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INSIDE THE TEST FLIGHT OF FACEBOOK'S 'AQUILA', THE FIRST INTERNET DRONE

It's 2:00 am in the dark morning hours of June 28th, Mark Zuckerberg woke up and got on a plane. He was traveling to an aviation testing facility in Yuma, AZ, where a small Facebook team had been working on a secret project. Their mission: to design, build, and launch a high-altitude solar-powered plane, in the hopes that one day a fleet of the aircraft would deliver internet access around the world.

Zuckerberg arrived at the Yuma Proving Ground before dawn. Zuckerberg said in an interview with The Verge.

“A lot of the team was really nervous about me coming.”

A core group of roughly two dozen people work on the drone, named Aquila (uh-KEY-luh), in locations from Southern California to the United Kingdom. For months, they had been working in rotations in Yuma, a small desert city in southwestern Arizona known primarily for its brutal summer temperatures.

 

On this day, Aquila would have its first functional test flight: the goal consisted of taking off safely, stabilizing in the air, and flying for at least 30 minutes before landing. Zuckerberg says.

“I just felt this is such an important milestone for the company, and for connecting the world, that I have to be there.”

For Facebook, Aquila is more than a proof of concept. It’s a linchpin of the company’s plan to bring the internet to all 7 billion people on Earth, regardless of their income or where they live. Doing so will lift millions of people out of poverty, Zuckerberg says, improving education and health globally along the way. But it will also enable the next generation of Facebook’s services in artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and more. This next era of tech will require higher bandwidth and more reliable connections than we have today, and drones can help deliver both. The road to a VR version of Facebook begins where Aquila leaves the runway.

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As the Sun rose over the desert, a crane lifted Aquila onto the dolly structure that would propel it into the sky. The drone has a tremendous wingspan: 141 feet, compared to a Boeing 737’s 113 feet. And yet Facebook engineered Aquila to be as light as possible to permit ultra-long flights. Built with carbon fiber, the latest iteration of the drone weighs around 900 pounds — about half as much as a Smart car.

A remote control operator activated the dolly, and Aquila began rumbling down the runway. The plane is attached to the dolly with four straps. When it reached sufficient speed, pyrotechnic cable cutters known as “squibs” cut through the straps, and Aquila lifted into the air, where it floated up its test altitude of 2,150 feet and stabilized. On the ground, Facebook’s employees were elated; some wiped away tears.  Zuckerberg said.

“It was this incredibly emotional moment for everyone on the team who’s poured their lives into this for two years.” 

Watching from below, Zuckerberg was struck by Aquila’s deliberate, unhurried pace.  Zuckerberg said two weeks later, at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, CA.

“It flies really slowly.  Most times when people are designing planes, they’re designing them to get people or things from place to place, so there’s no real advantage to moving slowly. But if your goal is to stay in the air for a long period of time, then you want to use as little energy as possible — which means going as slowly as you physically can, while not falling out of the air.”

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FLIGHT MANUAL

Okay, but why a plane?  There are lots of ways to bring the internet to people that don’t involve designing your own drone.

There are satellites, which are good at delivering internet access to wide geographical areas. But they’re only effective in areas with low population density — too many users can gobble up the bandwidth in a hurry.

There are cellular towers, which excel at connecting dense urban populations. But building enough cellular towers to cover the entire Earth is considered too expensive and impractical, even for Facebook.

In 2014, Zuckerberg wrote a paper analyzing various methods of internet delivery. High-altitude drones, he said, could serve a huge audience of people who live in medium-sized cities or on the outskirts of urban areas. They fly closer to the ground than satellites, meaning their signals are stronger and more useful to larger populations. And they fly above regulated airspace, making them easier to deploy.

If Facebook could build a drone that gathered most of its power from the Sun, Zuckerberg reasoned, it could fly for 90 days. A laser communications system could deliver high-speed internet to base stations on the ground, connecting everyone within 50 kilometers. The planes would be easier to maneuver than, say, balloons — a method embraced by Google, which has embarked on its own global connectivity crusade with Project Loon. (Last year Google challenged Facebook more directly with Project Titan, a solar-powered internet delivery drone of its own.) If the drones could be built cheaply enough, they would one day dot the skies, and become a critical piece of the global internet infrastructure.

And so 26 months ago, Zuckerberg set an ambitious goal: to release a functional version of Aquila in just a couple years. He personally recruited experts from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and MIT’s Media Lab, among other places, to bring his vision to life.

As part of the project, Facebook spent nearly $20 million to acquire the team behind Ascenta, an aviation consultancy led by Andy Cox. Cox is a mechanical engineer who previously worked on a team that kept a solar-powered drone in the sky for two weeks — still a world record. After Facebook acquired his consultancy, Cox became Zuckerberg’s top lieutenant on the Aquila project. The team works out of a warehouse in Bridgewater, 150 miles west of London.

