Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Time your sales right and earn PR points for your shop

April 9th, 2009 Dean

I got this interesting piece of insight on customer behaviour from Marketing Profs.

If you offer a sale, say 10% on a coffee maker, for a limited period. If a customer just missed the sale dateline and you wanted to be kind and extended the offer to her, there is a 87% chance that she will reject the offer. But if you told her that the sale for the coffee maker has ended and you offer her a 10% discount on another brand of coffee maker (probably as a ‘peace offering’) there is a 40% chance that she will accept your offer. Isn’t that interesting?

Possible reason:

“The researcher suggests that consumers may transfer the “negative affect” (regret at missing a sale) to the promoted product itself, leading to a lower opinion of the product.”

 

Lesson we can learn from this:

“time sales of different brands, or even of different items in [a] product line, to ensure that a consumer who misses a sale on one product can find another sale on a different yet similar product,” this researcher suggests….When one item goes off sale, consider offering similar products at a slight reduction, to keep latecomers happy.”

Now isn’t that easy way to make build a good reputation with your customers? 

If you are offering services, would you be able to apply the same principles? get back to the drawing board, friends…

Source

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You don’t own your brand, your customer does

March 16th, 2009 Dean

It is a common knowledge among big boys and the branding circle. Once your brand becomes popular and you have a loyal consumer base, you don’t own your brand anymore. After all the effort you have put into building a strong perception for your brand, it would be entrenched in the minds of your consumers, especially the loyal ones. Then if you want to change it, you better seek their advise, or else the backlash might be bad. And as business owners, we can’t afford it.

Here’s an example of a not so small company who changed the look of a well liked product and was met with very unhappy customers.

Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice thought it was time for them to get an updated sleek look on their packaging in early January. But interestingly, their customers were not ready for that and they were not quiet about it either. 

…consumers complained about the makeover in letters, e-mail messages and telephone calls and clamored for a return of the original look. Some of those commenting described the new packaging as “ugly” or “stupid,” and resembling “a generic bargain brand” or a “store brand.”

“Do any of these package-design people actually shop for orange juice?” the writer of one e-mail message asked rhetorically. “Because I do, and the new cartons stink.” Others described the redesign as making it more difficult to distinguish among the varieties of Tropicana or differentiate Tropicana from other orange juices.

 

Technology has made it possible for consumers to make their opinions known quickly, loudly and direct to the companies. If we as business owners don’t respond then we are in for trouble. Remember True Yoga debacle?

But does that mean we have to listen to every complain, comment and criticism? Because it might just hamper innovation. What do you think? Add a comment.

Article Source

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Are you talking nonsense? Stop the corporate babble

February 11th, 2009 Dean

Time and again I come across corporate profiles written in a language that don’t seem to be English at all. They are so full of jargons and adjectives weaved into one tight nothing! I keep reading a lot of words which has no meaning to me. 

Here is a fine example of ‘talking’ a lot and saying nothing. The business deals with flowers and gifts, but I shall not name the entity, just the initials will do.

HT is a floral design firm acclaimed for its bold attempts to inject vibrancy and excitement to conventional floral creations. HT is inspired to bringing dazzles to bouquets, inspiring emotions and joy to life. HT seeks to give the best by crafting warmth through its flowers to touch your loved ones and creating stunning floras to forge new relations, strengthen corporate ties or simply to brighten a dull day.

Woa! What??

All I can sum up is that HT is just a florist. Everything else is noise.

“acclaimed for its bold attempts to inject vibrancy and excitement to conventional floral creations” – acclaimed? did it win awards? if so, why not mention it?

“inspired to bringing dazzles to bouquets” — What does this mean, really?

“inspiring emotions and joy to life” – Do we need to be inspired to feel emotion and joy?

“seeks to give the best by crafting warmth through its flowers” — So HT craft warmth with its flowers and therefore they are giving their best? I am confused.

Oh dear!!

Here’s my humble attempt to unravel the corporate babble:

What do you want our flowers to say? That is the first question we at HT ask our customers. We all know that flowers are used for a myriads of situations and purposes. We at HT will bend our backs, and our floral arrangements, to give you stunning floral creations that send just the right message.

If it is a loved one that you are giving flowers to, we add warmth into our design. If you want to forge a new business relationship, we will add a touch of class and respect to your name with the right choice of flowers. Tell us the message you want to send, and we will say it with flowers.

Some of our customers are already referring to us as a design firm rather than a florist! Honestly, we can’t blame them. Come find out if they are right.

 

..…………….

Ah! the joy of simple English.

But that is just my opinion. Which version do you prefer? HT’s or mine? Why?

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Understanding Media Relations Download Page

January 25th, 2009 Dean

Thanks for subscribing to KinetiqBuzz newsletter. You can now download the article “Understanding Media Relations Process” via the link below.

http://www.kinetiqbuzz.com/publicity_tips/understanding-media-relations.pdf

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YouTube becoming a powerful PR tool

January 19th, 2009 Dean

I was having a discussion with one of my client, a learning programmes business owner. I told him he neededto record a video of his best classes and upload it to YouTube. And his response was, “You Tube is for entertainment, not for real business”. I was speechless!

I wish he knew that even world leaders are using You Tube to get votes. World-class trainers and speakers are using it to promote their programmes. Chefs are using it to promote their recipes and books.

If you don’t know it yet, You Tube is becoming a major How To resource centre. I myself have gone onto the portal to check on how to do this and that, especially new exercise routine. Here’s a article on Straits Times to proof my point (Sunday 18 Jan).

