ALL CONSUMERS ARE FOOLS!

Well, almost all! It was three years and three months ago when I had covered this concept passing a conclusive judgement on the intellectual incompetence of consumers around the world. And the wonder is, while releasing this iconic issue of 4Ps B&M that contains the exclusive ICMR survey of India’s 100 Most Valuable Brands, I realised that even after so many years, nothing has changed globally, and therefore I decided to bring to you the same editorial once again in toto! All consumers surely still remain fools! Seriously believe that, and you’ve got the most astoundingly rocking and smashingly successful marketing campaign! But don’t blame me, blame Dr. Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University, who received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002-03, for emphatically proving the above mentioned statement... His ‘Prospect Theory’ suggests that rather than undertaking decisions just based on ‘logical reasoning’ (namely, choosing the better product over the worse), humans also include a critical factor known as ‘intuition’, which is the main reason for consumers behaving irrationally and many a time even foolishly while purchasing products and services. Some years ago, even Dr. John Nash (of Nash Equilibrium fame) won the Nobel Prize for theorising a similar concept.

Most interestingly, the ‘Prospect Theory’ has its mirror image in the competitive strategy theory propounded by Dr. Michael Porter, where he postulates that all the global theories of competitive strategies and tactical warfare can be summarised into one electrifying word, ‘positioning’, and consecutively, into another word that is mind-bogglingly changing paradigms of marketing battles in global industries and consumer spaces. And that word is ‘perception’. Porter aggressively argues that consumers do not make decisions based on which product is better, but based on which product is “perceived” as better. Amusingly, across industries, more often than not, the product which is actually worse off in quality is the one which sells more, and many times, despite being priced higher.

And it’s been the same for quite a few years. For example, in 2006, the cell phone manufacturer that had the number one rank in quality in India was Sony Ericsson (IDC survey 2006); while the company which sold the most cell phones was Nokia (with a jaw dropping 79% market share, compared to a pathetic 5% of Sony Ericsson; the figures are 64% for Nokia and 6% for Sony Ericsson in June 2009), in spite of lagging behind Sony Ericsson in quality, and in spite of a majority 60% of their sales being in the costlier priced segments. Similarly in automobiles, Toyota has been consistently ranked as number one in quality, year after year (JD Power Surveys) and in 2009 was ranked the third Most Admired Corporation globally by Fortune. But still, despite being ranked relatively way below Toyota in quality, despite not even featuring in Fortune’s Top 50 Most Admired Corporations list, despite being bankrupt, the company that has consistently been the world’s largest passenger car manufacturer for years is General Motors (August 2009 global market share: GM 18.9%, Toyota 17.5%). And if speed & technological excellence were the factors of quality, then while Ferrari has won six of the past nine years’ F-1 Grand Prix Championship, its parent Fiat’s market share globally is 3.6% only. The ‘Judgement of Paris’ wine tasting competition in 1976, covered by TIME magazine’s George Taber, which was held again in May 2006 in London, proved that California wines tasted better than French, and by miles. Guess which sells more? But obviously, the French.

The strategy these global leaders use is ‘perception’! Play on consumers’ irrationality, and one can easily change their perception about eating cancer causing burgers, drinking liver destroying alcohol, consuming pesticide infested cold drinks, munching on fungal infected and worm strewn chocolates, smoking life destroying cigarettes, doing dope etc. etc. etc.; the list is never ending and extends even to football. In the history of FIFA World Cup Finals since 1930, only three times has a team that had the best quality player (that is, the player who won the Golden Boot award for scoring the most goals) gone ahead to win the tournament! For the sake of it, guess who is the most successful footballer of all times scoring the most goals in the history of international football. Obviously, the “perceived” answer is Pele, right? Wrong! The man is Daei Ali of Iran (109 goals). With 77 goals, Pele is not even second in the list (Ferenc Puskas from Hungary is, with 84 goals)! So are all consumers fools? Like I mentioned, I know of at least two people who’ve got Nobel Prizes proving just that! And none of them is a consumer like you or me!

Four questions about the Microsoft-Nokia alliance

The Microsoft-Nokia alliance turned out to be a lot more interesting than the pre-announcement rumors made it out to be. Rather than just a bundling deal for mobile Office, the press release says they'll also be co-developing "a range of new user experiences" for Nokia phones, aimed at enterprises. Those will include mobile Office, enterprise IM and conferencing, access to portals built on SharePoint, and device management.

Of those items, the IM and conferencing ideas sound the most promising to me. Office, as I explained in my last post, is not much of a purchase-driver on mobile phones. And I think Microsoft would have needed to provide Nokia compatibility in its mobile portal and device management products anyway.

I understand the logic behind the alliance. Nokia has never been able to get much traction for its e-series business phones, and Microsoft hasn't been able to kick RIM out of enterprise. So if they get together, maybe they can make progress. But it's easy to make a sweeping corporate alliance announcement, and very hard to make it actually work, especially when the partners are as big and high-ego as Microsoft and Nokia. This alliance will live or die based on execution, and on a lot of details that we don't know about yet.

Here are four questions I'd love to see answered:


What specifically are those "new user experiences"?