As recounted in Wired earlier this year, building a working model of Aquila put the team in daily battle with the laws of physics. Early on, it attempted to launch Aquila with a hot-air balloon. A planned test flight date of October 2015 was pushed back, and then pushed back again. Attempts to fly a 27-foot scale model of Aquila were hampered by El Niño storms.

But by June 28th of this year, the team had overcome those hurdles. At cruise altitude, Aquila was using just 2,000 watts of energy — the equivalent output of five strong cyclists, Zuckerberg says. The company hoped Aquila would successfully remain aloft for half an hour. But it was so stable that they kept it in the air for 90 minutes before landing it safely.

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THE HARD PART

In it's first flight, Aquila exceeded engineers’ expectations for its energy efficiency. More test flights are planned, aimed at flying Aquila “faster, higher, and longer,” says Jay Parikh, Facebook’s vice president of engineering, in a blog post today. And then Aquila will have its next big test: flying with the “payload,” as Facebook calls the laser communication system that a team is building in Woodland Hills, CA. In July 2015, the team announced that its lasers could deliver data at tens of gigabits per second, about 10 times faster than the previous standard. And the lasers are quite precise, able to target an area the size of a dime from 10 miles away. (The lasers connect with base stations on the ground to supply internet access.) Facebook says the system has performed well in independent tests.

When will a fleet of Aquila drones bring data to the world? Facebook won’t say. There are several technical challenges remaining in getting Aquila to reliably fly 90-day stretches. The team hasn’t yet implemented solar panels on the prototype — the test flight plane ran using batteries only. The team is still working out how to build batteries with a density high enough to sustain lengthy missions. Then there’s the cost — Facebook says Aquila needs to be much cheaper if the world is going to deploy a fleet of them. Cox wrote in a blog post today.

 “We need to develop more efficient on-board power and communication systems; ensure the aircraft are resilient to structural damage to reduce maintenance costs and able to stay aloft for long periods of time to keep fleet numbers low; and minimize the amount of human supervision associated with their operation.”

Aquila is also likely to face regulatory obstacles, which could rival the laws of physics in terms of the challenges they present. Facebook and Google have teamed up to work with authorities, such as the Federal Aviation Administration, to get permission for test flights and obtain access to the spectrum they need to serve data.

Facebook says it doesn’t plan to use Aquila to build its own cellular network. Instead, Zuckerberg says, it wants to license the technology — or even give it away to telecommunications companies, governments, and nonprofits. In emergency situations, he says, Facebook could direct its fleet to troubled regions to bolster internet access for hospitals and nonprofit centers.

But it remains unclear how governments will receive Facebook’s latest idea for connecting the world. The company’s efforts at diplomacy have sometimes been clumsy; Indian regulators banned Free Basics, Facebook’s effort to provide some internet services for free, on the grounds that giving the company control over the included services violates net neutrality. Bringing more people onto the internet, after all, is a way of bringing more people onto Facebook — and regulators have worried that the company’s end goal is to simply replace the open web for most users, while reaping the rewards in advertising dollars.

Zuckerberg says the company has learned from its failure in India — one he hopes is temporary.  Solar-powered planes will raise additional regulatory issues, he says.

“We’ve learned a lot about how we need to interact with governments and the political system and regulators, and build support in order to have these things work. And I think we’ll take those lessons forward.  But when I meet world leaders, a lot folks are really excited about this, because you want your people to be online, and you want more opportunities. And connectivity is one of the biggest ways that people get access to opportunities.”

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The path forward for Aquila isn’t totally clear, and it’s bound to encounter more bumps along the way. But Zuckerberg is resolute: billions of people who can’t access the internet deserve it. And for Facebook to achieve his long-term vision, everyone is going to need access to more bandwidth than they have today. A single test flight represents a tiny step toward getting there. But it also gives Facebook a dramatic success to rally around.

Zuckerberg says.

“I think the future is going to be thousands of solar-powered planes on the outskirts of cities and places where people live, and that’s gonna make connectivity both available and cheaper.  And, I think, can help play an important role in closing this gap of getting more than a billion people online. This is an early milestone, but it’s a big one.”

Zuckerberg smiled and said.  

“It’s not something you necessarily expect Facebook to do — because we’re not an aerospace company. But I guess we’re becoming one.”

 

COMMENTARY:    Zuck's strategy to fly internet drones over poverty stricken geographical areas, like those in Africa, where the internet penetration is only 9.8%, or the cost of WIFI connectivity is prohibitably high, is really a ploy to get more Facebook users.   At its core, it sounds like a noble and philanthropic mission of helping those in need, but it is solely about getting more eyeballs to connect through Facebook and sell them things through online ads.   If Zuck really wanted to help needy African's he should take some of those billions he has and give it to charitable organizations which are fighting to eradicate hunger, AIDS, Ebola, malaria and other diseases.  

