Speaking at the BRITE ’11 conference, Williams explained that companies today tend to have a myopic vision when using new technologies to build their brands. Digital magazines, for example, may offer more features, but they’re still giving consumers what they expect in ways that they expect. “As a result, a lot of our brand-building around these new technologies has taken on some pretty predictable trajectories.”

Disruptive innovation, however, is not about technological change. According to Williams, it’s about a revolution in behavior and “changing the way you think about a category.” Brands need to move beyond focusing on what the latest technology can do for their company or product. Williams challenged the audience to break free from conventional assumptions about a category to see from a new perspective. To do so, he reminds us to be careful of cultural influence and to pay attention to context, not just the foreground. As consumers and the marketplace evolve, it is increasingly important to embrace disruptive innovation before it is forcibly imposed by a new competitor or shifting consumer landscape. To quote Harvard Law School professor, Roberto Unger, “the task of the imagination is to do the work of crisis without crisis.”

BY ALLIE ABODEELY

Last fall, Columbia’s Center on Japanese Economy and Business hosted, with support from the Center on Global Brand Leadership, the “Global Marketing of National Products: Kikkoman and Coca-Cola” which featured Yuzaburo Mogi (MBA ’61), Honorary CEO and Chairman of the Board of Directors for Kikkoman Corporation, and Masahiko Uotani (MBA ’83), Chairman of Coca-Cola Japan Co. The two leaders shared powerful insights about effective techniques they developed for cross-border branding.

Yuzaburo Mogi (click for video)

For Kikkoman, an important innovation in its U.S. marketing, which had only focused on the Japanese immigrant community, took place after World War II. Chairman Mogi noted that Kikkoman watched American soldiers and civilians in post-war Japan using soy sauce on their American-style dishes. This inspired Kikkoman to position its product as a general, “all purpose” condiment, and began in-store sampling demonstrations in the early 1960s to encourage Americans to experiment with soy sauce. It also used experienced chef’s to develop and share recipes that used soy sauce in standard American dishes in order to further push Kikkoman into American food consciousness. Brand trust and financial impacts were also gained when Kikkoman became one of the first Japanese companies to build manufacturing plants in the U.S. in the early 1970s.

Today Kikkoman owns 60% of the market for soy sauce in the United States. “Kikkoman has never thought in terms of just selling a Japanese product overseas,” explained Mogi. “We prioritized our targets. We focused on the U.S. market, developed a successful business model here and then took that model to other targets.”

Masahiko Uotani (click for video)

Mr. Uotani then flipped the discussion by describing a strong U.S. brand, Coca-Cola, effectively entering the Japanese market. Central to Coca-Cola’s strategy for market expansion, was the decision to construct its Japanese subsidiary to tailor its product and marketing initiatives specifically to Japanese consumers. Uotani described it as a “hybrid approach” that allowed tiered levels of decisions to be made at the global, national and local levels. “The hybrid model enables us to offer new value proposition to our consumers,” explains Uotani. This approach aided the development of new products such as canned coffee and allowed for innovative features such as facial recognition to vending machines, of which there are 2.6 million in Japan. Furthermore, Coca-Cola Japan was able to provide insight to its parent company, Coca-Cola Company, about regional trends they thought could influence other geographies. This led to new vending machine designs that have become popular in the United States.

In closing the symposium, the discussion turned to how the interaction of global brands and local preferences will increase and companies should be meticulous in formulating clear strategies. The underlying message of both speakers was that brands shouldn’t focus on pure expansion, but rather integrate and assimilate brands with the local culture in order to be successful.

To watch video clips of the symposium and to read more about the event, click here.

BY MIKLOS RAIBON

1. Mobile by Default

In 2011, for the first time ever, global sales of smartphones overtook personal computers. This marks a huge shift in behavior by customers and employees alike. 2012 will be the year that computing begins to be “mobile by default.” Rather than marketers thinking, “Yes, our web experience is good, but how does it look on a mobile device?”, instead every digital experience will be built from the beginning with mobile devices in mind

2. But Tablets Redefine What Is “Mobile”

At the same time that mobile is becoming our default standard, the definition of “mobile” is rapidly expanding. This is due to the broad popularity of tablets, which have spread from personal computing to business with use cases ranging from mobile sales forces to C-suite executives on the go. On the strength of the iPad, Apple is poised to become the largest computer manufacturer in the world in 2012. Meanwhile, Amazon’s Kindle Fire is blazing the trail for a wider market of stripped down tablets at a fraction of the price. Increasingly, brands will have to develop digital experiences for three screens: the smartphone, tablet, and personal computer.

