Mercantile LIbrary – Courtesy of Urban Cincy

This history, firmly rooted in entrepreneurship, was what attracted me to recently join the Mercantile Library Board of Directors.  It was an opportunity to take a deeper role in one of our city’s cultural gems, while also helping guide the Mercantile as it sets its sights on a third century of invention and reinvention.

This past weekend saw one of our first efforts in that path of reinvention as we brought the 21st Century concept of a Hackathon to the Mercantile.  The goal of the Hackathon was to convene the brightest minds in the city to help us come up with the best way to present the Library to a new generation of readers, writers, and thinkers.   The result was a group of designers and hackers that came together for 36 hours to reimagine the digital presence of the Mercantile Library.  From mobile apps to open data to new website designs, the results were pretty remarkable.  In fact, every team had at least one concept that the Library plans on leveraging in the coming months as the Mercantile Library charts their path for the next 175 years.  I’m looking forward to taking part in the journey.

Motion is the reason that I’m traveling this week to Las Vegas and the Consumer Electronic Show or what most people know as CES.  Throughout the year, there are handful of events in the digital industry like CES and SXSW where people and companies come together.  The power of these events is the very planned serendipity that is talked about in Get Lucky.  When I’m attending one of these events, I intentionally structure each and every day that I’m there.  That structure revolves around catching up with old friends and colleagues,  attending parties / mixers where key industry players will be, and leaving a little time for the unknown.   For CES 2013, that means my week has things like:

• Dinner with a good friend (and former P&G colleague) who recently moved into a senior marketing leadership role
• Attending Twitter’s Annual CES party at the Cosmopolitan
• Giving a Lightning Talk at the Tech Cocktail / Vegas Tech event for the Las Vegas Downtown Project
• Lots of coffee meetings that are a mixer of catching up with friends and meeting new people

The pre-planning takes a decent amount of work, but the payoff is tremendous.

I personally think that too many people take a “wait and see” approach to industry events.  In their eyes, just attending the event is sufficient.  As a result, they end having a few fun days away from the office, but they spend the whole time with the people who they came with.  What they miss is the Motion, putting themselves into those unfamiliar situations to engage with previously unfamiliar people.  They miss the chance to bring a little luck to their business.  And I can’t think of a better town for luck than Las Vegas.

“Kincast is a fun and special way to engage loved ones in a worry-free environment. Chatting, sharing video, sending video messages and creating video cards get everyone involved.”

Today, Kincast launches their version 2.0 with a new app that has completely reworked the user experience.  The below video does a great job of capturing the value proposition of the company.  More importantly, the video captures a key insight that all consumer startups should pay attention to.  Instead of talking the various product features, Kincast focuses on the problem that they are solving for real people.  In this case, that problem is the fact that families have special moments that are often missed because of time and distance.   It is a problem I have watched first hand with our twins given that none of family lives here in Cincinnati.

Check out the below video and be sure to download the new version of Kincast.

Disclosure:  I am an adviser to Kincast

1. Basic Stats – Internet Growth Remains Robust, Rapid Mobile Adoption Still in Early Stages
2. Re-Imagination – of Nearly Everything
3. Asset-Light Generation – From Hand to Cloud & Back…Rise of the Sharing Economy (a great trend for Brandery grad FlightCar)
4. ‘USA, Inc.’ – A Lot to be Excited About in Tech, a Lot to be Worried about in Other Areas

For the first time, I’m going to try my hand at a sweepstakes here on Hard Knox Life.  I’ve been pretty radio silent with the time commitment of Rockfish, The Brandery and my new little ones at home.  So consider this sweepstakes a bit of payback for sticking with me and not deleting me from your RSS feeds!

Recently the folks at SOL REPUBLIC reached out to me regarding the new Anthem line of headphones that was launching in partnership with Michael Phelps.  These are the headphones you might have seen Phelps wearing at the Olympics when he was getting ready to win all those gold medals!  Needless to say, they are pretty nice.  With the open office environment at Rockfish, I’ve found my own pair of SOL Republic headphones to be a life saver for my concentration.

So I have a pair of Anthem headphones to give away to a reader.  To be eligible, please leave a comment on this post, along with your email so we can contact the winner.  The winner will be selected from comments that are left on this post by Friday, December 7th at 11:59 PM EST.  SOL REPUBLIC will send the headphones directly to the winner.

And by the way: There’s no purchase necessary to participate in this contest, you must be over the age of 18, and it is void where prohibited by law.  For entry, you must leave a comment to be eligible by Friday, December 7th and the number of eligible entries received determines the odds of winning.  The value of the prize is $149.99.

Amazing answer, @daveknox. Every co./startup should take note. “What will it take to build the next Procter & Gamble?” qr.ae/8Oqre

— tristan walker (@tristanwalker) August 5, 2012

 What will it take to build the next Procter & Gamble?

Of course there are many ways to interpret this question but I’m going to take the stance that building the next P&G refers to building a company with the following characteristics:
- Market leadership in multiple product categories
- A global footprint
- A reputation as a top company for business leadership
- Ability to be over 100 years old and still thriving

I think there a few core things that have helped P&G to become such a company:

Innovation Based On Expertise:  Today P&G competes in categories as far reaching as diapers, laundry care and cosmetics.  But one thing most people don’t realize is that P&G’s history is based on 1 Degree Innovation.  There is even a diagram at headquarters in Cincinnati that shows this principle.  P&G started in soap and candles, which were based fat based products.  Each product was innovation that was one degree away from a technical or scientific ability that P&G had from an existing product.  For instance, P&G’s entry into Oral Care (Crest, etc) in the 1950′s was driven by experience in Laundry Detergent.  And that holds true today where Swiffer was launched based on technology from Pampers (Swiffer Wet is basically a diaper on a stick).

