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Alibaba.com Goes Public
The IPO of Alibaba.com hit the Hong Kong Stock Exchange Tuesday the 6th of November 2007 with a big increase over its initial offering price.
Alibaba.com is a spinoff from the Alibaba Group, the company that owns Alipay, Taobao.com and Yahoo China and is 40% owned by Yahoo.
Applications for shares in the IPO were 256x the amount of stock available, 858.9 million shares or 17% of the company. The IPO price was HK$13.50 ($1.74) per share.
As of 12:30pm local time (+8 GMT) Alibaba.com shares were trading at HK$35.75 ($4.60), an increase of 164% on the list price.
Yahoo is a big winner from the IPO, having obtained a 8.2% stake pre-IPO that went from a paper value of $720.89 million to $1.9 billion based on the 12:30pm price.
Alibaba now has a market cap of a rather staggering $23.24 billion, significantly more than the market cap of China’s biggest search engine, the NASDAQ listed Baidu on $14.05 billion.
The New 4 P’s of Marketing
I read this post at my friends’ blog Dave Duarte
The Marketing page on Wikipedia now includes a sub-section called: “Web 2.0 and Marketing New 4Ps”.
The original 4Ps concept idea was developed to help marketers manage the four most important aspect of marketing (Product, Price, Place, and Promotion). With the Internet and the Web 2.0, marketers have needed to adapt a broader perspective on these elements. Idris Mootee devised a “New 4Ps” model in 2001 to supplement the traditional marketing 4Ps.
Web 2.0 and Marketing New 4Ps
The original 4Ps concept idea was developed to help marketers manage the four most important aspect of marketing. With the Internet and the Web 2.0, marketers have needed to adapt a broader perspective on these elements. Idris Mootee devised a “New 4Ps” model in 2001 to supplement the traditional marketing 4Ps.[2] They are Personalization, Participation, Peer-to-Peer and Predictive Modeling.
- Personalization: The author here refers to customization of products and services through the use of the Internet. Early examples include Dell on-line and Amazon.com, but this concept is further extended with emerging social media and advanced algorithms. Emerging technologies will continue to push this idea forward.
- Participation: This is to allow customer to participate in what the brand should stand for; what should be the product directions and even which ads to run. This concept is laying the foundation for disruptive change through democratization of information.
- Peer-to-Peer: This refers to customer networks and communities where advocacy happens. The historical problem with marketing is that it is “interruptive” in nature, trying to impose a brand on the customer. This is most apparent in TV advertising. These “passive customer bases” will ultimately be replaced by the “active customer communities”. Brand engagement happens within those conversations. P2P is now being referred as Social Computing and will likely to be the most disruptive force in the future of marketing.
- Predictive modeling: This refers to neural network algorithms that are being successfully applied in marketing problems (both a regression as well as a classification problem).
Seth Godin On Domain Names
Thirteen years ago, Josh Quittner wrote an article in Wired that almost made me richer than Donald Trump.
He wrote about how many domain names were up for grabs, including McDonalds.com.
Inspired, I sat down and registered hundreds of them. I was about to hit the ‘buy’ button when my office mate persuaded me that it was somehow unethical. Persuaded, I only ended up buying one or two generic terms.
Shoot.
Anyway, a decade and a half later, boom over, domains persist. Many are worth a fortune, tens of thousands are worth a semi-fortune.
Why are they still worth so much?
For a long time, clueless surfers would type a word into the address bar of their browser, figuring it was some sort of magic search engine. Type “gloves” into the address bar of Safari, and yes, it will take you to www.gloves.com.
But Firefox and others are wising up and connecting that spot to the search engines. Type “gloves” into Firefox and you’ll automatically go to the number one result on Google. Research shows that the number of people who accidentally end up on these sites is going down. So why the value?
I’m going to argue that it comes from two things.
1. Commitment. Because there’s ony one “dot com” TLD and no serious contenders, there’s only one neighborhood for business online. You’re either on Fifth Ave. (or Rodeo Drive, your choice) or you’re not. If you build a site at mexicansugarskull.com, you’re making it really clear to the surfer that you care about this topic, that you’re here to stay and that you can be trusted.
2. Focus. Similar, but not quite the same. By having a domain that matches what you do, you are able to focus the attention of the surfer. They know what to expect before they get there, and you can spend less time explaining yourself. The web already offers too many choices–this way, your site doesn’t have to.
