Marketing Begins At Home

like.no.other

Finally bought a new digital SLR yesterday. It happens to be a Sony A200. I'm actually shocked I did buy Sony, because I was going to get a Nikon but...read the reviews, did some research, and the Sony seemed like the right buy for me.

Registered online, pretty painless. Then oops. Got my first email from Sony today. It was a nice email, if content free really. BUT they personalised it as Dear Mr./Ms. Davies. Such a silly thing to do. I told them my title in the registration and they STILL got it wrong.

Will I return the camera because of it? No. But the product experience gave them a great halo that the marketing communications department ruined by inappropriate personalisation. My trust in their communications is much lower. And that's a shame, because on the basis of a couple of hours playing with the camera, it represents the Sony brand well.

A Tale of two sailing suppliers - part 2

Previously I wrote about a bad experience - today is a much happier tale. Our aged rubber dingy for our yacht was not staying inflated. I happened to come across an ad for Suffolk Sailing. Curious name, because in fact what they do is marine safety. Their main business is servicing liferafts and other safety gear. They also run Sea Survival courses where you spend a day trying to get into a liferaft in a pool with all your heavy sailing gear on.

With some nervousness we transported said aging dingy to their premises on an industrial estate not far from where we keep our boat. We were assured that they could look at it. I phoned about a week later, they said they had done a couple of bits of repairs, were testing that it still stayed inflated, and would be ready tomorrow. How much? was my question, but the nice man didn't know. He said, not much. Well, that made me a little nervous.

Let me tell you, here is a company that deserves all the customers that they can look after. Cost was less than £54. That included inspecting the dingy, replacing a crappy patch that I did with a proper one from them, replacing two valves that were leaking, and making sure that everything stayed properly inflated. Lots of people wouldn't get out of bed for that price.

Suffolk Sailing. Need a liferaft, rental or buy? Need marine safety equipment serviced? Cheerful, honest advice? They are gems. I couldn't recommend them more highly. www.suffolk-sailing.co.uk

A tale of two sailing suppliers - part 1

My wife and I own a 28ft (8.6M) sailing yacht which is about 20 years old. So she is increasingly in need of attention for various bits and pieces. Recently we had two very different experiences from two local suppliers.

First, we decided to add a new piece of navigation gear. We looked up their website, phoned all their dealers one Saturday in the East Coast of England and none of them had the product in stock. So we phoned the manufacturer and ordered it direct. They delivered it to our dockyard the next day. So far so good. We then installed it and started to use it. The instruction manual was poorly photocopied and confusingly referred to two different products with different instructions for actions for each. The practice chart that was supposed to be included was not. We tried using it on the first set of charts and all was well. We then tried using it on a second set of charts, those for Solent waters. This area has the highest concentration of sailing enthusiasts in the UK. The charts were not pre-entered.

We sent an email query to the manufacturer over the weekend, but hadn't heard anything by Tuesday afternoon. So I called them. The person who read those emails was on holiday so no one had read the query. It turns out that for our needs we have to have a plastic cover for the charts, cost about 10% of the unit extra. We would also need a software update kit to enable us to update the electronics when charts change. Cost about 25% extra. So our cost of ownership suddenly jumped 35%.

At the time of writing we have agreed with the manufacturer to return the unit and get our money back. Their customer service did not seem very friendly. When I questioned why they didn't have an answering machine for out of hours calls, they said that they expected people to call back during their business hours. I suggested that their website could use a little updating so people understood what the proposition was. This was met coldly. I also told them that I had tried to buy it from every retailer on their list. Not much reaction.

The bottom line - the equipment was designed to speed up navigation while underway (and if you have ever bounced around in a strong sea in a small boat, you will know how important that is). As shipped it would take a lot of work to get all the charts we would use in, and they would not be sequenced in a user friendly way. Only by spending 35% more could one achieve something close. It also didn't make clear how the chart updating service/software would work and how essential that is for successful use. And their customer service attitude was typical of the 1950s in Russia. You are lucky to have us sell you this. Sorry, but no. For that price I am almost in chartplotter territory with additional bells and whistles.

It's the neighbourhood, stupid

Recently we have had a lot of news about knife crime with some really sad deaths. Now Gordon Brown wants to target 110,000 families with "disruptive" youngsters. Other commentators wring their hands and say that fixing some of these issues will take a long time. David Cameron makes a big deal out of family values as well.

At the same time I have been reading The Tipping Poing by Malcolm Gladwell. A couple of quotes from a much longer discussion. "Peer influence and community influence are more inportant than family influence in determining how children turn out. ...  A child is better off in a good neighbourhood and a troubled family than be or she is in a troubled neighbourhood and a good family. ...children are powerbully shaped by their external environment...It isn't just serious criminal behaviour, in the end, that is sensitive to environmental cues, it is all behaviour."

It's pretty tough to intervene directly in families and get results, as well as being hugely expensive for the state. Instead, lets put all those CCTV cameras and other resources to having a zero tolerance for litter, graffitti, and poor maintenance of all buildings in target neighbourhoods. Repair and keep clean the lifts. Make sure that parks are clean, safe, well maintained. Remove abandoned cars and enforce parking regulations. Focus on teen unemployment by incentivising specific job creation. Make it attractive for Tesco or Asda to open a supermarket with lots of part time jobs. Do the little things to make sure that deprived neigbourhoods don't look and feel deprived. Then they will come around, and remarkably quickly as well.

Crossing the Chasm

Recently I had a chance to talk informally to the national council of STAT. What really struck me was that some of the technology marketing models would work really well for promoting personal training/services/wellness. The Alexander Technique isn't very well known, but has a following in certain circles - music, dance, theatre, and is used for back and neck pain as an alternative therapy. We discussed Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm.

Simplistically, your early adopters are willing to accept the tradeoffs that come with being first to use a new technology. The price is high, the product isn't complete, but it is compelling enough for you to put up with the glitches. Then there is a chasm, and you have to get to the early mainstream users. Unfortunately, early mainstream users are completely different. So everything about your marketing, positioning, etc has to change.

That's where I believe the Alexander Technique is now. Their core early users are happy, but not enough teachers have enough work. They need to reach out to a new audience with a new version of the proposition. Its going to be hard for the council to persuade their teachers to change, but if they don't the Alexander Technique will be limited in its appeal or in the Chasm. Crossing the Chasm will require them to think quite differently about which new audiences and how to appeal to them. I think Geoffrey Moore would like the analogy, even if it isn't about technology adoption.