Amazon has shown itself as the first true competitor to Apple in the tablet war. The launch of the Kindle Fire this week is an audacious move to out-price the iPad with a dumbed-down system costing just $199.

Tablets are a future cornerstone for the world’s data consumption. As ever, Jobs lifted the curtain on that future and then he charged us a fortune to let us walk behind it. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has had the hindsight of not being the first mover – he’s seen others throw pebbles at the armour of Apple with their tablet efforts (HP’s TouchPad was surely the most ham-fisted go at it).

I agree with Jason Calacanis that price is the key here, as you need to flood the market to gain traction and lock out competitors. Of course the product needs to be sellable in the first instance. Free may convert latent demand but it doesn’t create demand. No price reduction is enough if the product is tat – you could stand on every street corner in the country selling Betamax recorders for 1p. If you’d raised a whole £1 after a year I’d be stunned.

Amazon also had the gumption to go big. To double down as the yanks would say. And it needs to be so audacious because the scale of winning in this tech war is simply stratospheric. It’s not just about a few million bucks on the hardware, that’s just the entry fee to the club. The real win is at the bar. Consumers are paying for data that the world thought would be free for all time until the App Store showed us otherwise.

And nowhere is content more available than Amazon. Books, music, movies and TV shows are there. And of course, physical products from the deepest marketplace imaginable. Regardless of whether Amazon want to outgun the iPad, they are undoubtedly set to sell a whole tonne of content.

This is a killer strategy that doesn’t work in a cash strapped start-up with very little runway money and time. It’s the epitome of a loss leader, but it comes with the double whammy of providing a huge content channel as well as seeing off hardware competitors. Advantage Amazon.

This is a great move and a business test case for millions of students in years to come. What can Microsoft come back with?

I was asked to call out some examples of those using digital innovation well. It’s very easy to say Dell are making money via Twitter and the new Old Spice videos are viral winners but here’s half a dozen less-heralded examples that might tickle your marketing fancy:

Company: Disney

Category: Social Media promotions

What: Toy Story 3 created the world’s first promoted trend on Twitter along with a Facebook app that allowed visitors to pre-order tickets and then share info with friends to arrange group viewings.

Result: increased the likelihood of impulse purchases and the social aspect made group planning that much easier. Was the highest grossing movie of 2010.

Company: Orabrush (a tongue cleaner that solves bad breath)

Category: Online video (direct selling)

What: Marketing started with a video shot at a pool hall for about $500 getting over 13 million views. There’s now a weekly installment for Orabrush’s YouTube channel, Curebadbreath.

Result: sold $1 million worth of brushes (at $5 a time) through YouTube. Four pharmacy chains, including Boots will be carrying the product.

Almost 40,000 people have subscribed to get e-mail updates every time Orabrush posts a new video, making it the seventh most-subscribed channel on YouTube.

Company: Daily Candy

Category: Location-based mobile marketing

What: DailyCandy Stylish Alerts uses geofencing technology to notify application users when they approach locations recently written about by the DailyCandy editorial team.

Result: news on events, gatherings and style as you walk around NY. First to market with such innovation.

Company: Gatorade’s Mission Control

Category: Social Media

What: Tweets of encouragement to high-school athletes before big games and responses to Facebook queries.

Mission Control aggregates and weighs real-time opinions. It gives more importance to mentions made by loyal fans, people with a lot of followers, or people whose opinions tend to get picked up.

Result: Pepsi’s cash cow became ubiquitous (and uncool). Mission control was set to reverse the sales’ slide. Gatorade sales rose 7% in the second quarter and 2.4% for the first half of the year.

Company: Kogi Korean BBQ

Category: Mobile marketing on Twitter

What: Korean take out food that moves around LA. The places are announced on Twitter @kogibbq and the chef is now winning awards.

Result: Business grown to five trucks inside two years. A gaggle of great PR including Time magazine. 90,000+ Twitter followers looking for Korean food.

Company: BMW

Category: Mobile marketing via MMS

What: the campaign was timed, targeted to individual consumers, and highly personalised to recent BMW purchases who would need winter tyres fitted.

They sent the MMS on the first snow day of winter with an image of the users model, in their colour with their rims and the recommended tyre for winter use. They also included a link to a mobile site allowing customers to experiment with the tyre simulator before making a purchase.

Result: 30% conversion from message to purchase and $45 million in new business.

I attended Doug Richard’s School for Startups recently. The title is a bit of a misnomer as the day had nothing specifically to do with starting a business, but it did have plenty of action points for marketing.

The day was fast-paced with lecture-style talks from Mr Richard and three colleagues. Let’s be honest, you go to see the formidable Doug Richard in action and he opened the sessions with a broad talk about business and how little we actually control. See him in action here.

