'Smartphones are not the real enemy!'

Why the photographic market collapses and how effective countermeasures could look like.

Presentation held at Consumer Electronic Show (CES) and PMA, Las Vegas, January, 2015

It is an ongoing discussion: Smart phones killed the traditional camera and photo business. But surprisingly enough: No-one ever has checked and proven that statement by analyzing the facts behind that statement.

Thanks to data, we have received from German market research company GfK, we could first time ever compare ten years of sales data for smartphones, cameras and MP-3 players.

The results are astonishing enough - and give hope, that manufacturers, service providers and trade do not need only to stand and watch the shrinking market - but can start to work on effective countermeasures.

Here you find the presentation as PDF and - even better for understanding - the full presentation as video.

In case you are using Mozilla Firefox, the PDF may not be shown correctly due to a bug in Firefox. Please download the file and open it using Adobe PDF-Reader.

Full length video of presentation at CES, Las Vegas (50min):

Dying market 'Photography'? A call to action to CIPA, Photoindustrie-Verband and PMA

Presentation held at Gfk Imaging Summit 2013

The imaging market is in one of the biggest crisis ever: The market for cameras is shrinking with double digit percentage year on year and - according to actual CIPA - may reach this year only 50% of what we saw just four years ago.

How to stop this? How to turn the market back to something, which inspires consumers, enhances the market and satisfies trade and manufacturers again?

Find here the presentation video.

If you like to read the presentation itself, please find it here.

In case you are using Mozilla Firefox, the PDF may not be shown correctly due to a bug in Firefox. Please download the file and open it using Adobe PDF-Reader.

Facebook: Just eight posts to success.

Photo industry far behind - fashion in front

Brand activities on Facebook evaluated

What are the factors for success on Facebook? What generates 'Likes', 'talk abouts' and user comments ? To figure out these factor, Mayflower Concepts and its partners have developed a tool called Socialysis , which we are testing currently. Socialysis compares  facebook users' reactions (comments, shares and likes)with the activity rate of the site operators.

For a marketing presentation at the international congress Business Forum Imaging , we put the first , very surprising results together. 280 Facebook pages from different sectors were analyzed for this.

We were curious, if we could find correlations between activities and reactions, which may help to  develop rules for an cost saving, efficient use of the medium of Facebook.

In fact, the preliminary findings suggest that one can find such rules.

One example is, that most companies activate their fans with less than 10 own posts per week . In the observed period we found significantly higher values only from just companies in transport services (such as airlines or railroad  lines) with 40 posts per week , and fashion brands specialized on the young target group (34 posts per week ) .

But both branches pay for the flood of posts with a (relative) decline of consumer interest . In KPIs - the responses to these posts (post Likes ) and in the relative growth rates - both industries can be found rather in the lower third of the observed branches.

Photo business scores below average

For the preparation of our presentation at the Business Forum Imaging in Cologne we were particularlyinterested in the question of whether the photo industry benefits from the special role, images play in social networks.

In fact, it turned out that people on Facebook are much more interested in pictures as such as to the information published by photo brands, service providers and trade there.

If you are interested in further details, don't hesitate to call us or write us.

Since January:Your website is ranked down in Google search results.

But: There is a chance to move your website to the local results too - even as centrally operating brand!

It is not well known yet: just a few months ago Google changed the ranking methodology for its search results: The first sites shown below the paid ads a preferely given to local results.

By this, Google just follows it's own findings, stating that already now 20 % of all searches on PCs  are seeking for results in the immediate vicinity - and on mobile devices this share is increasing up to 40 %.

Consequently around 7% of all search results are already local results in US (source:Google) and Germany (source: Sitrix http://www.sistrix.de/).
 
Place 1 to 5 of the Google search results usually show paid advertisements and local results

This means: Other pages such as yours are clearly shifted down. A disaster - if you bear in mind that the fifth position in Google search is just clicked by 5% of user only - and click through rates (CTR) from the second page show figures belwo 1% .

Or in other words :

You lose at position 6 has 95 out of 100 potential customers - and from the second results page already 99 of the possible 100 prospects.

Google itself recommends to set up up an own page for each branch including an entry on Google maps. Matt Cutts ( head of Webspam team at Google ) recommends this strategy in his blog.

But: What to do, if your company operates centrally - without local branches?According to Matt Cutts there is no chance to get into the  regional results .

Our tipp: What do you do when you as a brand has only one location - involve partners !

Saving money through optimized processes in internationalmarketing

Why companies still give away a significant portion of their marketing budgets

Let's be honest: When have you lastly checked and adapted your marketing processes fundamentally?

The way of working in marketing has changed quite dramatically over the past 15 years : New channels (web , CRM , social networking, mobile marketing , etc), new methods and new markets always require new workflows for both, employees and agencies.

In fact, many of these workflows are existing - but organically grown rather than designed. In the best case one has simply copied and adapted an available, well-running workflow according to the new requirements.

The greatest potential for massive budget optimizations, however, is resuting exactly from this organic growth of the processes.

Potential for savings : From € 100,000 up to several million euros per year *

Using a model calculation based on real data we at Mayflower Concepts have determined a cost saving potential in a six-digit range for SMEs - and up to a million Euros potential in larger enterprises - per year!* The amount of savings depends primarily on the frequency a company need to produce/rework advertising materials , web pages , manuals in different languages. And obvisously the number of markets a company is in, is another important factor.

To unfreeze those budget savings it is necessary to question the existing materials, the re-design of processes and the introduction of new methods for localization.

Internationalization rarely is a planned, well designed and optimized process

The trend to pan-European or even global marketing production has grown tremendously in the past 10 to 15 years. Hardly any company that does not try to centralizeas many marketing processes as possible - following the logic that it is cheaper to invent something once from a headquarter instead of 30 times locally.

We saw processes growing like this:
To run the production process for the first foreign market a new process is developed. For the second, third and all following markets this process the simply is copied.

As a results we see huge Ecxel spreadsheets to control translation and production processes.


5 questions to help you determine whether there is a saving potential in your company:

1. You cannot figure out the your localization costs with just one look to your budget summary?
2. Do your staff members use excel lists to control the production local language materials?
3. Please multiply the number of countries that you operate in with the yearly number of advertising materials, websites, manuals , etc. Does this number exceeds 100?
4. You cannot name the time your colleagues in local subsidiaries need to care for such processes per week?
5. In your company there are various, independent departments responsible for the creation of local materials (such as advertising materials, web pages operation manuals, etc.) 

You answered any of these questions with 'yes' ? Then we should talk!

Consultancy without risk: Free for our clients
 

If you can not manage this redesign by yourself, we at Mayflower Concepts have a special offer : For process management in the field of localization Mayflower Concepts works for free for our clients. Our consultancy fee is based on the amount saved and will be due only with success!