As the holidays come to a close in 2011, it got me thinking about charitable giving.  We are all familiar with donating money into a bucket outside a department store or into a collection jar on a shop counter.  However, a charity in the United Kingdom called “Pennies” is taking this a step further by allowing consumers to donate electronically by rounding up their bills to the nearest whole pound amount when they paid by credit or debit card.

Customers utilizing the service can safely donate pennies to the charity chosen by the retailer participating in the program whenever they use their debit or credit card to pay for goods or services.  Consumers are asked electronically if they wish to donate and then they are given the option to round up to the nearest pound, or they can donate a set amount, such as 5 pence.  The other nice thing about the service is that anonymity is provided to consumers.  No one, not even the checkout person, knows whether or not you donate, which puts no additional pressure on the customer.  However, a consumer may be influenced whether to donate or not due to the charity chosen by the retailer.  The retailer chooses which charity (or charities) the money collected via Pennies will benefit.

More and more retailers in the United Kingdom are embracing the year old service, such as Travelodge, Zizzi, The Entertainer, and the Rugby Football Union. Retailers can choose to either participate in the Pennies service online, in-store, or both online and in-store.  In particular, Domino’s Pizza was one of the first businesses to sign up and the company chose the Special Olympics as the charity to receive the micro-donations from their customers who ordered and donated online.

The technology is free and ready for use by all United Kingdom retailers.  All the retailer has to do is select the charity that they would like to benefit and turn the technology on.  I am positive that more United Kingdom retailers will embrace the new technology in 2012, especially since it removes the donation tins on their counters that are often susceptible to theft.  Even though Pennies is only a year old, it has already accepted over 1 million donations totaling over £250,000 from the public’s ‘spare change’ for more than 20 United Kingdom charities. I am positive that this charitable service will continue to grow and flourish.  In particular, over 5 new retailers have agreed to partner with Pennies by early 2012.  My hope is that Pennies will expand the service to the United States and we would see how well it works here.

I recently read a quote from the writer Maurice Sendak, author of the children’s book “Where the Wild Things Are” that stated his views on e-books, “I hate them… There isn’t another kind of book!  A book is a book is a book.”  I understand some people’s affection for real books (or even newspapers or magazines).  There are the aesthetics of a nice hardcover, or the feel of opening the newspaper with a coffee of cup on a quiet Sunday morning.  Not to mention the reading experience that they can deliver, such as reading a good book next to a warm fire on a cold night or relaxing on the couch with a good magazine.  But current technology has changed how we read and interact with publishers and advertisers.  I recently noticed in USA Today that three of the top selling books are not even available in printed form and are self-published.  The technology of e-books and e-readers did not exist until a few years ago.  However, e-books now own 15% of the top 20 book listings.  This got me thinking about the various traditional print delivery methods that we utilize today and how things are now published.  Newspapers, books, and magazines were previously only available in printed form, but they are all usually available electronically now as well.  So how are publishers and advertisers taking advantage of this new electronic medium to target, engage, and interact with their consumers?

I recently looked at some magazines and newsletters online and it appeared to me that publishers and advertisers have not yet taken full advantage of e-readers on tablets and smartphones.  Unfortunately, it appears that most advertising was presented only in straight PDF format, or it was almost identical to the printed format.  With the new electronic reading technology available on tablets and smartphones, why are advertisers not taking advantage, or even embracing the new technology, to include video, web links, and social media with their ads on this new medium?  Publishers do not publish the same ad in newspapers as they do online.  So why would they not tinker their ads for these new e-readers?  Likewise, companies that send newsletters could customize their content to take advantage of the electronic reading technology that is currently available to them.

The electronic reading technology has already been embraced by Bradley University, which published its own custom campus tour guide electronically on the iPad.  When prospective students at the university take tours of the campus, they are given an iPad to take on their tour.  The iPad shows a campus map and is loaded with 10 videos that show the prospective students different views of the going-ons at Bradley.  Campus officials felt the iPad made the tour more engaging to prospective students.  To me that surely beats some booklet or campus map that they published and given to me as a handout, right?

In the end, I wanted to challenge Mr. Sendak on his views of reading electronically.  Why couldn’t the experience of electronically reading a book (or magazine or newspaper) be expanded with technology for consumers?  Why couldn’t the words and images come even more alive with tablets to enhance, rather than replace, the written form?  For example, Bradley University incorporated the technology to make it more engaging to prospective students on their campus tour.  Likewise, publishers can take advantage of the electronic technology to better interact with consumers through live links, video, and social media.  Regardless, the technology now allows people to read more frequently and that is a positive thing for publishers, advertisers, and authors looking to connect more with their targeted audience.  The reading world is changing and advertisers, as well as publishers, will need to adapt their previous content to this new technology.  In the end, I am just happy that the technology is reducing the weight of books in my messenger bag!

