Open up your mind and say, ahh...

The clickwheel of the first iPod worked by measuring electric field disturbances in one dimension. The first iPhone touch screen functioned similarly, but in two dimensions.

This week, Microchip Technology, a large U.S. semiconductor manufacturer, says it is releasing the first controller that uses electrical fields to make 3D measurements.

The low-power chip makes it possible to interact with mobile devices and a host of other consumer electronics using hand gesture recognition, which today is usually accomplished with camera-based sensors. A key limitation is that it only recognizes motions, such as a hand flick or circular movement, within a six-inch range.

“That’s the biggest drawback,” says University of Washington computing interface researcher Sidhant Gupta. “But I think, still, it’s a pretty big win, especially when compared to a camera system. It’s low-cost and low-power. I can completely see it going into phones.”

Gesture recognition technology has advanced in recent years with efforts to create more-natural user interfaces that go beyond touch screens, keyboards and mouses. Microsoft’s Kinect made 3D gesture recognition popular for game consoles, for example. But while creative uses of the Kinect have proliferated, the concept hasn’t become mainstream in desktops, laptops, or mobile devices quite yet.

Today, Microsoft, along with other companies such as Leap Motion and Flutter, are working to improve upon and expand camera-based technology to new markets. For smart phones and tablets, Qualcomm’s newest Snapdragon mobile device chip includes gesture recognition abilities, via its camera, but few mobile devices make use of gesture control.

Despite the six-inch distance limitation, the electrical-field controller could have some interesting advantages compared to camera sensors. “It’s really complementary,” says Fanie Duvenhage, director of Microchip Technology’s human-machine interface division.

Power consumption is a key issue for battery-powered devices. Microchip’s controller uses 90 percent less than camera-based gesture systems, the company says, and it can be left always on, so that it could be used to, say, wake up a smart-phone screen from sleep mode when a person’s hand nears.

The controller works by transmitting an electrical signal and then calculating the three-coordinate position of a hand based on the disturbances to the field the hand creates. Whereas many camera systems have “blind spots” for close-up hand gestures and can fail in low light, the Microchip controller works well under these conditions and doesn’t require an external sensor (its sensing electrodes can sit behind a device’s housing).

Perhaps most interesting, the controller could easily go into electronics that don’t have a camera, including car dashboards, keyboards, light switches, or a music docking station. In fact, Microchip Technology already sells components to 70,000 customers that make these products. Duvenhage says he imagines interesting uses in cars, such as controlling an in-car navigation system, or in medical or kitchen settings where users might not want to touch a button or screen.

The controller comes with the ability to recognize 10 predefined gestures, including wake-up on approach, position tracking, and various hand flicks, but it can also be programmed to respond to custom movements. Similar to the programming of voice recognition software, Microchip Technology built the gesture library using algorithms that learned from how different people make the same movements. These gestures can then be translated to functions on a device, such as on/off, open application, point, click, zoom, or scroll.

The precision is about the same as using a mouse, but the system has limitations. It can’t yet distinguish between, say, an open hand and a closed fist, or simultaneous movements of different fingers, an area the company wants to improve.

Today, less than a year after acquiring the German startup that developed the technology, the company is making a development kit available for sale, and Duvenhage says they’ll be looking to customers to see what uses they create. Microchip plans to reach mass production levels by next April, and it expects to see the first products using the technology on the market sometime next year.

Scott Forshay is a luxury and premium brand marketing consultant and mobile strategist who’s been featured in PSFK, Luxury Daily, Fashion’s Collective, Business of Fashion and The Wall Street Journal. He is the creator and editor of mobi.luxe. Follow him @mobiluxe.

The essence of any coveted brand is the story it conveys. The elements of heritage, craftsmanship, and creative innovation combine with a vision of an aspirational lifestyle that inspires the desire to associate with that brand.

Historically, this vision was realized on a print canvas, but the rise of digital has created new opportunities. Through video and other forms of brand content, luxury brands have become media companies and content marketers selling a vision of an exclusive lifestyle attainable only by a select few. This new media has not, however, been effectively translated for the mobile audience.

