A cylindrical gift is wrapped beautifully in a Japanese department store

The post How good is Japanese customer service, and how bad can it get? appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

Previous memoir episodes series have described how we cracked the code for making content-based promotions in Japan (as with the Puchi Bruce campaign for Die Hard 4.0 explained here), or how we got a taste for building technology solutions (as with the iTunes blogparts explained here). But no account of this period in the late noughties would be complete without documenting the disruptive rise (and rise…. and rise…) of the iPhone, and thence the smart phone, and it certainly had a big impact on the Alien-Eye business too. Zooming forward to 2014 as I write now as Lowe Profero I am sure that more than half of what we output is experienced on a smartphone.

It is hard to believe now with the recent launch of the 5.5inch iPhone 6 that the first iPhone was basically an iPod with telephony. Through our involvement with iTunes we were very much aware of the significance of Apple’s ecosystem of digital content across devices being extended to mobile phones, but we could not have imagined just how disruptive the App Store would be, creating an open market place for software.

As described in Chapter #1, when we set out on the Alien-Eye journey we expected the Japanese mobile carriers to enable an open mobile contents ecosystem, but this was in hindsight very naive of us. So although the bedroom creators and hackers got busy making Flash movies and games that could be freely distributed on the web, they did not have a platform geared to surface and popularise the most creative and original to a wide audience, and mobile content distribution was closed / locked down completely by the close-minded carriers. There certainly was no platform with the allure of coding for a new domain of interaction – the touch screen, combined with accelerometers, GPS and cameras all in one app.

YouTube proved to be that creators’ platform for video, complemented here by the distinctively Japanese video platform NicoNico, but no one could have predicted the phenomenon that was the gold rush onto the App Store, although I am sure some claim they did. All of a sudden designers and videographers, university students and ICT teachers alike were learning to code in C+. We certainly did not miss out either, and the constant stream of mobile app development projects, firstly for iOS, and then for iOS & Android, helped grow and sustain our in-house development team through to late 2011, when as previously lamented on this blog, we admitted defeat on a coding team without scale.

The first iPhones in Japan

Our first iPhone app project happened astride New Year 2007 > 2008, which was even before the first iPhone’s came on sale in Japan in July 2008, and was the first iPhone-related campaign of any kind to my knowledge. We were so desperate to get in on the act that we had someone bring us 3 iPhone’s from Hong Kong that we developed and tested on before promptly handing them to the winners of a travel blogger competition we ran to promote Chile as a tourist destination.

Applicants had to reply to the question “Why I want to go to Chile”, and having been seeded skillfully into young adventurous travel communities in Mixi this contest generated over ten thousand inspiring reasons to do just that, all in the persuasive and credible words of real people, creating a viral mechanism around the campaign. The winning trio were then sent to Chile, armed with an iPhone each and a suite of GPS-aware apps we hacked together to live blog their way around Chile’s stunning locations with instructions to take loads of pictures, and micro-blog about all the fun they were having. These posts were uploaded directly to open community platforms like Twitter as well as auto-aggregated into a live-stream campaign site that we set up.

Chile Tourism Campaign that was made possible by live blogging from GPS enabled apps on an early iPhone

All of this content, as well as the social media buzz, combined with the blog and travel news site coverage of the contest successfully transformed Chile’s online presence and positioning as a destination for young independent travellers. One of the most satisfying aspects of this project was that it fixed Chile’s SEO problem in Japanese. Until that point a search for Chile would yield pages of results relating to either ‘ebi-chili’ recipes, the popular chinese spicy prawn dish, or else the Red Hot Chili Peppers, since both contain the same two katakana characters “CHI-RI” as the country, and are searched for more frequently. Finally, and thanks in some ways to the iPhone, Chile was visible on the web in the Japanese language.

Today the Japanese app store is the most lucrative in the World, for the first time topping the US’s app store revenue in 2013, and now with Android going strong too, sales of game titles on smartphones are fuelling multi-billion-$ game companies’ IPOs and really killing consul makers like Nintendo with it. But back in 2009 when the iPhone sales had just about given the platform enough scale for businesses to take a serious look at it, things were more open and explorative.

Before there were apps, there were….

Our most complete experience with the App store came through a partnership with Tokyo-founded Cerego Inc, and their English learning platform iKnow!, previously named Smart.fm, but because we had already been active on another Apple-popularised platform, podcasting, we were able to adapt our way into apps in effect.

Over 4 or 5 years of working with Cerego I personally enjoyed numerous close working relationships through which I learned an awful lot, and several of those live on as cherished friendships, but it was co-founder Andrew Smith Lewis who brought us in initially and, with his eye for seeing a chance to create eye-catching spin-offs that made the core platform more convivial with the big wide web outside, was an essential supporter and advisor to all the projects we worked on together.

The partnership with Cerego had flourished during 2008 & 2009 thanks mainly due to the amazing success of a podcast program that notched up 10m downloads in its first 2 months after launch and was featured as top podcast in iTunes Japan’s “Rewind 2009” ranking.

The brain child of a talented and passionate Italian multi-media designer, Francesco Romano, he first conceived of the idea of creating podcasts that streamed the multi-media vocab flashcards as a smooth audio-visual experience while he was still working at Cerego. But the company’s focus was elsewhere and so they never got made. Some time later, and for various reasons everyone agreed, including Francesco himself, that he would be better off in the more diverse cut and thrust of the Alien-Eye working culture, and so we got to nurture his podcast idea among many other of his inspired creations.