You have video game rentals from GameFly, you have movie rentals from Netflix, and soon you might have book rentals from Amazon. Amazon already has the necessary platform of the Kindle to offer this envisioned rental service for eBooks. Now, it is rumored that Amazon is in discussions with publishers to offer books a la Netflix for consumers.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon approached publishing executives with the idea for a digital book library featuring their older titles. The library of content would be available to Amazon Prime subscribers, who pay $79 annually. Amazon Prime subscribers also receive other benefits, such as free two day shipping and unlimited instant streaming on thousands of movies and TV shows. WSJ theorized that Amazon would limit the number of books that customers could read each month and that Amazon offered revenue to publishers for participating in the program.

It appears that publishing executives are not thrilled with the program since it could potentially downgrade the overall value of the book business. It also has the potential to strain their relationships with the remaining book retailers that have not declared bankruptcy. On a positive note, the proposed service would save publishers on printing and shipping costs to book retailers. However, the service from Amazon raised concerns for both publishers and retailers due to its potential effect, which could be similar to how Napster and iPod permanently changed the record store business.

The service could benefit writers by increasing their profits and by increasing their distribution of titles that never attracted previous attention from publishers. Smaller audiences could support the lesser-known authors through the online model of publishing of eBooks. The online model could also allow publishing of more specialty or niche books. For example, Discovery Channel could publish a supplemental book for their annual Shark Week every year. Alternatively, an author could publish a military history book on the Battle of Palmito Ranch from the American Civil War.

It is not known yet how the service would work. It could be unlimited downloads with no expiration dates. Or it could be similar to the Chicago Public Library policy of downloading eBooks. The consumer downloads the book and the book disappears after the expiration date, which results in no overdraft or late fees.

If Amazon does offer this service, I cannot imagine competition sitting on the sidelines. Apple could easily offer a book service through iTunes for their iPad. Google could offer free books on their Android platform through their Google Books Library Project. If the service launches, I am sure both competitors will be a fast follow and competition is always good for the consumer. I know I will look forward to reading (or downloading) more about the new service when it launches.

A couple weeks ago, my brother and his wife bought me an Amazon Kindle as a graduation gift after I received my MBA.  After being in school for so long, I wasn’t sure if I ever wanted to pick up another book again.   But I must admit I was intrigued by the new Barnes and Noble Nook Color. This e-reader has a comparable book market as Amazon and allows you to go on the web and download games from the market (Hooray! Angry Birds!) while using a touch screen. I exchanged my Kindle for the New Nook.  This way I will be able to read some books here and there as well as check Facebook status updates.

I began to think how close are we to seeing these e-readers morph into the tablet market — would they be able to compete better than most of the tablets out right now? Here are a few advantages the e-readers have over tablets:

Price Advantage: E-readers come in at a lower price point ($119 to $249) than an iPad ($499 to $699). With low cost strategies already being used, taking on many of the capabilities of tablets could be a significant point of differentiation.

Book Market: What makes e-readers from Amazon and Barnes and Noble so unique is the instant access to hundreds of thousands of books. Sure, Apple has the iBook store, but the e-readers have seamlessly integrated the bookstores into their platforms that can be accessed through apps in several different devices.

Audience: If the e-reader evolves, it will evolve its audience from book readers to a more mainstream audience. Another potential outlet is in education. Online version of textbooks are already available – I’ve even seen classmates accessing them on their iPad. Barnes and Noble and Amazon are two of the top textbook sellers in the U.S., if they find a way to make online access more convenient it could be a very profitable venue.

Battery Life: The Kindle promotes battery life ranging from weeks for normal reading to 2 months for no Wi-Fi and lite reading. Being that this reader is black and white, and only used for reading, you can’t really compare it to a color tablet that lasts about 8 hrs (or an iPad which can get up to 10 hrs) when using it on more functions. Still, having experience creating items with long battery life will help when creating a hybrid product.

There have been growing rumors and reports saying that Amazon will be launching a new e-reader device that will have tablet capabilities by the end of 2011. Putting this together with Amazon’s online retail store of books, music, and videos, along with their cloud service (accessing your files from anywhere) and you have a serious competitor for Apple’s iPad. We’ll have to wait and see if this actually happens. Until then, I’ll be on my Nook reading a good novel…or just tweeting.

Or are they? It just depends on how you read what they say.