I was immediately stunned about how intelligent this [former] Dragon is. He reminded me of an economics lecturer I had who could tell what day of the week you were born on within about three seconds of knowing your date of birth (he’d run a cunning formula in his head).

The 120 or so business folk were scared to answer DR’s open questions for fear of engaging this razor sharp mind. You really do need your A game if you’re going to talk business with this guy, even your own business. A chap in the audience volunteered to describe his own organisation. Big mistake. DR took his ‘elevator pitch,’ highlighted several inadequacies and spat it back at the business owner with such flare that everyone else was writing it down thinking they’d plagiarise it for themselves.

But Richard’s cohort found that uber-sharp standard a tough act to follow. They gave us a social media-is-great talk with the obligatory Will it Blend video. We had a pay per click is-the-quickest-win talk complete with incomprehensibly small screen shots. Finally we had an ecommerce-is-the-place-to-be talk from an ex-Amazon exec.

I’m sure these chaps are great in their own right, but they’d been asked to cut their usual one day training sessions down to an hour or so and you felt they’d done it on the train that morning. Then again, it was government funded social enterprise (free entry) so I certainly couldn’t say I’d overpaid.

They had 120 or so small and micro businesses in the room and they broad stroked most areas. Granted, there is never going to be time in such bootcamps for massive details, but not one of the team had researched a company in attendance and come with examples of how they could improve what they were already doing online.

For me, social media is about authenticity and credibility and I don’t think SMEs new to the arena would’ve heard that message. They could’ve demonstrated more of the beauty of listening; of how to monitor the conversation and engage without stalking.

They could’ve run us through existing clients and demonstrated how their real-world social, PPC and on-page ecommerce work had resulted in X% growth this year for their architect, or bakery, or gym (you get the idea).

The standard for these online training sessions/bootcamps is rarely going to catapult your marketing endeavours, but I have to say these guys did let out several nuggets amongst some pretty awful PowerPoint.

Bravo to Doug Richard for undertaking this philanthropic project. Bravo to his team for willing to give away insight (without charge). And bravo to the local authorities for saying yes.

If you get the chance, please do go – I promise seeing DR’s business mind in action is as an inspiring an afternoon as you can get without involving an Olympic athlete or a war hero.

Do you like business books that inspire you to move into action, or books that break down what someone did in their business? If it’s the former then this month has seen a couple of excellent releases for you:

Gary Vaynerchuk is a hustler. His second book, The Thank You Economy is out this week. Gary took his father’s wine store turnover from $4m to $69m inside 5 years. He hustled. He expanded. He served. He innovated. He grew. He succeeded. This guy is someone you should hook into.

Seth Godin has released a short 70-odd page book called, Poke The Box. It’s about starting things, kicking off and shipping. Like so many of his short pieces he’s asking you to DO something.

A third beauty that I haven’t got ‘round to yet is Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination from Hugh MacLeod. It’s also his second release and another offering insight into an Internet and marketing powerhouse.

Enjoy (and then DO something).

Some business leaders say they can’t change because their demographic is 55 year olds and changing would jeopardize their custom. Changing would mean devaluing the offering. Changing would be a risk we don’t want to take. I’ve even heard, “We know our customer base is dying, but the boss wont change anything we’re doing.”

We’ve got to throw stuff out and see what sticks. Experiment. If we do what we always do, we’ll get what we always get. Pay per click campaigns are a case in point – they demand experimenting to know the winning/losing keywords and campaigns.

Michael Jordan infamously said, “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Morgan cars are a company heralded for being in time warp. Their hand built cars are oversubscribed with waiting lists of years not months. Their antiquated methods and manufacture add to the marque’s character. But even Morgan is showing innovation with their second new model launching in as many years.

The fact is when you’ve been around for 5 – 10 years and growth (if that’s a business goal) is stagnant then it’s time to change your growth strategy. What’s got you to this point isn’t going to get you to new plateaus. Change is needed.

That’s not wholesale change to your retail philosophy. I’m not suggesting about going from a hard working, ethical family business to a law-breaking SPAM merchant who hides from the VAT man. Differentiate, but don’t dilute yourself.

I’m proposing you let fly with your product range. Try new avenues of wholesale. Knock on new doors. Add a different category. Seek additional suppliers. Lower shipment thresholds – win customers today, look for extra margin tomorrow.

Yes there are niches that shouldn’t be diluted but an obvious A-list example of change for growth is McDonald’s. The fast food chain has had a five-year make over. It now sells as much chicken as beef, has redecorated branches with soft furnishings and mood lighting and they sold 100 million cups of coffee last year in the UK – that’s more than Starbucks. Boss, Jill McDonald (no relation) says, “We have probably changed more in the past four years than in the last 30.”

Yet some marketers at the time would probably say the McDonald’s demographics/customer base don’t want a sophisticated coffee, they want the soft drinks that are being sold now. Well, they’d have missed the boat on that huge opportunity.