Courtesy of an article dated July 28, 2016 apparing in The Verge

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HOW A DATA-DRIVEN APPROACH CAN ENGAGE CUSTOMERS AND BOOST MARKETING RETURNS

Digitally savvy consumers know there’s an abundance of choices when it comes to purchases. With high expectations, most will seek out appealing items with little regard to brand loyalty. Churn and attrition are at an all-time high.

The response for organizations sounds simple enough: Provide a consistently good, engaging customer experience, optimize it on a variety of devices and deliver it when customers want it. Why has it been so hard for organizations to do this?

The answer starts with the way companies operate on the back end. With multiple organizational silos, no online/offline data synthesis, rigid customer databases and other inflexible legacy systems, organizations only have a piecemeal view of the customer. It’s hard to take advantage of all the existing corporate customer data that’s available, much less the rich variety of external data. As a result, marketing efforts are fragmented. Communications are inconsistent and ineffective. And revenue growth is hindered.

By taking a technological approach that synchronizes marketing processes with the customer journey across multiple channels, organizations can achieve great results – in terms of revenue, customer advocacy and loyalty. First, they need to get a panoramic view of each customer. Then they can understand and anticipate customer behavior; orchestrate the next best action across any channel; and accurately measure results to inform future actions.

SAS recommends that you connect your marketing efforts with all the relevant data from customer interactions as well as back-end operations.  Then, through advanced customer and marketing analytics, you can deliver an integrated, omnichannel experience and truly compelling content. By responding to your customers on their terms – right content, right time, right device – you can keep them coming back for more and raise their value to your business.

Step 1: Synchronize Marketing Processes Based on a Comprehensive Understanding of the Customer

When marketing departments, call centers, service operations and merchandisers operate independently based on their own distinct views of the customer, both customer engagement and marketing efforts suffer.

Consider a scenario where a customer’s browsing history (showing his preferences or inferred interests) is in one database while offline point-of-sale data about the customer is in another database. If these databases are not connected, there’s a good chance you will have less relevant interactions with that customer than what the customer expects. Or you may see the “echo effect,” where you reach the customer through one channel but he responds through a different one – leaving you unsure how to attribute the response or plan your next offer.

Many organizations don’t use their existing corporate data to the fullest extent. They overlook opportunities to enrich customer data with information from service records, operations or contact centers. Many also fail to use external data sufficiently, missing chances to broaden their understanding of the customer with data from social media, open data, third-party data, etc. In an ad sales scenario, these proprietary data sets can present a unique differentiator in the marketplace and enable you to create highly targeted campaigns for your advertisers.

SAS Customer Intelligence solutions provide a panoramic view of the customer by consolidating all first-, second- and third-party data. From digital data to CRM information and call center records, SAS captures, integrates and transforms disparate data sources, breaking down multiple customer data silos. Built-in data management capabilities ensure that you can use your data effectively to engage customers, and boost ad sales. Use SAS to:

• Improve data quality where the data resides, regardless of whether it’s in a marketing or operational system. SAS profiles, standardizes, monitors and verifies data without moving it, which creates significantly faster, more secure processes. So you can speed up many marketing processes to run in real time and near-real time instead of weeks and months.
• Access the data you need, no matter where it’s stored – from legacy systems to Hadoop. You can create data management rules once and reuse them, for a standard, repeatable method of improving and integrating data – without additional costs.
• Be confident that your data is reliable and ready to use for analytics, whether you’re doing segmentation, content recommendations, next best offer, retention or lifetime value scores.
• Create a panoramic view of the subscriber that connects all touch points, contact history and online/offline interactions.

Step 2: Understand Customer Behavior and Fuel Content Engagement

Content is core to enticing and keeping consumers. You can attract the right customers by optimizing your content. But it’s just as important to optimize the customer’s overall experience. Using advanced techniques like text and predictive analytics, you can improve search engine optimization (SEO) for digital content, quickly categorizing content and text mining words, phrases and topics for customers.

Beyond SEO, you can profile and segment customers based on their historical behavior, profitability and lifetime value. Through a range of predictive analytic models, including affinity analysis, response modeling and churn analysis, you’ll know whether it’s a good move to combine digital and print subscriptions. You’ll recognize which content merits a fee versus which content you can monetize without a paywall.

To keep your marketing efforts fresh, you’ll need to continually supply models with updated data as you interact with customers and prospects. For example, your models should include purchase transaction data, online data from website users, direct marketing response data and more.

Figure 1 - Decision Tree to quickly idenify variables that can best predict iPad usage and high versus low user populations (Click Image To Enlarge)

Through advanced analytics, you can use these models to predict behavior and: 

• Identify how different customer segments are most likely to respond to specific content, campaigns or marketing actions. Your approach will be based on analytically driven, granular segmentation of both known and unknown customers.
• Reach the target population that’s most likely to respond positively to certain content, campaigns and other marketing activities. With predictive modeling, you can understand and predict the behavior of each targeted group.
• Improve economic outcomes using optimization to make the most of each individual customer communication. Take into account resource and budget constraints, contact policies, the likelihood of customers responding, and more.