The mobile device requires brand marketers to rethink engagement strategies and devise innovative campaigns that leverage the medium for effective mobile-content marketing. The challenge lies in enticing mobile users. Here are four ways to do that.

1. Produce Content in Episodes

Resist the temptation to unveil the entire story in a single instance. By breaking down the narrative into episodes, the audience has a reason to keep coming back. This approach essentially creates a desire to continue following the story as it unfolds.

2. Communicate in an Intriguing Way

Regardless of the communication mechanism employed, be it a mobile ad, SMS, or in-app push notifications, messaging should be intriguing and subtle. Be cryptic about what awaits the audience if they choose to participate. Creating mystery through veiled communication fuels desire to see what is on the other side.

3. Allow Customers to Participate

Take the consumer on a journey with the narrative. Provide sophisticated clues to challenge the audience by using the outside world as your canvas. Clues could exist on billboards, on buildings, or in taxis. By adding a sophisticated element of game mechanics you allow the audience to become players in the campaign.

4. Reward with Exclusivity

The luxury consumer seeks priority access to, and deeper levels of intimacy with, the brands they most covet. The lure of exclusivity is the most effective mechanism for pulling on the heartstrings of this highly-sought consumer and forming greater connections. Rewarding a select group of participants creates desire for brand association through exclusivity.

Guest post by Danna Vetter, VP, Consumer Strategies, ARAMARK – Part 2 in a series

There are no stronger or truer words in the business world: your people are your product. It sounds so simple, yet time and time again, companies make decisions and take action without including the pieces that make them whole. You are the sum of your parts. With the support and influence of your people, you can accomplish anything at a company.

So at a large company like ARAMARK, we knew right away that the first step to successfully becoming a social business was through our people. We created a center-led Social Media team that, among other things, is responsible for developing tools, training, and resources to help our businesses accelerate their social media strategies. But above all else, they are tasked with championing the social media effort for the whole organization and leading a Center of Excellence that empowers our employees to leverage social media into the way they do business.

Unless our people integrate social media into their work lifestyle, we will never become a true social business. We had to work with others from around the company or socializing these concepts would be comparable to shouting in the Grand Canyon, an echo only heard by us.

ARAMARK’s multi-business structure makes for a natural hub-and-spoke model to spread the message and ideas of social media. We created a social delegate team, made up of individuals from each of our businesses and functional groups. Delegates were tabbed as the designated leader for social media in their business area, helping build the social media strategies and manage the communication and activity for the field. Early on in the build, we made sure the team had vertical depth by including functional area delegates, who brought perspectives from groups such as Legal, HR, and Communications.

Social Delegates

At first, we thought that the delegates should be of a certain role or position in the company. Having a certain clout, the thought was, would help drive influence to the late adopters. But what we found out was that it’s really about finding the right people, not level or title. Being a delegate wasn’t a full time job – it was a designation and we needed people to be a part of this beyond their regular roles. If it wasn’t the right people, they weren’t going to find the time to do something that could be considered additional.

Our delegates are a diverse mix of roles and responsibilities across our company – we have marketers that have decades of experience yet limited social exposure, we also have relatively young professionals with maybe five years in the working world that grew up with the explosion of social media. But the common thread among them all is this – an energy and passion for bringing social media to ARAMARK and a willingness to challenge the status quo and embrace change.

We meet live every six weeks, which has been a great forum for the delegates to communicate with peers and share ideas. While we give regular updates on what is happening socially across the organization, we also created teams within the delegates to present information back to everyone about new and relevant social media concepts and ideas. It has gotten people involved and active in the group and helped create the dialogue that breaks down walls in large organizations like ARAMARK. We are also active in trying to bring in external guest speakers to present for the team where applicable (such as Facebook, who recently came in to present to the team).

One of the roles of our team at the center is to make sure the delegates are prepared to manage social media for their business. As this industry evolves into something different each and every day, we don’t want to just get our delegates smart on what social media is – we need them to become subject matter experts that are able to constantly adapt along with this ever-changing field. When that happens, everyone wins. The delegates are able to create more influence and credibility in their role and add to their own professional skills. For us, we are able to drive support at all points across the company.

