Marketing Begins At Home

What's your inflation?

The nice people at the government statistics office have a cool new tool. Now you can figure out what your personal inflation figures are based on how much you spend on stuff each month. You can compare yourself to the average and figure out if you can do anything about it.

I'd show you a pretty picture, but the same nice folks who produced this stuff don't let you export it in any manner that allows me to share it. Whoops. How to spoil a nice idea.  Well, lets give them 50% for trying. 

It won't surprise you to know that the official inflation rate has moved from 2.5% to over 4% and that mine has gone from a smidge under 4% to around 6%. Time for that chat about a raise, or else about moving to a new country.

Deconstructing Risk

Malcolm McDonald, Emeritus Professor, Cranfield University School of Management wrote a little article called "Getting Marketing back into the Boardroom". At the heart of the article is the idea that marketers need to be able to deconstruct business risk into three components and then develop strategies that account for each of these risks. 

 

1. Market risk: the risk that the market is not as good as you think it is

2. Share risk: the risk the strategy won't develop the share it promises

3. Profit risk: the risk the profit pool won't allow you to make the margins you promised.

 

I hadn't seen this before and really like it because the implications and actions arising from each are very different. My current employer actually faces a combination of all three. The mobile phone category is largely saturated so switching to a replacement market, the company is reworking it product porfolio to develop its share position, but the economics of the business and the cost of customising for individual markets make it very difficult to drive marginal profits from marginal markets.

Change This!

Just found a cool site www.changethis.com. Its the antithesis of the sound bite. Read their 9 page manifesto. Sounds like a lot, but its a good and compelling read. I haven't dived into any more of the content, but it sounds intriguing. I'd like to have my mind changed with compelling arguments rather than mainstream media content. We'll see.

Insure your new iPhone

Lots of comment on the new iPhone, especially about the more consumer friendly pricing. The 3G/WiFi combination works for me. Some complaints that some features like videoconference make it less attractive to the myspace/facebook fans, but that misses the point. Its not a swiss army knife, its a chef's knife, perfectly balanced for its intended use. Its a music and mobile browsing device with a telephone attached.

But if you do go out and get one, make sure you insure it. There is likely to be at least $300 worth of subsidy being applied by the network operators when you "buy" yours, and if you lose it or get it stolen you will quickly discover just how expensive a device it is. I'd much rather buy the device and then pay a cheaper rate for calls, but that's not how the business model works in most Western countries. Western consumers have an addiction to "free" phones and only discover the real cost when they have to replace a lost or stolen "free" phone.

Free Swimming

A fascinating show on BBC4 last night that tracks a number of kids from birth to adulthood. They are now about 8 years old. Lots of interesting stuff, but one that struck me was that borders have really shrunk for most of the kids. When asked if they would go to the shops and buy a pint of milk, most said no. Most weren't allowed to play outside unsupervised.

This morning brought an announcement that there would be proposals for free swimming for over 60s and under 16s as part of the 2012 legacy. In principle a good idea, although probably not both groups at once! Now the question is how many kids would be allowed to go there and participate by their nervous parents?

Creatures of habit?

It appears from a new study using mobile phones to track the whereabouts of over 100,000 people that we move in pretty small circles. Most people stay within 10km of their homes and return over and over again to the same locations.

Supermarkets could have told you this. They are pretty good at assessing how far people will travel to shop at their stores. And of course, people tend to return to work and home pretty regularly.

What would be more interesting would be to look at the edges as Seth Godin puts it. How about looking for exceptions and seeing what that tells us about people, their occasional habits and their movements?

Sense of humor or humour?

I just came across this - yes, you can accuse me of being slow, but it was such a giggle I wanted to share it. Apparently Richard Branson added an April Fool's Joke into his CTIA speech, but quite a few people didn't get it.

Now Google has got into the act with a website on the "joint" venture. Does show that some Americans do have a sense of humor or are the googlers honorary brits with a sense of humour?