Not a secret, often overlooked:
“Keep your promises.”

This is why marketing is now the job of entire organizations, not just marketers.

Marketers have always been good at making promises, but historically it has been the rest of the company’s responsibility to actually deliver on those promises. The mark of a good marketer was the ability to understand company or brand’s promise and the consumer well enough to communicate the former to the latter.

Marketers promise how a product is supposed to benefit the consumer, but the product itself determines whether that promise is kept. Now software products and digital services are critical to every marketing plan because they help continuously reinforce the promise, but also because they take the first step in actually delivering on the promise.

Example: Lowe’s promises to help you improve your home. Lowe’s has always sold products in their stores that help you do that. Now they’re offering the MyLowe’s, which is a digital service that helps you manage your home. Users of MyLowe’s are taking a step beyond understanding the promise Lowe’s is making, they are beginning to actually derive value. As soon as the user is deriving value, the brand is delivering on its promise – before the user ever enters the store or buys a product.

Finally marketers have a hand in keeping their own promises. Now imagine the power marketers have when the entire product line of the brand the work for is made up of software and digital services. The product itself is an even more important piece of the marketing.

It’s time for entire companies to think like marketers by making every decision based on making the right promises and keeping them. How does a brand come up with the right promises to make? By understanding consumers really well. How do marketers know how to communi

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Comcast and Disney said Wednesday they had agreed to a 10-year deal that will allow the cable provider to distribute Disney content via television and streaming on iPads and other devices.

But it’s not exclusive in any way.  So Disney (which owns ABC and ESPN) can still allow other content distributors, like other cables companies or Apple or Google, to distribute Disney/ABC/ESPN content as well.

Comcast customers will have access to ESPN sports on multiple devices. That network earns more money from cable and satellite companies than any other channel, about $4.69 a month, according to SNL Kagan. Combined with ESPN2 and ESPN Classic, the ESPN networks take in about $6.50 a subscriber each month.

So imagine Disney agrees to let Apple distribute those same ESPN networks  to consumers, as an a la carte option, for $9.99 per month.   If every content provider did this, I’d buy ESPN, FX, HBO and the basic networks.  Let’s say the basic networks cost $4.99 each, the “premium” network groups like ESPN are $9.99 and the “exclusive” network groups like HBO are $14.99.  My monthly TV bill would be around $60, compared to the $175 I pay today for it to be grouped with Internet service and a phone line.

The only question for me is how much the price of Internet-only service would go up.  The only question for Disney is what percentage of cable subscribers would subscribe to ESPN as an a la carte choice.  That’s likely where Apple’s negotiations are hitting some snags.

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I spent most of the last two days helping my family setup new Apple devices (2 iPhone 4Ss, 2 iPad 2s, 1 Apple TV, 1 iMac).  None of these devices were plug-and-play.*  And for the non-Mac items, it wasn’t even close.

The core of the problem is Apple IDs.  When setting up Apple devices, you must enter or create an Apple ID to download any new content (music, apps, books, movies, TV shows, newspaper or magazine subscriptions, etc), to get content from your other devices, to use FaceTime and iMessage, or just to sync your contacts, calendars and other basic data.  These are a few of the tasks every user wants to perform immediately when they start using their device.  They are the features that Apple pushes hardest to sell their devices – (can you even remember the last Apple ad you saw that didn’t focus on apps, FaceTime or both?).  But you need your Apple ID before you can do any of that, and there are a few major problems with device setup using Apple IDs:

1. The term “Apple ID” isn’t common enough for the average consumer to know what it is (“iTunes email” seems to be common name for it among my friends).
2. All 6 people who I helped setup devices this weekend have more than one Apple ID (I’ll explain why this is such a serious problem in a moment).
3. Apple IDs cannot be deleted.
4. Entering an Apple ID into your device upon setup or from device settings does not sign you in persistently across the device.

Alone, none of these (except maybe #4) are all that problematic.  But together they make it a huge headache to setup new Apple devices, especially the ones that run iOS.  These are verbatim quotes from new Apple device owners in my family over the last two days:

• “Apple hates me”
• “This technology is way to complicated for my life”
• “Can’t I just start fresh?”
• “Why is this so complicated?”
• “I don’t care anymore, I just want to play with my iPad”
• “I’m too old for technology”
• “I know you have way-above-average knowledge about Apple, but how is the average customer supposed to figure this out?”

Steve Jobs understood the importance of introductions, especially the first introduction of a person to the computer he’s just hired.  Setting up an Apple device wasn’t even deserving of the name “process” for most of the past decade, but now it deserves “arduous setup process”.  A significant part of iOS 5 is dedicated to a “PC-free” setup and experience through iCloud.  Hopefully Apple polishes this system in iOS 6 so every user truly can buy any iPhone, iPad, Mac or Apple TV, type in their Apple ID and password and begin using it like it’s their own.  This will be the new plug-and-play.

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*I’ll caveat that both iPads were running iOS 4 out of the box because they were purchased a couple months ago, but weren’t opened until Christmas.  iOS 5 would have made this easier but doesn’t solve the root problem.

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“Surprisingly,” she writes, “US consumers expect to buy more iPhones in C1Q12 than C4Q11″ (emphasis hers). Even discounting the survey results 10%, that suggests Apple could sell 13 million iPhones in the U.S. and 41 million worldwide next quarter. Morgan Stanley’s model has Apple selling 30 million iPhones in calendar Q1 2012.

Kary Huberty, mind you, is Morgan Stanley’s “cheif Apple analyst”. We continue to see almost every “business analyst” who covers Apple have no idea what’s going on with Apple’s business. Morgan Stanley’s 30 million estimate is actually not terribly off the mark, but it shouldn’t be surprising at all that consumers expect to buy more iPhones in Q1 of next year than Q4 of this year – especially if you’re an Apple analyst.

Obviously holiday sales are huge and intuitively it makes sense that Q4 would be the strongest for iPhone sales every year. But if you’ve been paying any attention, you’ll know every year since the iPhone launched Q1 sales have gotten closer to matching the Q4 they follow, and Q1 of this year actually beat Q4 for last year. And this year we’re even closer to the beginning of the iPhone refresh cadence than usual.

Also remember: as of Q2 of this year, Apple brings in more revenue from each iPhone sale than each iPad sale.

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Really wish the creator had cited sources, but I found primary sources confirming some of the facts:
http://www.treasury.gov/about/education/Pages/in-god-we-trust.aspx
http://www.wvsd.uscourts.gov/outreach/Pledge.htm

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“Steve Jobs gave designers credibility in the business world.”

Exceptional companies apply design principles to every aspect of their business. The principles of design that Steve Jobs espoused are very important when designing a business strategy, and organization structure, a marketing plan and almost any other aspect of business:

• “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what do to.   That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”

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One file in particular, USBDeviceConfiguration.plist, had formerly listed about two dozen different device variants. As discovered by 9to5Mac’s Mark Gurman, that list has now ballooned to well over 100 such entries as Apple has seeded it with dozens of new fake references to such future products as “iPad10,1″, “iPhone11,3″, “iPod11,1″, and “AppleTV8,3″.

Apple TV version 8,3? iPad version 10,1? Am I the only one who finds this hilarious?

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Colony makes a compelling case for “App Internet” as the next dominant software architecture to replace the web, and we’ve already seen trends toward this with the popularity of iOS, Android and recently Amazon. What makes Internet-connected apps better than the web? Colony says “Faster, simpler, more immersive – a better experience.” Bingo. It will be many, many years before it’s possible to create web experiences that offer the same quality of expereince as Internet-connected apps. Why? Again, Colony explains:

Storage is getting cheaper – twice as much space for the same amount price – every 12 months. Processor power is doubling a bit slow, every 18 months (Moore’s Law). Networks are improving at an even slower pace, probably doubling in speed every two years or more. (To see this illustrated, see the chart at 3:22 of Colony’s presentation.) This means that an architecture built only around the network (like the web) wastes all this progress and improvement in processor power and storage. Remember that 95% of web executable is at the server, not at your PC – you’re wasting all the power of the computer in your hands by relying on the least powerful and slowest component of the technology we all have in our hands: the network. (paraphrased from the video)

This is why Apple, and subsequently Google and Amazon, are investing so heavily in apps. Apps allow us to use the extremely powerful and fast-improving processing power and storage of the devices in our hands, while still tapping into the Internet network when needed. The web is the opposite. The web forces us to use the relatively low power network, enabling us tap into the extremely powerful local device very little. This is why Forrester is predicting the app market will grow at about 85% next year from the $2.2B market it is today.

So far, this all makes sense. Apps provide users with a better experience than the web because they leverage local power, which is faster and cheaper than network power.  But Colony predicts the death of the web because of this.

I disagree, mostly because the web has two things app platforms can’t offer:

• Openness (all modern platforms support it and can access it)
• Linking (it’s easy to direct users between different pieces of content)

These are two extremely important pieces that the fragmented app Internet platforms can’t support.  The short-term future does belong to apps because of the power benefits Colony discussed.  But the long-term future belongs to a web that can better leverage local power.

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*partial credit for the title to Brendon Mason
**video brought to my attention by Fred Wilson

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Amazon is offering consumers up to $5 off on purchases if they compare prices using the online giant’s mobile phone application in a store.

The promotion goes live Saturday and will serve as a way for Amazon to increase usage of its bar-code-scanning application, while also collecting intelligence on prices in the stores.

Smart promotion of an already great app. I use the Amazon Price Check app frequently and they usually have a lower price than the brick and mortar retailer I’m in even without the $5 discount.

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