Marketing Begins At Home

Airline security could learn from marketing

Yet again we see panic reactions to a new, ultimately unsuccessful attack on a plane heading for Detroit. We seem incapable of learning the real lessons, so we substitute by fighting the last war all over again. Airline security organisations have the answer. They just don't seem allowed or capable to implement.

Placing restrictions on how passengers behave on the plane, making them take off their shoes in security, restricting liquids, restricting hand baggage, etc won't prevent the next attack because the next attack won't likely re-use previous tactics.

Adding more expensive scanners at Schipol will just shift the next departure airport to Charles De Gaulle or Frankfurt. Or back to London.

Thank goodness I am not travelling regularly on business now. It was laughable that I could sit in business class to Asia and use metal cutlery, but was forced to use crappy plastic stuff to America. It was ridiculous to make everyone take their shoes off going through security. Heathrow even had a separate shoe scanning area AFTER you had been through the regular security.

It is plain to many that the way to avoid most, but not all attacks is to use good, joined up intelligence to prevent suspicious people from successfully applying for visas and tickets. For those that slip through the net, copying the El Al tactics for profiling and interrogating people at the point of departure is the best proven method for alerting security forces.

In other words, airline security have to segment and profile the differences between regular business travellers, family holidays, genuine emigration and terrorists. Some of it can be done by using positive discrimination. Someone with over 500K miles in their frequent flyer account isn't as likely to be a danger as someone who is flying for the first time. Someone who has renewed their passports multiple times isn't as dangerous as someone who has a brand new passport for the first time. Someone with lots of credit cards isn't as dangerous as someone who has none. Paying cash for your ticket has to raise more questions, as does having someone else pay for a ticket on credit.

So let's make use of the knowledge and technology we have, along with training airport security the way El Al does. I won't mind answering penetrating questions (from someone who is a trained professional and understands how to evaluate the answers I give) if we dispense with all the useless scanning, mind numbing waiting in lines, and delays caused by people on minimum wages playing at security. 

Oh, and perhaps then I can have my cutlery back, so I can cut my rubber chicken.

Seth Godin is mistaken this time

I'm a big fan of Seth Godin, and most of the time I think he is at least interesting, and more than often, right. But his recent post misses the point.

Amazon and the Kindle have killed the bookstore. Why? Because people who buy 100 or 300 books a year are gone forever. The typical American buys just one book a year for pleasure. Those people are meaningless to a bookstore. It's the heavy users that matter, and now officially, as 2009 ends, they have abandoned the bookstore. It's over.

Sorry, Seth. But I think your analogy is mistaken. The shift that you are predicting was predicted by people who said that movies would replace theatre, television would replace movies, and that the internet would replace television. Well, the relative popularity and usage models have certainly changed. And yes, I would expect new usage models to emerge.

Just don't tell me that the heavy users of the Kindle are going to give up consumption of any other forms of reading. Its just not true. Now physical books might become a niche business in a while. It may be true that more books are consumed online. But I bet that some books will still continue to be delivered as physical artifacts through retail channels. Art books for example. Or personalised books. I'm a www.blurb.com fan where I can deliver a high enough quality book, one at a time. Great for gifts, great to remember events, great to deliver a tangible momento.

Actually, Kindle users aren't yet typical book readers. There are a bunch of barriers still. I don't like the fact that Amazon can change content on me after I have bought a book. I don't like their pricing policy relative to real books. Kindle readers are atypical in lots of ways, and I don't think we have got anywhere close to crossing the chasm on electronic books. So are Kindles the next big thing, or just another electric carving knife, bought and abandoned to the back of the drawer?

Seth, you are just a little too advanced in your prophecy this time. Now some bookstores are going to die, just as some retailers are going to die with the advent of internet retailing. The ones that survive will adapt to the customers that still value them, just as theatres the world over survive, despite all the alternatives for consumption of theatrical content, many of them superior in production values and value for money. The magic of theatre is equivalent to the magic of a book. Their value won't change for me, even if I do spend most of my time in front of an electronic screen rather than in front of a book.