Step 3: Automate and Synchronize Customer Engagement Across Channels

Once you’ve determined which analytics approach is best, you’ll need to automate your engagement activities with customers. SAS Marketing Automation helps you to quickly define target segments, prioritize selection rules, choose appropriate communication channels, schedule and execute campaigns, analyze results, and make adjustments to improve future campaign performance.

Use SAS to orchestrate data-driven marketing activities across all of your channels. So you’ll be able to present customers with the best, most profitable offers to keep them engaged or to win them back from competitors. Analyze – in real time – how people get to your site and what they do while there. Then present them with engaging content at precisely the right moment. Use SAS to:

• Build an omnichannel marketing environment so you can align outbound and inbound marketing tactics across all channels.
• Develop event-triggered campaign tactics to ensure timely, relevant marketing strategies.
• Know the next best action to take for each customer by incorporating analytics into your marketing execution efforts.
• Track the effectiveness of all marketing activities and monitor campaign results in real time.
• Reduce your reliance on IT for campaign creation and deployment with an easy-to-use interface. 

With a complete view of the customer, a deep understanding of behavior and automated engagement efforts, you’ll be able to make decisions that resonate for customers and invigorate your marketing efforts. For example, if you know a customer checks email every Friday, you’ll send her an email on Friday – because you’ll know that’s the best way to reach her. You’ll also be able to decipher between premium content versus content that should be free. You’ll know what will hook your customers, whether they’re using your services for the second time or the hundredth time.

Today’s customers demand value and expect a consistent experience regardless of the channel or device they’re using. SAS positions you to meet these ultra-high customer expectations at every touch point.

Figure 2 - A marketing campaign response measurement dashboard (Click Image To Enlarge)

Step 4: Effectively Measure Campaign Performance and Attribution

It’s hard to understate the importance of accurate, useful measurement. Combining SAS Reporting capabilities with SAS Visual Analytics – a visualization and exploration suite built to handle big data – it’s easy to examine the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and tactics based on your budget and success metrics. Use response attribution modeling to understand the customer’s conversion path, and to know where to assign marketing credit. Then you can create future marketing mix optimization models, test/control strategies, predictive models and marketing campaigns.

With adaptive, agile marketing, you can test your offers and content quickly, on a small scale, and nurture continually richer customer interactions. Then get rapid feedback to show you when and how to modify the customer’s experience to get the most impact. Plus, you’ll have easy access to campaign reports and dashboards so you can track and manage campaigns across all of your channels.

Figure 3 - Campaign and offer performance reports are integrated with revenue metrics and demographic indicators (Click Image To Enlarge)

COMMENTARY:  

A New Definition of Data-Driven Marketing

What is data-driven marketing, how can event marketers effectively use it to drive conversions, and why does it matter? For decades marketers were forced to launch campaigns while blindly relying on gut instinct and hoping for the best. That all changed with the digitization of business and an increasingly demanding and digitally connected consumer. Now more than ever, there is a greater urgency to develop data-driven marketing campaigns as organizations have come under increasing pressure to deliver results or ROI for their marketing spend. To be successful in this landscape, a modern marketing campaign must integrate a range of intelligent approaches to identify customers, segment, measure results, analyze data and build upon feedback in real time.

While almost every area in marketing has been folded into the digital marketing ecosystem, in-person events have remained elusive to today’s modern marketer. In fact, when it comes to tracking your marketing efforts and determining which channels provide the best return on investment (ROI), most marketers will agree that results from in-person events are still difficult to track:

• 69% of marketers say that tracking ROI for events is their primary challenge. (Aberdeen Group)
• Only 48% of marketers report having any event ROI metric in place (Regalix)
• 82% of marketers cannot quantify the data received from attendee interactions at their corporate events (Kissmetrics)

Indeed, events often lag behind other marketing methods by a significant gap, with the success or failure of many events based solely on anecdotal evidence instead of quantitative measurement and logic.

Furthermore, because data-driven marketing produces highly personalized, engagement-focused campaigns for everything from enterprise servers to event apps, consumers are now beginning to expect a high level of personalization with each transaction.

What is data-driven marketing?

Let’s start out by trying to develop a simple definition for a relatively complex concept and practice. Data-driven marketing captures insights and data from a prospect, analyzes and scores the prospect’s data and behavior, and then subsequently triggers marketing actions and campaigns based upon marketing analysis. An appropriate analogy is to think of data-driven marketing from the consumer side in the average online shopping experience. When you purchase an item online, data-driven marketing strategies provide recommendations of complementary products to provide a better overall experience. If you’re looking at airfare rates for your next vacation to Hawaii, a data-driven marketing approach will focus on restaurants around the island with cuisine you regularly Google, potential places to stay based on positive reviews on Facebook, visitor’s guides that reflect your online budget-hunting practices and local activities such as scuba diving, listed on your LinkedIn profile.

