Marketing Begins At Home

British Airways - the world's favourite charter airline

Flew to Baltimore recently from London on British Airways. They now charge for more than one bag but allow a bag and a laptop/purse into the cabin. So now people try and jam oversized luggage into lockers. They charge even their frequent flyer members to book a seat online more than 24 hours in advance, so I feel really special about their programme.

 

On the way out the plane was dirty, tired and with the seat back coming apart because the velcro wasn't working properly. On the way back we were told that the lighting in our seats wasn't working, so my wife changed her seat. When she got on the plane she found that her new seat didn't have a working light either. I'm not sure I want to fly an airline with maintenance standards that low. After all, how well are they looking after the important electrics and the engines?

Summary Care Records - Opt in or Opt out?

Its perhaps not surprising that our government organisations adopt the do what I say, not do what I do attitude. In this particular case, I received a very nice letter and leaflet telling me that the NHS are creating electronic Summary Care Records over the next 18 months or so.

Now best practice would indicate that consumers should be specifically asked to opt in for programmes like this. But clearly the designers of the programme have read Nudge. They know that asking for opt in will make it much harder to get people signed up. So the nice leaflet gives you three different ways to opt out, buried at the back of the leaflet and mixed in with the rest of the text. There isn't a clear form with a nice check box and prepaid envelope to fill in.

In this case, I suspect the society good does outweigh the individual privacy concern. My problem is that we are asked, as commercial organisations, to take extraordinary care not to assume the right to contact or sign people up for programmes in an unfair way. New European legislation puts a big onus on organisations to prove they have the right to make contact with individuals and take actions based on opt ins.

Our government agencies seem to believe that none of this applies to them and their programmes.

Mobile OS challenges - How open minded are they?

Since we now have Android, Symbian, Limo, Apple and Microsoft Mobile operating systems all available, one of the interesting challenges for them is how do they handle acceptance for and distribution of applications that will be popular but will strain their brand values - I mean here specific apps in the area of pornography and mobile gambling.  Will they allow them to be bought and downloaded from their online stores?

These are clearly applications that people will want and will pay for. And while some societies find them socially unacceptable, they are viewed much differently in other societies.  Note - I'm not an advocate for either pornography or gambling. I just know they are potentially big applications with big audiences. One study says $1BN for mobile pornography today and another says that mobile wagering will be $23Bn by 2011.

Sovereign Harbour Showers

We ended up spending a reluctant weekend in Eastbourne because our yacht engine developed a problem. The local engineers were very nice but couldn't get to us until Monday, giving us three unplanned days in Eastbourne. The marina is in the middle of one of the biggest housing estates I have seen in the UK. Everywhere you look there are houses and apartments, some just being finished, others up to ten years old.

The showers in the title refer both to the lousy English weather and to the toilet block for marina use. The toilet block was superb. Clean, spacious, not terribly busy, nice mirrors. They also had the radio blaring through the speakers, but everything can't be perfect. In fact the showers really did reflect the care and attention that the staff gave us throughout our visit. For the first time in 25 years, we needed to be towed into the marina late thursday evening. The staff who came off duty to run the workboat out and tend to us were fantastic. The lock team who manned the radios were sympathetic and friendly. They offered to order us takeaway if we were too late for the restaurants (but fortunately one did serve a very nice pizza and salad!

Sadly the state of the economy can be seen from walking around Sovereign Harbour. Boats, particularly motor boats are up for sale as people try and cut back. Shops were closed, including the chandlery. Now a chandlery that can't make money with a captive boat population of 800 plus is in a mess of trouble. The yacht club was pretty deserted, and the restaurants only did well when the sun came out. Lots of property for sale too. So it will be interesting to see how Sovereign Harbour does over the next few years. Showers ahead, methinks. Hopefully they will be the nice clean ones in the toilet block, not the squally black clouds that hung over us most of the weekend.

Electronic walking around?

It's Proms season in London right now. One of the concerts I went to was a world music celebration. The last act was from Mali - Bassekou Kouyate and his band. They played a range of music from 17th century traditional to more recent works. What was fascinating to me was to see the thread that connects this music to US black southern music to jazz. The connections were really clear.

Bassekou had wireless mikes on most of the instruments so they could move around on the stage and dance. As the leader he spent a huge amount of the set walking around, looking at and connecting with the other musicians individually. He was definitely in charge and making sure that everyone was connected. My wife leaned across - "management by walking around" - was her comment and it was really true.

As we move away from meetings and offices and more into the electronic, home working, remote office scenarios, I wonder how we create the electronic equivalent of management by walking around? I have been spending more time away from my office location recently and haven't found a really good way yet to replace the eyeball contact with co-workers. IM, phones, netmeetings, email, video conferences, all have their own place. But I haven't found a better way to keep the team focused and positive than physically walking around. Any one else got any better ideas?

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.

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?

One simplistic technique?

I was visiting a marketing website today and was struck by the number of articles that had numbers attached. 7 Secrets, 5 lessons, etc. While I am sure that quantifying and making lists of things does help to get attention, it seems to me this particular trick is being overused.

Forcing your messages into boxes may be necessary in this cluttered world but once you get beyond a small number, do you really expect people to remember all of them? And if they can't remember all of them, perhaps you need to simplify your message?

Why Apple won't worry about iphone clones

Right now a lot of mobile phone companies are trying to design a competitor for iphone. So they are either looking at making it cheaper, faster, more features, bigger camera, bigger memory, bigger storage. Whatever. They might even make a better iphone.

They're missing the fact that they can't overcome Apple's position. OK, Apple might not have hit every feature right on the head when they launched the iphone, but competitors aren't going to be successful with incremental steps. That's because Apple has won the position in the minds of consumers for their phone. Not everyone will buy one, but everyone knows what it is. And they know that the future versions of iphone will contain the incremental steps. So most of them will buy another iphone, and convert more friends as well.

So what is the mobile phone company to do? Easy. Do what Apple did. Pick a consumer segment, meet and delight it, and you have something. Just one example - the way that the iphone screen flips from vertical to horizontal. Cool, practical, intuitive all in one. The little gizmo that is inside the iphone that does this has been available for some time. I remember getting pitched by the company that makes it. I thought it was cool but too expensive for the products we were thinking of making. I still think I was right, but I missed what the Apple team didn't. Combined with a touch screen, fast software and a good operating system it works like a dream. Apple probably weren't the first company to see the pitch. But they "got" it and made it core to the iphone.

So to be truly successful and gain a clear position, you have to have a great exploring technology mind combined with a clear focus on how to deliver to consumers. It doesn't get done by committees. It does get done by small teams with both great technology awareness and consumer focus. And that's not easy to do. The best their competitors can hope for is that Apple trips itself up. Or go and really think about what consumers want from technology.