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New home / end of tumblr posts
Hello everyone! We are finalizing our Marketing Blog transition from the Tumblr to our official site www.marketingblog.fi. This means we will not be mirroring our articles to the Tumblr anymore as this has took unnecessary time from our writers. All new and existing articles can be found from Marketingblog.fi website.
We encourage all our readers to direct their browsers to the
http://www.marketingblog.fi
Ruining your business PART 1 – Barking at your customers
Business is business, and even behind the biggest grey walls of the business-world, in the end, there are humans who are doing the work, as much as there are humans doing the purchases beyond the online invoices and client records.
In the modern world of the online shop reviews and instant feedbacks, there is always a danger that disapointted customers may lower your popularity by spreading a bad word of your business even if you have not done anything wrong towards them, but this can be usually damage controlled and repaired by the positive feedback which is coming from the pleased and happy customers.
Then there are entrepreneurs who do not even need customers behaving badly to do the bad reputation for them – They do it by themselves by barking at their customers, sometimes with a good reason and sometimes without a proper reason – ending the result that even if the reason was proper, they end up loosing most of their customers, even the good ones, just because they did not express their thoughs and experiences in the proper way.
They just barked at the customers.
Event like this recently took place with the Finnish retail company called Royal Kestot, a business which sells baby supplies both online and used to also sell them in store in Turku, Finland. What happened, was that Royal Kestot encountered what we call in business a “naughty customer experience” where some customers complained on purpose of the misplaces orders and delivers on fabrics and tried to gain free products by demanding shops to compensate complaints by giving them products free.
This, apparently, got too costly for the company because someone in the company decided to open his or her mouth in the Shop’s official Facebook – page complaining (barking) towards customers as well as warned upcoming delays in the delivery times because of the behavior of the few customers.
Before the day was over, the damage had been done: word spread like a wildfire across online communities where both current customers as well as target customers declared that they will never (or ever again) use the services of the shop because their behavior was childish and far from professional.
Although shop eventually removed the mentioned status update from their Facebook – page, it was too late – Word was out and they both lost much of their credibility as well as their Facebook fans.
Yes, they may have had a few bad apples with their customers but to open mouth wide and bark towards all customers? Very, very bad public relations. This is the reason why companies have PR people and PR teams doing all the needed announcements so the generic staff of the company “do not fuck things up”.
This one was not the first and certainly not the last business to do this same error in the online world where “keeping your mouth shut if you do not have anything positive to say about the customers” in becoming a priority rule.
Express Fortune buys piece of Jolla
Finnish smartphone developer Jolla has sold a small piece of itself to a Chinese investment company China Fortune‘s sister company Express Fortune, in a complicated financing operation.
As we wrote earlier, Jolla is working it’s way to compete with the Android and iPhone on the Chinese market. Last year Jolla unveiled their own operating system Sailfish on the Slush -startup conference.
Now Express Fortune has bought a 6.25 per cent equity share of Jolla which means about million euros worth of Jolla been sold to the Chinese investment company. Jolla is collecting capital and the financing operation is expected to end in March this year.
Google Glass – Dare to be innovative
Although Google Glasses may just be the next hype everybody’s already blogging about, I’ll take a chance and write few old but innovative solutions which are going to take place with Google Glass.
A short reminder for those readers who have not yet heard the buzzword “Google Glass” yet: Google glass, or more precise, Project Glass, is a research and development program of the search-engine company Google to develope a augmented reality (a vision technology where world is observer through real-time computer display which adds releated information to the viewed image) eyes glasses which also both acts as a HUD, computer, smartphone and a camera.
Google Glass may just be the next big thing in social evolution of the mankind, if it just makes through — At this moment, the introductory price is somewhat 1500 dollars what makes it harder to reach for a common consumer, but if it does what is promises, there is going to be a huge market for it which most likely would lower the price greatly.
Before solutions, lets hype a little
Before going to the innovative solutions, lets think who needs computer vision in their glasses anyway? Well the answer is basically “anyone”. With the possibilities of the API and thinking beyond the limits, there are several things you could achieve with the these glasses.