Enhanced podcast format that used chapter images to create a simple interactive English learning flow c. 2009

Francesco’s podcast hack relied on using the chapters feature in the podcast format, fitting one vocab item plus its accompanying image for each chapter, with audio files playing the audio file for the word, another chapter was used for an example sentence with its audio and image. We could control how many such items we stringed together to make up one podcast. These were interactive to the extent that users could skip between chapter points, although it seemed that most played them hands free on the train commuting.

But how to publish these efficiently? Another invention hooked the old and more hackable version of Garageband, amongst other things a podcast publishing software, to suck in the learning content data from Cerego’s databases and spit out beautifully designed audio-visual podcast.

In this way, Francesco, together with one of Cerego’s own prolific developers, Zev Blut, could generate hours of valuable learning media at will. This “enhanced podcast” format was a game changer on the podcast rankings, since all of the competing pods had to be made in recording studios with costly voice talent and audio engineers. We could produce high quality content much faster and cheaper than anyone else, so we were able to absolutely dominate the rankings. At one point we had 3 separate series created in this way occupying positions 1, 3 and 5 on the all Japan chart, and occupied #1 for most of one year.

To me this is a great example of a “growth hack”, a topic I have spoken and written a lot about in the years since, e.g. this post about growth hacking talent, and Francesco’s approach to turning his vision into reality by thinking fluidly and adaptively across technology platforms illustrates the required mindset.

The app store comes of age

So the first generation of the Smart.fm iPhone apps were based on the enhanced podcasts, but also included games and other interactive features that were developed and improved in later versions. Cerego entrusted us with creating and running this nascent off-shoot of their business, overseeing it of course, but allowing us to design everything, from the product itself, the naming, pricing strategy, promotional activity. We hired an app developer over from the US, Brett Gneiting, who we tracked down after he had been a prizewinner in Cerego’s API competition a year or so previously and he and Francesco formed an awesome UI/UX > coding partnership.

We really embraced this opportunity to take ownership for the performance of a business vertical, and the longevity of the partnership speaks to its financial success, riding the wave of popularity of each iPhone release and all the attention the App Store garnered, bringing in significant revenue for Cerego and keeping us honest too.

One of the most rewarding aspects of having ours hands on every element of the product and marketing strategy was the ability to apply strategic ideas and see very quickly and directly whether they worked or not. When you work on big brands in an agency with a bunch of smart, opinionated marketers you always look at the strategy and think you could write the script better: the client got the naming wrong, or screwed up the pricing strategy, or did not position it in the opportune way; but usually you are not able to change those core elements, and even if you could it would take a relative age to see the effects.

So the app store was almost like a microcosmic market simulator with very rapid and dynamic feedback, so we could tune all those things together with the smart folks at Cerego, Andrew Smith Lewis and Russ Moench in particular, and work out what worked best. In fact it was such an intensely industrious period and we cut our teeth in so many different ways that it spawned a host of different skill sets that we were able to offer to other clients, from short snappy promo videos like these for the first app series, we developed a whole app / web service identity design and positioning strategy offering off the back of this period, and over all it gave us a lot more confidence in our convictions as marketing strategists.

News entries on the Alien-Eye homepage for successive app generation releases c.2010~11

Cerego has developed an extensive and high quality corpus of learning material, and that is what we leveraged for the iPhone and later Android apps. But its secret sauce is when this content gets hooked up to its proprietary learning engine algorithm. For various reasons this could not be encoded into a standalone app, but once Cerego re-booted it’s backend for the cloud era and rebranded as iKnow! made their push as a truly web 2.0 service they were able to provide a seamless experience for their growing paid user base across all devices, and it made sense to phase out the stand-alones. However, the success of the app store partnership set up perhaps an even more empowering collaboration with Cerego that will be the subject of a future memoirs post I suspect.

Over the 2 or 3 years between 2009 and 2011 all kinds of brands were commissioning apps from us, IBM being another noteworthy one, and other agencies too of course. Although I am proud of much of the work we did, most of these programs became forgettable for one of two reasons.

The first was under investment in initial promotion versus development. There would be an intent to make the initial functionality as awesome as possible, leaving little of the inevitably limited budget to launch it properly. It would have been better to get to minimum viability quickly and cheaply and then test the water, but few brands are setup to think in this way.

The second was lack of sustained intent and investment. Like puppies, an app is for life, not just for christmas. Actually, an app is an investment in an engaged user group or audience, and you need to keep improving and developing your app in order to nurture and grown that user group. Marketing departments are sadly not usually empowered or else of a mind to embrace this sort of opportunity.

Since the gold rush era the “I want an app too” effect has warn off, we (now speaking as Lowe Profero) are still developing apps, but they are typically business critical ones, and we have several hundred top class developers to code them. Examples would be a members app for the multi-billion Euro fashion EC businesses like ASOS; the order for app Dominoes Pizza; the loyalty app for booming restaurant franchises like Guzman y Gomez…

The truly cloud-based service models like Cerego, whose team’s live and breath features, UI and UX across all platforms because they are the difference between business success and failure, have in general brought the development in house as you would expect, and so after 2012 we helped them in other ways.

News post on Alien-Eye site on the sad passing of Steve Jobs.

