Nonlinear Thinking

Mobile-First Strategy and the Growth of Responsive Web Design

As more and more consumers hold their “computer” in their hand rather than on their lap or use a venerable desktop version, the pressure on enterprises to improve/refine/perfect their active connection to these increasingly mobile consumers becomes ever more important.  For many businesses, commerce happens in a much more real-time and immediate manner than ever before and the ability to access those mobile consumers and influence their purchase decisions require that their digital access points be built for mobile.  Sadly, too few companies at this point are designing and developing business applications with the mobile interface as the primary design driver.  Traditional PC-based application development still rules over a “mobile first” strategy. 

A "mobile first" approach is where new websites and applications are designed for mobile devices first, instead of initially designed for laptops and desktops. Estimates suggest that by 2015, more people will access the Web via mobile devices than desktop computers.  Opinions on the validity of a “mobile first” strategy vary, but there are some reasonably strong advocates running around.

“Google programmers are doing work on mobile applications first, because they are better apps and that's what top programmers want to develop.” – Eric Schmidt, Google Chairman

“We're just now starting to think about mobile first and desktop second for a lot of our products.” - Kate Aronowitz, Design Director Facebook

“We really need to shift now to start thinking about building mobile first. This is an even bigger shift than the PC revolution.”  - Kevin Lynch, CTO Adobe

Still, every organization needs to assess what is the better process for engaging their key constituencies. One general school of thought is that if you don't design your products and services for what is rapidly becoming the dominant UI, you will not maximize the success of your business in the long run.

Not surprisingly, most Web development teams have designed for the desktop first. Mobile, if it even happens, is simply ported off the desktop version.  Consideration of what the mobile experience requires, in terms of user interface and navigation, seems cursory at best. But that thinking is based on a smart phone 1.0 context – challenges in browsing, Web access that was problematical, and slow network speeds.

As iPhones and Androids have driven a tidal wave of technological ease and sophistication in smart phones and smart devices, the necessity of designing for mobile has become more acute.  That is causing companies to consider adopting a mobile-first strategy to ensure that they capture mobile markets before going after the more traditional desktop community.

Into the breach a new approach, responsive web design (RWD), has arrived aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktops to smart phones).  The “philosophy” underpinning RWD is that designing for mobile first can not only open up new opportunities for growth, it can lead to a better overall user experience for a Web site or application.

Whether this all makes sense for your organization is a function of multiple components of your business model – who your customers are, the way you make money, and the channels that facilitate the most profitable engagement.  If your key markets are increasingly seeking you out via the mobile platform, it may be time to alter your app development strategy.

On Becoming a Social Business

Call it the tipping point, the moment of truth, a watershed event or any other synonym for when things have arrived at a point of irreversible, no-going-back, change.  Is 2013 going to be the year when social media truly becomes social business and social business morphs into business as usual?

Probably not.  Reams of data suggest that most companies are using social media.  Most of those are still really just dabbling.  Truly embracing social media as a core element of business going forward requires a belief and commitment that is still difficult to find in companies with more traditional business models and a bias towards the tried-and-true.  But with proof points on the efficacy of the practice/process/technology/culture of social media becoming more and more plentiful, it would seem that the more programmatic embrace of social media is coming closer to a need-to-have more than a nice-to-have.

The concept of a “social business” is still probably nascent enough that there remain a number of definitions running around.  In a recent report from Altimeter Group, Charlene Li and Brian Solis outlined the difference between a social media strategy and a social business strategy:

A social media strategy lays out the channels, platforms, and tactics to support publishing, listening, and engagement. A social business strategy is the integration of social technologies and processes into business values, processes, and practices to build relationships and spark conversations inside and outside the organization, creating value and optimizing impact for customers and the business alike. The most important criteria for a successful social business strategy are twofold: clear alignment with the strategic business goals of an organization AND organizational alignment and support that enables execution of that strategy.

Social media broadly permeates society (perhaps too much!) and that means it permeates business operations on all levels.  Ad hoc social activity runs rampant across the enterprise so it stands to reason that sooner or later, every company will want to formalize and harmonize these activities into a coherent strategy and plan.  Social business technologies help people connect, communicate, and share information and, whether informal or formal, use of those technologies allow companies to respond more quickly, take advantage more easily, and create competitive advantage.

Companies have historically tended to demonize those things that impact their business but remain beyond their control.  Though it may be stating the obvious, social media is one big, fat dynamic that is altering the playbook for business and not just in the marketing discipline.  De facto, every business today is a social business; they may just not have internalized it yet.  Possessing a strategy is merely the first step in the formal embrace of social.  That way, all those “Likes”, “Friends”, “Links”, and “Follows” can mean something more than a distraction.

