Leapfrogging into the Retail Landscape

As per usual, recessionary times are times where those with lots of money buy those without lots of money. Such is the case with Bell buying up The Source. BCE Inc, a privately held income trust, is taking this "daring yet risky" to rapidly penetrate the mall scene, where Rogers Communication Inc. and Telus Corp. have been aggressively making their presence known through branded outlets across Canada.

A few marketing related observations:
-The Source was previously owned by the now-non-existent Circuit City, which went into bankruptcy protection and liquidated last year
-The Source used to be called "Radio Shack" in Canada
-Despite (or because of) the recent rebranding, The Source has been profitable over the last 7 years
-The Source competes mainly with Big Box stores such as Future Shop, Best Buy, and Wal-Mart
-It has been able to maintain a niche market amongst gadgety type men who come to the stores to buy trinkets for their at home race car projects and the like

Since The Source is an "electronics store" rather than, say, a "cell phone store," it allows Bell to sell its whole line of communications products from cable, internet, phone, and satellite services.

I don't really see any obvious alignment between the two brands, and I wonder how much rebranding they'll do to The Source. Keep it as The Source? I feel like the brand equity isn't that big of a deal since it's a fairly new brand as it is. And the "by Circuit City" part, although long-gone, still lingers in the mind and may have negative connotations. Change it to some sort of Bell store? This may alienate people who purchased there for non-cell-phone related stuff. And the little DIYers around the country generally don't take kindly to major corporations impeding their pet projects.

Overall I'd say smooth move Bell! I look forward to seeing what is in store!

Have you seen the Chip Bandit?!

Last night (February 26, 2009) we held the Frito Lay Boardroom and it was a great success. Frito Lay, our lead sponsor, was generous enough to bring an entire display of chips and gave the chips away at the end of the night to attendees.

The majority of our guests took a bag or two for their families to enjoy. The parents were kind enough to exercise restraint, and let the income-less students take the majority of the bags.

It seems, however, that one grown man who was at the Boardroom decided to extort Frito Lay's generosity and the restraint of the other parents. This man was seen making several trips to and from his car, loading it up with free chips. Many students left empty-handed because of his greed.

Have you seen the Chip Bandit?

A fantastic and hillarious campaign

Frito Lay Canada has just unveiled their new marketing campaign for Doritos - "Become the Doritos Guru".

This is a contest where one lucky person will win $25,000 in CASH as well as 1% of future Canadian flavour sales.

All you have to do is create a hillarious commercial about the new unidentified flavour and submit it to Youtube! My guess is that the most hillarious one will win.

Tony Matta, Vice-President of Marketing at Frito Lay Canada was recently featured in The Globe and Mail (and Marketing Mag) along side this new campaign (and the commercial that aired during the Superbowl). The company has received a lot of industry feedback already on how breakthrough this program is on both the technology side, the consumer engagement side and the cross functional agency collaboration aspect. They know exactly where their target market lives (Facebook and Youtube are highest on my favourites bar) and are dealing directly to them.

Tony Matta will be a judge at the MARS Apprentice boardroom on February 25 here at the DeGroote School of Business. Sapphire Corp. is winning 2-1 over Flip Inc...both teams have been working hard - will Sapphire take the lead or Flip tie things up?

Only the judges will decide!

Market Rebels and Innovation

"Activists who challenge the status quo play a critical but often overlooked role in both promoting and impeding radical business innovation."

-Hayagreeva Rao

A recent report published in the McKinsey Quarterly discussed how "market rebels" have played a role in the creation of many new and innovative product segments or have prevented potential innovations from taking place.

One example is the PC market. All of the technology needed to have a home personal computer was available long before it was marketed to consumers. But hobbyists still had these computers at home, in their garages, that they made themselves with scavenged parts. They were rebelling against the market, creating products for themselves when commercialism had yet to catch up to their needs.