If Nokia and Microsoft can come up with some truly useful functionality that RIM can't copy, they might be able to win share. But the emphasis in the press release on enterprise mobility worries me. The core users for RIM are communication-hungry professionals. If you want to eat away at RIM's base, you need to excite those communicator users, and I'm not sure if either company has the right ideas to do that. As Microsoft has already proven, pleasing IT managers won't drive a ton of mobile phone purchases.


Will Microsoft really follow through?

Microsoft has been hinting for the last decade that it was were willing to decouple mobile Office from the operating system, but they never had the courage to follow through. Now they have announced something that sounds pretty definitive, but the real test will be whether they put their best engineers on the Nokia products. If Microsoft assigns its C players to the alliance, or tries to make its Nokia products inferior to their Windows Mobile versions, the alliance won't go anywhere interesting.


What does this do to Microsoft's relationships with other handset companies?

Imagine for a moment that you are the CEO of Samsung. Actually, imagine that for several moments. You aren't exclusive with Microsoft, but you've done a lot of phones with Windows Mobile on them. Now all of a sudden Microsoft makes a deal with a company that you think of as the Antichrist.

How do you feel about that?

I can tell you that Samsung is not the most trusting and nurturing company to do business with even in the best of times. So I think you make two phone calls. The first is to Steve Ballmer, asking very pointedly if you can get the same software as Nokia, on the same terms, at the same time. If you don't like the answer to that question, your next call is to Google, regarding increasing your range of Android phones.

Maybe the reality is that Microsoft has given up on Windows Mobile and doesn't care what Samsung does. But that itself would be interesting news.

I would love to know how those phone calls went today.


What does RIM do about this?

It has been putting a lot of effort into Apple-competitive features like multimedia and a software store. Does it have enough bandwidth to also fight Nokia-Microsoft? What happens to its core business if Microsoft and Nokia do come up with some cool functions that RIM doesn't have? Are there any partners that could be a counterweight to Microsoft and Nokia? If I'm working at RIM, I start to think about alliances with companies like Oracle and SAP. And I wonder if Google is interested in doing some enterprise work together.

Nokia and Microsoft, sittin' in a tree...

Multiple sources are reporting that Nokia is hedging its bets on mobile phone software:

-- The New York Times says Microsoft and Nokia will announce Wednesday that Microsoft is porting Office to Nokia's Symbian S60 phones (link).
--TechCrunch, quoting the Financial Times in Germany, claims Nokia is planning to dump Symbian in favor of its Maemo Linux operating system (link).
--Om Malik says he asked Nokia about it, and the company denied plans to dump Symbian. But the company also said, "recognizing that the value we bring to the consumer is increasingly represented through software, there is logically not just one software environment that fits all consumer and market needs." In other words, we have an open marriage with Symbian (link).


In one sense, this is absolutely not news for Nokia. It has been playing the field for years, trying to prevent any single company from gaining control over mobile software (and thereby imposing a standard on Nokia). The change is that in the past, most of that energy was aimed against Microsoft.

Microsoft too seems to be bending its standards. With the exception of the Mac, Microsoft has been extremely reluctant to license Office for other operating systems. In the past, if Nokia wanted Office, it would have been expected to license Windows Mobile.

But now both companies feel threatened by Apple and Google, and all of a sudden that ugly person across the dance floor looks a lot cuter.


The real question that no one seems to be asking is whether most customers will care about any of this stuff. Most Nokia smartphone users are blissfully unaware that their phones have an operating system, let alone whether it's Symbian or Maemo. They just want the phone to work well.

And speaking as a former Palm guy who dealt with the mobile market for years, putting Microsoft Office on a smartphone is like putting wings on a giraffe -- it may get you some attention, but it's not very practical.

Don't get me wrong, I like and admire QuickOffice, which is probably the leading Office-equivalent app in the mobile space today. It's a cool product, but for most people the screens of smartphones are too small for serious spreadsheet and word processing activity. It works, but it's awkward and produces eyestrain. Most people who have a serious need for Office on the go will just carry a netbook.

So Nokia and Microsoft will both get some nice publicity, but the announcements mean very little to the average user. What both Microsoft and Nokia need to do is create compelling new mobile functionality that's better than the stuff being produced by Apple and RIM. Until they do that, all the strategic alliances in the world won't make a significant difference.

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Update: The announcement this morning was more subtle and perhaps far-reaching than what was reported yesterday. I think the strategic situation is still the same as what I described above, but there might be more value for users than I expected. More thoughts after I have a chance to digest the announcement.

YOU’RE A CLASSIC FAILURE, BOY!

