I love the on-demand economy.  Among my favorite apps are Favor, Uber, and Amazon Prime.  I was an early adopter of the ill-fated Kozmo.com.  And I eagerly follow the market.  There’s Washio for dry cleaning, Instacart for groceries, and even VetPronto for a veterinarian!

When Amazon started to offer “same-day shipping” I was really interested to understand how they were able to offer that.  Then came Google Express and Prime Now.

If you were to set up a new on-demand economy company, what would you want?  Perhaps a network of people who knew different neighborhoods really well; small, local warehouses for products; a fleet of transportation vessels to transport people and things around; and an incentive to succeed.

You know, like the U.S. Postal Service.

It’s amazing really, how much infrastructure the government already has that could compete with or fuel this new economy.  Let’s say you wanted to start a company that delivered freshly ground coffee beans, or fresh produce.  Wouldn’t it be convenient to have local warehouses that are uniformly distributed throughout neighborhoods?

The post office is in trouble if they don’t come up with something.  Their taking over Amazon’s Sunday deliveries indicates that they’re eager for new opportunities, but I think they should be thinking bigger.

It used to be hard to get a taxi.

No, seriously.  I’ve lived in Boston for over 15 years now, and I have memories of calling cabs who never came, waiting on corners for the sight of one to flag down, calling the dispatcher back to ask where they are, and generally hating the whole process.  It always seemed like no matter which taxi number you called, you got the same harried dispatcher who was not thrilled that you were calling to request a cab.

When Uber came along, it was relieving.  I could use my app to request a taxi, I could at least know for sure that one was assigned to me, and see its progress towards me.  It might still take some time to reach me, but I felt like I had more control.

Now with Uber-X I can request someone to arrive at my door within minutes, even on off-hours. (Like today, at 4:30am.)  There are usually plenty of drivers on the road.  My entire routine of getting to the airport has changed, because I can rely on a car arriving when I want it, rather than factoring in time for wrangling a cab.

What’s most interesting to me (and this is where that PhD my mother wanted me to get in math would come in handy) is that in a pretty random system, this can be true.  That is, some number of people got up this morning, decided, “I’ll drive for Uber today” and enough of them ended up in my neighborhood at the right time so that when I needed a car, I could get one quickly.

Mass transit isn’t that efficient.  The taxi system isn’t that efficient.

I know that Uber does some amount of controlling the number of cars on the road with their surge pricing.  But Uber doesn’t assign territories or control whether cars are moving around or sitting still, or where they are.  Plus, there was no surge this morning.

It makes me wonder what other kinds of systems can be efficient in a purely random way.  I’m reading Who Gets What and Why about market design, and it’s got me thinking a lot about this.  But the experience I had this morning is more than just market design, I think.  It’s also about “randomness in a densely populated system”?

Stay tuned.

Like most families with two working parents and multiple little kids, dinner is a nightmare at our house.  Before kids, and then again before miniDivo, we did enjoy subscribing to those dinner boxes, like Plated and Blue Apron.  Sometimes it felt like there was a lot of prep/chopping, but the food was pretty good.  And I liked not having half a bulb of ginger left over and nothing to do with it.

The other day I idly checked their websites out to see what was new.  I was hoping that maybe they had a new service where for $8/plate, someone showed up at my house with a hot dinner that was already cooked.  Just kidding.  But I wanted to see what was new, and I thought maybe I’d get a few kits for some weekend cooking.

What I found was a near-perfect lesson in content marketing.

Content marketing is closely related to “inbound” marketing; the idea that you put good content out there to attract an audience that is looking for those things.  Since you provide valuable information to that audience, they respect you as an expert and look to you when they are ready to purchase.

Let’s take a look at what each company tells me about the food.

First up, Plated.

Plated wants me to sign up right away.  I don’t have a lot of choices on their website and it seems like to get any information I need to “join” or at least enter my info.

I can see pictures of the weekly options.

I can see what ingredients are in the weekly recipes.

I can get nutritional info (although that’s in the help section.)

But I can’t get an actual recipe.  Unless I am a subscriber.

Blue Apron is the opposite of this.  When I get to the site, I am educated about the system and the food.

I can see the menu for the week.

And choose a specific dish to learn more about.

