Checkout the article on ZdNet - http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/amazon-launches-ad-supported-kindle-for-114-a-milepost-on-the-way-to-free/47147

Basis the very little I know of consumer insights, those who are ready to pay $150 for a eReader are “not part of” the lower-part-of-the-value-pyramid who are desperately looking for a $50 rebate at the cost of their privacy – Heard someone say iPad will eventually kill the Kindle, I don’t think Apple will have to, as Kindle is on a suicidal mission.

Notion INK seem to a promising piece of a hardware, Sony must be working on something new and a host of offers are in the market (including a huge segment thinking Tablets/iPads could be used for reading) are trying to reduce the already reducing market share of kindle.

Amidst of all this, Amazon’s marketing team are hallucinating with mindless product/marketing ideas! Dear Amazon, could you please wake up to reality?

The rate at which things are going, mindless marketers and their technocrat siblings would want to get into someone’s dream and run a 30 seconder every once-in a while.

For GEN-Y (The Digital Natives, i.e., Navis from Pandora), performance is just another aspect and the ‘Snob’ value seem to have taken precedence – The Navis are looking for Leather-Seats equivalents from their computers – whatever happens to purpose of categories & their existence! Why we have to make a dirty cocktail of everything? The introduction to ARM/ATOM Processor made notebook available to virtually everyone, but whats its truly meant for? To the best, a Kindle 2 replacement!  To give it a shot, picked up an ATOM Based tablet PC for $300 a few months ago an realized the processor in my Blackberry Curve is much faster – However, the hardware appears to fancy my Ego got a good amount of boost for a few days carrying it around! Am sure the category will succeed  with performance-ignorant minds.

Why can’t the Navis look for Progressive Functionality in addition to soring on the Snob charts? A progression that has happened in the Television is a good place to start (towards the end of CRT television era, the purchase of such gadgets had reached a state where there were no involvement from consumers, they just had a brand in mind and sleep walked to pick up one). Now, with the invention of LED and 3D, the stale-steak-is-again-sizzling  with ‘Progressive Functinal Innovation’ around the category. Hey.. BTW the packaging has considerably progressed too.

Why can’t progression have standards? Instead of setting the sail basis the current caused by totally-ignorant-consumers (Do Note, Consumers don’t know what they want and mostly they come with fullly loaded truck of Opinions).

3D and a quite a few progressively interesting  areas (totally unchartered territories) are being researched to the hilt, monies is being poured through every hole, while this is true for Computer / Processor manufacturer as well, the dumb marketers with the stakeholder support, am sure are insisting the true innovators to sell what the market wants in Dollar Stores! Wish there is a Governing Body / Consortium to monitor such Pseudo innovations and penalize who purpose is to only sell but pretend to be Innovators?

PS: Innovators from space research, if you want to know about space, speak to ISRO or NASA or ESA, NOT  the GEN-Y sales/marketing / brand manager of Virgin Galactica.

Lets assume your brand’s 200 LED panels sold today through different format stores and you don’t know half of the customers who bought it? Well, you have swalloing too may redpills and welcome to the real-world. There are quite a few ways to get the data in. Let us focus on one suggestion that, as a CE brand you should probably be able to espouse.

Lets focus on the brass tacks, one of them being demo / installation. Your business’ focus should be more intently on installation and demo aspect then the way you do business today – Incentivise more to source the right amount of customer information from the personal visit by you engineer.

Not all the buyers are encouraging you to visit them for an installation / demo? Well, like I said its the redpills. No sweat! You need to focus on some incentive (let’s call Easter eggs) for your unknown buyer as well, incentive for the engineer alone would render itself as a useless strategy after sometime of deployment.

Lets take an example, if it’s the Air conditioners that you have recently sold and want to know a few psychographic and demographic details about the customers, ensure you engineer doesn’t call and ONLY say ‘When can I come over a for Installation/Demo?’, if he/she does, mostly he will end up with an undesired response. Instead, consdider teasing the customer a bit – Something like, “having spent a bit on your appliance now and knowing there is a running cost associated with it, do you know how to optimize the energy consumption and thus the monthly / quarterly bill? I (the engineer) can comeover do a bit of your room-assessment and arrangement and could make some recommendation” – No, you are setting the ball to roll a bit, most probably your customer would (hopefully) perceive some ‘Value’ in your engineer’s visit.

People are generally creative, that includes your Demo/Installation Engineers too. Sadly, most of the times we do not get opportunities to demonstrate our abilities – So, ask your fleet of service / installation folk to give you suggestions that could be incorporated in your process – Get a poll done, deliberate the chosen ideas and get a few qualified ones incorporated as part of process to collect customer information, don’t forget to have a nice & sustaninable incentive strategy – Trust me, you will be surprised with the results.!

The invention of Polaroid to film-based photography made a huge difference to how the art was performed, nonetheless, barring the invention of Polaroid nothing much really happened in film-photography.

The subsequent invention of digital photography pretty much changed all the rules of the game. In fact, Polaroid as a invention in film-based photography was probably one of the radical difference that was brought. However, in digital technology, I guess changes are happening on a fortnightly basis. Are you interested to witness such a radical change that can increase your ROI and reduce the management time multifold? I assume you are vigorously nodding..

