Game of Risk: Brand Edition

If Brands were playing a game of Risk in the social networking space. What rules would they follow?

-Economic Variables (Dice) will effect the game.

-Other Brands want your territory.

-Sometimes you need to sacrifice some customers to gain others (Soldiers).

-If too many brands are in one territory, it dilutes everyone's strength.

-Wait for the right moment to launch a campaign (attack).

-Not all territories are worth the investment.

-Focus on a few territories first to grow strength then move to the next conquest.

-You can't leave territories to fend for themselves, you need to continue to grow or at least maintain their strength, or opponents will take over the space.

The Chicken or the Egg of Technology

When it comes to the process of grocery shopping, there are people who have a plan. There are others (me) who do not. Today as I was pushing my cart through the aisles and leafing through the Jewel circular trying to find sales and ideas for what products to buy, I thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be great to have a mobile application that could beam the highlights and sales for that specific isle I was in? Wouldn't it be incredibly useful if a bluetooth signal populated my Jewel-built iPhone application with items I may like based on my past purchases?"

As useful as such an entity could be, I soon afterwards came to the realization that there is simply not enough demand, or payoff for the grocery chain to implement such a system. After all, if I were the store I certainly wouldn't think a large percentage of my shoppers would utilize this tool even if there were a few lone nerds who would think it was incredible. Now if enough of those nerds convinced their friends, family, and others to adopt the mobile couponing program, then it would make more sense to make the investment. This cyclical thought led me to the idea below. When it comes to consumer/brand interaction does technology represent a "Chicken or the Egg" situation?

So where does this leave people like me? The Green Circle above that represents those early adopters who want to leverage their shiny new toys to make their life easier? This is the group of people that are left to wait for the brands or proprieters of services to catch up with our needs. They wait because there are not enough of us to make the accomodations economically feasible or beneficial. So what are some ways the time line can be shortened?

1. Don't just do local tests of new products and ideas. Do local tests of new products and ideas and promote the heck out it! The feedback received from a small test is obviously valuable, but the level of hand raisers you get by sharing that test is also a big step in ramping up an infrastructure for a new product. (Or killing it)

2. Listen to the feedback you didn't ask for. Whether offline or online, observe your customers. Watch or listen to their feedback and see how they are interacting with your product and what efficiencies and innovations can be drawn from their behavior. Look for sites like this one. Like GetSatisfaction.com, your own forums. 99% of the ideas you get from these venues will be free. How many R&D departments bill zero dollars per hour?

3. Give away free tools that get your customers hooked. The Cell Phone companies have mastered this art. Provide the tools needed for a service that your customers can't live without. When they are hooked, the system you have created will be your source of profit.

4. Create a use for a technology that is different from the intention of the creators and the public. Again to use an analogy from the mobile industry, American Idol is widely considered to be the reason that the adoption of text messaging grew at such an exponential rate and became second nature to cell phone users. Instead of pushing the value of being able to send messages to your contacts, AT&T created a voting system that first made its customers comfortable with the idea of texting. After that they naturally moved into the original "intent" of the service.

5. Reward those who put faith in your brand. Crack open a marketing textbook from this decade. You know that there are always going to be the "innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards." The bell curve is essentially even, but by rewarding those closer to the Y-Axis you are moving the curve in a more favorable direction to integrating your product/service with a technology.

Obviously, how quickly these strategies can be implemented vary depending on the product or service in question, but nonetheless its a big step for companies to stop and ask themselves, what can we do to make our most forward thinking customers happy? What can we do that will make them stronger brand advocates, and help them bring others on board? What can we do to make ourselves look better than the competition and hold of the tens or hundreds of budding companies waiting to steal our customers?