“If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.” – Henry Ford

I just introduced some speakers at a fantastic conference hosted by IIR USA called Future Trends 2010. There was a wide range of backgrounds – everyone from the CTO at Hewlett Packard, to a VP for the Chairman’s Innovation Fund at American Express, to a space architect who works on the NASA Human Spaceflight Program. Everyone agreed that hearing all of this diverse information allowed us to look at our industries (and the world) in new and interesting ways.

There are so many things that I could write about, but as an economic anthropologist, I tend to hone in on social networking and where that might be going in the future. One particularly interesting focus was online brand building and how our definition of communities is changing. The related “hot topics” would be how online tracking and social media are allowing us to not only personalize the marketing message, but also to reinvent the “focus group” by crowdsourcing ideas for new product design (among other things).

On one end of the spectrum (the micro-segmentation end), companies are focusing heavily on metrics from behavioral data such as that from social media sites like Facebook. The problem is that we are all becoming so overwhelmed by data that we need to constantly reassess the data was have and how to use it.

On the other end of the spectrum is the “macro” impact of social media, i.e. companies are just beginning to look at reputation management and the possibilities arising from crowdsourcing as a result of the explosion of social media in the last few years.

But crowdsourcing can result in a reversion to the mean – you may not get exceptional answers, just the answers that appeal to the largest number of people. It takes a real creative focus to look at the ideas and determine if there is anything exceptional that can lead the company in new directions. Companies need to remember the impact of “tastemakers” in any social group, no matter what the “crowd” may say.

From what I heard at the conference and from our clients, the biggest danger is going overboard in either direction; there is no “magic” answer for social media. It can actually lead to negative consequences if too much emphasis is placed on one or the other (who else thinks that the personalization of messages on Facebook is kinda creepy?)

This is a topic that deserves and ongoing discussion, so more on this (and the conference) soon…

If the number of apps is any indication of the success of a particular smartphone, then Apple’s iPhone has taken the cake by far.

A recent article titled “The app gap” on CNN Money reviewed the number of apps available to smartphone users as a way to explain why the iPhone and Google Android phones have faired better in the marketplace than BlackBerry or Palm products.

It is estimated that there are approximately 250,000 apps available to iPhone users, followed by approximately 100,000 apps for Android phones. This is compared to only 8,000 available to BlackBerry users and 3,500 available to Palm WebOS users.

The benefit to having apps available to customers is that it gives individuals the opportunity to customize or personalize their phones. They are able to take a functioning phone and add features that increase individual usage and satisfaction.

The CNN Money article argued that the lack of apps was a major reason why the Palm Pre was not as successful as the release of other smartphones, particularly the iPhone, and stated that it could have contributed to why the company was sold to Hewlett-Packard for such a low market price. The author also wonders how the BlackBerry Torch (available this week) will fair, considering the significant difference in the number of apps available through BlackBerry versus competing products.

Do you think that the ability to “customize your phone” is a draw to the iPhone or Google Android over other smartphones?

What factors played a part in your choice of phone? How many apps do you have?

I’ve blogged in the past about how I am using my new phone to run my life in a constant quest for organization. When I bought my phone (the HTC Incredible) at the end of May, the reviews heralded it as the latest and greatest. The reviewers couldn’t seem to say enough good things about it. I knew when I bought it that the reviewers’ excitement would last about a week, until the next new phone was released.

Sure enough, Motorola released the Droid X. My brother AND my mother both bought it. (Yes, my mother, who until recently didn’t even know how to take a picture with her phone, let alone email with it, now owns a phone that the tech guys are drooling over.)

I’m just a little bit jealous. The Droid X is a fabulous phone. (If you really want to know why, you can visit www.phonearena.com which will tell you anything you want to know about any type of phone.)

There are truly a lot of things about the phone that are thrilling and interesting. (By now you might be thinking that I’m one of those techies I mentioned. Trust me, I’m not.) Anyway…one of the things that grabbed my attention about the launch of the Droid X is how Motorola used Social Media to promote it. I know about the event, in part, because a family member found the phone hidden in Birmingham, Alabama. True story. Really, truly, true.

So, by know you are probably wondering how this relates to banking. It does. I promise. Recently we’ve discussed using social media in several of our financial webinars. For the most part we conclude that financial services companies haven’t embraced social media, but we expect to see more experimentation. However, we acknowledge that the fit between banks and social media is a bit of a struggle. And since when I’m not thinking about my phone, I’m thinking about the banking industry, it got me thinking about what banks could learn from this, if anything.