But here’s where their online strategies diverge.  Blue Apron is an open book.  Not only can I see the ingredients,

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but I can also get the entire recipe – the instructions, help on my technique, advice on how to execute it, and what tools I need in my kitchen.

In short, Blue Apron is making all their recipe information public – I don’t have to sign up for their service or even give them my information to get access to it.  Not only are they going to give me the recipe, but they’re also going to offer me help in how to cook, show me videos on technique, and let me read other users’ comments about how to make each dish.  In contrast, Plated has a completely opposite strategy – I can’t get much information at all without signing up.  I need to be a paying customer to see their recipes.

It’s hard to say if this difference is based on a difference in marketing strategy or a difference in actual company strategy.  That is, do Plated and Blue Apron each think that they have the best way to acquire customers for a similar product?  Or do they each perceive their unique value proposition as something different: For Plated, do they see it as the recipes, while Blue Apron sees it as (for example) their supply chain.

I’m not sure I can answer that as an outsider.

As a customer, it’s a vastly different experience to browse their websites.  Plated (which I have ordered from in the past) feels less friendly.  And there’s more mystery around their product – the recipe itself and the ingredients are the product.  They’re betting that the images of their food, and how they position it (they have gourmet “chef’s table” choices, for example) will make it appealing enough to purchase.

By contrast, Blue Apron feels more accessible – it feels more like they’re there to let me browse a lot more about their products, even what it would be like to use them.  They’re betting, of course, that I eventually decide the recipes, tips, techniques, and suggestions are good enough that I will want to make them at home.  And that I’ll find their delivery of the ingredients appealing.

It’s an interesting twist not just on content marketing, but also on a freemium model.  You could look at it as the recipes being free, but you pay if you want the actual food delivered.

Either way, it’s an great look at content marketing – and the power it can have in customer acquisition.

I’m still a fan of the handwritten to-do list.

I know people really like many of the electronic alternatives, like using Google Tasks, or Trello, but I really like handwriting my to-do list.  Somewhat it’s habit, and somewhat it’s because years ago mrDiva took a Franklin Covey class and part of the system is to re-write, by hand, your to-do list each morning.  I don’t do that but I appreciate why it’s advised, so I stick with the handwritten list.

Also, as I go through the week and attend meetings, I take handwritten notes, and then put a circle in the margin next to anything that is a “to-do” for later.  Then when I have downtime, I either do those things, or transfer them to a central task list.

Starting this week, I’m trying two new things.

The first is something that I’ve been thinking is a good idea for a long time, but recently got re-affirmed when I attended Carson Tate’s session at the Mass Conference for Women.  Everything I put on my to-do list is going to start with verb.

No more “2016 budget.”  Now it will be “Draft 2016 budget.”  No more “Blogger strategy,” now it will be “Analyze blogger strategy.”

The reason for this is two fold. One – it’s more obvious how big a task it is if I write it as a verb. Analyzing a strategy is different from creating a strategy which is different from executing a strategy. They take different amounts of effort.  Two – another piece of advice from Tate is to group similar types of tasks together; as such, it is hard to do that if you don’t know what the task actually is.

The other new thing I’m trying with my task list is to keep a yellow post-it on my computer with the tasks that absolutely must get done that day.  I know a lot of people think that it’s a bad idea to keep different to-do lists, but I have had too many time-sensitive things fall through the cracks lately.  I’m hoping this is a good solution to that. Kind of like HSM for tasks.

I’ll let you know how everything goes.

Big data has been abstract to me for a long time.  Sure, I understand it in the context of things like “genomic research” and applications in Oil and Gas.  But how my own field of Marketing as a discipline is changing because of Big Data – that was not so clear to me until about a week ago.

Using (little-d) data in marketing is nothing new.  Through tools like Hubspot and Salesforce, it’s easy to track things like “ratio of qualified leads to leads for different marketing tactics” and answer questions like “what is the point of diminishing returns for the number of times we call someone?”

At Infinio, we are very data-driven.  We make nearly all our marketing budget decisions based on data.  I’m not sure how you’d do it otherwise. A few of my vendors have recently commented that we have a lot more data and track things a lot more carefully than most of their other customers.  But again, I’m not sure how else you’d do it.

But that’s “little-d” data, now onto Big Data.

In budgeting for 2016, I decided to look at 10 new vendors that are doing innovative things in marketing.  I’m pretty new to demand generation and online marketing (my background is in product marketing) so I thought it would be a good exercise to look at vendors with leading-edge technologies around things like demos, landing pages, retargeting, social advertising, and improving abandon and bounce rate.  I unscientifically picked a handful that looked interesting and started investigating what they do.

Nearly each and every one of them was trying to differentiate their value based on using data to drive decisions and actions.

• “We use data about the people on your website and where else they go on the web to find other people who go to similar sites and might be interested in your company.”
• “We track what people are doing on your website and show them content that other visitors who completed similar actions were interested in.”
• “We look at all the conversion rates for landing pages across all our customers’ sites to dynamically adjust your page design to increase conversion.”

Marketing is not about the “next big thing” right now.  There’s no new way to market, or new medium.  It’s about harnessing the power of data to get better results.  And I sound like an ad for something right there “harnessing the power of data” but it’s true.

It’s been suggested in several places that the CMO is the next CIO, and I think there’s something to that.  That article quotes a recent Gartner report predicting that in 5 years, Marketing will be spending more on technology than IT will.

Our company isn’t an “online” company, we don’t complete transactions online, for example. But the success of our company in the next 5 years is likely going to be attributable somewhat to our ability to leverage data about our customers and prospects and their online activities.

It’s creepy.  Knowing more about what these companies do, every time I hover over my mouse or choose a particular menu item on a website I think about how someone is tracking me. Even incognito browsing isn’t untrackable.  If you haven’t read The Filter Bubble, go read it, then think about these tools in that context – your activities (and various vendors’ budgets) determine what you see on the web.

What it boils down to is that this is the next generation of what marketers are doing. When I started in marketing, “Inbound marketing” (making good content available, becoming thought leaders, and attracting buyers to interact with you) was all the rage. This is what’s next.  It’s still about putting out the right messaging, but it’s doing it using technology and tools to automate finding the right people.

Those of us who sell things like to think it’s easy to buy them.  Meaning, if someone is interested and has budget and is motivated, then it’s simple for them to actually make a purchase. Even if it may be a slightly complicated process (Quote-PO-Invoice-Check) it’s not so difficult that someone can’t get through it.

But sometimes it is hard to buy something. Like, there’s an error in your shopping cart checkout process online and you have to re-load your cart up and buy everything again. Or you’re at a tradeshow (as a customer) and all the vendors are on their phones or laptops and you can’t find someone to talk to.  Or you’re at the supermarket and the person in front of you needs a price check on kumquats.  Then on tangerines.

Yesterday I had a hard time shopping – at a shoe store.  I went to a big shoe warehouse downtown that has several floors so it has two pair of escalators.  On the first floor, one escalator was broken, but that ok – I just used the other one to go up.  On the second floor, again, one escalator was broken.  Except the second escalator was going “Down.”

In order to go up to the third floor, you had to leave the store and use a common building elevator or stairs.  Even worse, you couldn’t take your merchandise with you. There was no way to easily compare items from the two floors without leaving items on the second floor, going up to the third, getting other items, and bringing them back to the second.  (And lest you think I am unusual in this regard, the store provides large mesh bags for you to walk around with multiple shoe boxes while shopping.)

I heard at least half a dozen people – clearly regulars, aka shoe addics- exclaim, “this escalator’s down? how do I get up there?”  And I was not the only person who accidentally walked through a theft detector with unpaid merchandise not realizing it couldn’t come with me.

It was hard to get to the product I wanted to buy.

It was hard to shop.

And the solution wasn’t complicated.  Escalators can be set to run in either direction. Frequently, escalators in transit stations change direction based on time of day (much like carpool lanes on highways.)  All this store had to do was reverse the running escalator to carry passengers up, instead of down.

By doing this, it would have been easy to get from the street to the second floor, then the second floor to the third.  There are checkouts on both the second and third floors, so wherever you ended up, you could pay.  And then the hassle would be getting out of the store, not getting to the products.

Either the store needed a creative manager, more autonomy for store personnel, or a way to get in touch with the escalator’s maintenance person.  Because we have *got* to be able to get to the shoes!

It has been years since I’ve owned boots that actually keep my feet dry.  With winter on its way, I asked the manager of our dog walking service what she recommends because I figured she’d have to have good boots.

Without hesitation, she said “I love my Bean boots.”

And I thought, “Duh.  I live in New England.  Why don’t I just get Bean boots?”

Except.

LL Bean is out of boots right now.  Yup, OUT OF BOOTS.  How is this possible you ask?  Me too. Most styles and sizes are backordered.  And it’s December.  In New England.

It’s one of those things where you want to say, “someone’s getting fired over this one!”  Except I’m not sure that’s actually happening.

Eliyahu Goldratt would have a field day with this – clearly there is a bottleneck somewhere in Bean’s ability to deliver to demand.  The Boston Globe’s recent article suggested there was a stubbornness around keeping the boots manufactured in Maine, coupled with an insistence on very narrow quality acceptance criteria.  And that this was compounded by recent good publicity about the boot in fashion circles that LL Bean management didn’t quite trust was driving demand up permanently.  In November, they were 50,000 orders behind; and they only have capacity to make 2,000 each day.  Check your calendars, November is not yet prime boot-buying season, so this will only get worse.

Think LL Bean has successfully made the shift from catalog to online?  I do 🙂  People talk about the internet as changing commerce and globalizing where goods come from and can get to.  All of which it has.  But LL Bean was doing that long before there was a Google or an Amazon. They’ve been successfully selling to a geographically dispersed audience for decades. You could argue that the demand is exponentially greater than it had been before the Internet, but I’m not sold that impacts LL Bean as much as other companies that weren’t as able to reach a broad audience before Internet.

Bloomberg posited that it might be a PR stunt, or at least an unfortunate issue that isn’t hurting PR.  The Bloomberg article also points out that this happened last year, so the issue of if demand is permanently increased may be that indeed it is.

There is some amount of panache associated with scarcity. The Bean boot has become the Birken Bag of winter footwear, but I don’t think that fits with their brand.  I think of them as being accessible, practical, and of the boots themselves as transcending fashion.  The Globe article indicates that LL Bean management is apologetic, and distressed, not that this is purposeful.

Whatever the case, I can’t get my hands (or my feet) on a pair.  So like many other New Englanders, I’ll slog around with wet feet this winter, disappointed.  But holding out hope that my order makes it through their system, before the first storm of the year arrives.

In a previous job, we used a phrase, “rock fetch.”

The idea is this –

Asker: go get me a rock roughly this shape and weight.

Doer: here you go.

Asker: no, not that one, a different one.

Often, the Asker is a manager.

As the Doer, it’s awful to be involved in a rock-fetch exercise.  It feel like a waste of time.  It feels like a moving target.  It feels like a bad game where someone knows the answer and is making you guess.

But as the Asker, that isn’t always what’s going on.  I sent someone on what could be considered a rock-fetch exercise last week.  It wasn’t because I knew the answer, I didn’t.  But I also didn’t know what I was looking for until I saw a few things that I wasn’t looking for.

Here’s what happened – we were preparing an email to a set of people in our marketing database who had been interested in our product in the past but hadn’t engaged with us due to timing or budget.  I wanted to understand these leads before we emailed them.  I was interested in things like where we had gotten the leads, how old they were, why they hadn’t engaged, and how else we had interacted with them.

The problem was, I didn’t know how I wanted the data organized.  Mostly because I didn’t know what shape the data would take.  We had a meeting where we chose a bunch of criteria to build a list of contacts.  Since it was a complex query, though, I didn’t know the composition of the list.

Let’s say 85% of the leads were people we met at tradeshows, then I didn’t really need it broken down by lead source.  But if the leads were equally split among tradeshows, seminars, and webinars, then I was interested to see that breakdown.

And I was even more interested to know if all the tradeshow leads were old and all the webinar leads were new; but if the date distribution was pretty even across the event types, then I didn’t need to see it broken down by date.

And then if we knew the leads were distributed evenly across events, but with certain date affinities, I wanted to understand why (for example) tradeshow leads from 18 months ago had an unusually high number of leads who had no budget.

