Terry White, Chief Innovation Officer, Amway Japan

MM: That’s straightforward.

TW: Well it’s not necessarily straightforward to do it in real-time, but yes-when you think about offers and when you think about trying to do split testing on marketing propositions to customers, it’s freaky. You’re now going to be able to do this in real-time. Over a mobile device.

With the population on the move, in a place of high urban density like Tokyo-it’s a major proportion of population. Remember -you have 12 million people a day move through Tokyo’s railway station.

MM: Yes.

TW: I think we see ourselves looking for people who have got our applications on. As we send more stuff to the mobile screen and people are able to download it to the screen, we’ve got applications running Native and Java, whatever. We’ll be porting applets out to the mobile phones. We’ll be looking for the interaction that occurs off of that.

We’ll be looking to see whether-again-the tone of the conversation and the volume of the conversation in and around the mobile devices is going up or down, or staying still. I think tracking things like users and whatnot-it’s like, “Whoa. Stop.” For the average user, there are 2 mobile phones for every person between the ages of 10 and 19 in Japan. I’m not going to track that. Everyone’s got a mobile phone. I’m not going to track their accounts or what devices they’re using. There’s no sense in doing that.

There’s so much diversity and such huge speed in innovation cycles at this point. I think again, it’s got to be around what we have to be showing to people. Particularly older people. People of our age, Michael, think that mobile phones are for talking on! And people of our age, Michael, are decision-makers in companies!

MM: Yes.

TW: When you try to talk about this being something we’d like to do on the mobile phone space, because we think this might be cool-they’re saying, “Hang on. That’s what I use to make a reservation at a restaurant. Not have a hugely rich emotional interaction with a customer at a time and place of the customer’s choice.”

MM: Yes. This begins to loop back to one of our initial points around brand interaction.
TW: Sure.

MM: The facets of a brand interaction. As I have shared with you a brand interaction model that has a federated search and search optimization and versions and social media webcast theaters and collaborative selling-the inherent challenge that many marketers have today is that they have no personal experience of various aspects of -for example-Webcast theaters or social media spaces.

TW: Sure.

MM: If you have no experience of it, then it doesn’t show up as a resource that I can leverage or harness or direct. As a function of that, their marketing strategies have these huge holes in them, as a function of not having had an experience of what this particular technology or capability or service provides the customer.

TW: Yes.

MM: So then as we start to put together these marketing plans and some 30-year old or 35-year old marketing manager comes in-and I’ll say as, “she” comes in and makes the presentation why they should have this whole social media strategy… the graybeards of the world are going, “Wow. What did she drink this morning?”

TW: Yes. “Where can I get some of that stuff?”

MM: It’s like, “Wow. This is too wild. This is not credible.” I’m sure you’ve had similar kinds of interactions there in your company around ideas that have come up from the younger members of your team proposing some concepts that initially sounded like, “Way out,” and then ultimately turned out to be the thing to do.

TW: Sure.

MM: Any personal anecdotes along those lines?

TW: Yes. You’ve met some of the people that I’ve had the fun and the thrill of working with. For the first little bit, I was in the graybeard space, thinking, “How do I come to terms with this? I’m not ever going to be able to be a wizard in all of these particular pieces.”

What struck me one day like a bolt of lightning was what I had to do was to define the play space. To say, “Here’s a broad vision about what I think we should do. Unless you hear to the contrary, the stuff that you’re thinking about is included in this playground. And if you can come to me with a business case of why you want to do a particular thing or try a particularly thing, then we’re going to talk about it in terms of, “Is it in the playground or out of the playground?”

“If you bring me the numbers, then we’ll have a conversation around the efficacy of that particular piece or technology or medium.”

MM: What are some of the numbers of a kind of left-field emerging technology capability? Oftentimes a lot of these new emerging technologies have no formal business case. I mean it takes a couple of years for people that have experiences in data to really report back.

When you’ve got something that’s brand new and innovative and potentially a game-changer, in lieu of a formal business case where you’ve got an investment analysis to justify a purchase or procurement decision-what are some of the things that you need?

TW: You need to guess. I’ve had this conversation with a lot of people all the time. If we don’t know, then let’s try to make an educated guess.

