Archive for the ‘marketing’ Category

I was watching my local newscast the other night when I watched a story about a local — and legendary — butcher shop.

Aubrey’s Meats is over 100 years old, and located in the Byward Market, one of Ottawa’s oldest areas. This may be one of its problems, actually. The Market, as it’s known to us Ottawans, is usually packed with a combination of tourists in search of the right tchotchke to take home to a coworker or maiden aunt and young revelers heading to The Heart and Crown or the Chateau Lafayette to get their drink on. If I’m gonna buy some steaks or a nice roast for the grill I’m not going to head to the Market.

But I digress. Aubrey’s Meats, according to its own “About” page, found itself in a serious bit of difficulty recently. The death of its owner and his declining health meant employees were running the shop. And not too well.

…in December 2010, Catherine Davis, the store’s bookkeeper, was made ad-hoc manager of Aubrey’s. When she took over, certain employees had run our store, between rent to the city and money owed to the suppliers, into a debt in excess of $300,000. Though it didn’t appear so, Aubrey’s was a sinking ship that some might not have tried to save. Out of a respect for Brian and his work, and an undying faith in this store’s potential, Catherine set about to keep Aubrey’s afloat.

So they were in trouble. Like some on a sinking ship, they grasped at anything that looked like it might help them float. And what they grabbed were Groupon and Kahoot.

They embarked on a number of different offers. One offered $200 in value for $89. They sold over 1000 of those. They offered others at $55 for $175 worth of meat. They sold thousands of those.

HANDLE WITH CARE

The hammer started to fall for the people running Aubrey’s when they realized that they couldn’t fulfil all the orders placed. So they limited it to redeeming $50 worth of meat at a time. Now they’ve suspended all redemptions until May 1.

What went wrong here? I think it should be obvious. The cash crunch they found themselves in made them decide to try this for an immediate cash infusion (even though they only get a portion of the revenue — according to the butcher who is the spokesperson for Aubrey’s right now, each $55 coupon resulted in $24 in revenue to Aubrey’s). But they didn’t look even one step down the road to figure out what to do if they SUCCEEDED with the offers. I feel for Aubrey’s employees. It sounds like they’re in a tight spot. But they’ve done themselves no favours by pursuing this strategy.

The companies which marketed their deals? I’d wager that they’re in no way suffering the way Aubrey’s is.

This isn’t a new story. Others, including my buddy Anne Weiskopf, have written about some of the challenges of managing daily deal sites for small businesses. Don’t just dive in. Think about the risks AND the potential benefits. If you’re new to doing that sort of thing, get advice. And if you’re considering a daily coupon site, you need to not only ask what will happen if your offer goes nowhere, you need to  think VERY carefully about what the implications of SUCCESS will be. Dying of popularity is not any better than dying of neglect. 

___

UPDATE, January 23: Three of the four companies which issued coupons for Aubrey’s meats are refunding those coupons, according to CBC Ottawa. Those are: Team Buy, DealFind and Groupon. CBC is reporting that Ottawa-based company Kahoot told its customers:

“We have been made aware of these unfortunate circumstances regarding Aubrey’s. Unfortunately we are unable to refund vouchers outside of seven days after purchase. If interested in a refund, we suggest going directly to Aubrey’s as they are now liable for their commitment to honour all vouchers sold.”

I wonder if Kahoot has thought about the several thousand people who bought through them rather than another of the coupon sites, and how likely they are to return to Kahoot to purchase.

UPDATE, JANUARY 24: I’ve asked Kahoot a couple of questions:

1. Can you provide the statement sent to customers who purchased Kahoot deals for Aubrey’s?
2. Is Kahoot concerned that its decision to not refund coupons will cost it brand loyalty when compared to the decisions of Teambuy, DealFind and Groupon to refund the coupons?

I’m hoping for a reply more substantive than this one from them:

Just 3 more and I get one free!

The Consumerist is one of my must-read blogs. But I don’t necessarily read it for solid marketing and communications advice. Until this morning, when I opened up my feed reader and found a post called “The Silly Hat Shop.”

It reminded me of a cool furniture store in my neighbourhood in Ottawa. They sell the sort of furniture that funky condos would have, as well as custom design services for furniture.