For example, if you are a modern jogger, you could see both your pulse, speed, location, travel-length as well of course, any common information such as text messages, news and upcoming weather as you are jogging while listening your favorite songs with the glasses (yes, they also appear to have bone conduction – earphone capacity) without needing external headphones seeing everything you need right in your eyes without even turning a head.
In case you would remember something important while jogging, Google Glass has a voice command – function, so you could just say what to remember and the glasses could send you a e-mail to yourself.
In the other hand, if you are a truck driver you could see your driving speed, traffic amount ahead, alternative routes, possible accident reports and any messages and calls whatsoever without taking your eyes from the road — and so much more.
For a any modern journalist Google Glass would provide both a real-time camera feed, recording, real-time connection to their teams, audience and to the other journalists without needing a external smartphone, camera or even a microphone.
Before I get too excited of the subject, lets just sum it up: If the Project Glass does what it promises, this android-based device could just do anything for anyone – Even help blind-people with audio feed back and object-, people-, and obstacle-detection as well as provide easier and more safe care taking of the elders with the glasses.
Ideas behind the product
There are several innovative ideas behind this goodie, for example, the bone junction audio system. Although it might sound scary, you really don’t need to connect anything to your skull-bone: Google Glass simply transmits sound to your ear by turning the audio into vibration on the headband which you then hear as a audio in your head.
This eliminated the need of the external headphones and also makes wearing glasses safer because bone junction – solution does not block any outside sounds like the regular headphones or ear-plugs do. It also keeps the clarity of the sound very clear even in noisy environments.
Perhaps the best, although it cannot be said to be innovative, idea, of the Google is that the glasses are very light, natural looking eyeglass-like product and you do not need to fear looking like a weird nerd from the 1980′s sci-fi movie.
With the several other “pack-everything-into-a-single-product” ideas, if the Google Glass wins the market, you will no longer need your smartphone, or your compact camera, or your MP3-player, or your PDAs, or your headphones, or .. well .. I almost said your personal trainer but lets keep that one with us just yet.
In the near future only thing (in addition to your clothes and car-keys) you might need to remember is your glasses – they could provide everything else you desire.
Conclusion
So .. who needs a computer vision in their glasses anyway? .. Well .. I DO! Google glasses may be the biggest hit mankind has ever achieved, and I am stating this as a software developer, not just as a consumer or a marketer, because human innovation is limitless and with the glasses both communications, social life, marketing, advertisements, targeted audience, helpful applications as well as those harmful applications, could just take a next big turn.
Google just need to find solutions for few hard problems: A battery-age of the glasses as well as high price of the product. If Google achieves in this, then it is going to be a huge success.
Who knows — I could list thousands of good and bad applications of this kind of glass – technology but let us first see what comes and then decide.
Forgotten markets
Today I write about something close to my heart as a mother, but also about something that annoyes me very much as a consumer. I write about cloth diapers – a forgotten market in Finland.
Cloth diapers are quite well known here in Finland among mothers and we have quite many commercial manufacturers as well as DIY-mothers who sew cloth diapers to their own babies. Even in KELA’s (Finlands Institute for Social Security) layette there is couple of cloth diapers, which is very good, because there isn’t that much of advertisement of cloth diapers.
In fact – I haven’t seen any advertisement of cloth diapers outside the Facebook groups that envolve cloth diapers in some way!
Well, yes, there’s few adverts I’ve seen in magazines for pregnant mothers but no, nowhere else. Not in TV, radio, newspapers, tabloids or outdoor advertisings. So, if you don’t order a certain magazine or are a member of a diaper or a baby group in Facebook, you don’t see cloth diaper advertising anywhere.
There would be a huge potential for manufacturers to advertise their products and spread the knowledge about cloth diapers, but no, they don’t advertise! Few of the manufacturers have even so crappy websites that you must just guess from what century they are from. It so sad, to see a good product suffer from lousy or nonexistent advertisement!
