World's Smallest Bento Box: Lessons in Content Marketing & Mindfulness

Four artists (a watch maker, a chef, a surgeon and a diorama artist) collaborated to create the world's smallest bento that fits inside a wrist watch.

I watched in awe the video on how an entire bento was made to fit inside a watch so that a man can eat his lunch on the go.

This is actually an advertising campaign by Takii, a Japanese agriculture company focused on making high-quality seeds for nutritious fruits and vegetables.

The message is simple. The Takii Phyto Rich vegetables are so packed with nutrients that all you need is can be packed into a wrist watch!

Not only is it innovative, it communicates the message clearly.  It is so interesting that everyone wants to share it and talk about it!  That's how great content is!

Watch the "making of" and the video on the world's smallest bento in a wrist watch:

World's Smallest Bento Watch (Ad & Making of the Ad)

As I look at the Bento Watch, I am reminded of how many amazing elements can fit into a watch and how cleverly each element was selected to fit in.  That is how much we too can cram into our infinite brain.

Take only those elements that give you the nutrients and that's all you need - love, compassion, creativity, courage, etc. Let go of anything else that does not give you nutrition - stress, ego, fear, excessive logic, etc.
If we all had a beautiful mind in a watch, what would we want to put in there?

For your reading pleasure, here's the story as narrated by Johnny Strategy, a blogger on Japanese graphic design and art.
"A watchmaker, a surgeon, a chef and a diorama artist are sitting around together. Each is a master of their trade and together, they’re attempting to create the world’s smallest bento. One that fits inside a wristwatch yet is packed with all the vitamins and nutrients that a busy worker needs to get through the day.

The watchmaker designs the box and chopsticks for the bento. The surgeon slices the meats and vegetables. The chef prepares the food (note the adorable miniature wok at the 47 second mark). Finally, the diorama artist pulls it all together to create the bento watch: the world’s smallest bento.

Making a bento to fit into a wrist watch
Eating a bento from a watch

Marketing Creates And Captures Markets

We recently won a Global Innovation Award for our Asia Pacific efforts to grow and capture the market.  It was a recognition of marketing in our true profession of strategy, management, multi-channel and integrated marketing across content, social, digital.

Code named CAMP (Create A Market For Power), marketing lead the initiative with understanding the market dynamics, being creative to develop a programmatic approach, daring to do things differently and making an impact to the business.

It helped us achieve several consecutive quarters of year on year growth. Here is the story of how marketing led the way to this transformation.

IBM Power Systems in Asia Pacific is the market leader in the Systems of Records for IT infrastructure requirements.  With the shift in infrastructure consumption to solutions for big data, , we needed to take a hard look at our business to assess what we needed to do differently to win. We started by understanding more about the market place.

Understand The Market. Use Analytics.
The market had developed besides Systems of Records to Systems of Engagement, Insights, etc.  This new area was a fair fight with many market players who were trying to make the shift.  We assessed our position of power, who we needed to work with to extend into the new solution areas and what was needed for the shift.  This was done by using analytics, social and other listening.

Appoint Champions. Lead The Business Plan
Within the business, we needed champions who could prioritize and focus on the growth areas. The champions were needed to pitch the propositions, drive capabilities and align resources. We then mapped out the business and marketing priorities and what the game plan was. Resources included budgets, facilities and people across sales, technical, marketing from both internal and external. 

Develop The New Approach. Make It Simple.
We clearly defined the business problem as “How do we generate revenue for Brand with Who for What Solutions in Where".  The plan included considerations for conditioning the market, recruiting key players, training to develop skills, developing joint go to market, creating the market demand and generated business opportunities.  The approach had to be systematic and scalable, easy to understand and execute, convincing for investors and worthwhile for the time and effort spent.

Choose The Battle Field. Define Success
We chose to test the approach in a region where the opportunity was the largest but adoption was the lowest and in another region where adoption could match up to the pace of the opportunity growth. The approach yielded great results against the targets. In the first market, we grew our revenue by over 400% year on year.  In the second market, we achieved grew almost 200% of our target.

Determine Success Factors. Learn As You Go.
Through this initiative, we learnt that there are critical success factors that made a significant difference.

1. Quality over quantity: creating an impact helps to then ramp up the volume
2. Standardize and simplify: making things easy to speed up go to market.
3. Leveraging others' ability: Each party is better positioned as advocates and have greater influence to their segments, and it would greatly accelerate the results where we can overcome resource or capability limitations and creates self-sufficiency
4. Ownership & team work: Strong collaboration across each activity phase across the various stakeholders is crucial.  Often, one of the team members will just step up to lead beyond their role to ensure success.
5. Integrated marketing: A 360-degree engagement is required - internal and external communications, digital and off-line, business and technical, social and content, etc.

