Online and offline trends to help you increase your brand equity
I just read a briefing from TrendWatching.com which discussed the topic of OFF=ON, which is a phenomena where offline businesses adjust to and mirror the increasingly dominant online world, from tone of voice to product development to business processes to customer relationships.
The briefing goes through real world examples of companies implementing the OFF=ON strategies and provides a checklist of strategies that have been successfully implemented online that you can incorporate into your offline business.
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What about ON=OFF?
The attraction is mutual….In fact, expect ‘online’ to enjoy being ‘offline’ more than ever. Three quick sub-trends that are currently fueling ON=OFF: visibility, warm bodies and mobile mania.
People still want to go shop in a real store, meet and connect with real people and the increasing improvement of the mobile technology makes it easier for us to make the real world connections.
TrendWatching.com offers some tips on how to apply OFF=ON and ON=OFF to your own brand:
- Incorporate online symbols into one of your next designs.
- Have customers design something from scratch online, then bring it into the real world.
- Add any kind of online functionality or access feature to existing physical products.
- Study and then incorporate winning characteristics of living and doing business online into your offline processes.
- Infuse your campaigns with the language of the online-versed.
- Give your online brand an offline presence.
- Partner with any kind of relevant meet-up venture.
- Introduce a ‘warm bodies FEEDER BUSINESS’.
- Hop on the mobile-meets-web bandwagon. Start with introducing an iPhone app. Hey, if British Airways can do it…
- Look beyond the next 6 to 12 months and dive into leading online gurus’ visions. After all, even if their exact timing is sometimes off, their predictions so far have all come true.
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Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business
In this month’s Wired Magazine, Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired, discusses why free is the future of business. If you are in doing business in the “Web” space and are trying to figure out your business model, read the article for trends, tips, and ideas.
Here are some of the points that Chris makes:
- Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.
- The rise of “freeconomics” is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore’s law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.
- It’s now clear that practically everything Web technology touches starts down the path to gratis, at least as far as we consumers are concerned. Storage now joins bandwidth (YouTube: free) and processing power (Google: free) in the race to the bottom. Basic economics tells us that in a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost. There’s never been a more competitive market than the Internet, and every day the marginal cost of digital information comes closer to nothing.
The result: Two trends driving the spread of free business models across the economy.
1. Technology is giving companies greater flexibility in how broadly they can define their markets, allowing them more freedom to give away products or services to one set of customers while selling to another set.
2. Anything that touches digital networks quickly feels the effect of falling costs.
Chris goes on to list six business models of the “Free” Business Models:
- “Freemium” - What’s free: Web software and services, some content. Free to whom: users of the basic version.
- Advertising - What’s free: content, services, software, and more. Free to whom: everyone.
- Cross-subsidies - What’s free: any product that entices you to pay for something else. Free to whom: everyone willing to pay eventually, one way or another.
- Zero marginal cost - What’s free: things that can be distributed without an appreciable cost to anyone. Free to whom: everyone.
- Labor exchange - What’s free: Web sites and services. Free to whom: all users, since the act of using these sites and services actually creates something of value.
- Gift economy - What’s free: the whole enchilada, be it open source software or user-generated content. Free to whom: everyone.
You can also read a post on “Free Love“, published by TrendWatching.com that discusses the five manifestations of FREE LOVE: ‘Any excuse to advertise’, ‘Courting saturated consumers’, ‘C2C’, ‘Swapping, not spending’, and ‘Less is more’.
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