Along those lines, here is a video from GE on their progression towards becoming a social business.

 

 

 

Happy Birthday!

It just occurred to me today that last week we reached the five year anniversary of the launching of Nonlinear Thinking.  In a world where content becomes just more ephemera as the evolution of thinking (particularly around the key foci of this blog – strategy, marketing, technology and business models) consistently accelerates, I guess that is something of which to be proud.

And I am.  Happy birthday, Nonlinear Thinking.

The Inevitability of Digital Marketing and the Digital CMO

A favorite debate focuses on the ascension of digital marketing over traditional marketing in today’s marketing model. Too many companies, even in the technology sector, still seem unable to grasp that such a transformation is taking place.

Perhaps the issue is that, even now, spending on analog/traditional marketing continues to exceed spending on digital marketing by a significant ratio according to Gartner Group’s 2013 U.S. Digital Marketing Spending Survey.  Based on the survey, average marketing spend as a percent of annual revenue, across all industries, is 10.4% while digital marketing spend is 2.5%. 

It should be noted that analog marketing tactics continue to be more expensive than digital options – media advertising being just the most obvious example.  Had the survey been broken down between B2C and B2B companies/industries, my guess is that analog and digital spending would be on a more even spending arc.

A related trend - how the advent of the digital marketing technologies that are reinventing much of the marketing model have altered the dynamic between CMO and CIO – is also highlighted by the results of the survey.  The CIOs of those same companies have seen their budget decline to 3.5% of annual revenue and with digital marketing spend at that 2.5% level, parity in technology-related spend seems not too far away.

In fact, in a 2012 report, Gartner predicted that by 2017, the CMO's technology budget will exceed the CIO's.  Pretty much every business should broadly consider itself a digital business but, right or wrong, marketing has emerged as the de facto owner of digital.  That makes the CMO responsible for driving the organization’s digital transformation, which clearly is built on many of the emerging technologies that are changing the conduct of business – mobile, social, cloud, SaaS/PaaS/IaaS.

SaaS and cloud technologies have had much to do with the changing balance of power between the two functions.  The ability to bypass the CIO organization to access key marketing technology platforms/solutions with ease in the new environment allows marketing leadership, or any other functional leadership, to avoid the traditional IT development/procurement queue and execute much more quickly on critical initiatives.

This would all seem to set the stage for the emergence and confirmation of the digital CMO, a marketing leader that not only recognizes the inevitability of this transition in the marketing model, but embraces and builds an organization to take greatest advantage of the new digital/social/mobile media.  Marketing strategy is still marketing strategy.  It is the tools, technologies, and channels that have been disrupted.  If there is a crossing of the Rubicon occurring in marketing today it is probably better to start thinking and acting digitally now than learn in some harder, and perhaps more final, way.

Authenticity, Point-of-View and Telling Stories

For an organization, your point-of-view (POV) is the expression of what your company believes, what makes you different, and why people (customers, partners, employees & investors) should care.

The vast majorities of businesses just blend, or disappear, into the crowd. While their critical metrics – sales, growth rates, margins, earnings, and market capitalization – position them as viable competitors in their chosen markets, being average should never be the aspiration.

Truly great and lasting enterprises have a great story to tell.  They stand for something. They are also able to articulate their unique value in a manner that is both clear and compelling and positions them in a way that separates them from their peer group. They are different and are able to continually and consistently demonstrate that difference through both words and actions.  Telling their story and institutionalizing their POV allows them to remain steadfast as they navigate both choppy and calm waters.  And this makes them valuable to all their stakeholders.

For consistently successful companies, the POV forms the core of both content and context.  It drives content in the way that their story informs every market facing document they share, online or offline.  It also informs their internal communication.  It provides context for both strategic and tactical decision making, including what products and services to offer and how to market and sell them and to whom they partner with and who they hire.

The best way for an organization to remain relevant in today’s dynamic marketplace, is to be authentic.  To be authentic, they must be able to tell their story and express their POV, in the most compelling manner possible, across every traditional and contemporary medium that might touch their key constituencies.  In such a fast moving, global business environment, telling your story is how you do business, how you turn suspects into prospects, prospects into customers, opportunities into deals, and investments into revenue.

At its essence, an enterprise POV is the compelling argument as to why a business problem exists and how that enterprise can provide the most valuable response to that problem.