Marketing truly creates and captures the market.  While this winning initiative is being replicated across the business. The principles of how marketing can lead in business transformation can be applied to what we can create to make a difference.

This is the awesomeness of marketing!

Time to Amplify The Power of Marketing

As some of you may know, I was awarded #2 Social Seller by LinkedIn in November 2014.  It is now November 2015 and I wonder about how well I now stand with my social media ranking.

The good news is that in 2015, our IBM Power blogs are being pumped out almost on a weekly basis with "We Believe - Power Wins" and "We Amplify - Power Marketing" blogs, and responses to the many global and regional Systems and Marketing blogs that we actively contribute and respond to.  I have lots of re-tweets, re-posts, shares and comments on IBM on all my social media platforms - Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Linked In.  I would like to think that besides the great work from our brand, technical and sales team, marketing and our social efforts has helped us turn around our business to several consecutive quarters of year to year growth since I have joined the Asia Pacific team.

Looking across 2014 and 2015, there was a significant change in my personal social engagement. In 2014, I was in ASEAN Systems Marketing and had to manage the System x team which had the challenge of enduring a year of uncertainty before they eventually transitioned to Lenovo.  Blogging had become a way for me to share my thoughts about the industry both tech and marketing.  I had hoped that my raw and honest view helped to provide an objective perspective amidst rumours and nay sayings.  It was my way to inspire my team, encourage my fellow colleagues, business partners, customers and the industry.

Many who were inspired or touched by my blogs reached out to me to share with them and their teams.  So in 2015,  I began sharing, training and mentoring many who were willing to learn about digital and social.  I was invited to share my expertise on how to build social eminence with general managers, directors, managers, staff and students.  These included universities, trade associations, government boards, human resource organizations, manufacturers, marketing forums and public events.

As I spend time mentoring and coaching, coupled with ramping up our IBM capabilities, I had somehow neglected myself and when I forget to share "me" to the world, those who followed me have lost the opportunity for inspiration.  Several followers recently commented that they have been following me and been missing my blogs.  So, it is time to really amplify the power of marketing by re-awaken my social identity and re-vitalize my blog. 

I will share as I learn.  As Tim Cahill says, "A journey is best measured by friends than miles."  Come and follow me on this journey.

B2B Content Strategies: Content is the heart.

It was a great gathering with a couple of panel speakers in "B2B Content Strategies: Lessons From The Trenches" with the world of content creators, aggregators, clients, agencies and communications professionals. 

Catch the interview: http://youtu.be/S0RJN6AIUUM via @YouTube

 
Here are some of my thoughts:

1. Understand B2B Content World. In the B2B world, targeting different job titles, industries, roles in decision making process, technical jargon and technology life cycle make content seem more complex than B2C.  However, if you think about it, the same targeting, segmentation and consumption patterns is studied and applied. Your target audience is human too.

2. Segment with precision. I am known as a guru of segmentation using analytics to better understand my customers and potential customers.  The reason why the marketing programs that are run by my teams are so much more effective is the precision of message and approach based on segmentation. 

3. Content can drive ROI. We have done such a great job in delivering pipeline for the business that sales believe in the power of marketing in lead generation. Demonstrating return on investment still remains an important part in getting budget and resources to focus on content.

4. Content is the heart of persuasion.  Today, there is a lot more content in multiple forms but are they the right ones? Content is the heart which transmit the right messages at the right time to the right person. Content is about how we can engage someone to develop a deeper relationship with the customer.

In the B2B world, we need professionals who are willing to invest time to understand the portfolio and pitch the appropriate content mapped to the customers' journey.

Here are some of my quotes:


“To break through the content clutter is to really understand customer and then bring the right content" 


"What do love and dating have to do with B2B content marketing?"
 
“Ultimately, when it comes to convincing internal stakeholders of the investment, IBM Asia-Pacific’s Director of Marketing for IBM Power Systems, Anne Phey, suggests “showing that conversion rates and revenue” are increasing over time. 

It may even be a case of sitting down with the business leaders and CFO to explain what marketing does, how conversations on social media help us gain insights on customers and content trends, how online activities such as web traffic, downloads, etc are monitored against targets, as well as showing the opportunity pipeline for conversion to wins. 

Adds Phey: “Our  business leader understands that content doesn’t have to generate revenue straight away. It’s like having a relationship. You’ve got to start dating and wooing the prospect before he becomes a customer. As of 2015, we’ve appointed content marketing managers. That’s a breakthrough for us.” 