If you are a consultant, then you need to seriously consider making a presence on You Tube. Here’s how you can do it in 3 easy steps…

1. Get a video recorder of some sort. It need not be super high quality

2. Record something you already know well but might be of interesting to somebody. Your video need not be polished, as long as it has good info. Keep it within 5 min. You might want to add your website link onto the video to encourage viewers to go to your site.

3. Upload, add the correct tags.

4. Sit back, feel proud of the work you’ve done, no matter how poor the quality of your video. You can improve it the next time around.

Many business owners hold back on doing this simply because they are waiting for a time when they can produce a high quality, polished, corporate video. The problem is, that time may never come. And what they dont understand is, the You Tube community dont care for high quality, polished, corporate video. They want reliable, interesting content. It needs to be authentic more than polished.

It is a good way (read low risk way) for your consumers to sample a little bit of you before they commit to a proper programme, product etc.

So what are you waiting for?

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The persuasive power of “Low-Fat” Nutrition labels! It can make you fat

January 8th, 2009 Dean

I came across this an extract from Journal of Marketing Research website that caught my attention. It just validates what we have suspected all along. Eating ‘low-fat’ labeled food product can actually make you fat! This is something food retailers might want to know: 

 

In this era of increasing obesity and increasing threats of legislation and regulation of food marketing practices, regulatory agencies have pointedly asked how “low-fat” nutrition claims may influence food consumption. The authors develop and test a framework that contends that low-fat nutrition labels increase food intake by (1) increasing perceptions of the appropriate serving size and (2) decreasing consumption guilt. Three studies show that low-fat labels lead all consumers—particularly those who are overweight—to overeat snack foods. Furthermore, salient objective serving-size information (e.g., “Contains 2 Servings”) reduces overeating among guilt-prone, normal-weight consumers but not among overweight consumers. With consumer welfare and corporate profitability in mind, the authors suggest win–win packaging and labeling insights for public policy officials and food marketers

Source

 

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What is Social Media? Here, in plain english…

January 2nd, 2009 Dean

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What you say can make you a PR disaster

December 10th, 2008 Dean

It’s bad enough that Sarah Palin got so much flak for saying all the wrong things during the election campaign. It seems like she has yet to learn her lesson. In this interview, in an attempt to sound diplomatic she ends up winding her words into a tight noose. A walking PR disaster, indeed!

The questions were simple, yet with a convoluted explanation she makes herself look like she wants rape victims to bear their pregnancy just because being pro-life is better position to take… 

What can we learn from here:

1. First off, understand your position/angle and explore its weaknesses even before you go for the media interview. there is no position without flaw, so you might as well be prepared to admit it or have a defense for it instead of stumbling and looking foolish in front of the camera.

2. If you are caught off guard with a difficult question, pause to think. You don’t have to rattle off something just so that you have something to say. You are more likely come across as a sensible person by just admitting that the position you took does have its short comings.

 

3. Don’t rehearse your answers. Media usually will give the talking points before an interview. Prepare the points you will want to make for each issue/questions. Don’t ever memorize! You will only come across as very mechanical in the interview. Nobody likes to see a living robot.

4. You may not be as high profile as Palin, but saying all the wrong things because you can’t think on your feet will make you a disaster as big as Palin…

 

How do you know that what you said is really really silly? When others repeat it verbatim and it is actually funny.

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All the buzz…. then it fizzles

December 3rd, 2008 Dean

Came across this blog post that nicely describes the danger of building up too much hype.

Nokia build up so much hype about its N97 before it was launched that media and blogosphere was abuzz with speculations. Then it was released and…..duh! nothing new there!

Here’s an excerpt:

Everyone was guessing about Nokia’s big announcement. All the heavyweight blog sites were weighing in with speculation. Some of the blogging elite even flew all the way to Barcelona for Nokia week just to find out what it was — but even they were sworn to secrecy….

…if you get everyone hyped about a launch (they had a massive countdown clock that countless sites had embedded in posts) is that you better have something spectacular to show when the time comes. Apple are masters of this tactic, but could Nokia pull the sme lever?

Umm, this is Nokia we’re talking about, remember. This is the company that is in a death spiral, shedding market share faster these days than Wall Street sheds investment bankers.

So at the appointed hour, Nokia unveiled the most underwhelming phone of the year:

The N97. It’s got a 16:9 screen, a slide out qwerty keyboard, a great camera, gps, accelerometer, 64Gb of memory, etc.

Whoop-ti-doo. We’ve seen all these things on so many other phones this year.

Talk about being late to the party!

Even the interface looks like they stole the “panels” concept from the Sony-Ericsson X1. And the “tactile touch screen” looks like a BlackBerry Storm ripoff.

Lesson we can learn:
If you must build up hype about your latest product. the reality of your product better live up to the heightened expectations, if not it is going to be received so poorly by the consumers are just going to react extremely negative to whatever good there is in your product.

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After the subprime mortgage bubble comes The Brand Bubble

November 20th, 2008 Dean

Here’s a vodcast of John Gerzema, Y&R Group chief insights officer, talking to Marketing Magazine on his book The Brand Bubble.

According to its website:

Customer surveys show that the number of high-performance value-creating brands is diminishing across the board. Yet at the same time, businesses and financial markets keep raising brand valuations. The result? A brand bubble that could erase large portions of intangible value in your company and send another shockwave through the global economy.

The Brand Bubble provides both analysis and solution.

The original post is here.

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