On their door, they trumpet that they’re on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. What’s that mean? For Twitter, they’ve posted 76 tweets in two years, with less than 50 followers. Most of those tweets are for sales on their products. On Facebook, a page with 133 friends and an unending series of sales. And on LinkedIn? Well, they have some employees there.

What does their online presence say to me? I’m NEVER buying full price from them, and they aren’t that different from a Leon’s, a “The Brick”, or other furniture stores.  In short, Ben Popken needed a hat and bought one at a new hat store. They then subjected him to a variety of marketing and loyalty techniques that, in his opinion and mine, don’t fit a hat shop. A frequent buyer card? Really?

I’d also wager that neither the hat shop nor the furniture store have put a second of thought into how they are going to evaluate the success of their frequent buyer club or their Twitter account.

Being a great buyer / retailer of hats, of furniture, of whatever, does not make you a great communicator of what you’re REALLY all about. If you sell great funky furniture that deserves premium treatment — and prices — why not treat it that way? And act as if you’re a trusted advisor rather than a salesman? If you sell hats, don’t treat them like they’re a cappuccino.

And if you can’t think this through because you’re too close to your store, too much in love with what you do — hire someone with a clear vision and trust their insights to do it for you.

(Photo CC licenced from Flickr user Slimmer_Jimmer)

Saw a chart today from Silicon Alley Insider:

There was something about the reported result that 21 per cent of consumers said they subscribed to the local paper mainly for coupons that made me go “hmmm.”

Apparently, coupons are growing (at least in the US — I can’t quickly find Canadian statistics). US coupon company Valassis had some interesting numbers in a report (registration required):

• In the first half of 2011, US companies distributed 167 billion coupons — that was down from 2010, but apparently up from 2008 and 2009
• Almost 90% of those are distributed either through inserts in newspapers or by direct mail
• Digital coupons are growing at a faster rate than traditional coupons

• Is there a value in unredeemed coupons — even if I don’t clip and use a coupon, does it offer some value as an ad?
• Is this a rate of return that businesses are really happy with?
• Are tools like Groupon and their competition any better?
• Do the numbers on coupon redemption suggest that there’s something wrong with the survey charted above?

Help me understand this, will ya?

Last month I blogged about my frustration with a lack of solid Canadian data on Internet use.

That frustration has by no means abated. Since I wrote that post in mid-December, I’ve been trying to get information about the seemingly moribund Canadian Internet Project, but so far to no avail. The good news is that sometime between December 16 and early January, their site went back online. However, the last content added seems to be a 2008 report titled “Canada online!” based on 2007 data.

There was a glimmer or two of light on the horizon though. I learned that Industry Canada has a team working to refresh its Digital Economy site. That’s good. And then yesterday, my friend Lydia pointed me to a report from new research firm Abacus Data that’s just come out this morning.

“What’s the big deal with Facebook” is a 10-page report based on a public opinion survey that explored who’s using Facebook up here in Canada and what they’re using it for. There’s some fascinating data here. Some of it is confirmatory of hunches that most of us have — that the younger a person is, the more likely they are to use tools such as Facebook and the less likely they are to see sharing information as risky. But just having confirmation of this is useful.

But here’s the big story in the data for me:

Graph from page 10 of the Abacus Data report

The fact that the number of people identifying Facebook as the most likely source of information about their friends goes from 8% for 60+ folks to 46% for 18-29 year-olds is information. But look at that text messaging bar. That’s 1 in 5 young people getting friend information via text.

That’s an amazing shift in carrying information. It requires incredibly condensed language; it also requires incredible virality — that text needs to push the receipient to pass the information on to another person. And that means that within the incredibly condensed language, there has to be attention and time to pushing on information — the texts have to have “hooks”. I’m not suggesting that 18-29 year-olds are taking marketing classes — I’m suggesting that unconsciously they’re practicing a version of SEO for texts and interpersonal communication. What is that? Would you call it TFO — text forwarding optimization? I’m not sure.

I’m really excited that Abacus Data is doing this work. Perhaps eventually, we’ll have a lively and productive Canadian Internet Project doing the same thing.

And in the meantime, I’m still hoping that people will ask  – or answer — themselves why we have so little native data on such an important phenomenon.

A different kind of digital divide

UPDATED, December 21: after some chasing, I heard from Daryl Korell, who was at the Canadian Media Research Centre. While the Canadian Internet Project site is still down, he offered to pass on my coordinates to the project staff. I’ve asked for an interview with them, and if and when I get one you’ll hear about it.