And the app store itself is not the playground of tinkerers and hobbyists that it was in the early days when a developer in her bedroom could create and market an app and earn a million bucks in a month due to the inherent scaleability in and buzz around the marketplace. Some of those early entrepreneurs now run scaled up business around the app store, but most of them have been squeezed out, no longer able to get any visibility as big software and gaming companies have weighed in.

Actually the reasons for the minnows getting squeezed are probably as much to do with the ever increasing number of devices and iOS versions that apps needed to support, and that only got worse when Android swept into Japan. Towards the end of our partnership with Cerego on the app store in late 2011 we really felt this. In the early days of the App Store there were only a few handsets (iPods, iPhone, iPhone 2) and similarly few iOS versions. As Apple released each new wave of iPhones with bigger screens and new iOS versions with new capabilities the development resource required to keep up swelled.

This evolution suited Apple and the Android device makers just fine, since it put more pressure on users to upgrade to the latest model phones, (where most of the revenue is for Apple) and big gaming titles on the App and Play store dominate revenue anyway. So the gold rush with its long tail of entrepreneurs panning for gold came to pass on the big revenue-mining companies moved in. Such is the way of the world, and with its passing Apple too became less of a darling of the creative community, which loved the openness of the early app store. Steve Jobs passed away in October 2011 accompanied by much grief and sadness among us as well as so many others. Perhaps that was the date that marked the end of this chapter for us too.

The post Becoming a creative hybrid – Tokyo Memoirs Chapter 6: The app store gold rush appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

The entire “Tokyo Memoirs” series is collected here.

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Our next big endeavor led to our biggest “culture hack” to date, where we tapped into a deep furrow of Japanese entertainment culture, to rejuvenate a tiring brand in the Japanese market place, helping it reclaim top spot in an increasingly crowded market place.

Norton Fighter was a product of hybrid culture

Norton, the security software company, had been a pioneer in the first mass era of personal computing, and had enjoyed a cash-cow business in Japan’s security-conscious market alongside the explosion of the Windows platform for over a decade.

However, by the time we were introduced to them at the end of 2007 it had found itself crowded in by local rivals with products that could claim to do the same thing (at least in the eyes of the average PC owner), and more agile, local marketing strategies, and their revenues were hurting as a result. Having previously relied on a combination of traditional media-based brand salience combined with boring descriptions of product functionality at the point of sale, they needed a communication platform that could capture attention and increase relevance with Japanese audiences.

A passionate hybrid team

Inspired by a smart and charismatic client, Anton van Deth, who believed that even security software could be a compelling product category, despite what most people including many in his own team, we set out to set up a totally new communication paradigm through which to engage consumers around Norton’s product benefits.

Combining with a team of local character designers led by one of Japan’s top character design and toy model gurus, Don Kratzer (fig-lab), and in cahoots with an awesome development team led by Vince Ota, we worked to develop a multi-channel campaign centred around a hero character that played off the hugely successful 1970’s Ultraman style TV  hero show genre called “tokusatsu”. Tokusatsu means “special effects” in Japanese because of all the latex costumes and pyro-technics the low budget TV shows used, and it provided a rich seam of stylistic references for our creative executions.

Inventing a communication paradigm

Starting as an stunt style event outside the World’s biggest electronics retail store in Akihabara, we quickly set about recasting Norton’s entire product efficacy communications within the good-versus-evil storytelling paradigm, broken up into an episodic structure. True to the original genre, a central superhero character was developed, “Norton Fighter”, who was a cross between a Japanese tokusatsu style “guy in a mask and lycra suit” with a more macho American comic hero like Captain America.

Also just like in the original TV shows behind the lead hero character was his scientist inventors. Together they fought against monster characters (think guys in crazy monster costumes) that were based on the hitherto intangible plethora of malware threats such as viruses, trojan horses, botnets and the like, we were able to create fun, compelling dramatizations of their product story in basically any communication touchpoint, from point of sale tools to online games, TV ads to OOH.

That was the strategy anyway, but it still had to be executed creatively and rolled out to channels, and done in a way that built credibility and relevance with local stakeholders and customers.

Engaging key audiences

Key to the success of this roll out was engaging Japan’s influential ‘otaku’ community, the nerdy computer geeks who play a critical role in defining the credibility and reputation of computer related products. Largely oblivious to international brands and unaffected by mainstream media campaigns, this community had to be engaged on their own terms and on their own turf, and within a cultural space that resonated with them.

The answer was “hero-shows”, live shows that re-enact iconic battles between the heroes and monsters of the TV series, usually incorporating stylized fighting scenes and tokusatsu weaponry. Hence we began by running hero-shows outside the electronic stores in the districts of Tokyo and Osaka synonymous with the otaku culture, namely Akihabara and Osaka’s equivalent. For one event that created a lot of buzz online we combined the hero show with a otaku idol group, Marvel Parfait. All of these events were captured on video and seeded on Mixi and tech influencer blogs where they attracted some notoriety.

In concert with the events we shot mini-episodes depicting a battle between Norton Fighter and one of his arch enemies, in a style that paid homage to the original 70’s style with low-fi effects. Incidentally the first of these videos was picked up by the big American tech blogs like engadget and TechCrunch, marking the first time Norton had been featured in the new breed tech-news sites, with most commentators expressing surprise and delight that such a typically conservative tech brand like Norton was doing something interesting. This put us and our activities in the spotlight within Norton global, and meant that incremental budgets could keep flowing.