Cloth diapers are a big market. One new cloth diaper bought from manufacturer, costs about 15 to 30 euros depending on the diaper model, size, materials and manufacture.
One newborn uses about 10-20 diapers a day, so you’ll need about 50 cloth diapers per newborn baby so you’ll have clean diapers to use as some of them are in washing or drying. So it makes about 750 to 1500 euros to the manufacturer. Per newborn. I would advertise this product if it was mine!
A one year old toddler uses about 5 to 7 diapers a day, so you don’t have to have as many cloth diapers when your baby gets older – a toddler needs about 20 cloth diapers. So that’s about 300 to 600 euros for the manufacturer. Per toddler. I would advertise this product if it was mine!
Even if the amounts of money mentioned above sound horrific, it’s a lot less money you’d have to spend on disposable nappies in a year. So for the consumer, cloth diapers are also good for your wallet (especially if you buy cloth diapers from fleamarket or Facebook cloth diaper groups).
What makes cloth diapers so good? Well, many things! They are reusable, you just wash and dry them and use all over again. When your kid is old enough to not to wear diapers, you can sell your cloth diapers to somebody else. Cloth diapers are good for the nature – they don’t end up in landfill – as their competitor the disposable nappy, which takes 10 to 20 years to decompose! Cloth diapers are easy to use – as easy as the disposable nappies and what is great, cloth diapers come in various patterns and colors and different kinds of models and sizes. There’s one well fitting cloth diaper for every baby!
I hope to see this part of market to bloom one day
If You dare, You can succeed
One who dared was a designer Andrew Kim, who designed a new brand for Microsoft without them even knowing about it – just for the fun of it. Kim made a rebranding for “The Next Microsoft” on his website Minimally Minimal. I have to admit, it looks pretty good.
Now Andrew Kim has announced tha he will start working for Microsoft next summer, as they had seen his designs and gotten in touch wit Mr. Kim. Kim will start to work in the Xbox division, so the minimalistic rebranding of the Microsoft family wont be used – at least not yet.
We’ll hope that Andrew Kim can hold on to his creativeness and create something awesome to Microsoft. Thumbs up for daring!
INPUT gives a big input in Finland
The world did not end in Dec 2012, so lets get some input to the marketing. The input we are getting is “THE” INPUT, International Public Television Screening Conference, a world biggest event for public broadcasting companies around in the world, which will be held in Helsinki 2014.
INPUT is a conference held annually in different countries. Last year it was held in Sydney, Australia. It gathers media professionals around the world. It was first held in 1977 Bellagio, Italy and has been then circulated around the world in various locations.
INPUT 2014, which is held in Finland, is provided by several Finnish parties such as Yleisradio (Finnish Broadcasting Company) and Finnish Film Foundation as well as several other known parties. This will be the 37th time conference is kept.
Event is expected to gather over 600 professionals around the world and will provide common ground and networking to the conferencing participants.
For those who cannot participate to the actual conference, there will be educational events called Mini-INPUTs around the globe which offer copies of the programs screened at the previous INPUT conference. Additionally there will be Best of INPUT events where productions from the previous three conferences are screened.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
We will be back on January 2013 (unless the Mayans were right ;) )
Jolla meets Yota – It’s Russia vs. Finland again
Smart phone markets have been quite limited for few major players such as Apple, BlackBerry and Nokia for the past several years and only in the last few years new players such as HTC and LG have gained more popularity.
The biggest mobile buzz of the last year was a new Finnish mobile phone manufacter Jolla, who was founded by the ex-nokia employers after they were either fired from Nokia or left it after huge organization changes and cancellation of the Nokia’s own mobile operating system development.
These changes were initialized by Nokia’s new CEO Stephen Elop, an ex-Microsoft head of the Business Division, who drove Nokia towards to the Microsoft’s Windows Phone – operating systems and canceled all Nokia based Operating System developments in progress.