Collaboration

While our live meetings are tremendously effective, we can’t truly sustain social media without continuous dialogue with our delegates. To help develop this kind of communication with the team, we leveraged an internal collaboration tool, which is a social network of its own. Our team leads the site in sharing resources and tools, wikis on social media topics, and blogs on the latest news. The blog has been a great area to not just present information, but also create discussion on what new developments mean for the company, our businesses, and even our delegates.

Internal collaboration, like social media, is a whole new idea and business process that many companies struggle to get off the ground. We’re no different. Getting people to share and look for information internally is a cultural shift in itself. But when we do share knowledge and learn from each other, it brings people together and opens up doors into concepts and ideas people might not have even thought their company took part in. And it makes people think of new ideas they should be doing for their own business.

While internal collaboration is always a work in progress, our best moments are when we are able to sit back and watch conversation and ideas go back and forth with our delegates. Sometimes not everyone agrees with a stance someone takes, but that’s what great – everyone is exposed to both sides of a topic and can make decisions for themselves about what works best for them. Productive conflict and challenge makes us smarter as a group and delivers more comprehensive outcomes.

Social media is only going to be as successful at ARAMARK as our people are able to make it. Because, as we mentioned earlier, your people are your products. Which in our case makes for a very powerful opportunity.

ARAMARK is a private, $13 billion global company that provides managed services (food, facilities, uniforms, etc) for clients in several industries, including sport and entertainment, higher education, healthcare, as well as other general business and beyond. This is the second in a series of posts on how the large company is working to integrate social media into the way it does business.

Part 1 – They all laughed

Image credit: Shutterstock

We chat with Chet Kanojia of Aereo, the new TV-where-and-when-you-want-it service that has a few legal troubles. Could Aereo finally disrupt the loathed cable bundle–and TV altogether?

Chet Kanojia is the CEO of Aereo, a Barry Diller-backed, TV-in-your-browser platform that launched in mid-March in a limited New York City release. For $12 a month, Aereo allows its users to watch live broadcast TV on any Apple device of their choosing (plus Roku), in high-definition. Users can also make DVR recordings that are stored in the cloud. I’ve sampled the beautifully-designed service, whose user interface offers just about the cleanest online TV experience imaginable. For now, Aereo is limited to basic over-the-air TV: no cable options yet.

At launch, Aereo was immediately beset by legal challenges from the New York media companies whose content Aereo redistributes. (How exactly Aereo does so is fascinating, and involves lots of dime-sized antennae stored somewhere in Brooklyn.) Earlier this week, a judge dismissed one of the claims of the lawsuit, but two claims of copyright infringement remain. On Wednesday, Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed friend-of-the-court briefs arguing in Aereo’s favor. We caught up with Kanojia to talk about his disruptive technology.

FAST COMPANY: In the age of Netflix and Hulu Plus, consumers seem to expect about a $9-a-month price point for online TV. Why should they pay you $12 a month for content they could potentially get for free?

CHET KANOJIA: Simplicity and convenience. When you get it free and over the air, you don’t get DVR, and you don’t get the ability to place-shift. You’d have to get a device like Tivo, plus a Slingbox, and it’s cumbersome and complicated. But I’d love people to do that more and more. The more people that understand that this highly compelling content is right there for free, the better it is for us. You’ve been trained by the cable companies to buy the whole thing at once, whether you watch it or not. Now it’s time to start trying to take a stand.

How did you choose the $12 price point?

Um, we made it up… That’s a half-true answer. These are early days, and we just put something out there that we would like to get some reactions to. From a value perspective, if you called a cable company today and said, “I just want over-the-air channels in HD and the ability to place-shift,” it’d be $75 or more per month. Just a DVR box is $18 a month with tax. My belief on this whole thing, and it’s a subtle but important point, is that what we are doing is the dislocation of the packaging of technology with content. We’re purely technology; we’re not making you buy a package. That dislocation has a really interesting side effect, because the cost curves of technology only come down. As we drive the cost curves down, you may see us do things that are very innovative in terms of pricing.

For example?