Norton Fighter takes on Botlas, the Botnet lord

Paying homage to a genre

From a creative execution point of view, we were very conscious of the potential risk of playing with such a treasured creative genre, as tokusatsu is in Japan. Do it well, and the foreign brand can be embraced by local audiences unlike ever before. But if you fail to do justice to the local creative genre you will lose credibility not gain it, and risk rejection from those who were previously merely indifferent.

As an example of the attention to detail that was applied, Don, who led the development of the all-important monster characters, would call creative strategy meetings to decide on the names of these web villains. For instance, the Trojan Horse genre of internet threats was represented by a mechanical horse-like character named “mokubakuba”, and he laboriously researched monster characters from the original TV shows.

Similarly Dicky, my co-founder at Alien-Eye, and lead video director, knew he had to get lots of details in the videos just right and so watched over 100 hours of original 70’s hero shows before he felt confident enough to direct something that could fit into the genre. But at the same time we could not simply ape the original genre. We had to take it somewhere new, and we did this by building in the brand values of the American software brand, making the hero character much more buff and hulk-like than the Japanese heroes would be, and using contemporary video effects to complement some of the old analogue techniques we employed.

I will never forget visiting the studio of the craftsmen that developed Don’s team’s designs into larger-than-life latex wonders. These guys had been working on tokusatsu costumes for decades, and more recently scale models for sci-fi movies, so their studio was an Aladdin’s cave of the weird and wonderful. We spent large chunks of the budget on these costumes, and much of the story development that took place over several years was driven by the costume production timeline.

Extending reach through multiple channels

In another medium, Don transformed the typical product pamphlet placed in the point of sale into a reprise of a tokusatsu fan comic magazine. Here the dry-as-a-bone technical spec sheet was replaced by manga dramatisations of the videos, product benefit statements into character profiles, with Norton’s cutting edge security technologies called out as the latest weaponry developed by the science team.

Having established the credibility of the our hero character in this way, the campaign was extended to mainstream channels with TV commercials, OOH and station media, and even a 25m high inflatable balloon of the hero character that was placed outside Japan biggest gaming event Tokyo Game Show. The buzz and awareness this created shifted sales to the extent that the brand reclaimed the #1 share of the category spot from its local rival, despite being significantly outspent both in media and in the retail channel.

One of the most interesting factors within this was the fact that for the first time the shop clerks who work the software floors of the big electronics chains, who are very much affected by what is being written in the otaku forums and blogs, started talking to customers about the hero character and explaining the campaign to them, being advocates for the brand for the first time.

Design credit to Masako Mori, Direction to Fig-Lab

Daring to be original

As we learned in many other ambitious campaigns we took on as well, effects like this showed us that if you set out to do something original and do it with creative honesty and integrity, all kinds of positive secondary effects spring up that you would never have been able to imagine at the outset and which help you make it a success. “You make your own luck” as they say.

And also as with other campaigns where we broke new ground in Japan, we started to see other brands with more money referencing our work, trying to come up with their own “culture hack” approach to gaining notoriety in Japan, not least Nike with their Akiba x tokusatsu viral, which actually seemed to get more attention outside of Japan. That may have been the intention from the start, since Japan’s culture has so much depth and authenticity to tap into, this too would be a valid strategy.

In the lecture series I have run on growth hacking since we wrapped up this multi-year break through campaign I reference it as an example of the culture hack as a way of gaining brand notoriety and scale. Technology brands tend to be obsessed with technology hacks for growth, and they should be. But they often forget that ideas are still more scalable than technologies, and that brands can leverage cultural genre in order to make themselves more accessible and interesting. With ever-growing competition among online services in particular, brands that can hack into an existing culture and create something novel out of it can enjoy very powerful effects.

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Read more from my “Tokyo Memoirs” series here.

The post Becoming a creative hybrid – Tokyo Memoirs Chapter 5: Otaku Culture Hack appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

The customisable “iTunes Blog Parts”

The fourth post in my “becoming a creative hybrid memoirs” series, describing my experiences growing Alien-Eye, a hybrid creative company in Tokyo which I co-founded in 2004. This chapter covers the period from 2008~09 or so, and describes the microblogging boom that exploded around that time and some of our exploits with it.

The entire “Tokyo Memoirs” series is collected here.

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With the novelty of Mixi peaking out, the next big wave to hit the Japanese web was the micro-blogging boom around 2008 to 2010 that  made Japanese the most blogged language on the planet for a while. During this time everyone who wanted to be with it and online had a blog, It was a lifestyle accessory.

Although blogs had been around since the 90’s, they were now not just for geeks but for anyone who was brave enough to stick their head up above the parapet of Mixi’s anonymity and declare their lives open to the public (although many of the blogs were also anonymous), and web giants like CyberAgent grew off the back of new blogging platforms that for the first time pulled in celebrities from traditional media, such as magazine models and TV talents.

It was significant, not least because Facebook would not have succeeded in Japan if the microblogging boom had not broken down the “closed-ness” of Mixi. Facebook also likely benefited from the blog-weariness that followed the blogging bubble.

iTunes meets Japan’s blogosphere

During this time we had started working with the iTunes division of Apple in Japan, who were looking to grow their music downloads business rapidly, and later apps. They had already got their catalogue of Japanese artists up to critical mass, but perception lagged behind and most people saw them either as software for ripping rental CDs, or rightly more as a store, but one that only had foreign artists, hard as that is to imagine now. This time the solution was a technology hack, but one that played very much of the design iconography of the early iPod series, as well as blog-fashion consciousness of the times.