Sometimes overlooking the importance of market rebels in adopting new products can lead to a floundering product. The Segway personal transporter is an amazing device with many potential uses. The developers, however, overlooked the "cultural and social mobilization needed to excite their targeted consumers." Getting regular people to scoot around on strange, moving, pogo-stick like contraptions is no easy task. You need to find and motivate people to be willing to "rebel", look like a dork, but make it cool. This is no easy task. (Believe me, as an engineer I know how hard it is to be simultaneously a huge dork and permacool)

Also mentioned is the idea of "hot topic" and "cool mobilization".

ahhh mention of being "cool" again. Cool is one of those words I've been using since I was a kid, and is still around. I hope it's around forever and my own children don't make fun of me for using it profusely.

Hot causes are those that inspire feelings of pride or anger. How do you make your cause - whether it be getting people to buy smaller batteries or recycling - inspire those feelings?

Cool mobilization activates emotion and engages audiences in new behaviours and experiences that are improvisational and insurgent. So now you have to engage people to travel to the specialty store to buy your tiny batteries since they aren't at Wal-Mart, and spend time each day carefully separating their plastics, glass, aluminum, and paper.

The study is actual very very interesting and I highly suggest that you have a read if you're interested in innovation. This is the really cool and special kind of innovation, that creates entirely new norms within society. It is available on the McKinsey website, but you do have to sign up for a membership (which is free). I recommend it wholeheartedly!

Click here to get to the McKinsey site.

Hayagreeva Rao. "Market Rebels and Radical Innovation." The McKinsey Quarterly. January 2009.

Millennials...the new generation of the workforce

"They’re the hottest commodity on the job market since Rosie the Riveter. They’re sociable, optimistic, talented, well-educated, collaborative, open-minded, influential, and achievement-oriented. They’ve always felt sought after, needed, indispensable. They are arriving in the workplace with higher expectations than any generation before them—and they’re so well connected that, if an employer doesn’t match those expectations, they can tell thousands of their cohorts with one click of the mouse. They’re the Millennial Generation. Born between 1980 and 2000, they’re a generation nearly as large as the Baby Boom, and they’re charged with potential.

"In this uncertain economy and highly competitive business environment, companies across North America recognize that the differentiator is their people. Those organizations that emerge as winners in the battle for talent will have their fingers on the pulse of this newest generation. They’ll design specific techniques for recruiting, managing, motivating, and retaining them. "

Source: Generations At Work

Yes, I own a ThinkPad

I really liked this article about the HP Jornada...an old old laptop that this reporter uses for taking notes which has an extremely long battery life.

I have a ThinkPad R51 and I purchased it as a refurbished model. This thing runs great and even though it's approaching 6 years old it's still durable as the day it was made (the same can't be said about other laptops, eh Jocelyne?)

This leads me to think about the next evolution of mobile computing...namely netbooks. Are they really useful? Are they even a good buy? These netbooks are the newest craze on campus and I've asked some owners what they like about it. It's great for taking notes, but irritating to surf the net (ironically) due to its small size. There's a lot of side-scrolling, apparently.

Then I remember an article where I recall Mike Lazaridis (Co-CEO and Founder of Research In Motion) said, among other fun things, that the BlackBerry Storm is a netbook. I'm not sure if I agree with that, but I guess the big difference besides a Dell or Asus netbook and the Storm is a 9" vs 3" screen...and the cool clickability of the SurePress screen.

Another cool indicator

I'm quickly realizing that I have a thing for articles that reveal some sort of insight into general business practices and indicators.

Such as in "Mattel's toy story not a happy one," by Aarthi Sivaraman published today. Talking about the awful decline in the toy market because of the gloomy global economy (way boring...ok we get it, every sector is declining), an analyst noted that the inventory levels at Mattel had risen sharply. Ok, we know too much inventory is bad, it's money just sitting there wasting space and using up capital.

But the “really shocking” aspect of Mattel's results was its inventory level, up 13.3 per cent from a year ago to $485.9 million, said BMO Capital Markets analyst Gerrick Johnson.

“That means things deteriorated much more quickly than they had planned,” Johnson said.

As usual, it's not what happens, it's what you thought was going to happen, and how that compares to what actually happened.

Clairvoyance is key in the world of business!

Aarthi Sivaraman. "Mattel's toy story is not a happy one." reportonbusiness.com. February 2, 2009. http://business.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090202.wmattel0202/BNStory/Business/home?cid=al_gam_mostview.