As we are still waiting to first Finnish Jolla smart phone to come to the mobile markets, the Finland’s old adversary in both war and business, Russia kicks the competition with upcoming release from the Yota Devices, a russian smart phone manufactor.
Yota Devices is going to publish a new smart phone with two displays in Mobile World Congress 2012, mobile industry’s biggest even in held in Barcelona. Yota’s phones are trying to get the market kick from the rare two-display setting which enables you to see the online streams as twitter or stocks right away without need of waking your phone from the sleep mode.
Yota smart phones are going to use increasingly popular Android operating system, the same Google – developed open source smartphone operating system as several other smart phone manufactors use.
According to the Yota’s CEO Vladislav Martynov new phone has been in development by 35 engineers with budget of 25 million dollars since last may. Yota is planning similar distribution as Jolla making direct contracts with the mobile operators instead of regular mobile sales.
With the ever growing competition in the mobile market, both Jolla and Yota are going to face great challanges marketing their novelty products in the markets owned by the biggest and familiar brands.
Traditional marketing is getting too traditional
Oldie goldie from 80′s said “video killed the radio star” which might have pointed the fact that popularization of the televised media started the downfall of the radio media.
Well, in the end, it might just have been the internet which killed both medias later on.
News what just may connect both of these subject is that recent study of the Fountain Park shows that social world with social media and modern communications just may have killed the traditional marketing.
In study of the Fountain Park, a Finnish brainstorming and strategy company, concluded that there are no longer large and focused groups of customers to be targeted with traditional direct marketing.
Instead of direct marketing modern marketing has turned into a social marketing in which customers are interacting with companies like they would be with each other. Marketing value and customer flow is usually gained from being “social individuals” with conscience and trust from the customers.
As the marketing value is starting to be gained from the social interaction between both customer to customer and from customer to companies, trustworthy and known brand has started to have more value than regular marketing methods.
According to Riitta Ahlholm, CEO of the Fountain Park, it becomes more important to companies to know their customers and to interact with them to gain the best customership with them.
Workday with a trainee
Here in Finland we have a work practice program on our secondary schools (in Finnish its called TET – työelämään tutustuminen), which means that every schoolchild goes to some workplace to learn to work. The duration of this work practice varies from one day to three weeks, depending on the grade and school.
We had the privilege to have this kind of a trainee on our studio yesterday. Our trainee was a teenage girl and she is in 7th grade on the local school of our city and she stayed with us for one day.
The day started out nicely, the trainee was on our studio on time, what is a big “thumbs up” these days as everybody tends to be late. We had planned out the whole day in advance, so there wouldn’t be boring times to the trainee to wait what would happen next.
We had three short lectures about the work and customers of advertising agencies, so that the trainee would have some kind of idea of what goes on in our studio on a normal day.
Then there was some photographing (product photography), graphic designing, social media tasks and some customer service to do. Our trainee was very interested of every task we gave her to do, it was nice to see a teenager truly enjoying her work.
Our trainee was very enthusiastic and it was nice to notice that she really enjoyed her day as a trainee on our studio. We’d like to thank our trainee and let her know that she’s welcome to work on our studio anytime
It was very nice to see, that todays young people are still interested about working and well-behaving.
Customers and toddlers
We are starting our weekend with comparing two subjects which first would seem to be on quite a distance from each other: Customers and toddlers — Others are high demanding specific wanting little fellas who can not yet walk too well .. and the others are toddlers.
Now seriously: What is the common with toddlers and customers?
In our modern world, we learn to be demanding from the beginning: First it is the warmth and milk of our mother, then it is the toys and fun, last, but not least, we demand luxury, money and warm feeling of achievements. Worst, and the best, all of us, are the people we call with the title “customers”.
Customers, like toddlers, learn from the early on to demand the best — or at least the best they define to be the best to them. It is the fact what really comes clear when you are a designer and a father of a small toddler boy.
It really does not matter how good you are at your work, or how long experience you have, or not even about how well you know things how they will go if your toddl.. sorry.. customer, knows that he or she wants things to be done otherwise, even if it would mean driving towards the brick wall with 200 miles per hour.
I recently read an article, I really can’t recall from where, where a designer stated the fact he had learned from interacting with the customers is that every designer and work provider should learn to let their customers to do all the talking first and then softly guide their customers to the good resolution, instead of trying to show them the best practices from the early on.
This is the fact that I myself have had difficulties to learn since I define myself as a “hardcore” international designer who have worked with big corporations and campaigns for years. My wife instead, also a professional designer and a regular writer of this blog, has learned through her earlier working experience in educational environment, that you should always let the customer feel that he or she is the king or queen of the choices and then offer the good ones to him or her.
The same thing and same principles cover working with the toddlers too: Little boys and girls know that they really, really want a certain thing to do or get and once you deny this thing from them, you can expect a world record of the crying to begin. Just like happened a few minutes ago when I was writing this blog and the little dude wanted to go under my desk to play with his toys: My mistake was to tell him not to do it which lead to the big sad tears instead of guiding him to do something else.
The similar concept concerns also customers: Even a big and experienced customers sometimes make a really bad decisions which will cause their products, companies and incomes to suffer just because they had a image in their head .. which in the end .. was not that good image at all.
I think it was my father who said that there is a expert for every field and even if you are good in several fields you cannot be expert in every field. One should always trust your most important deeds to the experts so you don’t mess up the things in big way.
Lets face it: You always go to the hospital to see the doctors when you are very sick instead of trying to be a doctor yourself, don’t you?
Jolla unveiled Sailfish
Earlier this year we wrote about the software Jolla was working on and now it has been officially unveiled on the Slush -startup conference. The software was of course the long expected Sailfish operating system.
The managing director of Jolla, Marc Dillon, praised the multitasking feature of the Sailfish, which is quite smooth and all running applications are easy to find right on the screen. The appearance of the Sailfish was quite much like any other smartphone OS on the market.
We waited for something huge, but the Sailfish didn’t bring anything groundbreaking to the market.
Jolla’s marketing tactics emphasized homespun feeling and the friendship between the workers of the company and there was a lot of workers seen on the stage. It’s nice to notice that somebody still gives the credit to the workers too.
Sailfish is heavily directed to the Asian markets, but here in Finland it will be available in some phones from DNA telephone company. Jolla will later launch their own series of smartphones with Sailfish software.
I don’t know about you, but I’ll be waiting for that, holding my breath
Bad planning has long lasting effects
Planning is always important, but the bigger the thing you’re planning, more important is the planning.
For example, in late 1990 South Korean government designed an encryption software (SEED) to make online banking and wire transfers safer. The system was made mandatory for all online money transfers.
The (huge) mistake in this system was, that it required the use of Microsoft ActiveX expansion, so everybody who wanted to use online banks, purchase stuff from online store or make wire transfers had to use Internet Explorer (Microsoft’s internet browser) as they made these money transfers.
This monopoly lasted over a decade, but as the encryption software is no longer mandatory, Internet Explorer still has over 75% of the market shares in South Korea.
Internet Explorer, although constantly updated, is widely considered to be out of date (“ancient”) and too unsafe to use. Many companies and professionals worldwide use more safer browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.
Now a politician and presidential candidate, Ahn Cheol-soo wants to support the alternatives of SEED software to end the dominance of Internet Explorer. Too bad, that Ahn Cheol-soo is an independent candidate, so his success in the election won’t probably be huge.
Advertising screw up
Every company and businessman should know how to advertise, when, how often and what time of the day. Apparently Papa John’s chain of pizza restaurants’ advertising company OnTime4U didn’t have a clue on that matter.
Papa John’s customers have proceeded a group lawsuit against the restaurants, as the customers started to have a lot of text message advertising from Papa John’s after they had ordered a home delivery pizza from Papa John’s restaurants.
Customers had as much as 16 different text messages in short period of time and even at night time. Altogether the advertising company OnTime4U send over 500.000 text messages without the permission of the customers.