I guess my real question is, if businesses – especially SMEs – don’t change, how will they ever evolve?

The Internet has only really been around for the masses since Microsoft brought us Windows 95 and the ever-present Internet Explorer. But over 15 years on, digital and digital marketing still remains a bolt on for many businesses that should really know better.

I’m always amazed when strong marketers tell me their marketing director (not HR or finance director) doesn’t know anything about digital or ‘The Web.’ This leaves the marketing managers or their assistants to direct any digital impact the firm achieves.

I mean, where the hell have they been for the past decade and a half, writing Yellow Pages ads?

This digital-is-an-extra-component mindset is the equivalent to the outdoor toilet. For decades the home toilet lived in the back garden. It was an outhouse; an extra to the main building. Of course, modernisation took place and toilets thankfully now live a lot closer to the bedroom.

Directors who think marketing is a whole load of ‘stuff’ plus a bit of digital on the side are dinosaurs. There’s a sea change coming thanks to digital TV and smartphones that beggars belief compared to what we have today, and these dinosaurs need to get on the bandwagon.

Not seeing digital as an integral part of your marketing and communications is as antiquated as an outdoor loo. Quaint, but terribly ineffective for all concerned.

A website isn’t a necessity for every single business in existence but few would argue it’s a massive opportunity.

When business people ask my opinion about website designers or what type of site they should employ, I say 90% should use a blog. This will usually cause a lifted eyebrow or two as the word blog invokes thoughts of lunch diaries and public letters to mummy. The truth is they make a brilliant platform on which to build your digital presence but they do need some technical skill to make them look more like a modern website than a free blog.

But Getting British Business Online is my new recommendation. It’s a free website and a free URL (i.e. website address or name, which doesn’t necessarily have to be your business name) thanks to a joint initiative between BT, Google, e-skills UK and Enterprise UK.

To quote their site “It’s simple:
1.    Choose a website address
2.    Select and customise a template
3.    Publish your website”

Point any new website starters you know here – Christmas is sticking around for a while longer.

It’s rare that I’m in front of the TV as much as I have been this evening and I don’t mean to be a humbug but a couple of things have struck me under the bombardment of advertising:

- Many would argue the marketers have appropriated Christmas. On the face of tonight’s TV advertising they’d be right. It’s milk-the-event-dry stuff;

- Sales stat: Boots will sell more fragrance tomorrow (Christmas eve) than they do in the month of April;

- Argos were the first to pull the Christmas advert trigger by airing on 16^th October;

- VISA expected to handle 26.5 million transactions today, totalling more than £1.2 billion;

- Brits will spend £150 million on trees and £40m on turkeys this Christmas;

- Woolworths – a company that infamously only ever made a profit in Q4 – produced the first blockbuster advert in 1982. It really was a watershed when you look at the big players today and their celebrity feast (John Lewis, M&S et al).

Just saying…

Seth would say there’s a dilemma when wanting to grow your customer base of going deeper or wider with your product offering. Victor Churchill in Melbourne is a fabulously extravagant example of going deeper.

They’re in the meat business but they’re anything other than a simple a butcher’s shop. This store takes things to an extreme, adding plenty of marketing sizzle to help the business stand apart.

Merchandising – the act and skill of butchery is part of the merchandising in store with the team working at timber butcher’s blocks on stage behind floor-to-ceiling glass. It’s practical and visually arresting.

Hero product – the daily special is on a pedestal inside a glass dome with over a dozen security cameras trained on it.

Depth of range – they’ve specialty cuts of meat and carcasses. These are hanging from a custom-designed, revolving, metal chain rack.

Story telling – the number one thing the father and son owners want you to notice is the backdrop brick wall made of Himalayan rock salt. Apparently, it infuses the hanging meat with flavour and sterilises the air!

Specialist service – could you receive anything less from these guys?

The best consumer-facing businesses are authentic; they have stories and a personality. Have you got a better example of that than Victor Churchill?

TED is one of my favourite sites on the Internet. The talks are simply magnificent. Watch this one from John Gerzema (photo) of Brand Asset Consulting.

He hits us with as many salient blows as is possible in 20 minutes, but one that particularly stood out for me was of values. Our mindless consumerism is turning into mindful consumerism.

It’s not just about the added value of the goods anymore; it’s about the company’s (and the brand’s) values. Does what they stand for align with me and my values?

I guess the big question is, is he only referring to a bunch of elitist, Prius-driving Californians, or is this actually a movement?

I presumed this recession and the near-meltdown of the banking sector would have a lasting positive effect on our society’s mindset. Apart from the obvious pain of the cutbacks, I can’t say I’ve seen it to date. Perhaps John’s got clearer vision than me.

What do you think?