The Future Place Blog

The myth of first mover advantage

Some business myths seem impossible to kill, no matter how many times they are shown to be rubbish. One such myth is first mover advantage. Entrepreneurs looking for funding and would-be pundits extol the benefits of first mover advantage. "We will be first the first mover, we will secure the market position and create barriers to entry.", is the sort rubbish that is pushed.

Over my 30 years in business I have found that second mover advantage almost always beats first mover advantage. The second mover tends to look at what the first mover is doing right, what the first mover is doing wrong, and enters with a better/cheaper offering. Two recent examples of brands entering a market late and tearing it apart are Google (remember Yahoo and Alta Vista) and Facebook (which was about the 100th social network).

All of which is a very slow way of recommending a really good post by one of the best MR bloggers, Nigel Hollis. Nigel's post looks at first mover advantage in the context of Joost and then he goes on to back his argument by looking at supposed cases of first mover advantage.

The end of CATI as we know it?

A Guardian article from March has just caught my eye. The article reports a UN study looking at telephone usage globally. The report shows that between 2002 and 2008 the usage of mobile phones increased from 1 billion to 4.1 billion. During the same time fixed line connections limped up from 1 billion to 1.3 billion.

Numerous reports have highlighted the growth of mobile phone only households in the developed economies. The days of assuming that a telephone sample, based on fixed lines, could be approximately representative have gone.

Universal McCann's Report on Social Media

Universal McCann have recently released the latest wave (Wave 4) of their global research into Social Media. This wave was based on almost 23,000 interviews, spread over 38 countries, and the fieldwork was conducted between November 2008 and March 2009.

I won't try to comment on the whole presentation, read it yourself, but there are a couple of nuggets that I think are worth highlighting.

1) Activities such as blogging are being subsumed into social networking, rather than being seen as distinct activities.

2) The main use of social networks in Wave 3 was to re-contact old friends. In Wave 4 messaging friends followed by uploading photos are the two most important uses, illustrating the maturing of social networks.

3) China has almost two-thirds more internet users than the US (the number 2 country). In terms of social networks, China has almost twice as many users as the US (which is the number 2 for this as well).

I struggled to find a copy of the presentation on the Universal McCann site, so I downloaded a copy from emoderation.com, you can access it here.

The 'What makes a great conference?' Survey

Following on from the survey about presenting, I have teamed up with Brian Singh of Zinc Research and Rick Frank of Dufferin Research to run a survey on what makes a great conference. So far we have 75 responses from 16 countries. It looks as though the majority of market researchers are a tad conservative in their tastes.

If you would like to take part in the survey click here.

The interim results are available here.

We will be keeping the survey open for a while yet. When the survey is closed we will be preparing and circulating a report.

Update, the sample size is up to 137 with 25 countries covered. A number of interesting findings are beginning to emerge.

The latest news is that there are 167 interviews from 29 countries. The survey is likely to stay open until the end of July, with the report following a couple of weeks later.

We will be closing the survey shortly and them producing the reports. At the moment there are 81 completes from 30 countries. One early indication is that the UK is more likely than other countries to favour a one day conference, and more likely to favour 15 minute presentations. The one day preference may be due to geography (most UK researchers are within easy reach of London), but the 15 minutes may be down to attention deficit?

The corrosive search for talent

The Economist has an interesting invitation piece by Chris Bones looking at the crisis of confidence in business about the nature of leadership. Bones starts by highlighting a point that Malcolm Gladwell made back in 2002, that assumption that that there is a limited pool of 'talent' and that companies must compete for this talent is highly corrosive and Bones makes the point that this talent mind-set was one of the causes of the arrogance, high salaries, and recklessness that led to the recent financial collapse.

In the research industry there has been considerable discussion, for example at ESOMAR gathering about 'talent' and perhaps we are lucky that we never reached the stage of creating 'stars'?

Geting the book Free for free

Chris Anderson's last book, "The Long Tail", was one of the seminal books of the 2.0 revolution, showing that many of the 'rules' of the game were changing.

Anderson's new book, Free, has been talked about for a while and it is finally available. As befits Anderson's evangelism for the long tail and the concept of freemium, there are a variety of ways of getting hold of his book for free.

You can find out about the various ways by visiting The Long Tail blog.

Some of the free ways can be found here, here, here, and here.

Social networks are almost ubiquitous in the UK

WARC report that 80% of the UK's online population accessed a social network in May 2009. One of the most interesting aspects of the report is the flatness of penetration by age. The peak age group was the 25-34 year olds, with 89% of online users accessing social networks. But even amongst over 55 year olds this only drops to 67%.

This brings me back to one of the comments I have made several times over the last couple of years, Facebook is a fad, social networking is a trend.

Back at work

For the last couple of weeks I have been taking my annual vacation, hence the lack of posts. This year my son and I cycled 954 miles from Land's End to John o'Groats, raising money for Oxfam. (You can see the photos and read about it here).

Today is my first day back and I am dealing with accounts, all day accounts. Sometimes running a thought leadership consultancy is fun (in fact most of the time it is fun), but there are times when it is a chore, and quarterly accounts and the VAT return fall into the chore category.

What makes a great conference?

Following the recent success of our  study about market research presentations, download a copy here or the Research article here, I have teamed up with Zinc Research Dufferin Research to conduct a larger project looking into what makes a great conference.

As with earlier project the first step is a survey, which will link to live updates of the data for people taking part, and then to a report that will be published and made freely available.

You can take the survey inside Facebook by using this link

Or you can take the free standing survey by using this link

We have also created a discussion space on MRSpace to allow the results to be discussed further. The discussion will include a link to the results shortly.