Read more from Gracia Chiang's at

http://www.kingcontent.com.au/creating-emotion-in-b2b-content-marketing/

3 Steps To Transforming The Economics Of Data

Data is growing at an explosive rate - over 667 exabytes of data will flow through the Internet alone in 2014. What is exabyte - that's 667 quintillion bytes ... 667 with 18 zeros after!! 

This tremendous growth places intense demands on storage systems, especially flash arrays and storage virtualization.  How can clients transform the economics of data? 

 Watch this video: This clear and simple white-boarding video below explains the details. 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kik3I7krTMQ

New Challenges From Big Data

Companies are facing challenges from data:

1. Growing Data – not just the traditional structured data from traditional, but also the unstructured data from social media

2. Storage inefficiency – companies are buying 24 percent more storage but less than half is used.

3. Storage complexity – More data is generated across departments which is not linked across the organization

Making Sense of Data

How can we make sense of the data and enable the infrastructure to support it?

1. Optimize the storage with real time compression technology – store 5x more data and reduce cost by 60%

2. Maximize performance with flash – business applications can run 3.5x faster

3. Enable new workload with software defined storage – simply storage management and access to get data when needed, easy to deploy cloud, social and mobile platforms.

Data Helps To Stay Ahead Of Competition

With the right infrastructure and technology, business can stay ahead of competition. Each division can access data and use it for competitive advantage:

1. Sales gets insights and are able to run analytics needed to make more profitable business

2. Marketing can run highly effective marketing campaigns with better customer insights

3. Finance can keep cost under lock with more efficient technology

Request for a 1-on-1 Demo

Register for Storage Solution Demo:

https://www.ibm.com/services/forms/signup.do?source=stg-transforming_the_economic

For more specific demo related to Cloud & Big Data Analytics:

• IBM Elastic Storage for Big Data

IBM Software Defined Storage transforms data economics for traditional and new era workloads with new data flexibility, agility, and responsiveness – all delivered through software.  And at the same time, maintaining the required security and reliability that are critical for your data systems. IBM Elastic Storage provides high performance for petabytes of data and billions of file using a mixture of disk and LTO tape under a single global namespace and reduce TCO up to 15x and energy consumption up to 230x. This demo shows automatic data placement policy and movement across disk and tape tiers and still retains data availability for your applications at all times.

• IBM Storage on Cloud

Enables enterprises to implement a private cloud storage service where users, with a few clicks, can request & receive storage capacity, share files with other users, and administrators can easily monitor & report usage. Simplify work for your storage admin, and reduce SAN & NAS storage provisioning time from days and weeks to minutes!

Technology - the secret to winning F1

Technology events have never gotten more exciting!  We had a total sensory experience at IBM ASEAN’s Xcite event with Infiniti Red Bull Racing Team.

Al Peasland (Head of Technical Partnerships, Red Bull Racing) was our speaker who gave us a TED-style sharing of the partnership between IBM and Red Bull Racing.  We experienced the Infiniti Red Bull spirit of fun and philosophy of “performance and reliability” with Al’s passionate delivery and interactive presentation.

 

Performance is great but if it doesn't happen when you need it, you cannot consistently win the race.  If it is just  about reliability, you may not become the best without pushing performance.  Both are important to keep staying ahead and winning.

Al shared, “Platform Computing is the back bone infrastructure for high performance computing, which helped Red Bull Racing with the design of the car, the analytics and the race strategy.”  It is used to plan into the future, to create all the what if scenarios and to predict what may happen in the two hour race.

When the single focus is to win races and championships, every element of the design and manufacture of Formula One racing cars is critical. With Formula One regulations becoming more stringent each year, Red Bull Racing is designing the entire car in a virtual world and parts are machined directly from 3D CAD models. Red Bull Racing also collects massive amounts of data from wind tunnel testing and from the car during races. These processes demand extensive use of simulation and data analytics, and a first class IT infrastructure.

Infiniti Red Bull Racing is ahead of the league that is embracing Platform Computing, a software from IBM Systems & Technology Group.  Also sometimes known Elastic Storage for Software Defined Environment. It helps to maximize the potential of computing power by pooling resources, managing them efficiently across multiple groups, so that one can run many iterations, simulations and analytics to get business results fast.  This is the winning formula to harness the benefits of unstructured data and data explosion.

We are glad to be the technology innovation partner that drives the winning Formula One car.  Technology - platform computing technology - is the secret to winning!

Catch Al's interview: https://plus.google.com/101708759635909645335/posts/MmgQDhqx3Yj
Read more: http://www.slideshare.net/annephey/blog-2014-1016-infiniti-red-bulls-secrets-to-winning-f1-races