Hey Microsoft: Enough With the Hipsters – Microsoft Kin

Last Updated on Tuesday, 13 April 2010 03:58 Written by Daisy Harley Tuesday, 13 April 2010 03:58

Do you wear stupid hats? Glasses that cover more than 35% percent of your face? Have a beard, even though you can’t fully grow one? Wear jeans that fit extraordinarily well? Love coke? Then you’ll adore Microsoft’s Kin, in theory!

If there’s one word that comes to mind when you see Microsoft’s Kin marketing materials—the flashy new website, the swish tubular packaging, typography-heavy imagery, or the images, events and information loaded up on their demo devices—it’s hipster. The citizens of Kin live in Vice Magazine advertorial spreads, and look like they just walked, self-consciously, out of an Urban Outfitters. Kin’s models look like caricatures (at least, to the extent that it’s possible) of those kids, from that neighborhood, in pretty much any city.

Microsoft wants Kin to be cool. And to the extent that blunt HERE’S WHO THIS IS FOR marketing can make something cool, they might be able to pull it off. And I get that Microsoft is segmenting their phones, catering Windows Phone 7 to an older audience and the social network-centric Kin to the 16-to-25s, (Wilson’s sterling analysis here), but it’s turning out so much more narrow than that: Kin aims for a type of “cool” which hinges entirely on the cultural touchstones of a bizarrely specific subculture—the urban fauxhemian.

Microsoft says the product is “aspirational,” which I suspect is a synonym for “trendy,” but what it really is is alienating. They’re not targeting a subculture and its admirers as much as they’re inextricably linking themselves to it, at the expense of every other potential customer in the entire country. Most teens use MySpace, or Facebook, or even Twitter. They like taking pictures and videos, and text entirely too much. But most don’t know or care who Japanther is, and most don’t dress like sci-fi flappers.

What’s weirdest about this whole campaign is just how familiar it is. Kin’s tagline is “It’s Time to Share.” The original Zune’s tagline was “Welcome to the Social.” Desaturated, flash-burned colors? Check. Screen-printed art? Check. Nontraditionally attractive people, acting candid, wearing American Apparel? Check, check, check. All the same rules still apply.

I don’t need to tell you that the first Zune was a notorious flop. But did you know that Microsoft actually blamed its first marketing campaign, in part, for the Zune’s shitty sales? From Ad Age:

Zune’s launch campaign had a big emphasis on alternative marketing, such as its Zune Arts program consisting primarily of a website, zune-arts.net, featuring short films and music from up-and-coming artists, all of which focused on the theme of sharing and friendship. The program has wound up in the New York Museum of Modern Art. Independent shop 72andSunny, El Segundo, Calif., remains agency for Zune Arts’ planned relaunch later this month.

Kids in skinny jeans, just squirtin’ songs between one another! That was the vision. Of course, they abandoned it, because it was bizarre and inaccessible:

The new campaign includes 60- and 30-second spots illustrating a journey inside the Zune. Spots will run on cable’s Comedy Central, ESPN and other cable channels, as well as during network prime-time programming such as Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives. The effort also includes ZuneJourney.net and banner ads, as well as print buys and cinema.

They went mainstream, but it was too late. So why on earth are they repeating the same mistake with Kin? If anything, the image of a Kin user is less relateable than that of the average Zune user.
Let’s all move to Brooklyn! Christ. And anyway, hipsters already have iPhones, and they’ll probably scoff at what, to them, will look like an awkward coopting of obvious urban cliches. That leaves, what, kids who wish they were hipsters? Teenagers who dream of moving to a big city after college, and somehow think a phone can draw them closer to their goal? Is that even a thing?

So, Microsoft: Just show the young people a phone that does stuff: Facebook, Twitter, photos, video, texting, sharing, whatever. Everyone will get that. The Kin hardware is interesting, especially to non-nerds. The Kin software is attractive, and not just to white, upper-middle-class kids with arts degrees. Just show your coveted young people what the thing does, and maybe you won’t drive this brand into the ground, too.

Article source: http://gizmodo.com/5516318/hey-microsoft-enough-with-the-hipsters

Brett King: Evolutionary marketing – Tribal, viral and mobile

Last Updated on Friday, 26 March 2010 01:59 Written by Daisy Harley Friday, 26 March 2010 01:59

There is a lot of discussion about how social media will play out from a mobile perspective, and how marketers in particular can monetize and leverage social media for real revenues and brand influence in the future. There are those, such as Umair Haque from Harvard Business Review Blog, that believe social media in its current form is a bubble with very little in the way of real income – in effect creating relationships that are not as robust as others would have you believe.