I am indeed delighted to witness a substantial change to a subject that I deal with more frequently than photography – Web Analytics as we know it for quite sometime is going through a sea change.

One of the solutions that I represent to the market is going to completely change the way how things are done. And, nothing more thrilling than playing a role of a change-agent in one-way or the other.

If you are website owner or a blogger or any sort of an active netizen, you often want to know more on whats happening to your website/blog/portal et al.

Till date, pretty much all the solutions that are out there with a high brand visibility and recall does one of the following or a may a little bit more.

• Parse/Scan through the web Server log files and provide you with some information
• Expects you to embed a huge-list of tags against various elements of the website and tracks them and subsequently provides some information
• Sniffs the network packets (Don’t ask me any questions on ethical aspects of this practice) and provides you with some information.

I must admit a few of the existing product/service providers do a pretty decent job in whatever they do. However, what they provide is either very limited or awfully diffult to implement and manage in an ongoing fashion.

In spite of the aforesaid limitation or the cumbersome process to use these solutions, you are assured only get to know what happened on the website. i.e., things such

1. Referrals
2. Time spent on Each Page
3. Keywords/Search Phrases from Search Engines
4. Goal definition funnel
5. Network & associated Geography location
6. And, the likes.

As you would have noticed, the way the aforesaid software applications are built IS NOT know about the end consumer/browser’ experience. Wouldn’t you agree?

How are turning the whole thing upside down? Well, not really as it would be totally disruptive! Lets ensure the bread is available as usual, and provide a Cake?

Do you believe your website/portal is a serious business channel? Are you dissatisfied with the inference you are deriving out on whats really happening to properties on the web? Do you want to move away from a whole of virtually useless information and want to know your consumer/customer’s experience on your web real-estate?

If your answer is YES to any one of aforesaid questions, talk to me, I will take you on a transcendental journey towards the new way of (Web Analytics)  life and help you do real-life magic in understanding your customer experience.

A recent incident where one of my colleagues gets a phone call from one of the leading general insurers in India and, the telemarketer ensures to gain my colleague’ attention and engages him in a chit-chat on phone for over 20 odd minutes. Gotten convinced with the marketing offer, my colleague was ready to buy the product under one condition – i.e., like most of us, asks the telemarketers to papers and an agent (read Human Being) to meet to furnish the details and subsequently process the policy.

This one simple but yet very important condition to any consumer lead to another 20 mins of dialogue and at the end, the telemarketer settles for take-it-or-leave-it-now attitude. Its so sad to witness this – The insurer almost won a new customer and lost at the same time for an obvious process failure which leads to substantial notional loss.

Automating various aspects of marketing process is considerably easy with some consistent effort, this however assumes the underlying strategies/processes are intact with an ongoing sustained effort from the management and other key stakeholders of the Business.

The equivalent business aspect I can think of is Retail Banks discouraging customers to visit the Branches. For example, to deposit funds into an account, some Banks levy a fee if the monies were to deposited through the teller counter in the Branch. Wherein, if the same thing is done via the ATM is totally free – Note, the Banks are moving a transaction to a cost effective channel, not managing customer acquisition.

The reason for the letdown from the tele-marketer is very simple, the insurer hires an external telemarketing service provider and has a seemingly tight SLA (Service Level Agreement) that states commissions/revenue for the telemarketer would be based on converted sales through telephonic offers only and not worries to amend the agreement on aspects of passing on the lead to the insurer – This is so supremely absurd!

I understand the value of customer acquisition through cost-effective channels, but with some substance beneath and not with an industry like insurance which is so nascent on market penetration levels and every insurer is doing the best to win customer.

To any business customer acquisition is a very critical aspect and its essential its dealt with uttermost care – Insurers or any business for that matter cannot just afford to miss a customer just because he/she cannot buy a product via the telephone.

Oh! My dear Marketers, are you listening?

Pretty much everyone in marketing space I have spoken to in the last month of two have mentioned budget cuts for the forthcoming year without any adjustment around returns expected, and incidentally the aforementioned folks were talking about approaches to optimize the budget in an effective fashion.

The situation reminds of the old-but-still-relevant saying “need is the mother of all invention”

Barring the fundamental issues around economic downturn, a telco operator in Australia is kind of insulated. Please read Vodafone Australia – Marketing Optimization to know more.

What is Marketing Optimization (MO)?

In a nutshell, MO translates marketing challenges/problems/issues into mathematical equation and recommends approaches to meet the optimized objectives – This is either reduced cost or increased returns.

Interestingly, to leverage the value from marketing optimization, you don’t need to have doctorate in Statistics or need to be technically savvy – Business team with basis understanding of Statistics and Computers would be able to comfortably reap the value. After all, we are using technology to solve business problem, and the solutions are built keeping this in mind.

If you liked reading this article, you can subscribe to regular updates on future posts by filling in your email address below.

And, if you want to know more or discuss further, please do click here to contact me.