I think this can help lead us to some useful strategies. If you own domains:
* Reinforce the idea of commitment. Don’t use generic photos or standard layouts. The incremental effort to make your domain look like it sounds, to demonstrate your commitment through your actions, is very small, but worth it.
If you don’t own a domain that’s a perfect match (and that’s most of us):
* Make up for the fact that your domain is imperfect by using design, testimonials and other substantial cues to remind people just how committed you are.
* Don’t hesitate to create multiple domains for your efforts if you think it will help your visitors focus.
Over the last few weeks, Squidoo has launched a number of new domains to take advantage of this focus impulse: Squidbids, Squidvids and Squidwho, to name a few.
I’ve been amazed at how quickly people ‘get it’ when they visit each domain, and how productive the effort has been. The internet has taught people what to do when they see a domain. It’s not just an address, it’s the first bit of marketing.
One last bit of backward thinking: if you’re looking to start an online business, consider finding a great domain and build the business around it, not the other way around. If you subscribe to the snapnames newsletter, you can see which interesting domains are about to be sold for not much money. No guarantees as to how effective this service is, but it’s a neat way to think about what to build next.
10 tips for naming your company, product, or service
First, to get an idea of how much money and time big corporations spend on name development, check out Valleywag’s post about how AOL named its new search service (thanks to Brady Forrest for sending this link). They “engaged a top-tier naming agency” (which, coincidentally, The Name Inspector used to work for), considered more than a hundred name candidates, and settled on the name FullView. It might seem like a lot of trouble and expense for a not-so-interesting result. Your average startup or other small-to-medium business isn’t going to be able to swing that.
Fortunately, there’s no magic to naming. Why fortunately? Because that means anyone can do it. It doesn’t mean it’s easy to do a good job, though. These tips might help a little.
1. Quantity and diversity yield quality
Naming is a matter of satisfying many competing constraints. Ideally a name is relevant, positive, memorable, reasonably short, not too generic, not too similar to a competing name, associated with an available domain name, and distinctive enough to bring your web page to the top of search engine results. The odds are against having a name just pop into your head that satisfies all these constraints. That means the most effective way to come up with a name is to think of lots of different ideas, carefully screen and choose, and repeat. A good metaphor for the naming process is evolution through variation and natural selection.
2. Selection is as important as creation
In all evolutionary processes, selection is more important than the initial causes of variation. So it is with naming. It doesn’t matter how you come up with your ideas for names, as long as you have some great ones to choose from. (Fortunately, the process that leads to variation in name ideas is not random, like genetic mutation. There are things you can do to increase your chances of having good ideas.) It’s important to realize that evaluating your name ideas and choosing the one that really works is as important to the naming process–and takes as much work–as coming up with name ideas in the first place.
3. Try different types of name
One good way to increase your chances of having great name ideas is to try creating different types of name. You might start with The Name Inspector’s classification of names and try to think of something in each category. This will make you consider possibilities you otherwise might overlook, and will help you learn what kind of name is right for your company, product, or service.
4. Use collective intelligence
Another good way to diversify your pool of name ideas is to have lots of people contribute. They can help both by suggesting names and by critically evaluating others’ name ideas. Other people will notice gems that you ignored, and duds that you’re attached to for your own idiosyncratic reasons.
5. Use linguistic resources
What goes for names also goes for the raw linguistic material that you use to create names. It’s unlikely that just the right word is going to pop into your head to serve as the basis for a blend, a compound, or some other type of put-together name. It helps to have lots of relevant words presented to you quickly so that you can select from among them. A thesaurus helps a lot. You might use a fancy online tool like the Visual Thesaurus, but a good old copy of Roget’s does very nicely.
6. Do exercises to explore connections to relevant concepts
Creative professionals, especially namers, love making mind maps and doing other exercises to break their habits of thought and explore connections that would not otherwise occur to them. You should do this, too. Start with a clear understanding of what your company/product/service does and how it benefits people. Then think of things that are indirectly associated with these ideas. Include some things that are visually distinctive (logo material). Also try to think of things that can represent a function or benefit metaphorically. Good metaphors make abstract ideas tangible and obscure ideas clear–consider the way the flake metaphor in the name PageFlakes helps people understand what an Ajax homepage is like. Finally, some simple free association never hurts.