Instead of a monthly basis, it could be based on usage. Twelve-bucks-a-month is a starting point, while we understand what utilization patterns look like. We want to make sure people get what they pay for, rather than just some random-ass number that people make up.

You’ve been live about two months. Care to share user numbers?

We don’t release numbers, but we have a subscriber base that’s several thousand deep. And we haven’t even enabled all platforms yet. We want to come to Androids and PCs.

And geographically? Any plans to move beyond New York?

Expansion plans are a bit of a state secret around here. Mainly because they don’t really exist. Having said that, our technology is designed to be highly modular, and we could be in 50 markets if we chose to do that. But we have a diligent team, and our goal is to minimize foolishness. A lot of companies go hog wild with expansion, and they don’t understand who their customers are.

Let’s talk a bit about your legal troubles.

All I would probably say is this: Our technology is built with three fundamental principles in mind. First, there was a requirement that the broadcast license was granted in the consumers’ interest. Second, it’s established in the law that the consumer is allowed to create recordings for themselves. Third, the consumer is allowed to rent equipment for the purposes of creating these recordings. Those are the three principles that bind Aereo.

What’s a potential vision of the future for Aereo?

“A lot of companies go hog wild with expansion, and they don’t understand who their customers are.”

The dream-come-true would be to really create a parallel ecosystem in which buyers and sellers of content come together in a way that makes sense. If you get a sufficient mass of consumers on the platform, new content will emerge, programmed for them. Say I’m a new internet-based news channel: I might price my news channel at $1.99, and users wouldn’t have to take 55 other channels to get value out of mine. Even the CEO of Time Warner Cable yesterday went on the record saying that there are too many networks, and nobody watches them all.

I think if you got HBO GO on board with Aereo as it is now, that’s all I’d need.

You’re not unique in that. The purpose of Aereo is to create a platform, that once you get to a certain size, content owners can’t ignore it, and they’re forced to come and sell to you.

Would you ever want to finance new content yourself, like Netflix?

I want to be clear in this: the goal is to create just a technology platform. We’re not a content company. That’s somebody else’s business. We are trying to decouple technology and content.

Is the goal to go as a la carte as possible? So I could just subscribe to and pay for certain shows, even within certain channels?

I can’t say what the future’s gonna be like. The baby step is to enable a la carte channel access. The goal is to break towards enough granularity that you have sufficient value in it.

If Aereo’s only legacy was to light a fire under companies that should have already been providing services like Aereo, would you be happy?

The reason for me to start Aereo was a strong personal passion for creating an alternative to the options out there today. To the extent that that happened, Aereo would be a massive success. I would contend we’ve already started the debate in a meaningful way.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

You say you want to get closer to customers, but your actions are different than your words.

You say you want to “surprise and delight” customers, but your product development teams are too busy building against a roadmap without consideration of the 5th P of marketing…people.

You’re employees are your number one asset, however the infrastructure of the organization has turned once optimistic and ambitious intrapreneurs into complacent cogs or worse, your greatest detractors.

You question the adoption of disruptive technology by your internal champions yet you’ve not tried to find the value for yourself.

You’re a change agent and you truly wish to bring about change, but you’ve not invested time or resources to answer “why” in your endeavors to become a connected or social business.

If we are to truly change, we must find purpose. We must uncover the essence of our business and the value it delivers to traditional and connected consumers. We must rethink the spirit of today’s embrace and clearly articulate how transformation is going to improve customer and employee experiences and relationships now and over time. Without doing so, any attempts at evolution will be thwarted by reality. In an era of Digital Darwinism, no business is too big to fail or too small to succeed.

These are undisciplined times which require alternative approaches to recognize and pursue new opportunities. But everything begins with acknowledging the 360 view of the world that you see today is actually a filtered view of managed and efficient convenience. Today, many organizations that were once inspired by innovation and engagement have fallen into a process of marketing, operationalizing, managing, and optimizing. That might have worked for the better part of the last century, but for the next 10 years and beyond, new vision, leadership and supporting business models will be written to move businesses from rigid frameworks to adaptive and agile entities.

I believe that today’s executives will undergo a great test; a test of character, vision, intention, and universal leadership. It starts with a simple, but essential question…what is your promise?

