasion is not manipulation; it is about connecting people with  the values and beliefs they already hold.

Rhetoric Rule #3: Always establish who you are and why you have the right to speak. Persuasion is about connecting a person’s experience to what you want them to know.

How to spellbind your audience

Here are some tips and tactics for using language as a tool that will spellbind your audience:

1. Observe, study and take note of the ones who are doing it right.

Barak Obama and Steve Jobs are two very persuasive gentlemen. They, of course have an outstanding speech writing team, but their effectiveness is heavily influenced by their delivery. I do not necessarily mean the visual presentation or the sound of their voice but their choice of words to present the message. Their speeches are riddled with rhetorical devices such as alliterations, enthymemes and parallelisms .  Take note of what resonates with you when reading or listening to their message and use the same technique when crafting your own content.

2. Time to brush up on your grammar.

Become familiar with rhetorical devices. To get started there is a list of 50 rhetorical devices for rational writing here. Try to integrate a few of these in your writing. For exmple use parallelism – the same part of speech or syntactic structure, or anaphora – repetition of one or more words at the head of consecutive phrases, clauses, or sentences.

3. Build and establish ethos and pathos.

Ethos, put simply, is you or your company’s authority and credibility. The era of the generalist is over. Employ language in your voice that is very accessible and denotes a connection to the common person. Pathos is a term used for your emotional appeal in a given message. It can be used to create feelings of confidence and intrigue in a brand (ex: established in 1901), or to create a sense of urgency and reinforce value to the consumer.

4. Provide compelling evidence for why your product or service is superior.

Prove to your audience that what you are offering is unlike anything else. Highlight the unique selling proposition with a real voice and make sure your claims are true and verifiable.

5. Use concrete language.

Keep your message SIMPLE = CORE + COMPACT. We are more likely to remember concrete details. Ask yourself: What one thing do I want my audience to know?

Content creators must be aware that story telling has moved from one way storytelling to dynamic storytelling.  Consumers are avidly sharing branded content. The key is to share your branded content not just through social media but with all types of digital tools and platforms. For more on dynamic storytelling check out this video on how Coca-Cola is leveraging its brand across the media landscape.

When crafting content remember that writing is intended to be read by others, with minds different from your own.

The takeaway

Getting the most out of your language and using persuasion involves establishing credibility, framing your goals along side of those who you are intending to persuade, using vivid language and to tie these all together in a way that connects emotionally with your audience.

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