One of the strongest drivers of the blogging boom was the culture around styling your blog with the right colors, characters, favourite brands and accessorizing with blogparts, since so many of the blogs of this time were lifestyle accessories, rather than a medium for sharing experiences, ideas of opinion. Known outside of Japan as “widgets” blogparts were the focus of a lot of attention for a while, with media sites ranking and reviewing them and media spends promoting branded blogparts.

Our solution was to suck the chart data out of the music store via the RSS feeds and insert it into customisable blogparts that were designed to look as similar as possible to the iPod Mini, and later the iPod Nano series.

Crucial to their popularity was to allow them to be customised to the style and tastes of the host blog. Firstly the colour could be chosen from among the official iPod colours. Similarly the chart genre could be picked from among a dozen genres, from JPop to HipHop, meaning that the look and musical taste of any blogger could be satisfied.

Designed to scale

In general this approach, essentially a product range strategy, of creating a line up that is consistent in form and hence recognisable as part of the lineup, but customisable in the details, is a real winner in the consumer psychology of Japan. It is for instance the cornerstone of UNIQLO’s success. They popularise a line of clothes that are identical in all but colour, but then make 20 subtly different colour varieties of it. This allows consumers to buy into the same look as everyone else, while feeling that they have made a unique choice.

Our blogparts were really right for their time and place, a blogging culture hack that had the Apple brand behind them, so we knew if we got them in front of the right people they would soon take off. First we promoted them through the blogpart ranking sites, with both media and editorial placement. We also ran highly targeted banners that featured on the blog update confirmation page on major blogging platforms like Ameba and LiveDoor. We also did some seeding with music influencers who had blogs, but only a handful.

They quickly took off and within the space of 6months were on the blogs of 15k music scene influencers and fans, and had huge UU and PV counts every month. In fact, the Google Analytics tracking code we had in those blogparts gave us so much interesting insights into the blogging culture.

With such broad visibility among the digitally savvy music scene the solution played an important role in shifting perception of the store’s catalogue as well as channeling a lot of users to the store, and all this for a pretty insignificant development cost upfront and then modest hosting fees every month.

Digital music downloads have long been dominated by downloads to mobile devices, and these revenues were all controlled by the carriers. So although iTunes was always growing in Japan its inflection point was of course the arrival of the iPhone, and carriers have not had it quite so easy ever since. Although the App Store was around before the iPhone launched in Japan for the benefit of iPods, again it was the iPhone that made it take off.

So our blogparts were also plugged into the App Store chart rankings RSS feeds, and away they went driving millions more impressions on a different set of blogs for virtually no extra cost.

The widgets were initially built in Flash, and worked just fine, but after a couple of years of garnering millions and millions of free impressions every month for the iTunes Store and its products we were told that Flash could no longer exist in the Apple ecosystem. So we had to rebuild them in HTML5 in about a month, and we did, and it made us pioneers in Japan of this now near ubiquitous technology since it was not a necessity for anyone else.

How big a can a widget be?

The blogparts also spawned a second bigger technology project which began when a small ISP portal site offered iTunes a tab on their portal in exchange for weekly updated content that would then fuel click-through purchase on the iTunesStore and hence affiliate revenue for the ISP portal. Building HTML pages every week was never our cup of tea, and besides would have been an inefficient investment for our client, so we hit on the idea of developing on top of the blog part engine to create fully automated main-column embeddable widget, and called it Partner Parts.

From the get go we saw Partner Parts as media product that could be used by multiple online distribution partners, from bigger portals to music community sites to web magazines, with minimal costs and total scaleability. Where the blogparts worked to distribute to the long tail of personal blogs, Partner Parts targeted the mid to high traffic site properties.

Unlike the blogparts, in order to work with multiple partners and for them to be able to customise their own widgets the system need to have an account structure and basic CMS, and a team to maintain them, and yes put them all in HTML5! I.e. more like a real web product.

We built this into a really solid solution, and got up to around 15 partners in Japan, and at one point we were in discussion with various Apple markets around the world to help them adopt the system. But the talk fizzled out and although we kept it going in Japan it never reached the scale we had hoped.

When hybrid teams don’t work

In retrospect I can connect the success of the iTunes Blogparts and the experience of trying to productise Partner Parts to the biggest blunder I have made in business. Their relative simplicity compared to the reach they were able to achieve gave me first hand experience of the scalability technology can give you, and a thirst to do it again, only bigger, and with the IP owned by us. I started trying to build out a development team within Alien-Eye, paid for by client projects, but aiming to build out our own products.

Of course the blogparts would have been nothing without the the massive content platform Apple had established with iTunes, its conviviality through the RSS feeds, and the momentum that the Apple brand had with early adopters consumers at that time, so it was in many ways a false lesson in instant scaleability. We were just joining a couple of dots within the realm of the brand.

We were not the first digital agency to try to spin off a product, or pivot to a product strategy, and were not the last either, and while I am sure there are success stories, it seems to be a pretty hard thing to pull off. I believe having a hybrid team of technologists, marketing experts and project managers is actually pretty ideal, but they have to be focused on the same thing. To make the technology product you really need to be focused on it, and perhaps riding your luck on the marketing stuff leading up to making the transition, so you can get to a minimum viable product as quickly as possible then bite the bullet, fire your clients and get investment, not necessarily in that order. We lacked that focus, not least myself, and we also never found a leader for the development team, so the DNA of the company at the top was all marketing in background, and that makes it really hard to recruit, retain and have a technology vision to inspire and direct developers.