3. Apps Are Out, HTML5 Is In

Since the launch of the iTunes App Store in 2008, downloaded (“native”) apps have dominated the mobile computing experience, offering a flexible user interface better suited to small touchscreens than traditional websites. But the arrival of HTML5 has brought a new standard to the Web which allows for mobile websites (“web apps”) with much of the interactivity and customized design of native apps. Following the lead of The Financial Times and Amazon, many brands in 2012 will begin to shift towards developing mobile apps on the web. This will allow brands to avoid many of the problems of the native app model: developing versions of each app for different operating systems (iOS, Android, etc.); persuading customers to the take time to install an app vs. simply clicking a web link; handing over a share of revenue and control of customer data to the App Store owner; and facing significant delays for every update to your app (web apps update instantly, just like a website or blog)

4. Offline Merges with Online

By 2012, QR codes (“quick response”) will have gone from “Too confusing, consumers don’t get it” to “Too new, the ROI is unclear” to “That’s old news, of course we have one on the corner of every brochure.” Meanwhile, innovative uses of augmented reality will continue to unfold in retail and gaming apps that merge on-screen reality with what’s in front of us off-screen. While the first iteration of Google Goggles has not caught on, visual search (or “true A.R.”) may start to make its first appearance in 2012, allowing us to point phones at random objects in the real world and find relevant online information about them.

5. Mobile Payments Drive Loyalty

Starbucks’ mobile app has processed 26 million transactions in its first year, thanks to scanners on location in many stores. Kenyan mobile payment startup M-pesa now processes more transaction globally than Western Union. Loyalty marketing firms like Aimia are focusing on using mobile payment to incentivize brand loyalty and customer retention. In 2012, brands will find new ways to manage customer relationships by tying payments to mobile devices using new technologies like Square and NFC (near field communications).

6. Touch and Voice Transform Computing Interfaces

Touchscreens have defined our experience of mobile devices — first on smartphones, and now on tablets. In 2012, Microsoft will finally launch its first Windows operating system with a touch interface built into it from the ground up. After years of telling your kids to stop touching your computer screen (it’s not an iPhone, dear!), you won’t have to, as your screen will seamlessly switch back and forth between mouse, keyboard, and touch. The emergence of another transformative interface, voice-driven computing, was first seen this year in IBM’s Watson, the Jeopardy-playing artificial intelligence (A.I.) computer. Consumers got their first voice A.I. interface to take home in Siri, the personal assistant in the Apple iPhone 4S. Expect voice interfaces to appear in more consumer digital experiences starting in 2012.

7. TV Grows Ever More Social

Multi-screen TV viewing is rapidly becoming the norm. 42 percent of Americans surf the Web while watching TV, and 26 percent send instant messages or texts. In the last Super Bowl, Twitter users sent a record-breaking 4,000 messages each second. YouTube’s integration with Google+ will allow for simultaneous social viewing of online video, not just television. Brand advertisers will need to think about how to engage customers across these multiple social screens. They may want to look to Bravo TV, who found that its online viewing parties gave a 10 percent ratings lift for the “Real Housewives” series.

8. Live Video Emerges as a Business Channel

Recorded video has already become a huge business opportunity, as testified by the many YouTube channels for brands like Home Depot, IBM, and Pepsi. By contrast, live video interaction (like Skype and FaceTime) has been seen as a consumer conversation tool. But it is now emerging as a powerful platform for conducting business. Not just teleconferences, but medical consultations, therapy, and even cooking classes are now being conducted via live video. The Hangouts feature on Google+ will further popularize this by making group video incredibly easy. Look for brands in 2012 to find new ways to use live video conversation to engage key audiences.

9. Social Commerce Stalls Two Ways

Social couponing will likely decline in 2012 for three reasons. Many Groupon competitors have pulled out (including Facebook Deals); investors are showing wariness about the business model; and local retail partners are growing increasingly wary. A recent study showed that customer reviews (as measured on Yelp) decline significantly after a retailer launches a Groupon deal. In another kind of “social commerce”: Facebook’s dreams of becoming a huge e-commerce platform to rival Amazon will likely not come to fruition in 2012. Facebook brings social sharing but not much else to the table (it can’t handle fulfillment, or customer complaints, or inventory), and it keeps too much of customers’ data for itself. Merchants will find they can do better by advertising their wares within Facebook apps, and encouraging customers to share their purchases on social media, but keeping the actual e-commerce transactions on their own websites.

10. Google Integrates

In 2012, marketers will warily watch the web’s three titans fiddle with the rules of their respective kingdoms. The first to watch is still search giant Google. Brands will need to carefully track how the integration of Google’s products (especially Search, YouTube, Maps, and Google+) begins to impact the rules of the game for SEO and customer engagement in 2012. Will brands need to spend more time on Google +1′s and Hangouts, as part of ensuring that their web presence stays high in Google’s search algorithm?