Notice, I didn’t ask about your brand promise. Nor did I ask for you to cite your mission and vision statements. This is much more than value propositions or manufactured marketing language designed to hook audiences and stakeholders. I asked for your promise to me as your consumer, stakeholder, and partner. This isn’t about B2B or B2C, but instead, people to people, person to person. It is this promise that will breathe new life into an organization that on the outside, could be misdiagnosed as catatonic by those who are disrupting your markets.

A promise, for example, is meant to inspire. It creates alignment. It serves as the foundation for your vision, mission, and all business strategies and it must come from the top to mean anything. For without it, we cannot genuinely voice what it is we stand for or stand behind. Think for a moment about the definition of community. It’s easy to confuse a workplace or a market where everyone simply shares common characteristics. However, a community in this day and age is much more than belonging to something, it’s about doing something together that makes belonging matter

The next few years will force a divide where companies are separated by intention as measured by actions and words. But, becoming a social business is not enough. Becoming more authentic and transparent doesn’t serve as a mantra for a renaissance. A promise is the ink that inscribes the spirit of the relationship between you and me. A promise serves as the words that influence change from within and change beyond the halls of our business. It is the foundation for a renewed embrace, one that must then find its way to every aspect of the organization. It’s the difference between a social business and an adaptive business. While an adaptive business can also be social, it is the culture of the organization that strives to not just use technology to extend current philosophies or processes into new domains, but instead give rise to a new culture where striving for relevance is among its goals. The tools and networks simply become enablers of a greater mission

You are reading this because you believe in something more than what you’re doing today. While you fight for change within your organization, remember to aim for a higher purpose. Organizations that strive for innovation, imagination, and relevance will outperform those that do not. Part of your job is to lead a missionary push that unites the groundswell with a top down cascade. Change will only happen because you and other internal champions see what others can’t and will do what other won’t. It takes resolve. It takes the ability to translate new opportunities into business value. And, it takes courage.

“This is a very noisy world, so we have to be very clear what we want them to know about us”
-Steve Jobs

Photo of matches courtesy of Shutterstock

For many American consumers mobile payments are still something to run away from–and fast.

That’s what research from the University of California has turned up. A new study there implies that shoppers in the U.S. aren’t yet ready for the mobile payment movement.

A large percentage of the American citizens questioned in a nationwide phone study called “Mobile Payments: Consumer Benefits and New Privacy Concerns” were found to “overwhelmingly oppose the revelation of contact information (phone number, email address and home address) to merchants when making purchases with mobile payment systems” and “an even higher level of opposition exists to systems that track consumers’ movements through their mobile phones.” 

The numbers are stark. When asked if they thought their phones should “share information with stores when they visit and browse without making a purchase,” 96% objected to the tracking, 79% said they definitely would forbid it and 17% said they “probably” wouldn’t allow it–meaning just 4% were indifferent or positive about the idea. When the question was instead about information sharing (phone number, address and so on) at the actual point of sale, 81% objected to phone number sharing–a mere 15% said they’d probably allow it and 3% definitely so. Similar figures emerged when the information shared was home address.

In terms of email addresses, survey respondants were more inclined to share, with 33% definitely or probably happy to share the transaction information. Still 51% said they definitely wouldn’t share email addresses.

And overall, 74% of resondants said they are “not at all likely” or “not too likely” to adopt mobile payment systems, while just 24% say they are likely to do so.

This all sounds very, very bleak for the future of mobile pay tech in the U.S., which is being being pushed by companies such as NCR, Square, Verifone, and even behemoths like PayPal. This news also, um, squares with a recent alert for the Center for Democracy and Technology which worries that mobile payments can “expose” more personal information to multiple groups at the point of sale than traditional transactions, even via credit card, do…right down to third party app writers.

But the numerous different parties in the mobile pay game needn’t worry yet. There may have been a stuble flaw in the questionnaire asked by the University of California team. The problem arises from the study question that asks, “would you voluntarily give McDonalds your phone number and personal details when you walk in their store?” Who among us would respond any way other than: “Of course not!”? After all, that sort of question taps into the part of our personality that is apt to click on a “don’t share my personal details with third party advertisers” when we sign up for in-store loyalty cards. When it comes to privacy issues nd technology, our default setting is: suspicious. And for good reason.