In the end the combination of the 2011 Touhoku earthquake and tsunami and a bubbly job market for developers in Japan at the same time brought about a mercifully swift end to the internal dev team experiment, but not before we had made some great mobile apps, social games and other projects I will be writing about in following episodes.

Incidentally now and Lowe Profero we have a couple of hundred developers in our office in Beijing doing development work for all the offices in the network, including ours. Having this kind of scale and competitive price advantage combined with quality assurance is the way to go.

The post Becoming a creative hybrid – Tokyo Memoirs Chapter 4: Blog Culture Hack appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

An initiative aimed at supporting international web / mobile brands grow in Japan, and developing Japanese growth hacking talent

I was recently interviewed for a Japanese creative industry magazine “Project Design” to talk about the relevance of “Growth Hacking” (Japanese article here), the approach to growing web and mobile startups that has come to prominence in recent years, to established and non-web businesses. I was interviewed in Japanese, but wrote up the main threads of the conversation in English below.

First of all though some context. Why was I being interviewed about Growth Hacking? I have been a involved a lot with startups one way or another. I have had numerous startups as clients over the years, companies with a good product-market-fit for Japan for whom my company has effectively been the growth team for the Japan market. Also through my role as a mentor for 500 Startups, Silicon Valley’s top accelerator program, where I offer advice to founders and growth hackers on how to grow in in particular, but anywhere for that matter. I also run Growth Hacking Japan University, a 7 week lecture course in Japanese that I have run twice now, and plan to run again soon, teaching growth hacking techniques and strategies to Japanese founders and aspiring growth hackers, and learning a lot from the participants at the same time.

Most of the time I work with bigger established brands, including cloud tech companies and web services, for whom we (Profero Tokyo) position ourselves as “the performance engine” that drives incremental results in one or a combination of marketing areas. I would not describe this work as “growth hacking” per se, but being so focused on KPIs and striving to create operational efficiencies, actually the work has a lot in common with what a growth team in a web startup would be doing, and this is recognised by several of our client partners. Ginger-Software, the disruptive native English writing technology, founded in Israel, is one brand for whom we fulfil this role in Japan.

At Profero Tokyo we are very conscious of the hybrid team we bring to each brand partner, the skill sets that combine when our specialists work together to create additional value, both through coming up with ideas that cross disciplines, as well as synergies that drive efficiencies for our clients, and in this sense we have embraced the growth hacking philosophy.

Here are my notes from the interview:

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Growth hacking can inform the philosophy, techniques and most importantly the hybrid teams that established companies should bring to new business models.

Growth hacking needs an agile environment

The whole point of Growth Hacking is to grow a new business model as quickly as possible. That objective is shared by many established companies when they start a new business division or launch new products, so in principle there is nothing stopping big companies from “growth hacking”. However, growth hacking works best in the purest sense when nothing is held sacred, allowing the product-market fit to be established without constraints, such as “brand XXX’s target are always YYYY type of consumers”. Nurturing this sort of agility into the culture and environment of a big company is very hard to do, hence why companies tend to become less innovative as they get bigger.

One way of looking at what changes when you go from a small agile startup to a big established company with many stakeholders, existing customers and partners, is to think in terms of where the efficiencies are coming from, since all business models need to be creating efficiencies of scale of some kind or another if they are to grow.

In small companies with very little baggage and a small cohesive team internal efficiencies should be off the chart, but because the business model has no scale yet in the market, it enjoys minimal external efficiencies. As companies grow and gain momentum in their market they go through a tipping point beyond which they have broad awareness among their audience, people know what to expect, they can enjoy economies of scale when purchasing, and in general external efficiencies get better. But at the same time they tend to become more complex internally with multiple management levels, physical and social distance between employees in different departments, more complicated decision making processes and more friction in general.

So a lack of agility within some big companies would likely prevent a growth hacking type model to whir within it. But in its purest ‘bootstrapping’ sense growth hacking is not always necessary or the most efficient route to success anyway. Where a new business division can leverage the strength of established business models and a symbiotic ecosystem can be created, such as Apple succeeded in doing across its hardware and software business, then that is the quickest route to success, and Growth Hacking doctrine would demand that that is the route taken. iTunes was never a standalone music store. The App Store only exists because of Apple’s mobile hardware. Building out an consumer ecosystem in a pre-planned way can be the right approach, provided you get the strategy spot on.

Having said that, I remember reading an interview many years ago I think after the iPod took off, in which Steve Jobs said that his main role was insulating his R&D team from being influenced by the commercial influences elsewhere in the business, nurturing a free-thinking environment for a group of super smart product designers and developers. Everyone knows what happened after that. Although I would not call Apple’s astounding run of innovation growth hacking, creating a free thinking context in which experiment can happen and a tight team can work fervently together is I believe also necessary for the growth hacking scenario.

