Back to the pencil, a lead-intensive status-symbol for men...

One of Faber-Castell’s more popular products is a pencil. But it is no ordinary pencil, it is the company’s Perfect Pencil, which will set you back about £180. Each!
It comes, admittedly, with a rubber on the end (tapping ipad?), protected by a little platinum cap. And the tip is also kept safe from breaking with a lid, which incorporates a hidden pencil sharpener. It is rather nifty. But it is still £180 for something that might only give you a few weeks’ writing.
Competition-wise, the availability of 20 bog-standard pencils for £1 at Poundland makes the Faber-Castell version stand out in a world where men’s status-symbols are limited to cuff-links and watches.
To add the numbers, the company, which is fully owned by Count Anton Wolfgang von Faber-Castell and his family, posted sales of €580m (£468m) last year, an increase of 19pc, and operating profits of €42m.
P.S. If you wish to push the boat out a little farther, Count Anton is holding their £60,000  'Pen of the Year 2012 Diamond Edition...
A lesson for all who believe that luxury cannot be added to the mundane….?

ADmented Reality - Google Glasses Remixed with Google Ads

Google's Project Glass is its attempt to make wearable computing mainstream 2014, and it's effectively a smart pair of glasses with an integrated heads-up display and a battery hidden inside the frame.

If you are one of the 16.5m people who have seen the latest Google glasses Youtube clip, you will probably appreciate this slightly more realistic version of Google's augmented reality glasses - now featuring contextual Google Ads, published by Jonathan McIntosh at rebelliouspixels!

All of the AdWords used are actual Google ad returns found via Google searches based on the dialogue, situation or setting in the original video.

NAM/KAM applications
Street accidents permitting, Google Glasses look like a potential boon to NAMs, especially in negotiation. Think of the advantages of instant lookup of sales stats, buyer’s name, bonus-progression, kamword definitions, simultaneous cost & value calculations, but especially continuous interpretation of body language signals and regular prompts to show a vestige of interest in the buyer….all whilst maintaining almost 100% apparent eye-contact…

Meanwhile, the only real decision is whether to shell out $1400 now for a developer’s working prototype, or await the mainstream launch in 2014, when the politicians will probably be telling us about the emerging green shoots of economic recovery…

Have an day-dreamy weekend, from the NamNews Team! 

P.S. Original Google Glasses clip here and useful technical details here.

Meet The Omnichannel Shopper: Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere

Add savvy (‘unwilling to outsource their purchasing decision-making to either suppliers or retailers, ever again’) to the omnichannel shopper and you have a major shift in  power to shoppers that choose how they interact with brands. Moreover they come complete with influential decision-making information readily available at their fingertips. Ignore at your peril...

Traditional channel management
The brand and retail ‘purists’ that devote energies to the preservation of discrete channel strategies like grocery, pharmacy, geography or even retail, mobile and web,  are missing the New Tricks of  providing a unified customer experience irrespective of the channel, to consumers that reward those who allow them to use a combination of store, catalogue, call centre, web and mobile - simultaneously.

In other words, meeting consumer needs...?

Managing the omnichannel
It follows that suppliers and retailers need to reorganise to accommodate this new market need, perhaps replacing the current channel manager role with that of Omnichannel Manager. This will enable a ‘one brain’ focus on ensuring that channels are not operating independently, thereby reducing the risk that the brand is attempting to maintain separate dialogues with an omnichannel shopper, and losing that shopper to a brand that is capable of engaging with them simultaneously in all channels…

Comments invited: 
1. Should all channel managers report into, or be replaced by, the Omnichannel manager?
2. Any practical downsides to building an omnichannel strategy now, like today?                        

(tips: unprecedented times, survival priority, risk-of-change, lack-of-experience, forgetting that with ideas in times of great change, everyone has the same level of experience…)

Touch but don't press - How daily Apples have become unhealthy for the competition

Latest figures from Kantar Worldpanel reveal that in the UK, more than one in seven people now have a tablet in their household and over 52% of the population own a smartphone. Couple this global realisation that tapping keys have become increasingly out-of-tune with consumer intuition and it can be seen why Apple have forced Microsoft, Blackberry and Nokia into catch-up mode…forever in pursuit of Apple’s innovator advantage.
In other words, Apple have made ‘screen-touching’ the only future…

A touching retail experience
Add to this the escalating success of Apple’s retail outlets, and it can be seen that the company is successfully applying the same fundamental creativity to retailing by populating its outlets with non-virtual Apple people! In fact, over the past five years, the company created 35,852 retail jobs, all acting as representatives for one of the best known brands in the world, optimising their unique combination of retail plus online plus a daily dialogue with enthusiastic users that few tech companies can duplicate.
In practice, their stores are more about being the front line for Apple advertising, rather than a ‘normal’ retail experience.

Helping people buy...
However, this experience of the ultra-softsell, in an open-table environment littered with products in constant use by enthusiastic shoppers, and continual access to human advice, can be addictive. In fact, this tactile experience, coupled with the realisation that the price cannot be bettered elsewhere, makes buying compulsive.
A frustrating lesson for ‘normal’ retailers everywhere….

Applying the Apple lessons to your business
Seth Godin extracts 10 iPad lessons to enhance your product launches, especially in niche markets.

Can you risk being out-of-touch in an Apple-free personal-corporate life balance that does not include a daily bite of the inevitapple?

Gourmet Flash-mobs, French Style!

Those who think that organising a flash-mob means simply encouraging members of your social network to turn up ‘as-is’, need to check out the 25 year old French version…
Dressed head-to-toe in white, flash-mob guests must bring a table and two white chairs, a picnic basket filled with "quality menu items" and a china service, including stemware and flatware. Only wine or champagne are allowed, as beer and hard alcohol drinks are considered no-nos.