And that’s the key to unravelling this problem right there: When you do use a current-tech store loyalty card you are effectively voluntarily giving the store your personal information, and “tracking” yourself. It’s why the cards exist of course–they’re partly there as a sales incentive, to get customers back in the door via money-off offers, but mainly so the store can collate information about customers and work out what kind of products to stock, what offers to run, and what future products to plan for. And if you have multiple loyalty cards, you’re giving this information away all over the place. A similar situation exists for Groupon coupons, and their ilk. Admittedly, this is on a store-by-store basis (assuming you tick the “don’t share my information” box), but millions of happy consumers do this anyway.

A new Pew Research survey shows that 80% of American adults use the Net, and 71% of those use it for shopping–meaning they’ve typed in all their personal details into store interfaces. And, if you think about it, Google already knows much of this stuff already. And Paypal certainly knows where you spend your online money, on what items and how frequently. Facebook is also trying to get into this game too, and it knows everything about you. All these firms aggregate Big Data independantly, and though this fact sometimes gets blown out of proportion by the media or lawmakers, it still goes on and we (sometimes even merrily) participate.

For these reasons and others education is one route to making consumers warm to the idea of mobile payment. That is, eventually it might make sense for mobile pay industry leaders to join together for a marketing campaign that points out to consumer that they already share much of this highly personal information with merchants and numerous third party companies (like consumer research firms).

And then there’s the novel fact that may surprise consumers: A mobile payments standard may actually allow them better control over this data, because instead of being shared across different loyalty schemes and different merchants and third parties, it’s all corraled in one place–in their phone (or whatever mobile pay app they’re using). It’s all but certain you’ll be able to configure this system to choose how much personal information you share on each transaction, or by store, or by date, or by whatever criteria you choose. The stores themselves may then opt to not offer you discounts, coupons or other incentives, but that’s your choice.

And the Californian research team behind the paper have another solution in mind: ”Adapting provisions of California’s Song-Beverly Credit Card Act, which prohibits merchants from requesting personal information at the register when a consumer pays with a credit card, to mobile payments systems.” This would work because as the survey says personal sharing is a worry, and consumers would actually welcome controls, and “Song-Beverly could be adopted to accommodate those who wish to share their transaction data.”

Essentially, whichever of the many vying firms gets a singificant early grip on the mobile payments market will have to take part in a large-scale, open, frank, “hearts and minds” PR campaign to explain the benefits of signing up to sharing at least some personal information. And they’ll likely have to back it up with some fleet-footed lobbying.

Image: Flickr user Luz Adriana Villa A.

Via Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com

If you’ve considered launching a new innovation to grow your top line, you’re not alone.

According to Forbes, 250,000 new products were introduced to the world in 2010 alone. We’re overwhelmed by so many new product entries, which range from sophisticated new technologies like the Nest thermometer and infomercial sensations like Pajama Jeans. To complicate things, brands are introducing new line extensions like Kraft Sizzling Salads, Disney Appmates, and a wealth of “new and improved” products from venerable brands like Gillette and Kleenex.

But the fact remains that the success rates of new product introductions and innovations have improved little over the last 20 years. Booz & Company reports 66% of new products fail within two years, and Doblin Group says a startling 96% of all innovations fail to return their cost of capital. This is due to a number of factors, including economic conditions, an explosion of consumer touchpoints, shifts in decision-making behavior, and the deluge of information marketers have to sift through to ensure they are up to speed with the latest trends.

Here are 8 steps any company can follow to increase their odds of growth and transformation through a new product launch:

1. Address head-on the number one reason for failure. You can’t fake it if an innovation has no clear or compelling relevance to people’s lives. Companies often refuse to acknowledge a new product or service idea serves no strongly identified customer need, and they try to retrofit their marketing to compensate. Start by identifying a relevant, resonant role you could play in people’s lives. Then develop offerings and experiences that deliver it in a peremptory way.