Rapid Prototyping cycles for product-market fit

So when is Growth Hacking relevant and possible for big businesses? At its heart Growth Hacking is an ongoing series of experiments, each one built on the intelligence gained from the those than ran before it. This is essentially iterative prototyping, a concept that is no way a new idea for big companies, but in the case of web startups they are doing it in public, or to anyone who will pay attention, and getting feedback directly to tune the product and the marketing mechanics at the same time. For many reasons not least the desire to keep new developments unseen from competitors, it is harder for big companies to do this process in the open.

The iterative method is founded on data. If there is no way to capture the performance of the product as data and use that data to make informed decisions about how to improve the product and market it better then forget the Growth Hacking idea. It’s something else at that point. This may well limit true growth hacking to web and mobile companies where the products are literally plugged into the market itself, but I am open minded on this point. All kinds of products are getting hooked into the internet-of-things now, and reporting performance data back to engineers and designers. Either way it does not stop other companies from using the ideas and approaches that are bound up with growth hacking.

Implicit in the argument above is the assumption that the marketing model and the product experience can co-evolve together. Often when companies get big and established one ends up downstream of the other. In many growth-hacked web services these days, the user experience itself comprises viral mechanisms that bring other users in, so that the product does its own marketing. Even if the viral effects are not wired into the product in this way, the product and the way it is distributed needs to allow for really short prototyping cycles. This principle is something that big companies could learn from, or at least aspire to this ideal, since often they place marketing downstream of R&D, which can end up in the miserable scenario of trying to sell products that are unsellable.

Connect customers & growth team directly

Spelling this principle out in terms of the people involved, the ideal is to short cut the feedback loop between those designing and creating the product and its ultimate customers as much as possible. The word “growth hacking” feels very cold and technical, not really the ‘human insight based thinking’ that we like to boast about in marketing, nor the ‘customer centric culture’ that corporate CEOs work so hard to advocate in their companies. In a way though the growth hacking approach is the MOST customer centric approach there is, provided that the data being collected and used for optimising with actually does represent the value the customers are bringing to your brand and bottom line, in both the short and long term.

Thus the quintessential growth hacking metrics-based process of experimentation and optimisation is in simple terms a way to short cut the ‘prototype > test > iterate’ loop and make it spin as quickly as possible with the least separation between market and product evolution. This efficiency is what underpins the “fastest route to success” philosophy at the heard of the growth hacking movement.

Anyone who has worked in a science laboratory or R&D lab recognises this process, and so in a sense growth hacking start-ups have effectively put the lab at the centre of the business. In too many big businesses not only can the R&D department become a costly appendage, but the scientific approach often loses out to internal politics or other constraints, or else the R&D amounts to just tinkering with existing formats because the bigger vision has been forgotten or become obsolete.

Defining the necessary conditions

So I believe big companies can benefit from growth hacking style approach to growing a new business model, but they have to set up the context to mirror to some extent that of a startup in the following ways:

• It should be run by a few people who “own it”: passionate about the idea and strongly incentivised to make it work, ideally through equity ownership
• These leaders should be given the responsibility to take decisions without committee agreement, leading to forthright decision making and accountability
• Allow risk taking and accept failure as a natural part of the process. Experimentation is needed to hit on the right formula, and you are unlikely to hit on it first time.
• Start off with as few people as possible. The last thing the leaders need is a big team to manage before they know what it is they need to be doing.
• You need to create an efficient, no-fat-on-the-bone base upon which to build out a profitable model. Too much resource early on, either people or money, will lead to inefficiencies that will at worse kill it prematurely, or else get baked into the business and restrict profitability later on.
• Give the business brand-independence, enough for it to be able to tell its own stories and connect to a distinct audience that becomes its early adopter customer base from which an early majority can be recruited.

The importance of a brand narrative

This last point about the need for brand independence is often forgotten I believe, but companies whose founders understand how to grow a brand often take off faster and win big in the long term. This is because they are making the technology mean something more than what its features would imply on their own. In my experience people often forget that the experience people have is fundamentally different depending on what they are looking to get out of it, and this is dependent on how well it is branded and the communications around it. No first time user touches a feature set without preconceptions, so framing this interaction and the ongoing usage is the role of the brand.

Founders and companies with simple, powerful brand identities and compelling ideas around their technology, such as Phil Libin with Evernote’s “remember everything”, or Mark Beniof’s with Salesforce.com death-to-software narrative, are so good at selling their technology story that we forget just what masters they are at branding. Both men had plenty of business experience before founding the companies that made them famous, and it shows.

I would say that successful startups always have a strong “founders story”, a vision to make the world better, core values, that for better or worse get baked into the brand perception from early on. Even if they are not a consumer-facing brand, this narrative is important for getting others excited about its potential, which is always necessary. These stakeholders are the investors, journalists and early hires in tech startups. But the same thing goes for new business models springing off big business, where the equivalents would be the board members, the individuals transferred in or hired into the business as well as the consumers who would adopt the new product.

So although it is very hard to generalise about how business models should get built out, the brand story and how it enables businesses to captivate each subsequent audience as it builds its following is one, and the other is the way the internal team expands.

Growth teams and growth hackers

It is my belief that team structure is the most important area of growth hacking for big or established companies to take note of, not least in starting off slim, but what type of people are brought into the mix.

If we generalise a growth team into specialists and generalist, a room full of generalists is not ideal, but then nor is a room full of specialists, and yet this is often the make up you see.

