Applying The Five Cs -- a business view
How can The Five Cs be used? For entrepreneurs planning to launch a new website or established businesses looking to bring part of its operation to the web, The Five Cs can provide structure and execution to the business strategy. For information technology providers targeting this web market with solutions, The Five Cs can assist with product ideation and development.
Let's look at an application of The Five Cs -- a new website called Beautiful Stranger.TV. I met with two of the founders of BeautifulStranger.tv a couple of weeks ago and was blown away. By now, most people have experienced social networking sites. When I saw a demo of an early version of BeautifulStranger.tv, the first thing that came to my mind was that it was a "fashion and lifestyle networking" site.
Editors from BeautifulStranger.tv travel around Manhattan with a video camera looking for real people who are fashion mavens. They tape these mavens answering questions about what they are wearing, where they get their hair cut, their favorite restaurants, hobbies, clubs, etc. As they answer the questions, links appear to sites where you can buy the products or services.
Beautiful Stranger.TV is a great example of The Five Cs at work. It is building a community that will scale rapidly and is made up of relatively big spenders. It is using high-quality video content to attract visitors to the site. It is promoting commerce using the product links which will soon drive advertising revenue. Future releases of Beautiful Stranger.TV will add user-generated content from around the world, which will drive collaboration and clicks. Imagine being able to see the latest styles in Tokyo or Paris on the street, as opposed to on the runway.
Applying The Five Cs -- a technology view
The Five C's also present a framework for information technology (IT) companies to develop products and services for the web market.
In the past, IT companies may have built solutions for target industry verticals (financial services, retail, healthcare, etc.), applications (database, word processing, analytics, etc.) or data types (integers, images, voice, etc.). Today, IT companies can design and build solutions mapped to the requirements inherent in The Five Cs.
Three major categories of technology are particularly relevant to The Five Cs.
Optimized internet. The internet is the foundation for the web marketplace. The challenge is that the internet is made up of many interconnected networks. Performance of the internet across these individual network links is fluid and subject to change at any time. You cannot bet your web business on a network with erratic performance. You need an optimized internet service that continually monitors internet backbones and adjusts traffic flows based on performance, costs and business rules.
Utility computing. Computing capacity -- servers, storage and security -- is increasingly being delivered as a utility. It's difficult to avoid buzzword overload in this area of IT. However, whether you talk about virtualization, cloud computing or software-as-a-service (SaaS), it's all leading in the same direction -- computing capacity that can be dialed up or down to support spikes and dips in usage of web-based applications.
Interactive media systems. Internet applications began with bits of data... that grew into character bytes... that expanded to megabytes of images... and now are preparing for gigabytes and terabytes of interactive media. New systems are emerging to create, organize, store, retrieve, update, deliver, present and analyze interactive media files.
From P to C -- the internet changes everything
The internet changes everything, including marketing. As marketers, we need to be careful about simply re-skinning traditional marketing approaches using such a disruptive technology as the internet. We should not "pave over the cow paths" of our marketing programs using the internet. The internet offers us entirely new ways to apply both the art and science of marketing. The Five Cs can be used as a guide to develop breakthrough marketing programs and business models.
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Jim Leach is VP of marketing at Internap.
