Too many marketing leaders still lump tablets and smartphones in the same mobile bucket. That’s a mistake. Why? Because tablets are not primarily mobile devices. Instead, they are mostly used within the home. Marketing leaders must create a differentiated tablet experience or risk dissatisfying their best customers and missing opportunities to engage when customers discover and explore their products.

Here are the key takeaways from a new research I conducted in the past few months:

• Tablet Marketing Matters. Tablet marketing enables marketers to engage with influential customers who spend less time on PCs and print media. People use tablets differently than they use smartphones, requiring marketers to adapt their approach.
• Marketers Should Use Tablets To Enhance Discovery And Depth In The Digital Home. Marketers will see the benefits of designing immersive tablet experiences for people discovering and researching their brands and products. Search marketing to drive better conversion rates and tablet commerce. They should maximize TV ads by creating tablet extensions for multitaskers as well as creating new marketing experiences in the digital home.
• Shift To Contextual Marketing. Most of us have only had mobile phones for, at most, twelve years. I have already explained here why we’re all mobile teens, figuring out our relationships with others and with brands. Unsurprisingly, marketers face challenges integrating mobile and tablet in the mix. It’s time to stop thinking about devices and, instead, shift to contextual marketing.

VMware pulled back the curtain on its vCloud Hybrid Service today. The concept of a hybrid cloud isn't new, but there are as many definitions of it as there are for cloud itself. Indeed, the beauty of cloud really is in the eye of the beholder, and it's important to align beauty with its beholders. Forrester defines hybrid cloud as a cloud service connected to any other corporate resource. That means most enterprises are hybrid today - if you have at least one SaaS app connected to anything in your data center, you're hybrid.

Today, VMware set out its definition of hybrid: An extension of the virtualized corporate data center. The beholders here are the infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams who've spent years virtualizing and optimizing a range of corporate apps. These pros haven't been the main drivers of public cloud in the enterprise so far; business-unit-aligned developers have. And the tension between the two is growing. Developers want to build faster, deploy quickly, and forget about infrastructure management, so they start with public cloud: cheap, fast, and easy. But I&O teams want to drive more value and efficiency from existing infrastructure by selectively moving apps (or the scalable parts of apps) off premises to take advantage of cloud’s elasticity and pay-per-use economics. They look at cloud as an extension of the corporate data center, and the vCloud Hybrid Service is designed for them first. Both perspectives make sense and both approaches to cloud can drive value.

My first report on marketing innovation cultures published last week. It includes four case studies from Nestlé, Chick-fil-A, Skinnygirl Cocktails, and 7-Eleven. The report also introduces four categories of marketing innovation cultures: risk-averse, pragmatic, experimenter, and customer-obsessed. 

The follow-on report will focus on how to assess your organization’s current marketing innovation culture and what it takes to migrate from where you are today to where you want to be tomorrow. Whether you have a risk-averse, pragmatic, experimenter, or customer-obsessed marketing innovation culture, your insights are critical to this research. 

I have developed a short (5 to 10 minute), anonymous survey on assessing your marketing innovation culture. The more responses I receive, the more insightful and valuable the report will be for you. Everyone who takes the survey will receive a summary of the results if they choose to provide their email address at the end of the survey (optional).

Please take the survey today, and forward it to any of your colleagues or peers you feel could add insight into this topic.

Folks, this one is going to be short because it's the easiest case I've ever made. Microsoft wins the next-gen game console launch wars by launching something that the company doesn't even call a console. Where Nintendo offered us a tablet to accompany the millions we had already bought and Sony then offered us a box that we couldn't even see, Microsoft has trumped them both by delivering the Xbox One. Let's tally up the points:

• The name. Wii U means something, I'm sure, to someone. PS4 means "we like the past and want to extend it." Xbox One takes a bolder and more important stand by saying, "It's time to reboot the whole category." This is beautifully illustrated in the way that the Xbox presenters never referred to Xbox One as a game console. It is an All In One Home Entertainment System.
• The reveal. PS4 famously flopped its launch by hiding the console entirely. That would have been fine last generation, maybe. But this generation comes in the post-Steve Jobs era where the device and its price are shown. Microsoft debuted the box, the new Kinect, and the new controller in the first 60 seconds of the event.
• The scope. Wii U and PS4 both promise to provide access to video and other interesting media experiences. Xbox One actually delivers those things in the most satisfying and complete way anyone other than TiVo has done so far, letting you switch from gaming to TV to movies to web browsing with simple voice commands and practically no waiting.

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the Future of Consumer Intelligence conference in San Francisco. This week, when I reflect back on the conference topics and energy, I realize how fitting San Francisco was as the location of the event: Much like the essence of the city itself, the conference speakers and attendees showed ingenuity and optimism around the challenges and opportunities that the market research industry faces. I also thought about the same conference that I attended last May (IIR Market Research Technology Event 2012) and the key themes that I gathered and blogged about: Big data is here, integrating survey and behavioral data is powerful, and behavioral economics has huge implications for market research. For me, the big difference between last year’s conference and this year’s is this: A year ago, market insight professionals were sizing up their challenges with the future of market research. This year, they are taking the bull by the horns and embracing both the challenges and opportunities that technology in market research presents. Here are the main themes I gathered from the event: