Doug Garnett is Now Blogging at AtomicDirect.com/Blog

Thanks for checking out my blog. As companies change our needs change. So we have moved my blogging activity. All my new posts will be published at:

http://www.atomicdirect.com/blog

My older posts will be available here and at the new blog – so feel free to browse either. And I invite you to check out newer posts at the new location.

Thanks!

Doug Garnett

Copyright 2016 – Doug Garnett – All Rights Reserved

Top 5 Posts of 2015

Happy New Year! While making this years’ resolutions, take a look back at my 2015 top 5 blog posts:

1. The 24 Hour Fitness Personal Greeting is Creepy
2. Kickstarter Mythology Needs Some Retail Reality
3. The Search for Meaning in Big Data
4. Cursed by the Checkbox Video
5. Target “Misses” It’s Online Projections. And we Care… Why?

Thanks for another great year, dear readers! Here’s to 2016!

Copyright 2016 – Doug Garnett – All Rights Reserved

Target “Misses” It’s Online Projections. And We Care…why?

Saw this story on RetailWire titled “Does Target have a problem online?” (click here).

The gist is that analysts are worried about Target because they exceeded the national average of 15% online growth. But their online growth at 20% was less than the 30% that had been projected. (Same thing happened at WalMart.)

And we care…exactly why?

The theory of “omnichannel” is that the consumer doesn’t care about our silos. So why should we be reporting and analyzing numbers based on those same silos?

I Want My TiVO! Cutting the Cable on Cable Cutting

Tech industry investment money has generated what it wanted – a perception within the TV biz that “old TV” is dying as people cut the cable. And they’ve titled this trend “cable cutting”. (Statistics show it’s still a relatively limited trend so far.)

And with all this hype over the past decade I’ve been bothered by a fundamental logical flaw:

• Enormous amounts of money are required to develop programming people want to watch (there are a few exceptions – but they don’t translate into a reliable low cost approach).
• Yet the enthusiasts for cable cutting have made it all about low cost (usually nearly free) subsistence viewing.
• If no one can afford to develop the programming to satisfy consumers, consumers won’t be satisfied.

In streaming we now see financial reality rear it’s ugly head.

Steve Jobs & Keeping Silos from Abusing Their Power

I was pondering Steve Jobs’ legacy again recently. And I continue to be fascinated that he showed that integrating less advanced, but more solid, technologies can deliver far more consumer power than exotic technological advancement. In a sense, with much of Apple’s work integration IS the innovation. And in doing so, Jobs showed that being jack of all trades is often the only way to deliver something exceptional.

But Succeeding with Integration isn’t Easy. In the Isaacson biography of Jobs, I was fascinated by how hard he had to work to keep the drive for perfection within silo’s (where, often the product must be perfect according to each silo’s criteria) from destroying good product. And I’d guess some of his well-documented rudeness comes from the frustration of this challenge.

Kickstarter Mythology Needs Some Retail Reality

Kickstarter mythology has outgrown reality.

(But let me be very clear. I’m NOT talking about Kickstarter art, music, and movie projects. It was designed for these and they seem to be running pretty well overall.)

I’m talking about Kickstarter campaigns that raise money by Directly Selling new Products that have never been built – and taking orders for lots of them. In the computer business we used to call this selling vaporware and investing in businesses dedicated to vaporware led to the dotcom crash. Segway and Google Glass were both massive vaporware disasters.

Now, by selling vaporware with Kickstarter, we’re seeing amazing train wrecks among the most highly successful money raising campaigns. These train wrecks are all made possible by the mythologies that drive Kickstarter and other crowd funding sites. (Incidentally, a comment below points out this is a far more dramatic version of the direct mail practice of “dry testing”. There is already FTC guidance on dry testing.)

The Mythology of Kickstarter for Inventors. Inventor mythology starts with a belief that it’s enough to come up with a good idea and some money to build it. And Kickstarter appears to “unshackle” inventors so this can happen.

Big Data Caution…from GK Chesterton

“The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.”
…GK Chesterton, “Orthodoxy”

It was with great interest I ran across this comment the other day. And it got me thinking about the world of big data today.

The red flag for data abuse comes when people cede their human initiative and let data take over. Listen to how people discuss “big data” and you’ll start getting a sense their vision is to have data run the world. I suppose in a corporate bureaucracy this provides perfect cover for a mistake. (“The data said to do it” or perhaps “The Data Scientists said it would work!”).

Bureaucracy Tends to Protect Itself Even If That Causes Its Own Failure

This is a short post – because I mostly wanted to pass along Steven Dennis’s excellent thoughts about innovation in big operations. He posted those thoughts this morning on his blog in an entry titled “The problem with saying ‘no’“. You can find him on Twitter at @StevenPDennis.

In this post he observes that while there are important times big operations (bureaucracies) need to say “no”, it is far easier to reject risk than to embrace the opportunity that’s possible through that risk.

He also observes that the reward system in corporations leans heavily toward risk avoidance – and I’ll add that this is true even when avoiding that risk leads to failure.

The 24 Hour Fitness Personal Greeting Is Creepy

Some of the worst ideas start when someone means well, but doesn’t think clearly. Or. maybe, just thinks clearly badly. Either way, 24 Hour Fitness’s newly impersonal “personal” greeting just doesn’t work for me.

The Facts. I joined back up with 24 Hour Fitness just over a year ago. It’s a beautiful facility with gorgeous big windows overlooking the Willamette River and Portland’s West Hills. And, I have a great personal trainer, the equipment’s solid, the facility good, etc…

Except, somewhere in the past few months, the front desk team received orders from above to “greet members by name”. To some executive it probably sounded like a warm, personal way to build connections with members. Perhaps it came under the category of “engagement”. Regardless it’s one outstanding example of how “personalized” can mean “creepy”.

Where There’s New Media Smoke, There’s Usually a Smoke Machine

I modified a JFK attributed quote for this title. But also thought another modification explains a lot about one of the biggest hassles in modern marketing:

Where there’s smoke, there’s usually deep pockets writing a check.

Marketers today are pummeled with smoke — especially about new media, brand love, and about big data. And there’s a reason the smoke is so thick… There’s a set of big companies, venture startups, and VCs that think they can make big money by selling these ideas. And that opens their checkbooks wide.

But just because the checkbook is open doesn’t mean they’re selling anything important. All it means is that a pile of VENDORS stand to make big money if they can only convince you that what they have is important. (Most often they’re the ONLY ones making money through the idea.)