By comparison, when you look at data-driven marketing from the marketer’s side, you’ll find a much more complex process. As you are able to obtain and update information on the customer from secondary sources, such as social media sites and web search data, you can create an approach that is customized to their buying behavior, interests, past purchases, web searches, social media posts and similar information. In other words, this approach allows you to optimize your funnel and customize your buyer journey to that particular prospect’s needs. You can also survey prospects to obtain primary sources of data, but be aware that there is often a bias between what individuals or groups claim versus their actual behavior. For example, an event attendee who was ranting about poor service at the luncheon one day may be raving about the closing keynote, leaving you with plenty of praise on the keynote but failing to mention the luncheon on the exit survey. Once you’ve obtained the data you need to make a comprehensive group, you can divide your prospects up into the personas they fit into best. This allows you to customize and personalize your approach, timing, channel and subject matter to optimize the results for each persona group.

The problem many marketers run into at in-person events is that they often don’t have the information they need to determine how to best engage each prospect. The closest option currently available are scans that provide contact information and basic registration information. But scans don’t provide the data you need to track that prospect’s engagement before, during, and after the event to prove the event ROI that particular group of prospects has generated for your company. As an example, at a recent conference, my badge was scanned by a gentleman from a company that prints promotional items. I was looking through the items in his booth to determine if there was anything I could use for our company’s next event. Though the exhibitor could have collected further data from me at the time, it would have been at the cost of other prospects that he could not help while gathering my information. When I returned home from the event, I had several recommendations for items that didn’t meet our needs because the minimum quantity was much too high, the quality wasn’t good enough and the prices were too expensive. The company had my contact information, but didn’t know enough about me or my organization to make appropriate recommendations. A data-driven marketing approach to this in-person event would have drastically improved my experience while increasing the marketer’s Event ROI.

How does data-driven marketing improve your ROI?

If you’re still wondering how data-driven marketing can make a difference to your company, you’re not alone. Though there was a 14% increase in confidence in putting big data to work in marketing departments from 2013 to 2014, with expectations for additional growth, many marketers still don’t know how the additional data provides a solid improvement in ROI or how to use the data to their company’s best advantage. In fact, companies that have implemented data-driven marketing into their marketing toolbox and recorded the results have often seen a 10-20% improvement on their ROI. Like any tool, it must be used correctly and implemented with other tools in your kit, such as using social media data, search analytics, SEO, content targeting and developing better buyer personas.

Why does data-driven marketing make such a big difference? Using the marketing convention example above, if the company had used data-driven marketing techniques to track my information, they would have known my organization was operating on a modest budget. All these factors made their special offer on a tri-fold brochure with a minimum order of 5,000 a very bad fit. Instead of learning more about the client, the company made a suggestion based on what was popular with their clients in general, few of whom had the needs of our organization, and lost a prospective sale. A targeted campaign based on data-driven marketing would have recommended a small-minimum product order that was inexpensive, while offering additional items that would have fit well with our company’s mission.

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Courtesy of an article titled "How a Data-Driven Approach Can Engage Customers and Boost Marketing Returns" appearing in SAS blog and an article dated May 26, 2016 appearing in Certain

4 TACTICS YOGA WEAR RETAILER LULULEMON USES TO LEVERAGE WORD-OF-MOUTH FOR THEIR BRAND

Founded in 1998, Lululemon is a yoga and sports apparel company from Canada.

Although its first store was opened in 2000, the company sold $350 million worth of products in their 113 retail stores 8 years later.

In 2012, Lululemon was reported to have the third most productive retail stores in the US, only behind Apple and Tiffany & Co..

According to Nina Gardner, Lululemon’s community relations manager, the company achieved all this almost entirely via word-of-mouth, and with ads in only two publications:

We don’t do ads. All of our marketing is done word-of-mouth and grassroots Gardner said. The only place you’ll see ads is in ‘Yoga Journal’ and ‘Runner’s World,’ two national publications.

Let’s take a look at how a company that started off selling yoga pants managed to grow so big from leveraging on word-of-mouth:

1. Lululemon’s customers are eager to show off their inspirational-poster themed shopping bags, just as they might on Pinterest.

Lululemon is all about living an active life, evidenced by their goal to “sweat every day”, and other activities like breathing deeply, drinking plenty of water and going outdoors.

These values promote a very positive and healthy image, something that customers can relate to and aspire towards. And customers who shop at Lululemon are given tote bags that have the company’s manifesto emblazoned all over them:

Lululemon tote bags image by John Lucas, Postmedia News (Click Image To Enlarge)

The feel-good quotes on the bags serve as a form of “social snack“: something we look at to make ourselves feel better throughout the day.

By associating the brand with these values, customers would feel as if they’re “connecting with her best self” as they buy their yoga pants.

Word-of-mouth action tip: Make something about your product worth showing off to others.

2. Lululemon staff feel more like your yoga or gym buddies – they’ll happily talk to you more about yoga and goal-setting than their products.

Lululemon store staffers wear yoga pants so they feel more like yoga or gym buddies (Click Image To Enlarge)

Lululemon’s store employees “are encouraged to discuss exercise goals with customers and take into account their feedback written on chalkboards in the fitting rooms.” This ensures the staff are better equipped with more information to give personalized recommendations to every customer.

They are also instructed to dress like they were going for a workout, so customers would see them more as people you see in a gym or yoga class, rather than a store employee.

Plus, most people who work at Lululemon are athletic and fit individuals, so they have a lot in common with their customers. This relatibility and similarity makes them a lot more likeable, and customers are more comfortable trusting them.

And this building of relationships is exactly what Nina Gardner is trying to achieve:

"Making sure we’re really building those relationships (with customers) — that’s what really sets us apart from being just another retail store that’s opening up to sell clothes. Absolutely we sell clothes, but we are building relationships. We are supporting communities.”

Word-of-mouth action tip: Don’t rush into selling your products – connect with your customers like a friend, so they’ll like you more, and open up to you.

3. Retail stores transform into fitness and conversation hubs on weekends for free lessons, to give back and get people involved with the brand.

One of Lululemon's in-store yoga classes (Click Image To Enlarge)

For one of their stores in Burlingame, California hosts free yoga classes on Saturday mornings and Sundays, as well as a weekday run club. This practice originated from Lululemon founder Chip Wilson, who used his office space as a yoga studio at night to help pay for rent back in the day.

This, according to former CEO Christine Day, positions Lululemon stores as a “fitness and conversation hub”. It also increases customer engagement, encourages regular visits to the store, and keeps the brand constantly top-of-mind.

What having similar-minded individuals for store employees and free fitness classes in-store does is – it evolves customers’ perception of the brand from being an apparel company to an entity that embodies your ideals, and a community to find like-minded people.

Christian Buss, a Wall Street analyst described Lululemon’s brand identity to a fitness partner:

"They’re selling a brand identity…the model that Lululemon is trying to build is, you’re pretty cool, we’ll be your partner in being your best possible self. And that kind of turns retail on its head."

Word-of-mouth action tip: Leverage your existing assets to contribute to your community.

4. Lululemon engages fitness trainers and athletes as brand Ambassadors to inspire and engage with their customers, so they can feel motivated to keep fit.

Nicole Katz from Yoga 216 is one of the many brand ambassadors of Lululemon (Click Image To Enlarge)

So if Lululemon organizes free yoga and fitness classes regularly all throughout the world, who exactly leads all those classes?

They are Lululemon’s brand ambassadors; yoga teachers and fitness trainers that have chosen embody the brand’s values and lifestyle.

These 1,500+ ambassadors host classes in Lululemon stores within their communities, and according to a yoga teacher from Australian fitness group OzSquad, get support from the brand to pursue any events and initiatives they desire.

Of course, they’re also outfitted with the Lululemon products, so they get to wear free gear while promoting their own yoga schools and the Lululemon brand.

Apart from local yogis and fitness trainers, world-class Olympic athletes are also part of the ambassador program, such as Olympic cross-country skier Sara Renner and Jaime Komer.

Word-of-mouth action tip: Celebrate and promote individuals who embody your brand values, so customers will think of you when they look at them.

Lululemon has always been a brand that connects their products with values that inspire their customers. People buy Lululemon pants because they agree with the values that Lululemon embodies and expresses.

And that can be a powerful thing, as branding expert and author Karen Post explains,

"They’re selling emotion and happiness and joy and feeling good about yourself, … and when companies keep their eye on that in a more focused way, and less on the features of the product, their chances of being a successful brand just go through the roof."

Questions to ponder:

1. What are some values that your target customers live by?
2. Does your company embody and communicate those same values in your marketing?
3. How can you create a positive and engaging community, where your customers can interact with your brand?

COMMENTARY:   Based in Vancouver BC, lululemon is known for their athletic apparel, including clothing for yoga, running and any other “sweaty pursuits.” Customers can not only buy clothing and merchandise but they can also sign up for in-store events ranging from workshops, runs and yoga classes, offered on a weekly basis and tailored to the local surroundings. To personalize the in-store experience, lululemon educators and community ambassadors can be found in every store to talk to customers about healthy living, yoga, exercise etc. The ambassadors program is composed of individuals who adhere to the same lifestyle and cultural ideals oflululemon, and can share their expertise with the local community.

Lululemon Athletica retail stores have taken the store and shopping experience to a new level.    Julia Brunzell, Manager of Store Design at lululemon atheletica discusses the unique in-store experience that the brand provides.

“We are constantly listening to feedback about how guests experience our stores and how they function for our educators. Every store designer works in the stores to experience firsthand how the space is used, what works best for flow, product visibility and efficiency.  In addition, we want every store to feel like a part of its community from the first day it opens; we invite our guests to hang out, chat with our educators and learn about local yoga/fitness studios. Every week, our stores push aside their product fixtures and open the store up to the community for a complimentary yoga class.

Our stores are designed to be conversation starters, while also being fundamentally warm, inviting, eclectic and accessible to everyone. Over the years our fixtures have become more streamlined, modern and modular which allows for flexibility and creativity with visual displays. We are known for our unique, creative and locally relevant storefront designs which range from making a big design statement to a fun reflection of the community we are joining.  For example, our Burlington, VT location is a strong ski community so we used two gondolas as benches outside to create an eye-catching and locally relevant storefront.  At our Houston Galleria mall location, we designed our storefront using glass windows that look like those from a space shuttle, a nod to the nearby Houston Space Centre.”

There have also been many changes within the lululemon brand. Recently, the brand has launched a new fast fashion clothing line, &Go. With apparel ranging from dresses to pants and tank tops, the line is set to be offered online and storewide. With this change comes another in the men’s clothing division. Lululemon is set to open a standalone men’s store by 2016. The brand offers a range of men’s clothing on its website, including jackets, hoodies, pants, socks and underwear. Finally, with lululemon’s latest expansion into the European market, it will be interesting to see how these developments continue to affect the stores and brands initiatives worldwide.

When Julie Brunzell was asked how these changes and expansions affect the store design concepts and whether consumers will begin to see larger stores, pop up shops etc. to showcase the new clothing lines, she said.

“As a company focused on innovation, we are always evaluating how we design our stores and with that comes continuous examination of layout principles, space planning, size and location. We aim to create community and shopping experiences that speak to our guests and settings which vary from city to city. Entrepreneurship is one of our core business values and as a business that is grounded in community, we enable and support store managers to have a hand in creating spaces that resonate with their guests and their community.”

Lululemon Store Of The Future

Lululemon just opened a new flagship store in New York City's Flatiron District. At 11,500 square feet, it's the brand's largest flagship location. Its Union Square location closed its doors.

The Flatiron District is home to many other stores that specialize in athleisure — Sweaty Betty and Athleta, to name a few. But that makes sense: The area has many of the most popular boutique fitness studios — Flywheel Sports, Exhale, SLT, Pure Barre, and two SoulCycle studios that are mere blocks apart.

And Lululemon is capitalizing on that. One of the new store's features, The Concierge, will dedicate floor space to helping shoppers beyond the sales floor.

The Concierge at Lululemon's Flatiron District store in Manhattan (Click Image To Enlarge)

The Concierge will recommend nearby classes and locations, so that the exercise-obsessed shoppers can don their new pants in class. To top that off, shoppers can book classes while they're shopping.

The Concierge will be a hangout spot — there will be a "community board" to help shoppers discover new places to run, new classes, and even new places to eat.

The Community Center located inside Lululemon's flagship store in the Flatiron District of Manhattan (Click Image To Enlarge)

Lululemon will make shopping a luxurious experience, with a coat check, water, a coffee bar, snacks, and a phone-charging station. You can also have your purchases delivered to your home, office, or hotel, so no need for lugging big Lululemon bags around during the day.

The company is focusing on expanding its already-strong community with a new space called Hub Seventeen. Hub Seventeen will be above the store's retail floor.

Carla Anderson, Lululemon's general manager of US retail, said in emailed comments.

"Our stores are inspired by community, from the design aesthetic and in-store guest experiences and classes to our ambassador and studio partnerships."

Chairs hang from the ceiling inside the Community Events Center of Lululemon's flagship store in the Flatiron District of Manhattan (Click Image To Enlarge)

The 5,000-square-foot space will be used for fitness classes, monthly dinners, concerts, art shows, and more.

Lululemon's stores already have yoga classes, but Hub 17 will take it up a notch.

Anderson said.  

"While all of our stores offer in-store yoga and fitness class and events, Hub Seventeen is the first time we created a dedicated community space separate from the retail experience."

The Community Events Center inside Lululemon's flagship Flatiron District store includes an area for yoga exercise demonstrations (Click Image To Enlarge)

Don't worry, Lululemon acolytes — there's a vast retail floor.

The retail floor located inside Lululemon's flagship Flatiron District store (Click Image To Enlarge)

There's a great chance that many other forthcoming Lululemon stores will follow suit.

Anderson said.

"Our flagship stores in particular are designed to elevate the community in new and unique ways, often serving as a testing ground for new guest experiences and retail innovations."