A compelling invitation, in the right media?
Last week, thousands of participants at the "Diner en blanc" were told of the venue via social media sites and the Internet, then rushed to assemble in the heart of Paris' Marais district, in a 25-year-old tradition that still leaves passers-by open-mouthed. Other venues in Paris have included Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre Museum's courtyard, Les Invalides, the final resting place of Napoleon, and the famed Champs-Elysees.
The pop-up event is so popular it has been picked up around the world, with Diner en Blanc events planned this year for the United States, Canada, Spain, Singapore, Mexico and even Rwanda.

Traditional new product launches a little passe? 
Given the competition for attention represented by this 25 year evolution of consumer engagement, it may partially explain the increasing expense and diminishing returns in attempting to persuade ‘our’ apathetic/savvy consumer to drop everything and rush to buy our brand in a Kings Cross supermarket…  
Perhaps a little less money, a little more creativity, and ideally unique, starting at home?
In fact, for something really different, why not make this a pop-up weekend, from the NamNews Team?

Walgreens-Boots - a new $100bn global customer?

With yesterday’s Stage1 purchase, Walgreens-Boots ($100bn) began a process that in three years will see them become a $130bn global player (prescription medicines, OTC and Beauty) with $100m savings on purchases in Year1.
In other words, plenty of time for suppliers to procrastinate on issues like prices and terms disparities…Wrong!

Given the high speed at which companies move in these circumstances (see their combined site which opened yesterday, and appears to have taken months of top secret preparation…) and the fact that Wall Street appear to think that Walgreens are paying over the odds for Alliance Boots (see yesterday’s drop in share price), suppliers would be wise to anticipate early pressures on prices to both companies ‘to prove it is a good deal’.

Action:
1. Check your US colleagues for your company sales to Walgreens, along with retail/wholesale margins, net margins on Walgreens business, credit periods and terms, plus pointers on trade funding and deductions…fast!

2. Check your UK and rest-of-world colleagues for your company sales to Alliance Boots, along with retail/wholesale margins, net margins on the AB business, credit periods and terms, plus pointers on trade funding and deductions…faster!

3. Quick ‘what-if’ on all of the above rising to the highest common set, the worst scenario for the business…even faster!

4. Map out key steps to harmonise prices & terms….already overdue!

5. Selling Prices to Walgreens and Alliance Boots: Run the following numbers for discounts of 1%, 2.5% and 5% on your best selling prices to each company
- Assume your total annual sales to Walgreens-Boots                 = £120m, ex. taxes
- Assume your Net Profit margin on Walgreens-Boots business   = 7%     = £8.4m
- Assume additional discount                                                    = 2.5%  = £3.0m
- New sales                                                                             = £117m
- Assume Costs, etc. remain the same                                      = 93% of £120m = £111.6m
- New net margin                                            = 4.6% i.e. 100-[(£111.6/117) x 100] = £5.4m
- Incremental sales to restore net profit  of £8.4m                     = £65m = £182m- £117m
                                                                                          i.e. (£8.4m/4.6) x 100 = £182m

6. Time to map out your Walgreens-Boots negotiation strategy, globally?

Underestimating a 26% CAGR customer in a flatline zero-sum world…

With a vision ‘to be the earth’s most customer-centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they want to buy online’, the problem in many categories is that Amazon’s vision is becoming reality, fast.

Walmart-like origins

Essentially, having started trading in 1994, Amazon has grown fast, and in relatively low profile to its current global scale of US$48bn, growing over the four years of the global financial crisis at a CAGR of 26%, producing a net margin of 2.2% and an ROCE of 9.06% in fiscal 2011. In other words, serious customer-centric retailing, from a standing start, rather like Walmart - only faster - with an EDLP platform that seems to retain its excitement for consumers, everywhere.

Customer-level assortment
Amazon is raising not only the online commerce bar, with all of its potential efficiencies, but is also going to the heart of state-of-the-art retailing, providing much more than store level assortment. It is, in effect, tailoring the offering to individual consumer level, better than any other provider.

Convincing colleagues, fast
Our free analysis of Amazon’s business model aims at helping you build an in-house case to raise its profile within the business. We have also added a key-point treatment of the wealth of insight available within Amazon’s 2011 Annual report to help you explore the implications for your categories.

Finally, if still in any doubt about Amazon’s impact on your business, think 50% of most categories in the next 5 years, and see if that provides an appropriate wakeup call…

Exploring the downside: A positive benefit at the museum of failed products…

Spend time vividly imagining exactly how wrong things could go in reality, and you'll often turn bottomless, nebulous fears into finite and manageable ones.

Happiness reached via positive thinking is fleeting and brittle; negative visualisation generates a vastly more dependable calm.

A new book* by Oliver Burkeman supports the intuitive realisation of many NAMs and KAMs, that we learn more from failure than success. In other words, when a project is successful, all of our energy goes into bragging about it, whilst a failure keeps us awake nights, revisiting every step, missed signal and failed KPI…

Provided we have the courage and power to cut our losses, maximise the learnings and move on to try again, the overall result can be positive.

The book deals with examples of many failed FMCG brand variants available at the Museum of Failed Products, Michigan (part of GfK Custom Research, North America). More details of products here. Each failure must have made it through a series of meetings at which nobody realised that the product was doomed. Perhaps nobody wanted to contemplate the prospect of failure; perhaps someone did, but didn't want to bring it up for discussion. The examples are fascinating in themselves, but also reassuring for those marketers and KAMs that feel their little set-back is a one-off…

*The Antidote: Happiness For People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, by Oliver Burkeman, published next week by Canongate at £15 (guardianbookshop.co.uk )