Happy Holidays from the SIME Team!

Here’s wishing you and your family a season of great happiness and joy. Thank you for helping SIME reach greater heights during 2010. It has been a dream year for us, bringing together the best speakers and thought leaders to talk to an overflowing enthusiastic crowd of top level CMO’s, decision makers, entrepreneurs, investors and press in 3 cities. Without your support and enthusiasm, none would have been possible. Again, thank you and have a rocking 2011!

Dear Brands, build fanboys and not customers

The attention economy demands you build fan boys and not customers.

If you had a care-o-meter, most of your average mass marketing messages do not elicit enough attention from most if not all consumers.

Apple has fanboys who will kill for their brand. It’s even part of pop culture called mac envy

Walmart might be considered too cheap, but they serve their market exactly well. So do budget airlines.

The key is not what everyone thinks, but what your actual consumers think and then take their experience to a delightful new level.

At SIME, we asked marketing managers of the major brands today, what and how they built their fanboys. And we collected their response in this video below as part of the SIME Brand Stories collection.

So what’s your story?

"We let entrepreneurs be entrepreneurs" – Raoul Grünthal, CEO Schibsted @ SIME 10

One of my personal highlights at SIME Stockholm this year was the CEO of Schibsted Raoul Grünthal being surprisingly clear on the media industry’s route forward – the one where there are multiple core businesses, one where businesses are required to be lean and agile yet maintain their volumes, one where businesses are driven by entrepreneurial minds and not solely on a vague vision set by the leader on top. The most poignant statement of the whole fire side chat with Raoul was entrepreneurs having a place in large companies today, and Schibsted being one such company where entrepreneurs are allowed to be entrepreneurs, allowed to take their risks within a fluid framework in a large organization.

That calls for a mindset and cultural shift within the whole organization, and Schibsted is one of the very few companies which has managed to get the soil right in their core. It was inspiring to see the head of a media company today being super clear in an industry plagued by constant transformation, disruption and too many death sirens.