Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: marketing

  • Kodak and the smartphone

    Kodak and the smartphone

    On reading the Verge’s story that UK tough smartphone company Bullitt would realease a Kodak branded phone in the new year my first though was “Aren’t Kodak out of business?”

    As it turns out Kodak are still in business having come out of Chapter 11 administration last year with the company focusing on commercial printing, cinematography and the odd bit of revenue from licensing out their name.

    Bullitt on the other hand does that licensing with their main product being a range of tough smartphones marketed under the Caterpillar name which doesn’t seem to be a bad niche given the importance of connectivity to farmers, miners and construction workers.

    It’s difficult though to see exactly what the Kodak name is going to bring to smartphones; the brand has long fallen out of favour and is irrelevant to today’s digital photographers, the only way conceivable way the Kodak name could be a selling point is if the devices offer something additional in the way of processing digital photographs or offers some advanced camera features.

    From the media release that doesn’t seem to the be the case, however in a marketplace increasingly dominated by cheap Android phones having an additional selling point is useful in locking in higher margins.

    Both Bullitt and Kodak though will both be happy for the publicity, in one way it’s good to know the brand is still around.

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  • Why websites are important to small business

    Why websites are important to small business

    Imagine you were overcharged by four dollars for a home delivered Chinese meal. Would you harrass the restaurateur and demand extra payments?  The story of Ben Edelman and Boston’s Sichuan Gardens Chinese restaurant illustrates the importance of a business having an up to date website.

    Boston.com describes the saga of when Edelman ordered a delivery of $53 worth of Chinese food, on checking the bill he found he had been charged four dollars more than the restaurant’s website indicated.

    Edelman, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, didn’t take this injustice lying down; he contacted the restaurant and when the proprietor, Ran Duan, admitted the prices on the website were out of date Edelman demanded twelve dollars — in line with the typical damages awarded against overcharging businesses under Massachusetts state law.

    Update: Since posting this, Ben Edelman has apoligised to Ran Duan and Sichuan Gardens.

    Keeping things current

    While the matter between Edelman and the Sichuan Gardens remains unresolved the dispute illustrates why it is so important for small businesses to keep their website current.

    At least Sichuan Gardens has a website as many Australian hospitality establishments don’t bother and, when they do, often neglect the basics like opening hours, location, telephone number and other contact details. It costs business as potential customers can’t find them.

    To be fair to Ben Edelman many of us who’d been overcharged four dollars would probably not bother contacting the restaurant, we’d be more likely to order from someone else next time we felt like having Chinese delivered. At least the professor let the establishment know they had a problem.

    For those restaurants and cafes who do have a website, often the menus or rates are out of date and are in formats — usually PDF documents — that can’t be indexed by Google, meaning potential customers searching the web for ‘braised fish fillets with and Napa cabbage with roasted chili’ might be missing out. Menus should be on the site as their own web page in HTML format that search engines can read.

    Once a menu is published on a website, it’s necessary to keep it up to date. Having out of date prices on menus is just as much a breach of Australian consumer laws as it is in Massachusetts, so there’s legal aspects to having current information on the site as well.

    Losing customers

    Probably the biggest risk for most restaurants and cafes though is lost business because those potential customers can’t find you. Wasting hours arguing with angry customers like Ben Edelman is also a genuine cost to the business as well.

    With most proprietors and managers in the hospitality industry being chronically short of time, it’s essential websites are easy for staff to access and update; the days of complex updating tools or paying your web guy a couple of hundred dollars every time you want to change a page are long gone. Systems like WordPress, Blogger or Wix offer free services which are adequate for getting the basics up on line quickly.

    Social media listing are important too, with most customers searching on their smartphones for venues; having a basic Google My Business page and a Facebook listing are the least you can do to help your customers find your establishment.

    Ultimately none of us want fights with our customers, so letting them know who you and what you charge is plain good business sense. With so many other businesses not having a basic web presence also gives you the advantage over the competition.

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  • Klout and marketing’s holy grail – an interview with Joe Fernandez

    Klout and marketing’s holy grail – an interview with Joe Fernandez

    For three months in 2007 Joe Fernandez had his jaw wired shut following surgery and found himself relying on social media for news and companionship.

    Over that three months of sitting on the net Fernandez found he had become a social media influencer and the idea for Klout was born.

    In many respects Klout is the classic startup in that Fernandez started with a series of spreadsheets with the algorithm being an Excel formula, something he now calls a ‘Minimal Minimum Viable Product’.

    “It was super minimal,” Fernandez remembers. “When people would register for Klout, it would send me an email and I would manually download their social media data into Excel and run the algorithm and then I’d manually update their page.”

    Today Klout processes fifteen billion accounts every day with data pulled from four hundred data points including 15 social media services.

    Like all tools, Klout does have some limitations and Fernandez admits he gets frustrated with businesses giving priority to users with high scores, another area that concerns him is marketers who don’t examine the relevance of individuals to the business before making judgments on that person’s influence.

    One of the key things that Fernandez is proud of is how Klout is spawning its own alumni in a similar way to the PayPal mafia that developed out of the payment service at the beginning of the Century.

    “It’s really awesome to see people go on and take on big challenges and do different things.”

    As social media develops, tools like Klout are going to become more important for businesses trying to understand how

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  • Attacking Apple iPhone 6

    Attacking Apple iPhone 6

    One of the saddest things in life is the company that bleats ‘but we thought of it first’ when overtaken by a smarter or more credible competitor.

    Since the release of the iPhone 6, the knives are out for Apple with Samsung, HTC and even Sony poking fun at the new product pointing out the features already in their products.

    The problem for Apple’s competitors is the market isn’t listening to the attack ads. In China alone a million iPhones were sold in first hour they went on sale.

    For companies competing with Apple they have to find a compelling product, not be sniping at the market leader. For Samsung in particular with its falling revenues it needs to be generating some excitement in the market, not depressing its customers.

    Here’s the Samsung ad; while it’s pointing in the wrong direction it’s good in that it holds the critics to account but it makes not a spit of different to the marketplace.

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  • You’re being scanned

    You’re being scanned

    A  cute little story appeared on the BBC website today about the Teatreneu club, a comedy venue in Barcelona using facial recognition technology to charge for laughs.

    In a related story, the Wall Street Journal reports on how marketers are scanning online pictures to identify the people engaging with their brands and the context they’re being used.

    With the advances in recognition technology and deeper, faster analytics it’s now becoming feasible that anything you do that’s posted online or being monitored by things like CCTV is now quite possibly recognise you, the products your using and the place you’re using them in.

    Throw all of the data gathered by these technologies into the stew of information that marketers, companies and governments are already collecting and there a myriad of  good and bad applications which could be used.

    What both stories show is that technology is moving fast, certainly faster than regulatory agencies and the bulk of the public realise. This is going to present challenges in the near future, not least with privacy issues.

    For the Teatreneu club, the experiment should be interesting given rich people tend to laugh less; they may find the folk who laugh the most are the people least able to pay 3o Euro cents a giggle.

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