7. Pictures are important, even when you’re just thinking of words
Often what makes a name good is the fact that it gives people a mental image that helps them understand how something works or what benefits it provides. Ideas are more interesting and easier to remember when they’re associated with sensory, especially visual, experience. That means when you’re coming up with name ideas, sometimes it’s best to start with a visual image and then think of the language that goes with it. With a visual dictionary you can look at pictures of complex objects and physical settings that have all their individual parts labeled.
8. To avoid embarrassment in other languages, ask the experts
If you’re releasing something on a global scale and are concerned about what your name might mean in other languages, there’s simply no way to get around asking native speakers. Nothing else will work. One native speaker’s opinion is worth more than any amount of research you might do using dictionaries or online resources. If this is an issue and you can’t afford to hire a naming firm to screen the name for you, try to identify the main languages you’re concerned about (start with the ones with the most speakers in your market, obviously) and find speakers yourself. Try friends of friends. Try online social networks. Try a university with international students.
9. Forget etymology
Maybe it’s shocking for The Name Inspector to say this, but the etymologies of words or word parts that you use in your name don’t matter. What do matter are the associations people make. Sometimes there’s an overlap between the two, though. For example, many people recognize that -lumin- relates to light, and it in fact comes from the Latin word for light. However, most people don’t make the association to light because of their knowledge of Latin or etymology. They make it because they know words like luminous and illuminate and recognize the word part. In general, etymological meaning connections only come through when they’re also part of the living language.
10. Know when to let go
Because naming is about satisfying constraints, it’s important to know when to let go of a favorite idea that won’t work. Suppose you really want to use the word meme in your name, but you want to have a distinctive name and three competitors already have names built around that word. Forget meme and move on.
Post Source TheNameInspector.com
How To Build a Global Brand
By John Quelch
Ford has finally woken up to what Toyota knew a long time ago: the power of a single global brand.
Over twenty years ago, Harvard professor Theodore Levitt praised Japanese manufacturers for their focus on “what every consumer in the world is seeking: world-class modernity at affordable prices.” Either because they didn’t understand regional differences in consumer preferences or out of self-confidence, Toyota, Nissan and Honda sold standard products under a single brand umbrella.
For decades, Ford adapted its manufacturing platforms, features, and model names from one country to another. The results: added manufacturing and supply chain costs that strained consumers’ willingness to pay; a balkanized bureaucracy in which regional managers exaggerate the need for local adaptations to defend their turf; and a deteriorating market share, financial performance and stock price.
Ford was once one of the ten most valuable brands in the world. They’re no longer on that list, but Toyota now is. How did Toyota—and the other nine companies—do it? There are five characteristics that all top global brands have in common:
1. The same positioning worldwide. This provides a combination of functional product quality and innovation with emotional appeal. Think Coca-Cola and Disney.
2. A focus on a single product category. Think Nokia and Intel.
3. The company name is the brand name. All marketing dollars are concentrated on that one brand. Think GE and IBM.
4. Access to the global village. Consuming the brand equals membership in a global club. Think IBM’s “solutions for a small planet.”
5. Social responsibility. Consumers expect global brands to lead on corporate social responsibility, leveraging their technology to solve the world’s problems. Think Nestle and clean water.
Ford has a proud history. Its name recognition is strong worldwide. The chairman is committed to the environment. Many consumers are no longer considering Fords when buying their new cars, but they are predisposed to giving Ford another chance. Fords worldwide should henceforth have a common look, feel and brand essence. Low volume management distractions including Jaguar, Land Rover and Volvo will be sold off; they’re now meaningless. US-based models like Mercury will be discontinued.
Can Ford recover? The answer lies in whether the common vehicle platforms developed for the new strategy prove to be truly global in design or merely more of the same Detroit-centric product that have caused Ford’s market shares around the world to erode.
What do you think? Can Ford rehabilitate its global brand status?
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John Quelch was one of ten marketing experts profiled in the 2007 book, Conversations with Marketing Masters, authored by Laura Mazur and Louella Miles. A professor at Harvard Business School since 1979, he is known worldwide for his research on global marketing, global branding and marketing communications.
John is a non-executive director of WPP Group plc, the world’s second largest marketing services company, and of Pepsi Bottling Group. He served previously as a director of Reebok International.