You definitely need deep vertical expertise. In a web start up you might have an SEM specialist, a PR specialist, a contents marketing / social media specialist and product developer as the first 4 members of a growth team. The challenge is getting these relatively diverse skill sets to work cohesively together so that much needed synergies emerge. It is even harder in big companies where these verticals might already exist as distinct departments, potentially physically separated.

In order to get them working synergistically you need someone who can speak all all their respective lingoes, and who has a sense for the difference between just showing up in that area, and actually driving competitive advantage. Who is that person? It needs to be someone who has themselves dived into these skill sets at one point, not to the extent that they became an expert in all of them, but typically in one area at least.

These multi-skilled individuals are the sort of people who, being quick learners, dive headlong into a knowledge specialism for a while, get to the point where they understand 90% of it, can perceive the nature of expertise in that last 10%, but do not fancy spending the next 3+ years to perfect those skills themselves. And then they move on to another vertical. They get bored as quickly as they get inspired, but rather than being a weakness, it equips them with a rare combination of literacies.

Not T-shaped, but “rake-shaped” talent is key

In management theory they are similar to the T-shaped people, but actually more like a “rake”, or Japanese “kuma–te” meaning “bear’s claw”. You heard it here first! Ideally you can find one of these talents who also has leadership potential, and build the team around them, since they can be the bridge that gets the teams working together efficiently.

These sorts of people are rare and hence very valuable assets, especially if the areas they can bridge between map to the necessary skill sets of your business, and have the communication skills to forge a team spirit. These sorts have been key drivers in the growth of the US silicon valley tech startups, where they are highly prized but they are even rarer in Japan. These people represent the “growth hacker” archetype, and so perhaps more so than “growth hacking” the approach, it is this archetypal skill set that is most important to highlight beyond web and mobile startups.

In Japan deep vertical expertise is celebrated and rewarded. Finding your craft and plugging away at it for a lifetime earns you respect and career progression. This is no bad thing, and Japan’s ongoing success as an economic force is built on this tradition. Japan does not have a shortage of specialist, I believe.

However, the way companies and careers are structured it makes it hard for multi-disciplinary careers to be nurtured within companies, and hence there are not many growth hacker types around, and I believe this is a limiting factor on Japan’s economic success going forward that needs to be addressed.

The post Growth Hacking for brands and how to grow a hybrid team appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

Image: A broccoli x cauliflower hybrid sold in Japan

 Welcome to my new blog!

Why now?

I have been writing pretty regularly over the years, some of which has been going up on line, but most of it never gets out of my Evernotes. I have been feeling a mounting inner pressure recently to get more of it out in the open to start some dialogues and share ideas with others. One excuse I was using to not get a blog going with regular updates was the fact someone else owned JamesHollow.com, so once I got hold of this domain I had no excuse to not get it together.

I have also been piecing together the knowledge required to set up and run a blog like this one from scratch so I can be totally self sufficient. I have been frustrated by not being in control of my own publishing before and so for this one I wanted to be totally self sufficient. Thanks to plug and play hosting solutions and the brilliance of WordPress and all the tools and communities around it these days, that required knowledge is pretty accessible all of a sudden.

Why the “hybrid thinking” theme.

Recently it dawned on me that I am living a “hybrid” life, or rather I realised that I could use the concept to pull together a bunch of consistent characteristics of my life. Hybrids are genetic combinations in the original meaning, a bit like my children being half Japanese and half anglo-saxon-celt! But these days the word hybrid has been applied to many things, not least cars and many other types of technology too. My focus however for this blog is on the hybridisation of ideas, behaviour and cultures.

My family life is a hybrid of Japanese and British: igo classes followed by cricket practice; udon for lunch but roast pork for dinner. What does this mean for my kids? I am really not sure, but am definitely in the process of discovering.

Likewise professionally I run a company, Profero Tokyo, which is a hybrid culture. We are about half Japanese, half international including a few international Japanese. A lot of our work is with international businesses and brands that are well adjusted to Japan, not least thanks to our efforts, but are certainly note Japanese in their DNA. One way of looking at what we do is as an interface between Japan and the rest of the world, bringing ideas and their conduit brands in, and taking Japanese brands and their associated ideas out of Japan too. To do this we have to be this hybrid culture that is not one nor the other, but both at the same time.

In this sense of the word we all grow up in slightly “hybrid” contexts, there is no such thing as the “normal British company” or “standard Japanese upbringing” and all companies and families are a blend of influences, but the contrasts that I both enjoy and am challenged by on a daily basis are a little more extreme than most, at least compared to my own previous experiences.

I believe that with highly contrasting hybrid cultures there is a greater chance of creating a really original and special offspring, just like the hybrid vegetable depicted above with its miraculous fractal structure, but also a higher chance the result ends up a bit messed up!

Who would be interested in a blog about my hybridised life?

That is a very good question! I will touch on themes that I believe are relevant to anyone trying to nurture a positive hybrid culture or environment, whatever the mix is. There is no doubt that what I write will be coloured with the context of Tokyo,  as well as the uniqueness of Profero: a company founded in London but with global curiosity at its heart from the outset, but I will be trying to draw generalised conclusions from my local examples.

I also believe that Japan will play more of a pathfinder role in global society, coming up with all sorts of hybrid solutions as it confronts various socio-economic issues before other countries inevitably meet them themselves, and so I intend to proactively imagine what that role will be, pick up examples of Japanese technology and social trends that might be indicative, and based on these rethink Japan’s role in the world.

The post A blog about nurturing hybrid culture appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.