The bullsh*t detector question & 15 interesting facts
Wednesday, July 28, 2010 at 8:00AM
MBA, Questions, Survey in Management, Research Wednesday, July 28, 2010 at 8:00AM MBA, Questions, Survey in Management, Research Congratulations to the team at Nationwide News
Saturday, July 24, 2010 at 3:04PM 
Congratulations to the Field Sales Team at Nationwide News under the leadership of Stephen Pilon.
They all graduated recently from the Ganador Business Academy with a Cert IV Business.
Hope you go on to do more and achieve even more.
Nationwide News in Management, People A theory waiting to be proven
Saturday, July 24, 2010 at 2:50PM Dear browser, reader, stranger, friend.
Can you please lend a hand? I have a very short survey: 4 questions (A or B) = 4 clicks that I REALLY would like you to participate in.
It is peculiar to Australia, so if you are an international reader, then please ignore.
If you want to know the outcome, you can either drop me a line or subscribe to our newsletter (box to the right of the screen.)
The survey is HERE.
Muchos Gracias.
The problem with experience
Wednesday, July 21, 2010 at 12:00PM A contrarian observation this week:
Tom Peters posted a short video on the Problem with Perfection (see below). We have long taught service personnel who do our Customer Service training that it is impossible to exceed expectations. Tom Peters has just vindicated our approach.
And all of this got me thinking about the problem I have with experience. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am happy to blow my own experience trumpet as warranted.
But we have the opportunity to train many very experienced employees. But as you work closely with so many of them, you realise that they have been short-changed by their employers and they don’t really have 20 years’ experience, but 1 years’ experience 20 x over.
They learned to do the minimum at the ‘sit-next-to-nellie’ school. They learned a few procedural matters = the way we do things around here. But they never mastered the underlying principles, and consequently they have never been able to add value to the business by making suggestions/ improvements.
On a more strategic level, your experience predisposes you to keep repeating what has always worked in the past. It blinds you to the new imperatives.
Because, to continue to be successful, you need to abandon past successes.
So one needs experience in knowing how and when to change, not just familiarity with processes. (You need that too, but it is not going to prepare you for the impending changes.)
You get that experience in any of the following ways:
- by going through change repeatedly & looking for patterns
- by risking untried methods
- by wilfully changing things in small ways (much like the fire fighters do back burning)
You don’t get it by hanging on to what worked and resting on the laurels of your experience. Success is addictive, but very few addictions work out well in the long run.
Don’t use your experience as a shield to defend against change, use it as a machete to chop a new path.
Assortment, Range, Width, Variety: Definitively
Saturday, July 17, 2010 at 3:44PM The literature throws up a wide range of definitions for some everyday terms we use in retail.
So I did some digging to find the definitive answer. This is as good as it gets... and well worth learning and copying.
assortment, range, variety in Merchandising, Retail Operations Why did you not call?
Wednesday, July 14, 2010 at 12:00PM Not sure if you noticed that there was no RetailSmart post last week. My guess is not.
Nobody called to enquire simply because the ideas, insights, opinions expressed in this blog, whilst hopefully informative and maybe even entertaining, do not form an integral part of your life.
If you were a customer of mine, that would be devastating.
If my customers don’t miss an update or an output of mine, then I would be in serious trouble. (Fortunately, the reason for the missed post was because I was delivering some of those outputs.)
But it does raise the question:
Would your customers *really* miss you if your business disappeared overnight?
If not, what are you doing about it?
If so, do you really know why? And can you sustainably defend that reason?
To be sure: I am not referring to your ‘competitive advantage’. I am not a fan of the concept because it suggests to me that you are keeping an eye on the competition instead of worrying about your own business and keeping an eye on the customer. I am referring to the notion of having a strong (in-demand) retail proposition.
And the most important question of all is this:
Would your customers really agree with your answer above?
Invisible dollars: Or the Art of Retailing
Thursday, July 1, 2010 at 12:00PM Where the material ends, art begins.
This is a quote by Etienne Hajdu, and it reflects his view on sculpting. Retail too, is an art, and we are inclined to forget that sometimes.
Sometimes it is what is NOT there that makes a retail experience memorable. In fact maybe, as alluded in the title, that is really what retail is all about.
In retail we focus on getting the offer right, on getting the prices right and so forth. We focus on the ‘what IS’ to the exclusion of ‘what is NOT’.
By this I mean we consider all the variables of retail and we attempt to manipulate that into something that is unique.
When people buy a product or a service, they do not only pay with money, they pay with many ‘invisible dollars’:
- · They invest their very precious time
- · They risk their reputation
- · The opportunity cost of not pursuing a different product/outcome
Forgetting these invisible payments can cost us dearly.
Similarly, the retailer pays with those same invisible dollars (i.e. indirect costs) for the products. We don’t factor the opportunity cost of the working capital, the risk of obsolescence and damage into our cost of sales.
Forgetting these ‘invisible costs’ can cost us dearly.
But more importantly, how can you improve the customer experience by taking things away rather than adding it? It is human nature to want to add/grow/improve and it does not come naturally to prune or backburn.
We have found that we have to build these checkpoints into our Customer Experience Design initiatives by conscious effort to make sure we keep things simple and that we remember the value of the unseen.
Because, more often than we would care to admit, getting out the way of the customer is more valuable than the alternative.
20 Lessons I learned about marketing starting a website business
Saturday, June 26, 2010 at 3:00PM I run a business in the real world that has an internet presence and we are pretty big on eLearning. (Hey, I am even on twitter, have a LinkedIn profile, but I wouldn’t describe myself as one of the cool kids on the block. Like this one, and this one and this one.
Running and marketing this ‘real’ business is very different from running an internet business – even if you use some of the same tools. But there are also some universal principles that continue to apply, no matter what the platform and no matter what the business idea.
Like everyone else, I am lured to the internet-only business model because there is such great potential to:
- automate processes
- scale up
- tap into global markets
- earn recurring revenue
I am also an experienced marketer (in fact I teach marketing part-time at a world-class graduate school) and I like to think I know the basics. Boy, was I wrong?
In April 09 we launched retailsmartresults.com. And these are the lessons I learned along the way.
It started out as a membership driven website business model, but evolved into something else. That is because we made many mistakes. Some of these we should have known better because it really is just about fundamentals and the other lessons are just about us paying our school fees. In hindsight, they are all obvious.
- There are a lot of people who can talk the talk but not too many who can walk it.
- There is a gulf (of money) between social-media-as conversation and internet marketing scams. (And there is a real opportunity in between.)
- If your business model and if your target market is not exactly clear before you start, you will spend a lot of time re-writing and re-designing.
- The technographics profile (put forward in ‘groundswell’) probably over-estimates the number of participants and ‘creators’.
- No one on the internet knows you are a dog. But the flipside of that is that no one cares about your blog.
- And they might not care if you are a dog, you will not be able to hide your ‘dog-ness’ for very long.
- There is an art to eliciting comments – and one not yet mastered.
- If it is extremely difficult to do, or if no one else has done it before; it probably is for good reason.
- A large following counts for a lot – and it is a lot harder to achieve (authentically) for anyone but a first mover. (In the internet world there is only room for one. One Amazon, one Ebay etc. – but that is a post for another time.)
- One month = 7 internet years.
- The corollary of you don’t need much capital to start is that you can’t raise capital easily.
- By the time somebody has discovered the recipe AND is prepared to pass it on, the goalposts have moved.
- The average business person and employee – and that includes Gen Y – is not as computer literate as you think.
- Crowdsourcing cannot be applied to decisions you have to take.
- Customer service cannot be automated.
- Your competition almost always charges ZERO.
- The internet is a shallow pool.
- Face-to-Face counts. A lot. Maybe even more than before.
- Being in constant beta is a reality of the platform, but it is harder to live with than you think.
- Just because you like it does not mean everyone else will.
- Simplicity is hard.
- And one bonus lesson. The business plan counts for nought. The planning is invaluable. (I think I steal this from someone famous.)
If you have lessons of your own, comment below and I will be sure to take note because I don’t have any money left for more school fees.
eCommerce, members in Management, Strategy 7 reasons why Apple will fail
Friday, June 25, 2010 at 8:05AM
Make no mistake; I think Apple does Marketing amazingly well. I wish I had owned shares in them. (I am sure Bill Gates is glad he does.)
But sycophancy that surrounds the brand needs to be tempered; this emperor is not wearing any clothes:
- They don’t build what the customers want - they luck into it because they build what they want and that just happens to be cool. At the moment their definition of cool coincides with the dominant view.
- There is already a sameness in the design and the processes (iPad = big iPod Touch) – so it is inevitable that the sameness will come into the thinking.
- That (currently & apparently) unerring sense of what is hot - will leave when Steve goes.
- They are building a walled garden that looks like paradise but will eventually prove to be a prison. They are much worse offenders than Microsoft ever was; and really harks back to the closed ecosystem of the early internet. They will get away with it as long as a lot of ‘players’ continue to make money with them; but ultimately their philosophy is anti-internet and I think the internet will win.
- No organisation (to my knowledge) has jumped the curve more than 3 times. They have one life left – and in internet years that is not so long. Someone will build a better mousetrap sooner rather than later.
- A big chunk of their cool comes from being the underdog/ anti-establishment. That is brand archetype that represents the essence of Apple. The reality does not reflect that and it is only a matter of time before the cognitive dissonance begins to jar.
- Their products are not very reliable – and after the coolness wears off, frustration sets in. I don’t know a singe owner of Apple iPhone, who is not a certified Apple fan, who will buy it again.