Three years ago I shared with readers a list of 50 ways to be more customer-focused and deliver a better experience.  I’ve decided to update the list and publish it again.  It’s a bit long so you might want to print it out and read it later.  Even better, check off those actions you and your team take on a regular basis.

Here are 50 Ways to Improve Your Customer’s Experience:

1. Open the door for your customer whenever possible.  This is especially important if her hands are full.

2. Don’t just hand your customer his product, “present” it to him.

3. Keep the store temperature at a setting that is comfortable for customers.  Most retailers set the thermostat at what’s comfortable for the employees.

4. Acknowledge your customer’s children.

5. Offer to gift-wrap purchases if you already know it is a gift.  Don’t wait for your customer to ask.

Read More..

After finishing some reading on the net last evening, I was chating with a gentleman who asked me to check a particular link in crm2day portal – The referred link led me to a white paper download from one of the leading software vendors in the world.

Before I start raising the ticket on the issue and sharing with you, let me remind you the value of white paper download when it comes to marketing via your web channel.

To measure effectivness of marketing programmes on the web, enterprises can run a campaign on thirdparty websites or a corporate portal for lead generation. To generate lead, these enterprises either provide a trial-pack software or a whitepaper download from the aforesaid sites, this is becoming one of the empirical approaches in today’s online marketing world for marketing.

The aforesaid link also lead me to VG, a site to download the whitepaper of CRM Solution for mid-market/sme industry. I surely was curious to read it and was ready to provide a five-field information (Ufff! What a mistake) the site wanted to capture to let me know download the paper. After providing the Zip Code and click submission, I was lead to another form, then another. In total, these blokes at VG were trying to capture close to 20 plus fields to let me download the whitepaper – This is totally absurd! Even credit card application forms have been substantially shortened.

Showing the online audience a carrot of “not much to fill to download the whitepaper” and subquently making them virutually write an essay will make your audience run away for ever.

These marketing cartoons need to realize, by having a simple and crisp form that ensures name, email address and phone number of the audience is good enough to get started. Once received, through eMail communication engage in a one-to-one dialogue to take the relationship forward. But, friends are VG are busy chasing their audience out of their site..

The enterprise partnering with the aforesaid VG is one of the leading German Enterprise Software Solution vendors.  I assume they know what they are doing as part of their marketing. I sincerly hope they realize partnering with such third rated self-proclaimed Guru’ is surely shot futile attempt and wasting their marketing budgets, importantly irritating the wits out of potential audience who are intereted in knowing the offerings from the German player.

I just saw a press-ad from one of the leading airlines in India that read “We removed a row of Seat to give us more space” and the creative looks like every row between every two rows have been removed. The truth actually is, removal of one seat from approximately 30 rows in Economy class. This increases a decent amount of leg room, but surely not substantially.

Audience of this press-ad, those who fly regularly can understand what leg room means, message on a row removal essentially means nothing to these audience and this cannot be one good enough reason for them to choose this airlines. For first time travelers, the message does not make any difference.

As one can understand the move from this Airline is essentially a “Me-too attitude in Action”. An attempt to stay on par with one of their leading competitor in Indian skies. I wish, instead of trying to match what the competition does, why this airline is not working on its strength. Fair enough to say, if they were to succumb for the peer pressure, then, why try to make a fool of its potential customers by presenting a case so stupidly incorrectly?

This airline’ marketing team is aware of the fact that it’s a “Me-Too attitude at play” and seemingly be perfectly okay with it. So, why can’t they loudly admit the fact in much better fashion, sometime with a strong tinge of courage? I hope they are not thinking by increasing the leg room by a few inches they are are not doing its passenger a great favor.

If I were to reproduce the essence of the post without giving too much of importance to the Verbatim, he talks about using Disruption techniques to gain momentum or value in any endeavor. Though his post was in connection with the Venture Capitalists industry, think it’s wise to extend its reach beyond the VC horizon.

Any responder to a stimulus has some sort of idea about the stimulus (most of the time a biased view) and expects to see the flow of the stimulus as per his view, many times marketers fall prey to this and end up doing exactly as anticipated by the responder in a communication.

Many times this leads to not-so-desirable response. If you think of an alternate mechanism to circumentvent this, consider weaving a communication message with a twist (something-absolutely-unexpected element) to it. To cite an example, you might have seen the following commercial on Indian Television for personal care and see the role of a cow in Personal Care, the attention during the commercial (at least when the marketer is trying to win the attention in addition to eyeballs the first three times) is quite high – How it results into consistent sale will be determined by the quality of the product, however the success rate of the commercial could be high.

Message with a Thought-Out Twist can be used as a very effective technique to drive attention in any communication you may plan for your audience. However, please do exercise some caution on the new seam you plan to embed in your message, importantly ensure it is not too vague of off-tangent. Last but not the least, close the unexpected-element with a clear actionable to reap the benefits.

I can think of a few ways to see this theory in action, but think it’s better to address specific areas that interests audience of this blog.

Please do use the Contact Page to let me know your case or use the comment page for your accolades and brickbats for this post.