If you’re going to advise people on communications, PR or social media, chances are you’ll spend a lot of time thinking and writing and talking about online life. I know I do. It helps if you’re passionate for understanding how people use media to communicate  Doing that means that I love to read stuff about what people are doing online. But I realized this morning, when I saw a CBC story about internet use among older people, that there’s a big gap here in Canada.

The story quoted something that I consult all the time: The Pew Internet and American Life Project. This project, one of seven that make up the Pew Research Centre, regularly publishes data about … well, the Internet and American Life. Of the Centre’s 117 staff, eight are working on the Pew Internet and American Life.

So far in 2010, the Pew Internet project has issued 19 reports on everything from government online to social media reputation management to “the future of the Internet.” Their reports are really great. I frequently download them, and I use them to write, make presentations, and the like.

But where’s the Canadian equivalent? For the Canadian who’s interested in these issues, there’s really no way to dive deep into this data that I can find.

• Statistics Canada does some work. In May, it released data on Canadians’ Internet use from its Canadian Internet Use Survey, which reported on data from a 2009 survey (the previous one was in 2007); in September, it released information on e-commerce in Canada from the same survey. As far as I know, that’s it.
• Industry Canada’s Digital Economy site has research on e-commerce dating to 2008, as well as a “research and links” page that doesn’t look to have been updated since 2006.
• A site called “Internet World Stats” has a 2007 review, mostly of broadband penetration in Canada.
• Emarketer has a report on Canada from 2008 that would likely cost a couple of hundred bucks.
• The Canadian Media Research Consortium (a group made up of partners from York University, Ryerson University and Université Laval) has the “Canadian Internet Project.” Unfortunately, the project’s site is down. But there are two reports, one from 2008 and one from 2004.
• Services like Comscore do monitor web traffic and offer Canadian statistics. But that’s site based, not user based. And they haven’t issued a release mentioning Canada since August 2009.
• Even the Pew Global Attitudes project surveys 22 countries but excludes Canada.

Am I missing out on sources here? Why is it that we don’t have something like the Pew projects? Tell me where I haven’t looked.

Johanna Skibsrud, author of The Sentimentalists, in a photo from the Toronto Star

Recently, a young writer won Canada’s richest literary prize. Johanna Skibsrud won the 2010 Giller Prize for her novel The Sentimentalists.

She gave a moving acceptance speech, thanking her late father for information, and then started to prepare to rejoin her mother on a vacation in the Middle East. A great story! But  … that’s where the trouble started.

Skibsrud’s novel, like her previous volume of poetry, was published by Gaspereau Press, a small publisher based in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley. Gaspereau describes itself as part of: “a unique but traditional publishing model that brings printing and publishing together under one roof [whose] publishing program stresses the importance of quality across the entire process, from editorial and design to the manufacturing stage.”

In realistic terms, that meant that The Sentimentalists could be produced at a maximum rate of 1,000 copies per week. That was fine for the roughly 800 copies it had sold since its release. This was not going to work for a Giller winner. For example, last year’s winner The Bishop’s Man sold about 75,000 copies. Even if you halved that number, Gaspereau was facing a bit of a problem. They had demand that was far outstripping supply. It could take the better part of a year to produce enough to meet the immediate demand, and this is the time of year — as Christmas shopping ramps up — when the vast majority of books are sold.

So let me lay out the issues that faced Gaspereau as I see them:

• They have a principled commitment to quality production
• They have a book in demand far beyond what they can supply (Amazon is selling ONE copy for nearly $900!)
• That demand is partially time limited
• Printing by someone else will likely reduce the quality of the physical book
• Printing by someone else will generate additional revenue for the business
• Printing by someone else will generate additional revenue for the author

Today, it appears that Gaspereau has found a solution. They’ve sold trade paperback rights to another publisher, Douglas & McIntyre. This means that their editions will still be the beautiful objects they are, but that many more people will be able to buy paper versions. There will be 30,000 copies available in about a week, and if they need more, they can do another 20,000 pretty easily. Douglas & McIntyre will also make e-reader editions available for all the popular e-readers. Previously, you could only buy it for Indigo’s proprietary Kobo e-reader. There’s a certain irony in a book published by a craftsmanlike press being primarily available for e-readers, I think.

All that is good news, and I wish Gaspereau and Ms. Skibsrud much more success in the future.

But the story of The Sentimentalists made me think. On one level, I admire Andrew Steeves and Gary Dunfeld of Gaspereau Press for their dedication. But I’m led to believe that most of the time, when a book is shortlisted for a Giller Prize, the publisher prepares for a possible win by making printing arrangements.

So perhaps what the folks at Gaspereau did was to neglect to prepare for success. It’s easy to think about failure. It’s easy to disaster plan (even though we often don’t do it!). But do we prepare and plan for success in the same way? I think it’s worth thinking about.

The Ottawa Fringe Festival, one of the seemingly dozens of annual events that make life in Ottawa in the summer fun (and sometimes exhausting) has been holding a series of lunchtime events that have ranged from bloody debates on the future of theatre to… an Ignite event.

With the help of theatre and communications guy Ryan Anderson, the Fringe folk put together a roster of artists (not including me) and business types (yeah, that was me) to do Ignite presentations with the loose topic of the intersection of art and business.

For those of you not familiar with Ignite, it’s a movement where people put together 20-slide presentations that are the visuals for a five-minute talk. The slides advance mercilessly, every 15  seconds, so it’s like “The Pit and the Pendulum” for speakers.

The good news is that  all the presentations were great.

The presenters were, in order of appearance:

Tyler Cope, co-founder of Overlay.TV, a local tech startup and general good corporate citizen in Ottawa
Nancy Kenny, a peripatetic young actor, writer, and marketing guru
Sterling Lynch, another hyphenate (actor-writer-only-guy-wearing-a-tie).
Ram Kanda, creative director at Fuel Industries, a seriously big advertainment and online company here in Ottawa
Me
and Barry Smith, a Colorado newspaper columnist here with a show called “Every Job I’ve Ever Had”

Anyway, I thought that since I’m in the business of shameless self promotion, I should record my audio and match it up with the slides for you.

The presentation, which I called “If your art falls in a forest was it really art?” is only about five minutes long, so at the very worst you won’t have wasted much time.

I’ve put up the audio from the presentation, as well as a PDF of the slides. I tried to marry the slides with the audio, but sad to say, couldn’t get the timing to work the way I wanted it to.

UPDATE: Or… you could just wait a little bit for the enterprising folks at Ottawa Tonite to put up the video (which I thought was just being streamed). I’m really not that smart.

My partner and I have done a lot of gardening in the last couple of years, since we landscaped our back yard. We will likely never be cottage owners, so we decided to make the yard our refuge.

Thanks to a great designer, Lynda Milina of Kavamilina, and a great installer, Denis Willaert and Apprize, we have a back yard we can hardly tear ourselves away from on weekends or in the evening.

One side effect: MANY plastic pots that once held plants for the trip from the nursery to the yard, and then sat empty.

So when I saw a brief story in the weekend Ottawa Citizen saying that Loblaws stores would accept pots and flats for recycling — and give you a $5 coupon if you brought in 25 — I was sold. We immediately started in counting our flats & pots, and came up with 150 that we were happy to get rid of.

So off we go with six bags full of pots. While Cathy trundles through the garden centre, I line up to return the goods and add to what Loblaws says is 600,000 pounds of plastic it will recycle. When I get there, the woman grunts at me and points to where they should go. Then she asks if I have more than 25.

“150, actually.”

“Would you like a coupon?” I’m a little bit surprised. I figured I’d get 6 coupons. “No, you get the coupon if you bring in more than 25.”

Then she gives me the coupon — $5, sure enough. If I spend more than $50, one coupon per purchase. Instant disillusionment.

When I shared this with my partner, we wandered around for a little while, looking at fairly nice pots and fairly sick-looking plants, and left, having decided to spend our money elsewhere.

So whose fault is this? Was I being greedy to expect $30 worth of coupons? Should I have gamed the system by dropping off the pots in batches? If I got 6 coupons, I would have to have bought $300 worth of stuff to use them.

My feeling: There’s a bad case of conditionitis here. I went there feeling like I was doing a good thing and getting a reward. But afterward, I would have preferred just to have dropped off the pots and flats and gotten nothing than a “this but not that and only under this condition.”