This kind of advertising is against the laws of United States and Papa John’s chain of pizza restaurants is waiting for the hammer to fall. In the US law it’s said that from every offence there can be a 500 dollars compensation, so with a little bit of math Papa John’s can have about 250 million dollars to compensate to the customers. Unless the court desides that the law was violated intentionally, which could even triple the sum of compensation.
What do we learn about this? Learn carefully your rights and responsibilities to advertise. (Don’t send text messages too often and not at night. You need customers permission to advertise to them via text message or e-mail, if they are private persons.)
Renouncing my privacy – Welcome to the social media
We all know it, we all do it, and we never think about it – It’s not about sex, it’s about privacy on social media.
In last year’s december, 24-year old Austrian student Max Schrems asked world biggest social media, Facebook, to send him all the data they have gathered about him — a request based on European privacy laws which entitle a person to receive any and all information about oneself what a company has stored about him.
And receiving he did – a CD filled with 1200 PDF pages of data which contained everything he had ever done or updated on Facebook or in any other sites which had Facebook – plugins enabled. This included his all private messages, statuses and GPS coordinates, even those which he had already “deleted” in the past — which all can be considered to be read, used and sold forward by Facebook itself.
This is all old news and most of the observant web users are aware of it but it still raises few questions which everyone should ask — how much information are we willing to give out to the corporations for sale.
Before anyone starts climbing up to the barricades and start to chant “1984” rhythmically, we all should return to the surface of the ground and consider following facts: There is no privacy in internet. Every site you visit gathers some information from you – at least IP address if not more.
Although Facebook is a great tool for hooking up with people and telling to the world what you just ate or how is the weather outside in case they do not have any windows in their apartments, most of us willing give our personal information willingly of our families, friends, points of interest and our lives: everytime you clicketi-click “like“-button on some subject or actor or product-page you like, you share the world information about you and of your opinions, whenever you realize it or not.
After you have used Facebook for few years like me, you realize that you have shared information of all the actors you like, all the products you favor and how many children, friends or family members you have as well as where you live, where you work and what do you do for relaxing — most of this information is available in public even if you are a extreme privacy settings-tuner like me.
You just may set the settings that other people cannot see too much of your personal information but that only focuses on few, mostly unimportant facts on your life, as you share more precise information of your interests by clicking “like” buttons around the Facebook, which tells more about you thank your own personal Facebook – page. This information will be most likely to be sold forward to the focus companies of your interest.
But is this the information horror after all? Maybe, maybe not. I see myself finding more of the subjects I am interest with the targeted advertisements and even new companies I want to get affiliated to with one way or another.
Even though modern world makes us less private persons, it might just give us more options to choose from because in the end, world is going to be a private property of the modern corporations liked we it or not.
R.I.P. Messenger
The worlds most well known instant messenger – nowadays known as Windows Live Messenger a.k.a. Messenger – has come to the end of it’s road.
First MSN Messenger was released in 1999 and first Windows Live Messenger was released in 2005.
Microsoft integrated all it’s social services with Windows Live Messenger as it was their flagship for many years and with this they tried also to compete with Facebook as it was released. It didn’t go as they hoped for and Facebook is still the number one social media for millions of people.
Messenger was and still is very widely used by people and companies as instant messenger software around the world, but after Skype was released, it’s dominance has gotten weaker.
It can be assumed, that Microsoft felt that Skype, an instant messenger program by Swedish Niklas Zennström, was too powerful competitor for Messenger as it had better video and call features than Messenger, so they went and bought Skype on year 2011 for 6,1 billion euros (about 8,5 billion dollars).
Microsoft is now working to integrate Skype and Messenger to one great (?) software and you can already log in to Skype with your Windows Live ID. This software will be the most important software on Windows based computers, tablets and smartphones and will be huge competitor to Apple and Android as they have had Skype for long time in their appstories’ collections and now it’s going to be a Microsoft owned software.
This can be a begginning of many good things, new softwares and even better applications, but it’s also quite sure that smartphone application stores will boil because of this.