How to Leverage Branding Techniques and Technology for Competitive Advantage

March 22, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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Part 2 of 2 ( go to part 1)

How do brands navigate the treacherous, democratized, new customer relations landscape to provide a genuine representation of their experience? The answer is part organizational mindset and part technological enablement.

Part Operational Mindset

First, an organization must be highly aware internally with active internal communication. Making this more difficult, modern business has become truly global with major growth markets in Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa, as well as in mainstays like the U.S. and Western Europe. Town hall meetings simply will not cut it anymore. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Complex Event Processing (CEP), Event Processing, Loyalty, Social Tagged With: , , ,

The Discount War: Are Shoppers Really Looking for Just One Price, No Gimmicks?

March 22, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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There has been a lot of talk recently about how consumers are starting to opt-out of loyalty programs due to lack of true value. I have to say, I have been a little annoyed myself at how some retailers can’t give me the same experience whether I am in the store, or buying online. Why do I continue to keep giving them the same information, and why are they only offering me deals on items I have never bought, nor do I intend to?  This doesn’t mean I haven’t found myself purchasing a new brand, a color I don’t really like, or a size that doesn’t really fit, just because I couldn’t pass up the deal. I mean, who doesn’t like a great bargain?

54% of consumers polled feel that programs lack personalized messaging and valuable rewards. — Consumer Insights

To justify this thinking I have to go no further than my own closet and I know I’m not the only one who convinced themselves “I can just put a footpad” into the size 7½ Prada pumps when I really wear a 7, only to find them—unworn–with the other “great deals” mocking me from my closet. Obviously this type of impulse shopping does come with its share of buyer’s remorse, so I can see why some brands are shifting towards a one “honest” price strategy, rather than offering discounts or sales, but I think a lot of shoppers would tell you it’s not the sale that retailers should get rid of, but the how the sale is presented to the shopper.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Analytics and Optimization, Automation, Complex Event Processing (CEP), Event Processing, Industries, Loyalty, Mobility, Retail, Tech Trends, Transform, Two-Second Advantage Tagged With: , , , , ,

How Big Brands Keep Falling Behind and Losing Market Share

March 21, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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Part 1 of 2 (go to part 2)

There are a lot of brands that still have not successfully worked out how to generate tangible bottom line results in the brave new world of social media. So much so that it is worth taking a look at why.

To fully understand the branding landscape, we have to acknowledge the historic symbiosis that has existed between big brands and big media. In traditional news media like television, print, and radio, the news content has always been a loss leader for advertising space. Back in the days of dominant conventional mass media, huge advantages accrued to major brands, to the disadvantage of both minor brands and, arguably, consumers. With only three dominant television stations and one newspaper per city, the scarcity of venues to advertise a brand created huge barriers to entry in leveraging media to promote a business or idea. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Mobility, Social Tagged With:

Are Your Customers Asking to be Touched?

March 19, 2012 by 1 Comment
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How Retailers Can Provide Personalized Shopping Experiences–Anytime, Anywhere.

There is a problem with which traditional retailers are struggling. Their competitive landscape is increasingly brutal with the advent of online competitors and rapidly evolving customer expectations. To make the problem worse, retailing has now become a 24×7 business, instead of the traditional store hours of 9 to 5, with it the definition of what a “store” is. Physical stores, web-sites, kiosks, smart phones, and even social networking sites are now considered “stores.” These changes are creating a new generation of consumer who demands a unique conversation, unique in that it’s contextualized for them, from retailers across multiple channels in real time. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Complex Event Processing (CEP), Event Processing, Loyalty, Mobility, Retail, Tech Trends Tagged With: , , ,

Big Data vs Fast Data

March 14, 2012 by 2 Comments
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There was an interesting, but not uncommon, comment (on tibbr) recently about a Proof Of Concept in the CEP space that had been completed in 3 days by the 3-person TIBCO team while the competitor team were still struggling at the 3 weeks mark. This despite, per certain analysts’ reports, this competitor being one of the “big guns” in CEP. In the past some could argue that high productivity is an opposing requirement to high performance / scalability; I would counter that in event processing they are closely related. Consider:

  • TIBCO BusinessEvents remains today one of the few CEP technologies to include integrated high performance datagrid technology – you develop the concept model with the necessary metadata and methods for interacting with that data, but have no need to step out into a different (database) environment
  • Large (Tb level) datasets can be accommodated in the DataGrid simply by organising several DataGrid service instances (and a fast interconnect!)
  • Without such data interaction, development teams are forced to involve new skillsets and problems in integrating (at best) other cache or datagrid technologies to (at worst) high-latency databases. [Read more...]
Filed Under: Event Processing, Tech Trends Tagged With: ,

Patient Safety: Going Well Beyond a Checklist

March 9, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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Patient Safety WeekWith National Patient Safety Awareness Week coming to a close, we thought we would give some attention to this important topic.

In following this week’s articles, blog posts and tweets, much of the discussion about patient safety has centered on the treatment a patient receives during a procedure or hospital stay, so we asked Dr. Gary Ferguson, one of TIBCO’s Chief Healthcare Strategists, for his perspective. In his words he feels strongly that: “Many of these approaches are treating the symptoms, and not the cause.”

This is a good point. Take for example the case of hospital readmissions.  It’s well known that CMS will begin penalizing hospitals if their readmission rate exceeds standards.

So what should caregivers be focused on in order to achieve patient safety, and how does technology fit into the overall goals? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Automation, BPM, Event Processing, general, Healthcare, Industries, Social, Tech Trends, Transform, Two-Second Advantage Tagged With: , , , ,

Are “Zero Accidents” the Only Goal in Healthcare Today?

March 9, 2012 by 1 Comment
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During National Patient Safety Awareness Week, I am reminded of a bumper sticker I once read on a passing truck; “Our Goal is Zero Accidents”.

Really? On time delivery, no damaged goods, customer satisfaction, SLAs, and all you could come up with was zero accidents? Setting the bar a little low, wouldn’t you say? [Read more...]

Filed Under: BPM, Event Processing, Healthcare, Industries, Social, Spotfire, Two-Second Advantage

Are Businesses Ready to Put Augmented Reality to Work?

March 8, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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There is a new buzz in town, and just like “big data” received a lot of attention last year, the new trend is around “augmented reality.” True techies will scoff at this being a new idea and movies have had some fun with this idea for years, but with the rise of phones and smart devices, is this now something REAL and useful to the enterprise? TIBCO’S Matt Quinn, CTO, and Sriram Chakravarthy, Senior Director of Product and Engineering for Social Computing, think so. IT Business Edge spent some time talking with them both on the subject. Quinn summed it up nicely saying “We expect the industry to evolve very quickly as enterprises see value in augmented reality. We expect an explosion in the types and approaches to augmented reality. We expect to move out of games as a proof of concept to business apps.”

Read the full article here: Augmented Reality Gets Real

Related Blog Post: GEO “Check-In” Enterprise Style

 

 

Filed Under: Mobility, Tech Trends Tagged With: ,

IT – The New Business Unit

March 5, 2012 by 2 Comments
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Change ITOver the past few weeks I have been in a number of meetings with current and prospective customers talking about the growth challenges they are facing in 2012, due to the economic recovery. I get true insight from these meetings, and lately, I have been hearing a consistent concern from a number of these conversations. Their number one concern: will their IT staff be able to keep up with the company as it grows? My response to this has raised a few eyebrows; IT needs to fundamentally shift the way it approaches business. IT can no longer be just a department that keeps the lights on–it needs to think strategically like any other business unit, focusing on ROI and efficiency. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Automation, Cloud, Transform Tagged With:

The End of Football as We Know It

March 1, 2012 by 5 Comments
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Havard Business ReviewAs much as companies like to tell you the customer is king, that’s hardly true in most industries. Instead, major players put enormous effort into narrowing our choices — selling us on what they have to offer.

These efforts are obvious in the bricks and mortar world, where retailers control what goes on the shelves, but it’s not all that different for e-commerce. Although etail increases consumers’ access to more and more products, the focus remains on getting people to want what companies choose to provide.

Right now, this power of incumbency is enormous and very undemocratic. And, one might argue, heading toward consolidation, as Apple has consolidated the music distribution business and Google, Amazon, and various other platform providers vie to dominate electronic publishing.

But a parallel trend is building toward giving customers far more opportunity to express their views. And those who move to harness that collective voice have an opportunity to storm many traditional vertical markets. [Read more...]

Filed Under: general, Social Tagged With: