It seems the world is on a dubstep kick after Skrillex hit the scene. Curiously, digging into the genre you find that he’s basically the only one who sounds like that – or maybe it’s that I don’t know where the Secret Awesome is. I admit it. I am old and the art degree only goes so far.
To my surprise, I found this release by Airborne Drumz. I really wouldn’t call it true dubstep, though. That’s not a bad thing, and from the great pile of stuff in that genre, it’s probably a good thing. What is it then? I think it’s something that sits somewhere in the middle of a triangle between Skrillex, Deadmau5 and perhaps rougher Kid 606. Essentially, you have the sounds of dubstep (without the over-done ‘wubwubwub’), the driving beat of good house and the edge of Hardcore. This is perhaps best executed in track two, Andromeda.
Moving to Dertoit Wastelands, perhaps you get a feeling that Airborne Drumz are well-influenced by Daft Punk. It’s a very nice track that also recalls the first Justice album, as if it were a bonus track or it could really be that connecting sound between Skrillex and Justice. The next few tracks give you the same sort of feeling and it’s good stuff. The nice thing these tracks do (besides sound good) is take you down from Andromeda so you can get amped up again towards the end.
At the end is Back to Saturn. Starting off slow, it builds to some really gritty distorted samples. It’s tough to get that right balance of song construction and the manic, deconstruction that we all wish dubstep to be. A big plus is that the release still uses a driving, easily found beat no matter if it’s on some of the calmer tracks or the big hitting ones. Airborne Drumz has also found what seems to be almost the perfect tempo to build these tracks, unlike most who run at what I figure is about 10-15bpm too slow for utility.
If you’re a fan of such things, and I can’t see who wouldn’t. You need to have this album. Especially when you’ve listened to the above mentioned artists and you need a new fix.
The new pricing scheme unveiled recently is brave in a number of ways. Most importantly, it seems to draw a line in the sand against department stores’ downward race towards becoming discount stores. Stopping the roller coaster of sale pricing and the continuous need for price slashing could have some interesting effects for stores of their sort.
For the past 3 decades or so department stores have let the features that separate them from big box stores atrophy. The biggest difference was in the quality of attention and service a shopper would experience. This was cut in an attempt to control costs and compete with discount stores. The next thing cut was the quality of products, further blurring the line between department and discount stores. What was the difference between JCPenney and Wal*mart if the service was similar? Then, if there was no difference between products, what would justify the increased price?
In these occasions the brand is important. It has to stand for something different and for the longest time, department stores in general – and Penneys is no exception – have lost their way. The first step back is to begin to delineate itself from discount stores by holding price.
JCPenney halting a discount sale scenario is an excellent start in holding back further losses in its brand’s perception and its bottom line. The normalization of pricing is effective in moving the chain away from a discount perception and the vicious cycle of sales. More importantly, it begins to allude to the notion higher quality goods, not to mention a boost to its brand’s esteem. Penneys needs to create a difference between it and stores like Shopko and Target if it is to continue living. By not playing their pricing game is a great start.
The lack of crazy pricing will have to be filled up with some other reason to bring shoppers to the store. The more staid manner of actual close-outs and monthly featured items probably won’t provide it much. The next step would be to bring service back – the true differentiation between department stores and big box stores, as mentioned by the new head of JCPenney.
The concept for the average shopper of what ‘better service’ really is may be quite alien now. Obviously, there’s the Nordstroms level but what would be expected from Penneys in this regard? I don’t think you’d really need to go far. Putting more sales people on the floor might be the best start. Managing customer service quality would be an easier task when stores aren’t running skeleton crews. Thinking that the person in charge now has come from Apple, could also more employee empowerment be in the cards? There’s a lot of possibilities there.
The really interesting thing is that these changes are not going to make an immediate positive change to the financials. Dropping the sales is going to hurt in the short term. There might be an up-tick for a while with the novelty of the new pricing scheme for perhaps a quarter but after that, the changes are going to be much more incremental. Increases in quality of experience are not the easiest things to quantify and may take a while for gains to be attributed to it. In a world run by quarterly results, this all might just come down to results versus how patient the Board is.
If they do hold to their plans, these changes will eventually allow for Penneys to move to higher price points, both on better quality products and the perception of value stemming from a far better shopping experience. If done well, they’ll make some nice brand differentiation too. The real question might be if JCPenneys has the stomach to take the slog back into the segment where department stores used to occupy. My hope is that this doesn’t lead to another terrible JCPenney logo.
Packaging gets refreshed all the time. Initially, I thought this was just an update but I think there’s a few interesting points that are happening with the change.
Firstly, Hershey’s is putting greater emphasis on the sugar-free nature of the product, so that it’s easily discerned, especially when placed next to a non-sugar free item like these Dots. (I couldn’t find a more closely related package than the Dots. It seems this size and quantity belongs only to sugar free chocolates, so this will have to do for comparison…and yes, I ate them both!) The vertical “swoop bump” has given way to a large white band across the center of the front panel. The change makes completely clear there is a distinction between these and the standard offerings. It also stands out at shelf, doing a far better job of calling out Hershey’s offerings in this area.
The postulations I glean from these changes are that Hershey’s may have had issues with customers having difficulty finding the product or perhaps they confused the sugar-free product with normal offerings. The other possibility maybe that Hershey’s is making a bolder bid to own the sugar-free chocolate space. A louder package would go far in that regard. Seeing as the shelf-space set aside for such treats has increased drastically in the last few years, I can see the draw to advertise this feature.
For branding folks, the second interesting change is the ownership of the brown field on the packaging. Both the Dots and the new sugar free packaging have gone with a straight Hershey’s brown. The packaging my seem less ‘fun’ but it also comes off as more bold. The change to the simplified Hershey’s brown background also serves to increase ownership of that color in the merchandising space and condenses the brand message.
Not only that, but the border around the Hershey’s logo has been removed, essentially making the entire package the logo’s brown field. Breaking the logo out of the border tends to break the “badge-ing” effect. Instead of saying it is a product BY Hersheys, it IS a product of Hersheys. Sure that sounds a bit like a game of semantics, but the ownership is more clear with the border-less logo.
The great thing is all of these changes bring the new packaging more inline with the classic chocolate bar look.
There are always gyrations between packaging being simplified and overly styled to be eye catching. This new packaging look by Hershey’s is definitely the former, but a congruent brand look is always preferable, especially when you’d like to exclaim that the new product offerings are the same quality as the old standards. Since I have tasted both, I can say that there might just be truth to packaging.
Autemu – This EP Netlabel MP3 Review
I think every time you listen to This EP by Autemu, it sounds like something completely different, which is a good thing. I am not sure how she accomplished that, but it’s a win for the rest of the world.
To kind of put a finer point on the work, you could easily put it in your library between Amon Tobin and Squarepusher and feel pretty good about that. I think that location tells a lot about what you’re getting with this release. It’s definitely headphone and not dancing electronic music. Autemu puts down some very cerebral and just-this-side-of-rhythmic beats that make the difference between really well done modern Drum & Bass and cacophony – a balance many try to tackle but rarely achieve.
Track L-R has a nice sort of Jazz- downtempo sort of feeling over considered and Foley Room -esque beats, striking a pretty nice sort of balance. Harpoliciious, on the other hand is perhaps the most melodic of the tracks and reminds me of Photek’s Boy Girl Song – with teeth. You can’t miss the first track, either!
The sad part is that it’s really too short. I wish it were full-length. A nice hour’s worth of work so that I can stay in Autemu’s world for a bit longer, so here’s to hoping that there’ll be another release.
Download the 320k EP here…well it’s not here, Crazy Language has a Flash site so I cannot or am too lazy to peel out the link, so you’ll just have to follow the link below and look for release cl-039 for the download. I left this in here because I like consistency. 
Autemu is on the Crazy Language Netlabel
What do you do with a company that makes 75% of it’s business from B2B and 25% from a nascent portable market and the dying consumer computer market? You could do what the late CEO thought: sod the consumer and jump all the way in to B2B. What’s the problem with that? IBM and Oracle to start and perhaps SAP to end. Essentailly, you’re getting into a market with already established competitors in an area of industry that’s not very excited about change.
Then there’s the idea of blowing out a quarter of business which sits at just past the tipping point. Sure , the market for conusmer desktops will only be a shadow of itself in the near future, but the technolgy that HP now has could eclipse this.
What would be the right thing to do? Do both, but connect them. HP is in a unique place where it could, in fact, connect the dots from the mobile/portable/tablet market and big business systems and have the clout to make it work. The genius is the making the end-to-end work.
HP would actually become what everyone thinks RIM was. The business portable device company. They would be the trusted company that business would turn to to integrate from mainframe to cloud to cell phone. No more hunting down patch programs or looking through tables to see what’s compatible with what. They could just buy the whole system.
You see, this is a race. And that race is to see who can close the circle between the secure server, the cloud and the portable. The world is moving away from desks in office buildings and becoming mobile and fluid. This is made possible by having the internet everywhere, absurdly portable devices and the need to reduce operating costs. Right now we all have each of the components, but the integration is certainly not at the depth we need.
The big problems companies face in connecting the dots is essentially bespoke hardware and software and the notion of trust. This is where HP could shine. HP is a trusted name in the corporate world – certainly trustworthy enough to enlist the help of managing important data. Most importantly, HP owns their operating system, and can open or secure it at any depth or expand it to any who asks. Something companies using android cannot do. It also controls the hardware on the devices (hopefully) guaranteeing a quality of service just like iOS but in a more business-friendly manner.
By becoming business’s mobile solutions integration company, Hewlett Packard sits in a market it arleady knows and against players who arguably haven’t figured it out yet, namely Microsoft and Research in Motion. This positioning also takes itself out of the more cut-throat competition in the consumer space, where HP has shown it has no clue on how to compete. Finally, if HP is truly serious about moving totally into the B2B market, being the integration company would be the ultimate leveraging platform to own the rest of the market.
An article on Inc.com has posed the thought that the tablet wars are already over. I posit that they have just begun.
The tablet computer will be the platform of choice for most of the developed world in the near future. It’s size and capability are ideal for the great bulk of the computing populace. It’s portable, easy to use and does everything the normal user cares to do, namely consume media and communications.
As for the market, it’s a bit too early to claim anyone a victor. When one takes into account the competitors to the iPad, thus far you can see that the players had obviously rushed products to market without analyzing the segment. They produced the over-priced, under hyped versions we see today.
To start, we can discount HP’s leaving of the market. HP has an identity crisis that is far larger than the competitive value of their tablets and pulling out of the market had very little to do with how the devices fared.
As for the rest of the market, I imagine that what we just had was the opening volley. Competing manufacturers are re-tuning their offerings to be more competitive. Arguably, the tablet has reached a sort of innovation stabilization point where large movements in features give way to refinements and styling. Usually, this is the point when most competitors get into markets.
Companies (that are not called Apple) will now focus on price structures, pushing tablet prices lower into what would be called something like ‘the commodity tablet market’. By doing this, they will hit a greater number of the population and simultaneously push Apple into the smaller ‘premium’ category.
There will be a massive battle for the commodity tablet in the near future. Apple will not be a part of it, just as Apple entering the low-end smartphone market has only been rumor up to this point. If that might seem a bit of a fantasy, think of both the smart phone market and even reaching back to the onset of the personal computer market. Apple had a similar dominance then, but as more competitors got into the game on a standardized, competing platform (Android for phones and Win/Tel for PCs) Apple got pushed out of the bulk of the market in favor of more cost-effective products.
The interesting thing is that the commodity market, thus far, has not been explored by any competitor – and it is, by far, the largest segment. To make it easy to visualize, this is the market that makes up all the folks who buy their computers from big box stores and discount centers. That group is the bulk of the US and other markets. A six hundred dollar tablet is hard to swallow, but a three hundred dollar tablet is much more palatable, and for a very large buying populace. They won’t care that it does slightly less than the iPad as long as it plays their media where-ever they want. Perhaps this may seem like an unreachable pricing baseline, but one look at what some Chinese importers are selling unbranded tablets shows, this is certainly not the case.
We could foresee a real victor to this war if there will be a tablet competitor who steps up with the magic $300 tablet just before the holiday season. Whomever does that, captures the tablet market for the season and sets the stage for the biggest tablet battle: the every-man’s tablet.
What is a ‘brand’?
I saw this question posted on a discussion group. I was going to reply but I realized it’s a more thoughtful definition than could be written in a follow up, so I’m going to write it here.
What is a brand? A brand is the perception of a company that lies in the minds of consumers. That’s pretty philosophical, huh? It’s true. A brand isn’t a logo or a catch phrase or a value statement. This is precisely why changing merely a company’s logo does nothing to change the perception of the brand.
A brand is what consumers think of when they think of a company – how good their products are, how easy it is to deal with the company, how owning their product makes them feel and so on. All of these feelings and experiences make up a company’s brand.
Truly great brands make sure that they hone every aspect of the customer experience to make sure it fits with what the company wants to be. IBM does a phenominal job of overseeing the entire customer experience, which is why ‘no one ever gets fired for choosing IBM’.
The brand is bigger than the logo. The logo is just shorthand for what the company stands for. It’s a little signal that says the product or service that bears the logo ascribes to everything we percieve the company as a whole is about. We know that everything that has the Apple ‘apple’ on it will have the same high standards and warranty as the rest of the line. This is why companies protect their logo.
When a company looses that logo stewardship it runs the risk of destroying the promise its brand offers. We all know of companies who license brands promiscuously. We trust those brands far less. Customers are smart and can smell carelessness and that’s when a brand can work against itself. Just as you can extend a company’s brand promise to other products, a stretched brand, operated by a careless licensee, can send terrible tremors back to the brand.
Because a brand is not a logo or a saying, changing them will not change perceptions of the company as the experience of the company is still the same. If calling customer service is more infuriating than actually using the broken product, no softer typeface on a company’s website is going to change how a disgruntled customer is going to explain their experiences to prospective buyers.
It is important, when thinking of your brand, that you think of that brand as every way that the customer interacts with the company. This extends from the easy things like what happens when a customer uses your product or when it contacts the company and it matters in the indirect things like what the company aligns itself to and how the company carries itself in the world. All these things are taken into account by the customer when they consider supporting your brand (and your company).
If a company acts concerted in its mission as it exerts itself then its reward is a strong brand. A strong brand yields a solid and rewarding following of customers.
Think of a brand as the idea of law enforcement. The logo is a policeman’s badge. The badge does not make the lawman trustworthy or uphold the law. The words and deeds of that lawman does. If the lawman is corrupt, the shape or color of the badge will not fix the corruption to those who know – and soon enough, everyone will.
A company’s brand is a company’s ‘badge’. The company’s actions forge the meanings of the badge – not the other way around.
In the world of today, humans are the prime benefactor and target for branding work. We see it with our eyes and we process our experiences and desires to make judgments whether products and services are for us or not. We also can divine through good branding campaigns the extensions of products or services we will enjoy or recognize the ones we will not.
We all have a personal brand that we use to keep track of the things we like, the things we didn’t and what we’d like others to think of us. From this, we determine if products align with our brand. If they do, we buy. If not, we pass it by.
As the world moves into the future, we can extrapolate how much more dependent we will be on technology. Already we have begun to trust our mobile devices more than we trust our own senses or knowledge. Maps and way-finding are a perfect examples. A few decades ago we relied on physical maps, sign-age and perhaps even a little intuition to find our way. Today, we have GPS and apps that just tell us the steps that we’d have to take. We blindly trust that Magellan knows the way.
What about knowing what we like? Would our technology then do the deciding of likes for us? Perhaps there’d be some sort of algorithm that would take into account similarly branded items and deliver our tastes to us?
Technology could easily understand our habits and predict our tastes, then deliver suggestions, creating blinders to everything else as we travel down our own long tails of personal taste. Google already does this for us, to a degree. They list our browsing habits and forecast similar sites. Why not do the same in physical stores? Couple this with a more finely tuned location aware application and the inside of a store becomes as specialized as a Nordstrom’s visit.
Now that things are far more helpful, what would this do to branding? It would essentially make the mobile device the brand consumer. The device would be in charge of continuing the loyalty to a brand, as long as the actual consumer does not specifically say not to. Brand loyalty may actually become like opt-out email campaigns, we continue to support them just because we’re too lazy to shut it off.
Devices will find the selected objects in stores by some sort of location awareness or NFC technology. This will save us time, primarily from the waste of browsing or deciding as we will trust our devices to understand our personal brand and the brand loyalties we enjoy.
Packaging will still serve to close the final decision. Instead of selling the product, it will serve to support the buying decision merely as a re-check against the branding algorithm. Advertising could have an immediate effect. Ads with QR codes could be instantly scanned (if liked) and added directly to the shopping list, and the buyer’s personal brand likes are updated.
Branding would become more of an algorithm than a face of a product or service – it will still be there on the packaging and in ads, but the brand’s most important component will be how it is found and interacted with in the mountains of cloud data that connects preferences with shoppers. A shopper’s buying habits will be analyzed along with countless other shoppers to form a kind of ‘like’-chain, making it easier to suggest products in other categories. Using their devices, the shopper will rate the product afterward and their preferences of brand and product will change slightly and the cloud would be updated.
As the world becomes more and more hectic, our reliance on our devices to make the more mundane decisions for us will only increase. These decisions will extend into shopping and having a program that recognizes what we like, keeps up with our (subtitle) changing tastes and recommends items will become invaluable. These apps will guide us through shopping experiences with precision and ease, cutting down on the time it takes to buy our needs. For that, we will be grateful, even though decisions on brand loyalty will be made by a small device and a large, distant server rather than by our own tastes.
Curiously, I was talking with a friend of mine about Motorola’s plans this past weekend and we had gotten on to a discussion about the equity in the Droid brand. Our conversation revolved mostly on how Motorola’s then plan to introduce another operating system and the destruction of the Droid brand it would bring. Obviously, things changed on Monday.
Google’s purchase could mean a number of things for the Droid brand. The interesting aspect is that this will essentially be Google’s first real consumer brand that lives outside of the Internet. Brands that extend to the tangible world – and especially the product world – are different beasts than purely digital ones. The care and feeding of a brand like this is much more than what Google has experienced in the past.
The Nexus line was probably their best foray into actual products and it could hardly be called a success. Otherwise, you have the current push for the Chrome laptops, which I am sure that many who are reading this probably haven’t even heard of. Even the Android operating system, which is poised to be ‘the’ mobile device platform in the coming years has anemic advertising behind it, smacking of Business-to-Business bland-our.
Should Google notice, they may have lucked into a solution that could make their own branded phone a success. With Droid, they have essentially a turn-key branding solution for their mobile products, as well as the channels necessary to make it easy to get things in front of clients. More importantly, they have the cache to convince shoppers to buy.
Motorola put a lot effort into creating the brand, which is possibly the strongest Android brand on the market, even though it seems that Motorola has backed away from the push, cutting down on the more pervasive, high-value advertising campaigns. With a little effort, Google could breathe some life back into the Droid brand and perhaps own the market once again, just as Motorola had done initially.
The question is will Google understand what needs to be done to maintain and grow the brand? There has been a lot of talk about Google’s purchase being merely for the mountain of patents that Motorola had relating to mobile devices and not so much about the actual product lines. Perhaps Google just doesn’t know what they have. It is not without precedent that large companies lack the understanding of everything they receive when they buy other companies. It happens all the time.
The other issue that’s brought up in this Businessweek article is that Google may just have to scuttle the brand to head off an exodus from the Android OS and scatter us to a number of proprietary mobile OSs. Should that exodus happen, WebOS and Windows phones may become the heirs to Androids other-than-iOS crown.
What would be the best way to operate this purchase? I would think that allowing Motorola Mobility to operate as a somewhat independent subsidiary would yield the best results. Google would get its patent protection for Android. Google would also get a premium supplier of handsets to make sure their Android vision is properly executed. In order to do this right, Mr. Page would have to keep Google’s branding off of Motorola – a hard thing to do with mergers. When people buy things, they can’t help changing those things.
For the Droid brand, it would be massive mistake to push forward a co-branding scenario that’s all too common in these situations, like ‘Droid by Google’ or ‘Google Droid’ Ruining strong brands is easy when you dilute them with the misplaced necessity of staking claim.
Personally, I am a big fan of Motorola and their mobile products. The Droid campaign was genius and perfectly executed against everything iPhone. I am also a fan of Google and the products they put forth, although I am unsure that this plan will work out on in the most fruitful manner.
When you look at a smart phone you see a sort of 21st century Swiss Army knife. It has a lot of functionality but every one of its functions are compromised (at least slightly) to cobble them all together. Perhaps it’s time to break them apart. If you did that with the knife, you could have a proper-sized set of scissors and just deep-six that bloody cork screw.
Looking at where phones are at right now, I think most can see that the mobile device world is having some growing pains. You can see it most when you consider the dimensions of the products available. People would really like to have a larger screen to run apps and do a bit of mobile browsing. This obviously bumps into the portability of the device and using it for calls. If it’s too big you can’t comfortably carry it in a pocket without anyone thinking your sumuggling paperbacks and it’s even harder to jam one in a small purse -not to mention holding the brick to your head for calls. Do you then have two phones? One that you can carry easily and the other the mini tablet?
Coming from the other side of things are tablets. Personally, I think the ideal size for a tablet is at least 10 inches. Most companies are aiming at 7 inches. This awkward size makes it just a little too small to do a lot of serious work, but also makes it even less portable than a large smart phone. Then they have a connectivity issue. Do you buy one with 3G? Play the hot-spot-hopping game with WiFi only? Buy both?
Finally, there’s the questions of etiquette. We all know that taking a call while talking to someone in person is pretty rude ( or at least we should ). Perhaps we also know that checking our phones every few minutes or every time we get the buzz of an update is pretty irritating as well. These actions also have an effect on our productivity. Our interconnectivity is not going to diminish in the future. The goal now is to take all these things and think about how we can change them for the better.
How would this look for a mobile device? I think the best way to think about it would be to make our persons a portable network. We would perhaps carry a ‘Personal Server’ that would really be the link to outside networks like 3G or WiFi and the connector to a number of peripherals, like a handset or a Status Monitor, perhaps even a tablet or some devices we haven’t even thought of yet. If we separated all of these components we could choose which items we would like to bring with and which to keep at home or in the car.
There would be even more advantages to a selective constellation rather than a single device. By pushing updates to some sort of Status Monitor, like a wristwatch or a fob, we could diminish the need to always unpack the phone to check what all the buzzing is about, we’d also diminish the chances of toliet-bowling our phones.
Having a tablet to interface with your personal network would have a few advantages as well. The tablet would operate through your network’s connection, eliminating duplicity as well as perhaps pulling processing from the network server itself, making the tablet a much more affordable item. Perhaps then, you could have two – a completely unusable 7inch tablet you can barely use and a larger one for more pointed operations.
While it sounds great, what makes it better is that the accessories for the network wouldn’t have to updated when you’re finally at that point with your data plan. You could get that peripheral when you need it or maybe even want it really, really bad. Think about it: if we broke with the brick we could finally drive fashion into our electronic accessories and maybe the world would be a slightly less irritating and connected world.