A Talent Development Pipeline:  While P&G’s promote from within culture has been questioned, there is not denying the ability of P&G to develop world-class business leaders.   In recent years, 15% of Fortune 500 companies were led by a CEO who had started at P&G (a few examples include Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, Meg Whitman of eBay / HP, & Steve Cook of Intuit).  P&G invests a tremendous amount of resources in training and developing their people and they prefer to start with a clean slate with 90% of people joining P&G at entry level.  This approach creates a consistent culture of leadership that provides stability in even in difficult times.  It also provides loyalty that is rarely seen in today’s business environment.  People will stay at P&G for decades because of the opportunities, something that isnt exactly a hallmark of Silicon Valley.

A Consumer Is Boss Mindset:  P&G has always put the consumer first and basically invented market research in order to drive many of their product decisions.  The mindset of understanding the consumer is also a reason P&G has always called Cincinnati home because it gives their employees a front row view at the lives of their consumer.  Its also why they opened office in New York City to understand the Prestige Beauty consumer and why their Skin Care and Baby Care divisions are establishing major presences in Asia.

Competing With Itself:  P&G is an expert at tiered marketing, launching brands in the same category in order to meet diverse consumer needs (back to the Consumer Is Boss mindset).  In Baby Care, they have both Pampers on the premium side and Luvs on the value side.  In Laundry, they have Tide, Era, Cheer, and Gain all in the same market.  These Brand Managers might only sit 20 feet apart at the office but they are competing fiercely with each other instead of letting a competitor beat them.  This is part of the reason that P&G has been able to develop over 25 Billion Dollar brands.

If you aren’t familiar with Startup Weekend, it is a non-profit, community-building event that brings together entrepreneurs (and aspiring entrepreneurs) of all backgrounds including software developers, marketers, designers, and other enthusiasts to pitch ideas, form teams and start companies in just 54 hours. The participants that attend have 60 seconds to make a pitch (optional), the pitches are whittled down to the top ideas, and then teams form around the ideas to come out with several developed companies or projects. Finally, the weekend culminates with demonstrations in front of an audience of judges and potential investors.

Today is the last day to get the early bird registration price of $40 for the weekend so hurry up and register.  I promise it is an experience that you will never forget.

When I look at the Foundry Group portfolio, we’ve got a bunch of them in it. They don’t spend a lot of time trying to get written up in TechCrunch. They often aren’t based in the bay area. Their CEO’s don’t run around bloviating about what they are going to do some day.  They just do it. And suddenly they are $10 million, or $20 million, or even $50 million revenue companies. Before anyone has really noticed. Without any real competition. They are the unambiguous and dominant market leader… But they sneak up on you. They don’t waste their time hyping themselves. They don’t run around trying to get VCs interested in what they are doing. Rather, they just do.

Many of the companies that excite me at The Brandery fall into this camp for sure.  And the same goes for Brand Ventures.  I definetely share Brad’s feeling for these type of companies.

Gone are the days where we continually rent audiences from media companies and pay them significant dollars time and time again.  We should not have to do that continuously if we have platforms that allow us to engage with audiences, have them opt-in to participate with us (as a brand) and interact with them over time.

This very topic was one I was talking yesterday around the halls of Rockfish.  I personally think we are the beginning stages of a new trend in digital marketing when it comes to where brands invest their dollars.  In the early dot com days, brands spent the majority of their digital dollars on building their own dot com site and driving folks towards it with big display and search buys.  As click through rates declined and social media came to the forefront, brands increasingly invested in building out their social outposts on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and others places where audiences were gathering.  Today I think the third phase is coming where brands return to building their own audiences through a central hub, using the latest social and mobile technologies to usher in a new era of content marketing.

Content Marketing is not a new topic by any means.  P&G has been in the game for over 80 years since introducing the first soap opera and General Mills has been at it just as long with the Betty Crocker Cookbook.  And J&J has shown the tremendous upside in recent years as they bought BabyCenter after the dot com bubble and turned it into a valuable media powerhouse.  But I think the embrace of “brands as publishers” is gaining speed thanks to the confluence of several trends:

• Rise of Social Technology:  The advantage of big media in the past was their built in audiences.  Thanks to social channels, it has never been easier to engage audiences and spread your content through these audiences.  In fact, content platforms like Tumblr, Instagram, and Viddy have placed social at their very core in order to more effectively promote sharing.
• Availability of Talent:  The recession of the past few years has been especially hard for people in the media business.  Newspapers are trimming their staff across the country and magazines are doing the same.  The silver lining is that there has never been a better time to find amazing editorial talent to help a brand move towards content marketing.  At Rockfish, we are constantly on the search for Content Strategists and Social Content Developers for this very reason.
• Increase in Content Consumption:  With the proliferation of tablets, mobile and other digital devices, content consumption is on the rise across the board.  Long gone are the days where the only source of information came from the daily newspaper or the evening news on TV.  This has created a new willingness from consumers to seek information from alternative sources, including those curated or created by brands.

TEDxCincy – Chris Erb