2. Focus on the most critical rule of thumb for growth today–customer acquisition. Get as many quality customers–even light, occasional users–as quickly as possible. More customers mean more sales, share, and with that, conversion to loyal, heavy users. In addition, new customers have a key attribute that every marketer should leverage–word of mouth. Forrester Research concludes the most valuable customer today is the one that may buy little but whose blog postings, online product reviews, and favorable word of mouth gets 10, 50 or 1,000 others to buy. The longer people are with a brand, the less they talk about it, but new customers are more likely to recommend a brand to their family and friends.

3. Face what you must really accomplish through Facebook. Nielsen reveals that the number one reason a Facebook user “likes” a brand is to receive a discount or special offer. Their research also shows 84% of users who “like” a brand on Facebook never return to a brand’s page after exercising the incentive that got them there. This means the typical marketer’s Facebook strategy is doing little to grow their customer base, and worse, it could be inadvertently and dramatically hurting their margins. Marketers must ask themselves: What–beyond a discount–will both incent new customers to like my brand and habituate their interaction with it?

4. Think faster. With the impatience of bosses and investors today, you can’t just obsess about how to quickly add quality customers. You also have to obsess about how to add them faster than anyone else in your category. Growing a customer base quickly is unlikely to come from building an e-commerce site and expecting people to find it only through search and blogs and Facebook. Getting lots of new customers quickly requires some sort of mass reach. From the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) to the World Advertising Research Center (WARC), the findings are quite consistent: Mass reach from traditional media is–at least for now– still the most effective way to grow a customer base. It’s also the quickest way to jump-start search, online relationships, and e-commerce. Even the “most viewed” YouTube videos get their biggest jolt with a mention in mass media. The very thing that can’t be done in social media is what traditional media does best: jump-start conversations. Social media then fuels these conversations.

5. Don’t be fooled by the hype. Contrary to the buzz about the power of social media and apps, adding TV to the media mix still proves to be the most effective way to jump-start growth. One particularly interesting case is that of KAYAK.com, which launched only online and grew steadily over two years without mass advertising. Since adding TV to its marketing mix last year, sales experienced a dramatic lift. TV exposure can–even weeks later–drive a potential new customer to search for you.

6. For maximum ROI, perfect your mix. It’s a waste of time to debate whether TV or Facebook delivers it best. It’s more important to identify the ROI of the media mix that advances people through the purchase funnel–what medium best engages to drive a consumer to deeper engagement in another medium, and then habituates engagement or converts the interaction to a sale. Identify the mix that leads to the best conversion rate and then work continuously to improve it.

7. Map your measurement. Many marketers say they know the media or touchpoint path their consumer takes on their way to purchase–until asked to map it visually. Plotting the path takes a chart with a horizontal axis of touchpoints, and a vertical axis with the steps and stages of the buying process. Identifying the elements of each axis and then tracking the order and incidence of each forces marketers to confront what they know and don’t know, like: What is the entry point into people’s lives for a new category or product? Where and when can one maximize reach? Where are people falling off the path to purchase? What message is best at each touchpoint to move a person to the next stage of their decision-making? The ultimate benefit of mapping is identifying the mix of touchpoints and messages that drive the best conversion rate. It’s almost never one medium or message but a mix that, with the right analytics, can always be improved and optimized.

8. Prepare yourself: Your launch never ends. Marketers must face that their launch will be forever in beta, a state of continuous improvement that prevents the brand from losing momentum, or worse, stalling out. Studies confirm that marketers who assume their launch is over, who pull back, who stop innovating, or who let share of voice fall below their market share, do not fare well.

While embracing any one of these ideas can make a difference in the launch of a new initiative, really increasing one’s odds of success will come from bringing them together in a comprehensive strategic marketing plan. As so many successful company leaders have confessed: The best way to predict the future is to create it for yourself.

–Author Marsha Lindsay is CEO of Lindsay, Stone & Briggs, whose specialty is launching new brands and revitalizing stalled brands for clients from the Fortune 100 to regional marketers. The firm is known for its annual invitation-only conference, Brandworks University.

Image: Flickr user Emanuele Longo