I had a reason for wanting to know all this.  Actually, a lot of reasons.  For this email campaign, I wanted to be sure our messaging would resonate with our audience.  For my future planning, I wanted to be sure we were going to events where we were meeting the right people. I wanted to know – did we use messaging at certain tradeshows that is attracting the wrong crowd?  Did we say the wrong things to prospects after events?

So I did send someone on a rock-fetch exercise.  But I think I had a good reason.

This is not one of those posts like, “how do you break down a complex idea like supply chain and explain it so a 2-year-old can understand it.”  This is the story of how I actually tried to explain the concept of a supply chain to babyDiva, who is now 2 1/2.

babyDiva is obsessed with trucks and construction right now.  On our way to school each morning, we discuss the trucks and construction sites we see in great detail.  “That an excavator or a mini-excavator?” “Why that bulldozer not have tracks?” Etc.

Earlier this week, a local restaurant in our neighborhood was receiving a delivery.

It was very exciting.

“Look!  Delivery truck!”
“You’re right, that is a delivery truck.”
“What truck delivery?”
“Water, I think, maybe some juice too.”
“Who those people?”

She was asking about the pictures of the people on the truck.

“Well honey, those might be the people who put the water in the bottles.”
“Oh, those people in the truck?”
“Well, no, it’s just pictures of them.”
“Those people driving the truck?”
“Well, no, the people who drive the truck might be different from the people who put the water in the bottles.”
“Oh, one people put water in bottles, then one people drive truck?”
“Well, actually there might be people who bring the bottles from the factory to a center, then someone else who brings the bottles to a restaurant.”

(Pause.)

“Those people like juice, too?”
“Yes, honey, those people probably like juice.”

“I like juice.”

And that was the end of Supply Chain 101.

It’s weird, synchronicity. Upon my return to work after maternity leave I have found an uncanny similarity between the challenges at home and those at work.

In both cases, I am in over my head taking on new challenges. At home, it’s a second child (an actual living breathing human being, another one!) and at work it’s demand generation and marketing strategy.

In both cases, I’ve had well-meaning people nod sympathetically at what I’m taking on and say, in a kind of parallel unison, “Well, it’s one of those fake-it-til-you-make-it situations, right?”

WRONG.

I don’t believe in “fake it ‘til you make it.” I believe in actually doing it, from day one, knowing I’m going to make some mistakes along the way.

There’s some science behind FITYMI: A 2010 study demonstrated higher confidence and cortisol levels from people using “power positioning” that physically positioned them as seeming more confident. (While this study wasn’t able to be replicated, the core idea, that people felt more confident, was.)

But this idea that we are supposed to “act the part” until we are the part doesn’t sit well with me.  It’s like a self-imposed impostor syndrome – and who needs that?.

I’m not pretending to be miniDivo’s mom – I am actually his mom.  And I’m not pretending to run demand generation – I am actually running demand generation.  I’m learning what miniDivo’s disposition is like, what soothes him, what upsets him; I’m learning how to allocate budget across demand gen tactics and understand the reporting that comes back.

I’m not faking these things – I’m doing them.  Just not at 100% because I don’t know how to…yet. If I’m faking it, I’m not asking enough questions, of myself or of others.  I’m much better off feeling like “I’m doing this for real, I’m not faking it, but I’m also not bad at it, I’m still learning.” I think it’s better for others around me to think that about how I’m doing too.

Why would I hide from my family and friends that adjusting to a second baby is HARD?  And why would I hide from my colleagues that I am doing things I’ve never done before and it’s going to be a little bumpy for everyone?  Well, those are rhetorical questions, I’d hide those things if I was ashamed, or embarrassed.  But I’m not, I just want to get better at them.

Brene Brown has researched and written extensively on vulnerability.  My favorite story about her is as follows:

“I got a lot of offers to speak all over the country — everyone from schools and parent meetings to Fortune 500 companies. And so many of the calls went like this, “Dr. Brown, we loved your TED talk. We’d like you to come in and speak. We’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t mention vulnerability or shame.”

“What would you like for me to talk about?” There are three big answers. This is mostly, to be honest with you, from the business sector: innovation, creativity and change.

So let me go on the record and say, vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.”

And that’s where I am.  I’m making it without faking it.