11. Facebook Ups Its Ante

Facebook is next. As brands still wait for the roll-out of Timeline, we can expect that Facebook will continue to play with its algorithm for what gets shown to consumers in 2012. On the plus side, this may lead to less visual spam for the user and higher click-through rates on Facebook’s vast but underperforming inventory of banner ads. On the down side, marketers may find they have to pay more and more just to get their content seen by their own Facebook “fans,” let alone spread virally to others.

12. Twitter Innovates for Advertisers

Finally, Twitter will continue to experiment with its interface and its advertising products in 2012. Its addition of brand pages this month is a welcome step, and it adds a bit of polish for users visiting a business account via a web browser (but this is only a small portion of Twitter’s traffic). The real question for 2012 is what new advertising products Twitter will develop (like the new Promoted Trends) that will give marketers more visibility in front of the right Twitter users, while ensuring that what users see is relevant enough to keep them engaged with the service.

BY DAVID ROGERS

This post originally posted by David on the DavidRogers.biz blog at: http://www.davidrogers.biz

In January 2012, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the non-profit organization that governs the internet’s naming system, is opening the opportunity for global businesses, communities, governments, and even geographical locations, to apply for generic top-level domain names (gTLDs)—such as .canon, .wine, and .nyc. Many are now weighing the pros and cons of “dotBranding” themselves.

The news surrounding ICANN’s new gTLD program, has stimulated a broad discussion raising questions such as “How could my business benefit from this?” to “Do I need to protect my brand?”

Like all things, there are a wide range of considerations to factor in when deciding whether to apply, among them trademark protection, brand equity, and cost. To help business leaders evaluate the benefits of investing in a gTLD, Columbia Business School’s Center on Global Brand Leadership hosted a video webinar, “Who Should Invest in a dotBrand?” this fall. The event brought together branding and internet experts to discuss the strategic questions decision-makers are facing. To view this free webinar, click here.

First, it should be clarified that ICANN isn’t simply handing out gTLDs to the first person or organization that applies. Just because Jane in Arizona is applying for .madonna doesn’t mean that she’ll get it. There are “checks and balances” in place including a trademark clearinghouse providing authentication of trademark information, and an objection-based process enabling rights holders to demonstrate that a proposed gTLD would infringe their legal rights. Of course there are valid concerns for businesses, organizations, and communities who do have common or even similar names. A company like Patagonia may be legitimately concerned about securing the same domain name as the region of Patagonia. ICANN has created a dispute resolution program, and even auction procedures, to handle such issues.

While some brands perceive gTLDs as a risk and may be considering applying for trademark protection, others envision possibilities involving brand extension and brand architecture. For example, a parent company like Unilever with multiple sub-brands could employ “dove.unilever.” B2C businesses like Citibank could create a more personalized consumer experience through their websites with url’s such as “www.michael.citibank.” But this also begs the question about the appearance of a brand’s homepage—is it “home.bmw” or “bmw.bmw”? Brand consultants seem to still be hashing this out.

And many opponents to the new gTLD program feel the financial commitment is a hefty price to pay for a top-level domain system that they feel works fine with its 22 existing TLDs (.com, .gov, .jobs, etc.). The application costs US$185,000 as well as a reported US$25,000 annual fee. Then there are the additional expenses such as technical, administration, and maintenance fees. For big name brands, this could be worth the investment. When compared to the cost of a single, 30-second television spot, it’s not a huge chunk of change. For small to mid-size companies, however, it is an expensive endeavor that may take deeper consideration.

“The kinds of benefits we see from a brand-building perspective are things like controlling your brand and your content,” explained Karl Isaac, Executive Director of Landor’s digital branding practice, during the Center’s webinar. “If you are a business that transacts with your customers or that protects very private and confidential information for your customer, the increased security benefits alone may outweigh the risks of doing this.”

The application process may be preempted, however, as the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation has called for a hearing this month to discuss the merits, implications and concerns surrounding ICANN’s new program. If the gTLD application process does move forward as planned, businesses and organizations will need to do due diligence if thinking about applying.

BY ALLIE ABODEELY

In my webinar “New Rules for Business in the Social Media Age” (for Columbia Business School), I present best practices for planning a social media strategy to match your customers, your business and your objectives.

This 30 minute webinar examines:

• Best practices from top brands for building customer relationships online
• Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+: the critical differences for business
• How much social media is too much? (for your business)
• New research on when and how to best communicate with customers in social media
• Why you need to integrate social media with the rest of your communications
• How to know if your social media is paying off (with real metrics and ROI)

This webinar is based on a lecture from my 3-day executive program “Digital Marketing Strategy“, offered by Columbia Business School Executive Education. Click the link to learn more about upcoming sessions (March 12-14, and October 15-17, 2012).

BY DAVID ROGERS