MM: What are the elements of the guess?

TW: Let’s take Second Life as an example. What drove a decision for us to want to play in Second Life? Was it because it was “way cool,” and people got to put on funky gear as avatars? No.

The question was “Do you think people are coming in or will be coming into this space? Are people in this space? If they are, is this a place where we could talk about our lifestyle propositions?” If the answer is, “Yes,” and we think we can generate a certain number of brand interactions, we’re going to be all over that idea.

MM: So let’s presuppose that you already had a sufficient maturity around a lifestyle proposition.

TW: Absolutely.

MM: And you also had the assumption that it was more than just a one-way broadcast of, “Here’s what we do.” Rather, it was more reciprocal. It was really about creating the conversation with others around or with or using our lifestyle proposition.

TW: Sure.

MM: And that you had meaningful things to contribute to a conversation.

TW: Absolutely. People who broadcast are merchandisers — not marketers. I can print a million leaflets and put them on the windscreen wipers. That isn’t going to achieve anything.

MM: I’m just trying to tease out some of the unspoken or hidden assumptions. The always already taken-for-granted assumptions, here.

The other dimension of that is that Amway is already a social network. So then the idea of expanding the social network to online-that kind of intuitively makes sense. There’s no, “Why are we in the social networking business?”

TW: This is a business made up of people. There are 3 million people around the world who are Amway distributors. They already are in these spaces.

MM: So, “Follow your customer.”

TW: Well, you’ve got to follow the customer. But it becomes a natural extension of what we do. If our people are there, that’s where we go to talk to them.

MM: I understand. So when somebody came to you and said, “Okay. Let’s put together an Amway Experience Center…” Right? You say, “Okay. Well, our customers are already out there. They’re already setting up versions of themselves and/or their brand franchise ore their business units.” They’re already setting that up out there. They’re doing their stuff. They’re talking about us, but there’s no formal footprint. There’s no formal point of reference. There’s no formal stand for Amway in that conversation.
TW: Sure. But Michael, at the same time, a lot of it’s intuitive.

MM: I understand.

TW: One of the skills I think I bring to these sort of environments is that when a guy like my friend, Max Perelman-when he comes and says, “You know, I think we should be thinking about something over VOIP or telephone.”

People take photographs of their face, and then we run a little app that lets them put on some lipstick and eye shadow. It blows the top of your head off. You say, “Yes. We want to do that. Yes. I want to be in Second Life. And Max — what I want you to do is to create a brand experience center in there.” Because it’s the perfect space.

MM: But is it a 10 million yen or is it 100 million yen?

TW: 100 million yen.

MM: How do you right-size those investments, given the scant information you have about things like that? You were saying you have to make the case.

TW: You make the case. You determine whether you’re going to get hard material benefit out of it as you would for the transaction model in the mobile telephone. Or whether you’re going to get brand-value added and you’re going to increase the value of your brand franchise out of doing it. Or whether you’re going to be in a space like Second Life or FaceBook or some of the blog spots in Japan. Whether you’re being there to take a position-to say, “If you’ve got questions about our brand or our brand experience, come see us!”

MM: And here’s how to interact with it?

TW: That’s not an economic argument. That’s a brand voice argument. And the brand voice argument is just as valid.

MM: Sure.

TW: I’m lucky to be blessed to work in a place where people understand the importance of brand voice. They understand intuition. We’re trusted to do our jobs and make decisions. And we get away with doing some crazy stuff. It’s a blast!

We also understand that we have to figure stuff out - there has to be a point where we need to make a decision of whether it’s working or not. If it didn’t work, why? But that point is always somewhere in the future of the day you’re making the decision. There’s wheelbarrow-loads of value in the lessons learned.

You’ve got to have a bunch of wonderful people working with you to understand that I’m going to give them permission to be in the playground. But they have to think about it from a business perspective.

It’s then my responsibility to go to the board. It’s my responsibility to get the financials together in such a way that it makes cogent business sense. I’m working on the passion that my people have when they come to me with an idea.

MM: Yes. That’s a great place to summarize and end on this. Terry, I want to think you for sharing your experiences and insights with us.

TW: Thank you, Michael. It was fun.