Monthly Archives: January 2019

Après Spotify et Epic Games (Fortnite), le leader mondial du streaming vidéo vient à son tour de prendre ses distances avec la boutique en ligne du groupe de Cupertino. Les « applis » les plus connues pensent être suffisamment visibles en elles-mêmes.Un de plus. Netflix a défait ses liens avec la boutique en ligne d'Apple. Depuis quelques jours, il n'est plus possible de s'abonner aux services du leader mondial de streaming vidéo en passant par l'App Store.A l'instar de Spotify ou d'Epic Games (l'éditeur du jeu vidéo à succès Fortnite), Netflix va ainsi contourner ce qui est surnommé la « taxe Apple », c'est-à-dire les 30 % que le groupe de Cupertino prélève sur tous les revenus générés par l'intermédiaire de son App Store. Un taux qu' Apple a fait redescendre à 15 %, en juin 2016, dès lors qu'un utilisateur est abonné depuis plus d'un an à la même application.Mais cet effort a été jugé insuffisant par les éditeurs d'applications les plus en vogue. Ils pensent pouvoir s'émanciper de ce distributeur qu'est l'App Store malgré sa puissance. « Nous n'acceptons plus iTunes comme mode de paiement pour les nouveaux abonnés », détaille Netflix  sur son site internet. Ce nouveau système sera sans incidence pour ceux et celles ayant déjà souscrit à l'offre de Netflix.L'application générant le plus de revenus sur iOS L'été dernier, Netflix avait essayé de se  passer du service de facturation « in-app » d'Apple sur un nombre limité de marchés. Un test semble-t-il concluant puisque la firme de Los Gatos a décidé de généraliser cette pratique. Le groupe avait déjà procédé de la sorte avec le Google Play Store dès mai 2018 ; la boutique en ligne du géant de Mountain View ponctionnant également 30 %.

A series of laws passed in California this year raise a new possibility: that individual US states will splinter off into their own versions of the internet. In July, California passed a privacy law, similar to the European Union's policies, that will give users more control about the data companies collect about them. Governor Jerry Brown followed by signing a net neutrality law in late September meant to replace federal rules banning broadband internet providers from blocking or otherwise discriminating against lawful content, as well as a law that requires bots to identify themselves if they promote sales or try to influence an election.These are hardly the first attempts by a state to regulate online life. Illinois, for example, has a biometric privacy law that has been invoked to cover facial scanning software used by Facebook and Google. And states such as Washington have also passed net neutrality rules. But California’s size and the sweeping nature of its regulations, especially when taken together, set it apart from other states.Milton Mueller, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Public Policy and author of the book Will the Internet Fragment?, calls policies like California's net neutrality law and Chinese censorship “alignments” rather than “fragmentation” for technical reasons. But he does think such policies can be dangerous. "We're undermining what's good about the internet, the ability to offer services anywhere, the permissionless innovation idea," he says.Mueller likes the idea of bots having to identify themselves, for example. The new law will require that anyone who automates all or “substantially all” posts to platforms with at least 10 million monthly US visitors to disclose that the account is run by a bot or bots, if the account is being used to promote products or services or to influence an election. But Mueller worries about the effects of implementing the policy at a state level. "It encourages this trend of breaking up the internet into different islands of jurisdiction that could be worse than the benefit that might be achieved by this," he says.