As we start to see massive adoption of smart or App phone handsets, the promise of potential migration of social media onto these platforms are hailed as the real future of 2.0 with endless possibilities. When we throw Augmented Reality and Geo-Tagging into the mix, those who are pro social media envisage an interconnected semi-virtual community where purchase decisions, social grouping, real-time collaboration, even political lobbying are all enabled by mobile 2.0. Neither Haque’s lukewarm perception of ‘thin-connections’ or more upbeat assessments of the impact of AR-enabled social media are completely accurate because a key ingredient is missing in the assessment of the viability of mobile social networking.

The real question businesses ask is how do you make money out of social media? We have seen social media give a voice to customers, empowering them to either individually or collectively influence policy, pricing or strategy.

The flawed logic by Haque and others is that you need to define your social ‘network’ through a social media platform like Facebook or Twitter and that the voluntary nature of participation in these networks does not always guarantee quality relationship that can be leveraged commercially. The fact is that there are social tribes that exist that are a great deal more powerful than defined networks established on social networking sites (SNS).

Everyday when we use our mobile phone we are participating in social behavior that is a great deal more natural and powerful than those established via SNS. Every time I call a friend or business contact, SMS or MMS my friends, check my email, or use mobile internet based communication tools, I’m forming social connections that look just like those you’d see on Facebook or Twitter, but are made up of extremely strong connections with my most intimate and trusted contacts and colleagues. These are extremely powerful natural, social networks that transcend programming and platforms – they are the networks formed by our day-to-day interactions in real terms.

CDRs or Call Detail Records are the day-to-day transaction data recorded by mobile network operators to enable accurate billing on your mobile bill. These CDRs contain all of the information required to map social interactions within tribes with substantially more accuracy than an online social network.

By data mining CDRs and seeing the natural connections between mobile users, strong network activity can be observed. Within these networks exist natural influencers of the tribe, key influencers or as Gladwell calls them connectors. By targeting these key influencers with targeted messages that are group sensitive, marketers could reach the entire group via the viral network effect.

None of this is really happening effectively today because we are either still broadcast advertising, relying on sketchy CRM databases not informed by analytics or are using demographic, tag or keyword association in weaker social networks online.

As an illustration a small start-up in Australia, QMani Analytics, has recently demonstrated a platform they call tribefinder which can identifying the tribes contained within a mobile network operators CDR pool. But the key to success on the revenue side is matching other profile information from an enterprise CRM system, or from customer behavioral analytics (like credit card usage data) and filtering CDRs to create better tribal models. Then we need intelligent marketers who can create compelling viral offers that we can roll out via MMS to a key influencer so he or she can send it on to their valuable network. The best key influencers, of course, should also be great advocates. So once we identify these guys we should service the pants off them so they feel inclined to support our viral efforts (although they won’t recognize them as viral campaigns hopefully.)

For network operators converting pre-paid to post-paid and preventing churn will be a handy by-product of tribe marketing. For retailers, banks, and other service organizations, however, we are talking highly targeted mini-segment offers that will have a massive acceptance rate. Cheaper than pretty much every current media platform, and magnitudes more effective at conversion, tribal marketing via natural mobile social networks is nothing short of a revolution in customer connectivity.

The real challenge is not the technology. Tribefinder’s analytics engine is not rocket science. The real challenge is for companies to understand the shift in marketing dynamics. For almost a decade now traditional broadcast media has been in decline. Marketing to tribes requires a completely different skill set than is on offer in most organizations today, but it is a key part of our future in reaching and retaining customers.

Tribal, viral, mobile – they are your future if you are trying to reach customers.

More on Google

Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brett-king/evolutionary-marketing_b_514989.html

Colorado Springs Budget Woes Continue As Tourism Board Forced To Repay Full Debt Instead Of Waging Marketing Campaign

Last Updated on Monday, 22 March 2010 02:29 Written by Daisy Harley Monday, 22 March 2010 02:29

Colorado Springs – convention and visitors bureau will not be able to retain $142,494 it owes the city government under a recommendation the City Council will consider today.

Two weeks ago, Terry Sullivan, president and CEO of Experience Colorado Springs, the convention and visitors bureau, asked the council for permission to keep a portion of the $342,494 it owes the city to wage a marketing campaign in Texas and possibly northern Colorado to counter the negative publicity that has hit Colorado Springs in recent months.

More on Economy

Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/22/colorado-springs-budget-w_n_508624.html