Contrast this with Floral Design Landscaping, a nursery in Kemptville that we found while looking for another one. They have a sign up saying they’ll give you credit for plants you bring in. We asked about it. They had a specific set of plants they were looking for – peonies, hostas, and the like — and the guy told me that while it wouldn’t be much money, it would be a store credit we could use.

If we go out with a carload of split plants, it won’t matter whether it’s $5 or $15. We’ll feel like we get something for nothing. Not “if you buy $50″ – whatever.

At the risk of sounding like Seth Godin (I WISH!), conditionitis is a bad thing. If you want to give something away, then GIVE IT AWAY and make people feel like YOU JUST GAVE THEM SOMETHING.

Ciao,
Bob.

Interesting analysis of some refreshed logos in the New York Times, with the hat-tip, as I’ve done so many times before, to Jason Kottke.

The article looks at companies including Walmart, Kraft, Cheer detergent, Stop & Shop, Super Fresh, QuickChek, Australia’s Woolworths, food distributor Sysco(whose name always makes me feel funny since my dad spent 44 years working for another Sysco entirely) and the company formerly known as Blackwater and is now called Xe (pronounced Zee), which have all unveiled new logos or wordmarks recently.

Other than generic interest, I found this interesting because we’re at the beginnings of a discussion at my day job about whether it’s time to change logos, tinker with our brand, or do a full rebranding exercise.

According to the article, we should “Behold the new breed of corporate logo [as] non- threatening, reassuring, playful, even child-like. Not emblems of distant behemoths, but faces of friends.”

Fair enough. I can see why companies want to take on those characteristics. But the question for me is whether their actions and activities reflect that.

For me, the question that comes to mind is what are companies doing — OTHER than the logo — to shift their image. And the point that comes to mind is that analyzing these logos separately from their brands — and we all should know that the brand is more than a logo — is a mug’s game.

And one big problem I just discovered — if you Google “Xe blackwater” you get to … someone else’s site. In fact, there appears not to be a global Xe site, and Xe.com is a foreign-exchange site. Blackwater.com takes you to http://www.yeah.com/

Why have a name/logo change if you’re not going to have anything to back it up?

Anyone have great / terrible examples of relogoing that has backfired on the company in question? I call dibs on the Tropicana disaster (old one left; new one right), which must be destined to go down in history as one of the biggest pullbacks EVER.

Ciao,
Bob.

Here in Canada, Rogers is a huge communications conglomerate that includes cable TV, DVD rental, cell phone, magazines, radio, and high-speed Internet services. Most people, including me, have some interaction with Rogers. To be quite frank, I try to keep mine as limited as possible. Our Internet at home? Rogers. Our home phone is Rogers too. My ancient and loathed work Treo, soon to be replaced by a Blackberry — Rogers. For now, we still have rabbit-ears on the TV at home, so we don’t pay ANYone for TV, and the DVDs we rent are from a local independent video store.

I have a knee-jerk negative reaction to Rogers. But then again, I also have a negative reaction to Bell. That might be because of their INCREDIBLY stupid “ER” campaign.

But man, oh man, I got something today at my house that just drove me to the computer.

When I arrived home, a piece of advertising was rolled up in my door handle. From Rogers. Here it is.


Let’s see if I can ennumerate the ways in which this piece of marketing collateral left me gaping in slack-jawed astonishment.

1. I’ve lived in my house and this neighbourhood since 2000. I know my neighbours. Some of them come to my house concerts. So why would you (a) give me a piece of mail saying “the previous account holder at this address has requested that the Rogers Cable services be disconnected.” (b) and THEN SCRATCH IT OUT.
2. Why would you change the terms of the offer by hand? Can I write up my own terms? Do I get to choose too? Is this legally binding?
3. On the first image, it appears that FREE as in installation is scratched out. On the second image, something is written over the word FREE in FREE INSTALLATION. Does that mean it’s not free, or does it signify an initialing, as in Tech # 0285 is endorsing the free installation?
4. I’m ALREADY A ROGERS CUSTOMER! Why not treat me like one?
5. Is this a better offer than anything I can get from Rogers online or elsewhere?

UPDATED: I’ve taken out the name and number of the rep in question at her request. I don’t think we need to single her out on this one.

I’ve gotten a ton of direct mail from Rogers over the years. We used to joke that we were the white pin in the sea of red, as non-cable-TV people. But I’ve never seen something as obtuse as this.

Ciao,
Bob.