Research conducted by Marketing Week in partnership with MiQ earlier this year showed that while 42.4% of marketers think their organisation should be structured around the customer (the largest proportion of respondents), currently just 5.8% of business are actually set up this way. The majority of marketing departments are either product-centric or structured around marketing disciplines.Perhaps more concerning is the fact marketers rate themselves just 3.1 out of five when it comes to achieving customer-led objectives and being driven by customer insights, and just 2.8 on their ability to capture a single customer view.In order to drive customer-led thinking, CMOs are increasingly being replaced by chief customer officers (CCOs). Research by recruitment consultancy Talecco shows the number of CCOs at UK companies rose from 14 to 90 between 2014 and 2017, with 46% of those introduced in the previous 12 months. But doing this alone will only paper over the cracks.Marketers have always been ‘the voice of the customer’ but for them to truly serve that purpose businesses must be structured in a way that enables collaboration across all functions – whether a CMO or CCO is at the heart of that shouldn’t matter.Consumer demands are evolving at a rapid rate, so organisations have got to be structured in a way that enables them to respond and adapt quickly. Having disparate teams that don’t talk to each other, or are set up around different objectives, will not enable that to happen.And there are signs it is becoming a problem. The latest Customer Experience Excellence study by KPMG Nunwood shows a distinct lack of improvement in brands’ customer experience over the past year, partly because businesses are not set up internally to respond to the rapidly changing environment they’re operating in.The average score across the top 100 brands rose just 0.7% from the previous year to 7.13 out of 10. But this growth isn’t coming from the brands at the top of the table, where scores remain flat, it is being driven by the organisations at the lower end, which are pushing up the average.Marketers’ intense focus on customer experience shows no sign of abating, but if brands truly want to meet consumers’ expectations they need to get much closer to customers so they can not only react to but anticipate what they want. The brands that don’t focus on this in 2019 will very quickly be overtaken.

In Tanzania, land is public property held by the president as trustee on behalf of the people. Its registration, however, is often a cumbersome process riddled with corruption and mismanagement, according to Transparency International. Though the law requires companies to obtain land through the Tanzania Investment Centre, an independent regulator, firms in some cases have tried to bribe local leaders to directly lease parcels of land.“Evidence indicates that during the implementation of large-scale investments, the rights of rural communities over land and natural resources have not been respected,” says Emmanuel Sulle, a researcher at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies in Cape Town.The legal framework governing land is so riddled with holes that there’s often no express illegality needed for a dispute to arise. In Nyamitanga, for example, villagers had agreed to hand over 1,500 hectares of land to AGO. The firm, in return, was to build a school and a dispensary and fix a water-supply system, local residents said. But no contract was signed. It turns out, no contract was needed. Verbal approval was enough under the country’s village land law, and AGO took the land. The promises never materialized, and eventually, faced with protests and a project struggling to take off, AGO walked away. Asked, the company has denied any wrongdoing.But finding ways around laws is no longer just the preserve of big companies in Tanzania. Traditionally, individual land-use rights are awarded through what are known as certificates of customary right of occupancy (CCROs). Loure, who has run a nonprofit called the Ujamaa Community Resource Team since 2003, helped forge partnerships between villagers and local authorities, eventually leading to the issuance of the first CCRO in 2013. Communal registration of land use for communities like the Maasai gives them collective strength and bargaining power in negotiations with any land seeker.What has also helped Tanzanian farmers is the pro-poor and pro-farmer platform Magufuli came to power on in the 2015 presidential elections. He promised Kapunga villagers that he would get them their land back. But while cynicism greets such promises in large parts of the developing world, farmers in Tanzania are now trying to hold their leaders accountable. Kapunga saw no progress on Magufuli’s assurance for a year after he came to power. Then, when his land minister visited the village, they reminded him, point blank and publicly. “After many years, we finally won the battle,” says Maria Jonas, a Kapunga farmer.Theirs isn’t the only instance of communities getting the government to act. In Bagamoyo District 43 miles north of Dar es Salaam, local farmers regained 5,000 hectares of the village land in June 2016 from Swedish firm EcoEnergy after the government revoked the company’s land title. Tanzanian Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa halted EcoEnergy’s $569 million bio-electricity project after concerns over a threat to protect fragile ecosystems and a nearby wildlife sanctuary.And independent of the government, Loure, 46, has his eyes set on securing close to another 800,000 hectares of land for the Maasai and Hadzabe. Tanzania’s farmers and indigenous communities aren’t done staking a claim. The land was theirs, and they intend to get it back.

Returning to his theme of data, Hegarty proclaims it is this feeling that marketing risks losing. Every creative, he believes, should love their work and not worry so much about what the research says.“We lack today people who love what it is that they do. They are very professional, they’re well trained, they read data, but they don’t love it.“Today the reliance on data is destroying love and therefore [advertising] is losing its audience. And if we lose it we won’t have the economic growth we want. Why is it we’ve not got economic growth? We can’t just blame the financial world.”Getting that creativity back is the key to ensuring the future of the ad industry, and that it is seen as a driver of company profits and economic growth, not just a nice to have.“Creativity is the future. When we got a troubled brand we would go back to its roots – what made it, why was this brand so successful – and we tried to capture that again. It’s the same with advertising, when it was great what was it doing? We have to go back to that.”