Flying is something that I simply hate. The symptoms are always the same. My heartbeat and BP shoot up the moment the aircraft starts taxiing for a takeoff, I break into a sweat, yet my hands turn ice cold. Thus it was when last week, with great trepidation, I entered an unavoidable flight down south. It was with pleasant surprise that I noticed that my co-passenger was none other than my favourite professor from my b-school days; the wizard used to teach us astounding leadership case studies, but I liked him more because he was the easiest to irritate amongst the lot and we used to take full advantage of it. Initial greetings aside, the fleeting scowl on his face was a giveaway that he remembered me too well. Attempting to rekindle old relationships thereon, I mischievously told him how I remembered his classes even now, and he smilingly nodded back, knowing very well I didn’t mean it at all. Thereon, we kept exchanging random statements... till the point that I got this crazy devilish urge to vex him and fibbed up a make-believe grouse that despite trying very hard, I had still not been able to achieve some of the visionary things that I had been aiming to achieve by this age. He looked at me, and surprisingly said, “That’s pretty good, I say!” I was foxed by his reply. Looking at my confusion, he said, “Let me tell you a story...” And that’s how the story began...

He was born at an underprivileged medical center. Even as a baby, life was anything but sweet for him. His parents divorced within three years of his birth. Although his mother remarried, she unfortunately married a man who was known to be jobless, and who got into the habit of coming home drunk every night – in fact, during a drunk-driving incident, the man had both his legs amputated and died soon after. As a young lad, struggling to keep up with social questions about his multiracial heritage, he became addicted to alcohol, marijuana and cocaine during his teenage years, which he later said was his “greatest moral failure.” He also became an uncontrollable chain smoker who couldn’t quit smoking despite trying too many times. He even lost his mother to ovarian cancer in 1995, much before he had anything signify cant to achieve. But failures are what taught this man the beautiful attitude of sincerity. That belief is what led Barack Obama to win the Illinois senator seat in 1997; that belief is what led him to convince a totally opposed state assembly to pass a bill that forced police to videotape all interrogations to reduce torture and deaths in custody, especially of blacks; that belief is what led him to run the Presidential elections in 2008 despite being trounced devastatingly in the 2000 Congressional elections and despite being told a few years back by his media consultant that he stood very little chance as his name sounded too similar to Osama Bin Laden.

If Obama had an underprivileged childhood, Steve Jobs went through worse. When he was born, his mother was an unwed graduate student who put him up immediately for adoption as she did not wish to rear him. Ironically, Steve wasn’t even the first choice of his adoptive parents as they had actually wanted a girl. Steve’s ‘new’ mother was just a high school pass-out, and his father wasn’t even that. Later on in life, Steve Jobs did join college, but dropped out within six months as he couldn’t see the value in it. But despite dropping out, Jobs continued dropping into classes that interested him. He would sleep on the floor of his friends’ rooms and returned Coke bottles to earn 5 cents per bottle to buy food. Every Sunday night, he would walk seven miles across town to get a free meal at a Hare Krishna temple. The learning from that part of his life and those ‘dropout’ classes is what gave him the zeal to co-found Apple in 1976, market its Mac products too passionately, and make the cover of the TIME magazine by the age of 26. It’s common knowledge now how Steve Jobs was fired from his own company by Apple’s board of directors, a failure that drove him again to found Pixar and NeXT, two more iconic companies, before he was reinstated storybook style as Apple’s CEO! A pancreatic cancer patient (one of the most dangerous cancers with the lowest survival rates), Steve Jobs also had a liver transplant earlier this year. And he has already joined back for work! “Living every day as the last day of your life,” is the very statement Steve Jobs says has been driving his ambitions through all his failures since the age of 17.

From Milton Hershey of Hershey Chocolate Company (whose businesses went bankrupt three times before he finally made it big) to Henry Ford (who failed twice before Ford Motor Corporation was born) to Abraham Lincoln (who lost seven times in the Presidential elections before he finally made it), all successful people have been the biggest failures at one point or the other in their lifetimes.

My professor was almost done speaking and strangely justifying to me why when he kept reemphasizing that I was an utter failure, he actually meant good. Well, I seriously didn’t know how to take it. Before I could poke him further, the plane hit the biggest godforsaken air pocket I’ve ever experienced in my life and started rocking and rolling better than Elvis could ever have done in his dreams. And then, suddenly, the aircraft plunged into a dramatically sickening dive; and I did likewise into a crazy bloodcurdling banshee scream. With cups, and my whole life, streaking in front of me, I couldn’t help but astonishingly notice the professor calmly smiling away to glory. It looked totally ridiculous. Didn’t the professor realise we all were well on our way to Kingdom Come? Sniggering, he shouted to me through all the noise, “Live every day as the last day of your life!” It sounded insane and totally inappropriate. I shouted back, “Sir, if I don’t make it alive through this rotten flight, how the heavens do you think my failure to survive will ever make me hugely successful?” The prof shouted back through his guffaws, “Son, your ‘failure’ could result in somebody else’s success! Your sacrifice could very well help rewrite future safety rules to create the most successful airlines in safety standards...” If I had to understand what being a failure meant, that moment in time encompassed it all; a moment when I decided that if I were to escape the crazy air ride, I would never ever trouble any professor of mine, especially this one. Well, as is obvious, I escaped; but I have to confess that the talk did have some advantage at least. These days, whenever my sweetest wife accuses me during our classic championship bouts of being the biggest loser in life, she just can’t get it why my face starts glowing with pride. Last I heard she was growling at me that this was going to be the last day of my life... That’s the way we husbands live it all the time honey, that’s the way we all live it...