The Droid X promotion was interesting because it combined users’ virtual worlds with their real worlds. Verizon did this by using Twitter to tweet clues about where the phones were hidden. The final clue was the GPS coordination for the location of the certificate. The company gave away 21 phones, each valued at $569.99. The tweets were along these lines:

• Last two phones today! Feeling lucky in Las Vegas? Want to see a Droid X in the “Show Me” state? Get ready because clues are coming!
• Droid X designate #1 has hit Las Vegas Blvd. GPS coordinates transmitting in 30 minutes. Let it roll!
• If you are in Las Vegas, go to N 36 09.308 W 115 08.977. Check with Google Maps but hurry!

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think banks should jump head first into social media today, or even anytime soon. But since advertisers have to go where the people are, and the people are on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and increasingly on the newcomers such as Four Square, I don’t think social networking can be ignored.

To date, I think one of the best uses of social media for banks are things that can be moved from traditional media or things that become better by allowing users to interact with them in some way.

Chase’s Community Giving Program was a great example of this. It was a program that existed for some time, but the company made a decision to move it online. It also took a decision that was typically made by the bank and let customers take part in that decision.

It seems like social media would also be a great place for banks to promote their contests and sweepstakes. The Capital One Million Miles giveaway is the most recent promotion that comes to mind. The company took out print ads and online ads (you can view them in Comperemedia) but it seems like a social media presence would have been a great addition to the promotion.

Further evidence that the “Great Recession” has had a significant effect on consumer behavior:

– In a recent Mintel consumer study, a substantial 76% of respondents state that they are “smarter shoppers” than they were a year ago.

– Almost seven in ten say they are trying to buy only necessary items, such as food (and that last number includes about half of those households earning more than $100k annually).

But price is not the only consideration. Only half of the consumers in the survey say that low price is more important than good customer service, while seven in ten say they only buy brands they trust.
What does this mean? It means that the definition of “smart shopper” is not just about price, it is more and more about value. And the concept of value has been extended to include trust in the brand, as well as good customer service.

These numbers look very much the same as they did a year and even two years ago, when the recession was just beginning to alter consumer behavior. This means that consumers are settling into a “less is more” mindset, while expecting more from their brand and shopping experiences.

Anyone in Financial Services (along with other industries) who is not conducting branding studies and consumer experience research should probably take note.

Off the heels of a successful rollout of the Apple iPad, Apple has unveiled the Apple iPhone 4.0.

While a prototype was discovered and authenticated earlier this year, questions still arise as to what Apple has up its sleeve. Will the company be able to raise the bar again within the smartphone realm, as top competitors like Google, Samsung and Motorola (for example) continue to close the gap in the uniqueness of the iPhone with similar products?

Does the new iPhone have enough “oomph” to propel it dramatically ahead of the competition again? Only time will tell if the public will embrace the fourth generation of the iPhone, but given Apple’s successful past, I am betting that the new version will be well received. What do you think?

I recently bought a new cell phone. I previously had a phone that let me do my email and instant messaging, but wouldn’t allow me to do much else. I learned a lot of important things during the process of buying a new phone. Most importantly I learned that I only TALK on my phone for about 83 minutes every month. (My husband, who supposedly hates cell phones, uses our other 1,317 minutes each month.) But I’m getting off topic…

When I realized how little I talk on my phone, I realized that I needed a newer phone that would allow me to do more STUFF on it. What else I needed to do on it wasn’t exactly clear, but how else could I justify the $219 we pay each month for our cell phones? (Two phones, both with data and 1,400 minutes.)

After the agonizing process of trying to find the perfect phone, I now own an Android Incredible. I’m still learning how to use it. In fact, I’m learning really important stuff about it every day. So far it’s helped me navigate to strange places across town and find a restaurant in the mall. I also now always know the five-day forecast. Yesterday I bought my first app for the phone. It is going to organize my entire life and I know it will be life changing. I have a long list of other apps that I want to find.

I didn’t grow up with a cell phone. I didn’t grow up with a computer, let alone email or the Internet. I didn’t grow up with a scanner, a fax machine, a color printer, or an iPod. I grew up with Trim Line phones, typewriters and record players. But in this day and age I use my phone to run my life. I use it for my email, instant messaging, my entire calendar, my grocery list, my to do list, Facebook updates, GPS navigation, the weather forecast, to name a few.

And that brings me—albeit in a roundabout way—to my point. Mobile banking. Clearly mobile banking is going to happen – it needs to happen. It’s a question of when, not if. Right now mobile banking isn’t on my list of things to do on my phone. For me to do mobile banking, I need my bank to receive all my bills electronically. And I want to be able to use my bank to do all my budgeting. Those two things would make mobile banking work for me. But right now I don’t want to pay bills remotely because all my bills are at home in a folder. Is there an App for that?