Courtesy of an article written by Samuel Hum appearing in Referral Candy and an article dated April 14, 2015 appearing in Mind and an article dated November 18, 2015 appearing in Business Insider

FORD REPEATS 1966 VICTORY AT LE MANS WITH HISTORIC VICTORY AT LE MANS 2016 WITH ITS NEW GT '66 HERITAGE EDITION

The new model comes in both gloss and matte finishes (Click Image To Enlarge)

Just over a week after its LM GTE Pro category win at Le Mans 2016, Ford is taking a trip back in time to an even bigger win. The all-new 2017 Ford GT '66 Heritage Edition pays homage to Ford's historic 1966 Le Mans victory. This special edition Ford GT brings a race-inspired look to the streets.

 

Ford made its historic come-back to the most mythical endurance race in the world, the 24 Hours of Le Mans. After more than 50 years, and its last victory in 1966 with the Ford GT40, they came back, and snatched 1st place, 3rd & 4th. That's a pretty awesome come-back.

Click Images To Enlarge

Inspired by the GT40 Mark II driven to victory by Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon in 1966, the 'No. 2' 2017 Ford GT wears "shadow black" paint (in a choice of gloss or matte finish) with silver stripes, "frozen white" #2 graphics on the hood and sides, and an exposed carbon fiber package. The car rides on 20-in one-piece forged aluminum wheels in a gold satin clear coat.

  

The Heritage interior has ebony leather around its carbon fiber seats, instrument panel, pillars and headliner; debossed Ford GT logos on the headrests and leather-wrapped steering wheel; exposed matte carbon fiber on the center console, door sills and air register pods; gold appliqués; and blue-webbed seat belts. The "2" appears inside the door, as well as outside, and an identification plate lends authenticity to the unique limited edition.

Garen Nicoghosian, the exterior design manager says.  

"While the looks are distinctly based on the GT40 Mark II race car, we've accentuated new styling cues to provide a modern interpretation." 

Ford will offer a limited number of Heritage packages exclusively for the GT's 2017 model year.

COMMENTARY:  On the outside, the Ford GT has been painted to resemble the No. 2 GT40 MkII race car that won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1966. If you’re not a big fan of vintage racing, the car driven by Bruce McLaren and Chris Among was painted black with a pair of silver stripes running from the nose toward the deck lid. Ford used the same livery for the modern GT, but offers its familiar Shadow Black in either gloss or matte, so customers can choose between something similar to the original car or a more modern matte finish that goes well with the exposed carbon-fiber package that comes with this limited-edition model. The black paint is complemented by silver stripes and Frozen White No. 2 graphics on the hood and the doors. Rounding off the exterior is a set of 20-inch, one-piece forged aluminum wheel in gold satin clearcoat and with black lug nuts. Although the twin-five-spoke design has nothing in common with the racing rims of the original GT40, the gold color is true to the car that won the iconic 24 Hours of Le Mans race.

Click Image To Enlarge

The interior of the ’66 Heritage Edition also received special features, starting with the carbon-fiber seats wrapped in Ebony leather and equipped with pillowed inserts and plow-through stitching. It would have been nice for Ford to replicate the GT40’s famous brass eyelets into the upholstery – as it did with the previous GT – but the pillowed inserts are enough to give the interior a vintage-style appearance. The instrument panel, pillars, and headliner also features an Ebony-leather wrap, while the trim on the instrument panel, the seat’s X-brace and shift paddles are finished in gold. The seats’ head and restraints and steering wheel are debossed with the "GT" logo. Like the 1966 race car, the steering wheel and the seat belts have a unique blue webbing. Rounding off the cockpit is a serialized identification plate, "#2" door panel graphics, and exposed matte carbon fiber door sills and center console.

Click Image To Enlarge

Not surprisingly, the ’66 Heritage Edition is a standard GT under the hood, meaning it uses Ford’s race-derived 3.5-liter EcoBoost (twin turbo) V-6, which generates in excess of 600 horsepower. All that power travels to the rear wheels through a seven-speed, dual-clutch transaxle, making it the first GT ever to not use a manual gearbox.

No word on pricing yet, but with the standard GT said to fetch around $400,000 before options, the ’66 Heritage Edition could cost in excess of $450,000. Ford said it will be built in "limited quantities," but gave no actual figures. I expect a production run of 66 unit in order to match the company’s most important year in motorsport.

Nine years after it discontinued the first-gen GT, the spiritual successor of the iconic GT40 race car, Ford introduced the second-generation GT at the 2015 Detroit Auto Show. Initially just a non-running prototype, the GT began hitting public roads months later, as Ford began testing the production car. Although the first GTs won’t reach their customers until late 2016, the supercar has already spawned a full-fledged race car that has been battling for glory in GT classes in North America in Europe. Its most important achievement as of 2016 is a class win at the 2016 24 Hours of Le Mans, where just like in 1966, it crossed the finished line ahead of arch-rival Ferrari.

NOTE:  The entire production of 250 vehicles have been sold and Ford Motor Company is no longer taking orders

Courtesy of an article dated June 28, 2016 appearing in Gizmag and an article dated June 25, 2016 appearing in TopSpeed and Ford Motor Company official press release dated June 27, 2016