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Tag: Marketing

203|365 Intellectually Inquisitive

15 April 2010 /

Day203.jpg One of the problems with being intellectually inquisitive, is one can tend to over think or even over discuss things that have absolutely no impact on ones life.

Take as an example Countdown, the new brand for Woolworths, Foodtown, the old Countdown and Price Chooper. The first time I saw the new brand with the new logo was in Greenlane in Auckland, where the colours were green and orange. Next was Rototuna (pictured here), where the colours are black, white and green.
 
So I started trying to work out what they were doing with their brand. Getting rid of multiple brand names seemed to be a great idea, but to two different colour sets? Strange. I discussed it with a number of people and came up a whole myriad of explanations. We wondered if they were trying to make some stores appear more budget, and others more classy, while bringing value back to the core brand. We wondered if they would have different pricing points.
 
We over wondered and over talked given that it is not our brand (although it was mainly travel time).
 
A lot of thought about something that has no effect on me.
 
But then that is the point of inquisitive. By thinking and discussing and even waxing lyrical, one refines thinking for real life situations in the future.

[203 | 365 Took this photo while getting milk. Originally titled it 'Intellectual Curiosity' but then changed curiosity to 'inquisitive' because that is a family value and my girls occasionally read my blog.]

174 | 365 – Coal Wagons

16 March 2010 /

Day174.jpgBack in the New Zealand Rail days, the Railways thought they were in the railway business. They thought they had no competition and they were wrong. They were actually in the transportation business and their competitors were trucking companies. For passengers the competition was bus companies and then airlines.
 
In business, knowing what business you are actually in is critically important.
 
Finally though, with new management, Kiwirail have sorted this out. They are not in the transport business or the railway business. Now their competition is static walls as they compete for taggers.
 
Not really true, but maybe a good idea for Jim is to run a competition for taggers to ‘beautify’ the Huntly coal wagons and them arrest them all afterwards.

Another day. Another trip to Auckland.

Does advertising really work?

30 March 2007 /

'Old marketing is dead
10 years ago we were able to advertise a position in a paper and know that people looking for a job would see it. Nowadays you need to advertise in many papers and on multiple websites and you are still not guaranteed a good response.

It used to be that you could build a product and market it really well and people would naturally use your service. Nowadays we are all bombarded with advertising and media and information. We as consumers often ignore these messages. When was the last time you made that call after hearing an ad? It is almost impossible to make an impression and a thousand fold more difficult to actually get them to pick-up the phone.

New marketing is everything we do
Brand is no longer about just having a great logo and good advertising. Brand is now driven by everything the company does. Every time we answer the phone or deliver a sales proposal or email a client or they use online, we build our brand. The aim of new marketing is to get talked about, in a positive way of course, because of how ingenious we are!

To have a strong brand you now have to have a service that is so ingenious, so smart and edgy and stunning that it gets talked about.  Think about Google. How many of you started using Google because you saw their ad. None, they didn't advertise. You heard about it, tried it, liked it, kept using it and if you're an early adopter like me, probably told others about it.' – quote from my eBook called 'Being INGENIOUS @ agoge'

All this means that the old way of attracting candidates or getting customers works less and less. It will get harder and harder get peoples attention. Your only chance is to focus on providing a stunning service or being an incredible employer, so that you get talked about.

Finally, fyi, we measure most of our advertsing, we change ads and try new and creative things. When you measure advertising, the results generally dont make good reading, it forces you to think outside the square. You should try it!

Wasting your advertising dollars

24 March 2007 /

A couple of years ago, Amazon.com announced that they were going to stop their advertising all  together. No more magazine adverts or TV. Instead they decided to invest all of their advertising dollars into providing free shipping of books.

AmazonFrom what I have read the marketing industry thought it was a foolish decision and predicted that it would spell the downfall of Amazon. How could they possibly think that investing money earmarked for advertising into making the customer experience more positive would increase sales.

The results: 1 year after the decision total sales were up 37% and international sales were up 81%.

The implication of applying the same thinking to our industry is huge. What areas do we spend money on, that if deployed into making our customers experience more positive, would actually increase sales.

Is it technology or marketing or advertising or capital equipment or research & development. How could we redeploy this money, improve the customer experience and increase our business along the way.

What Origin Pacific lacked

23 September 2006 /

It has been said 'The best way to make a small fortune in aviation is to start with a huge one'. I am sure that Mike Pero might have personally learnt this lesson after sinking $10 million into Origin Pacific. The full-blown disintegration of Origin Pacific last week, confirmed New Zealand’s domestic aviation market has become fully mature.

No one, other than a huge multi-national, has the resources to compete with Air NZ. They, along with Qantas who choose not to do regional, are the Super Powers [see previous post] in the domestic market and there is simply no room for ‘secondary [ugly] powers’, like Origin.  In the ‘business guerrillas’ camp we have small niche operators like Air2there, Sunair and Sounds Air. Each has very niche markets that Air NZ simply doesn’t care about or is too small to enter.

BIG question – Can you become BIG without directly competing with the Super Powers?

Short answer – No!; but the road of business is littered with companies that tried.

There is a place for specialists with a niche market, but ultimately they have to be prepared to stay as “guerillas”.

If you are not happy being a guerilla, then sooner or later you are going end up in the middle ground. To stay there and grow to be BIG, you will have to take it to the Super Powers. Once you reach the never never land of the Secondary Powers, you now must compete in price, service and features. If you can’t compete in that position for a prolonged period of time and if you can’t continue to grow month on month, you are near stuffed!

Now here’s the challenge if you want to be big, somehow you need to grow and yet maintain the nature of guerilla warfare. Making very strategic decisions about the markets, even specific customers you want, the service you will offer and the prices you will charge. If you can continually move the battle front, the Super Powers will struggle to fully understand what you are up to. They will respond with a defense that is already irrelevant as you have move to the next battle field and target.

In my opinion Origin was doomed to failure before their first flight left the ground. They tried to behave and act like super powers, then align themselves with super powers like Qantas, rather than establishing profitable niche markets and attacking and growing through guerrilla warfare.

Agree, disagree, have a question? – Post a comment now.

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