Democratising wellbeingIn the startup world, a number of brands are seeking to democratise wellbeing by making healthy products accessible to everyone.Dash Water takes misshapen lemons and cucumbers that are not a high enough grade to be bought by supermarkets and turns them into a zero-calorie flavoured water. The sustainable water brand describes itself as a combination of wellness and lifestyle, aiming to offer a credible alternative to high sugar drinks on the mainstream market.“I don’t necessarily see the brand as a wellness, health brand,” explains co-founder Jack Scott.“I see it as more of a lifestyle brand that offers something credible that tastes good and doesn’t have any of the artificial sweeteners or sugar. We want to be accessible to all. We’re not selling a £6 juice that only certain people can buy.”Dash Water has deliberately opted for a mixture of stockists from Planet Organic and Farmdrop to Selfridges and Amazon to match its “everyday premium” positioning.“Starting out, our sales strategy was to concentrate on some key retailers that created a little bit of a buzz around the brand,” Scott explains.“The nature of making a product is expensive to begin with because you’re not making large volumes. However, going forward part of our strategy is to make a product that is accessible to all or ‘everyday premium’.”Accessibility is also at the heart of pop-up wellbeing dining experience Little Bee Kitchen. Launched in the south London area, the pop-up creates bespoke, nutritionally balanced set menus hosted at guest restaurants. Run by nutritional therapist Chloe Bannerman and wellbeing advocate Mary Anderson-Ford, Little Bee Kitchen aims to democratise healthy eating.“We help the restaurant put together an interesting menu of the latest foods people are eating, but maybe don’t know how to cook,” Anderson-Ford explains.“It’s about putting together really unusual ways of cooking that people don’t really think about. We generally try to hook up with a charity at the same time that makes money from the ticket price and any additional drinks sales, as well as selling merchandise like tote bags and tea towels.”On a daily basis, Little Bee Kitchen posts homemade meal inspiration to Facebook and Twitter in order to keep the community engaged between its events.“Social media is so important. Twitter and Facebook seem to be the best way to connect with people for a business as young as Little Bee Kitchen which doesn’t have all that much money to spend on the marketing and PR,” says Anderson-Ford.Cracking a new marketGoing from market leader to a relative startup is the challenge being faced by Aussie fitness wear brand Lorna Jane, which is looking to expand into the UK. Established in 1989, the brand has 140 stores across Australia and describes itself as a technical fashion label, offering the performance credentials of anti-pilling, anti-fade fabric with the relaxed look of loungewear.The brand has adopted a wholesale model to drive brand awareness, combined with investment in social, influencers and bloggers. Lorna Jane plans to hit the UK mass market through wholesale tie-ups with department store groups, online retailers and stores like JD Sports, which it launched with in late 2017.With plans to debut on Asos in three month’s time, sales director Claire Lamb explains that Lorna Jane wants to stretch from a commercial price point to premium retailers like Selfridges, Net-a-Porter and Harvey Nichols, as well as setting up its own retail locations.“Stealing market share from others is not easy, but I think we’re niche in what we offer as it’s that technical element with that fashion credibility. We are a price point above mainstream brands, but I think people are getting board of the standard brands and they’re looking for something different,” says Lamb.She believes that having continuous collections with new product coming through on a quick turnaround is crucial in a market like the UK where consumers shop regularly. It will also help them to engage customers throughout the year.While all these brands may have launched with a very specific target market in mind, as consumers’ appetite for healthy lifestyle brands rises, there is opportunity for these brands to grow too, if they can find the right message to reach the masses.

Bitcoin is a Tool for Freedom, Not SpeculationAlex Gladstein, Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation, has published an article titled ”Why Bitcoin Matters for Freedom” in Time Magazine. In it he explains how cryptocurrency can help people retake control of their lives from oppressive regimes.“Speculation, fraud, and greed in the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry have overshadowed the real, liberating potential of Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention,” writes Gladstein. “For people living under authoritarian governments, Bitcoin can be a valuable financial tool as a censorship-resistant medium of exchange.”