The Holiday Kindle Reading List

Ahh the holidays. A time when it's so cold and/or rainy outside that you just want to curl up with some blankets and a good book, or in this case a digital slate packed to the gills with ebooks checked out from various county libraries. I wonder if Los Angeles County ever audits their customer database. I mean, I don't exactly live here, but my relatives do and that's really all that was needed to get an online library card. Each metro area has a slightly different configuration of available ebooks, audiobooks, and magazine subscriptions. I have to use a different app (Flipster) to read magazines that my own county library subscribes to. Multnomah County Library allows you to read magazines in a browser directly from the OverDrive app.

Onward, to the books! Here's what's in the Kindle:

E-Books:

Audiobooks:

The best part about the Overdrive app for public libraries is that you can download all the chapters of the audiobook to your smartphone or tablet; then listen to them on the airplane.. or wherever.

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Industries most impacted by the pandemic

The following industries have been most affected by the pandemic impact on supply and demand in the US:

  • Travel and hospitality: The travel and hospitality industries have been hit particularly hard by the pandemic. This is due to the fact that people are traveling and staying in hotels less due to the pandemic.
  • Retail: The retail industry has also been affected by the pandemic. This is due to the fact that people are shopping less in stores and more online due to the pandemic.
  • Manufacturing: The manufacturing industry has also been affected by the pandemic. This is due to the fact that there are supply chain disruptions and factories have had to slow or even stop production due to the pandemic.
  • Food and beverage: The food and beverage industry has also been affected by the pandemic. This is due to the fact that there are supply chain disruptions and restaurants have had to close or reduce hours due to the pandemic.
  • Healthcare: The healthcare industry has also been affected by the pandemic. This is due to the fact that there is an increased demand for healthcare services due to the pandemic.

It is important to note that these are just a few of the industries that have been affected by the pandemic impact on supply and demand. There are many other industries that have been affected, and the impact has varied from industry to industry.

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Things you should know about Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest version of Google's analytics platform. It was released in October 2020 and is a significant upgrade from the previous version, Universal Analytics (UA). GA4 is designed to be more flexible, scalable, and privacy-focused.

Here are some of the key differences between GA4 and UA:

  • Data model: GA4 uses an event-based data model, while UA uses a session-based data model. This means that GA4 tracks individual events, such as page views, button clicks, and form submissions, while UA tracks sessions, which are groups of related events that occur within a certain time period.
  • Attribution modeling: GA4 offers a variety of attribution models, while UA only offers a few. This means that GA4 can give you a more accurate picture of how your marketing efforts are driving conversions.
  • Privacy: GA4 is designed to be more privacy-focused than UA. This means that GA4 collects less data about users and makes it easier for users to control their privacy settings.
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Persona Marketing vs Account-Based Marketing

Thanks to the rise of Marketo and its plethora of early adopters, the company has pushed the concept of why to switch (from Pardot, Eloqua, etc.) with Account-Based Marketing. The content language of which speaks to the many pain points of commonly used marketing automation tools. The fact of the matter is that both concepts require a lot of content to be created just to make a decent waterfall or drip marketing campaign.

 Persona-based marketing really looks at data segmentation as its main focus for generating content for different decision makers and influencers in customer lifecycle management. For example. when targeting K-12 institutions as a software developer of an educational platform, your buyer personas may include superintendents, edtech buying consortiums (NY does this, for instance), principals; and the influencers may include teachers, students, and perhaps even PTA groups, if they are involved with new technology purchases or adoptions within a school district. It's also used by electronics manufacturers as well that sell direct or through distributors into businesses. With persona-based marketing, not every persona that is targeted with marketing content is a viable buyer. Most are information seekers and will eat up valuable production time creating digital content assets for their insatiable appetites. But, it is all good in the long run because these people are very vocal within their own organizations if they really like what you have to offer.

 With both styles, your market strategy for reaching out to customers is based on a few firmographic segmentations to start: industry/vertical markets, revenue, location
Read more »
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Marketing Automation : AutoResponders

In this weekend's newsletter browsing, I scanned through a few headlines from Retail Dive and found that our local Powell's Books announced they were discontinuing use of Amazon.com for distribution of books. If you're a small business, Fulfillment by Amazon is probably not the way you want to go. The fees will eat up any profit you're hoping to gain for each item you list and advertise on the Amazon platform. But, this post isn't about FBA or supporting local retailers.

As part of the ad interstitials on Retail Dive, Validity offered a guide titled "Email Marketing for Retailers: The Complete Guide to Maximizing Your Email ROI". Looks intriguing, so I clicked. Got the guide and two autoresponder messages. The first had a subject line of "Your requested content: Email Marketing for Retailers". This is fine and expected. The email does everything right. It acknowledges that a request was made, includes a link for the PDF guide, and has other helpful information about the company's publicly available digital resources.

However, what immediately followed was a second auto-responder with the subject line of "Your Sender Score is step one." with content about welcoming and thanking me for checking my sender score.. which I did not do at all. Let this be a reminder to you about copying existing campaigns to repurpose for future campaigns, whether you use Pardot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud (aka ExactTarget), HubSpot, or other marketing automation tool. I can tell by the subdomain of the email content that Validity uses Pardot. Anyhow. Just a note of caution.

The execution looked flawless ... until I received that second irrelevant email.

I can also imagine that the second email was part of an engagement drip campaign, intended to start as soon as any content was downloaded by a prospect. So that is entirely possible as well.

If you want your own retail emails to keep their momentum and mindshare, don't make simple mistakes like this. Don't just assume that someone wants to hear of your other offerings right after they downloaded unrelated content from your website or marketing campaigns.

It's kind of rude. Heck, I haven't even finished reading the guide.

Commuter Podcasts

When I use public transit to commute from Vancouver to Portland, I could nap.. or I could fill my head with other things, such as podcast content. It's a 40 minute ride in the morning (provided that I hop on a bus before 7am) and an hour ride home (if I leave downtown Portland at 4pm), of course this is the inflexibility of the express bus that C-Tran (Vancouver) has; however, with the plague of humanity outside, transit travel is bit disrupted with travel times. I aim for podcasts that are about 30 mins to an hour long. I typically listen to business podcasts in the morning, and something fiction/sci fi/horror in the afternoon. It's likely that Android smartphones have the function as well as iPhones, but with the Podcasts app, I can download podcast episodes and then just listen on the go without having to rely on cellular data for podcast listening when away from wifi. Links are to the show's website, if one exists.

Non-fiction, less than 30 mins:
Non-fiction, 30 mins to an hour:
Non-fiction, about an hour or longer:
Fiction, 30 mins to an hour:
A side note: If you have financial or company data on your phone, don't connect to public wifi even if your bus or train has it. Just saying. Better be safe than sorry after the fact.
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The Online Brand Experience

Domino's has been running a lot of web ads for their Order 2 or more $5.99 per item coupon special; though, there appears to be a lot of mistakes in how their ecommerce engine is currently setup. Though, it could also just be user error. While adding items to a future order, the pricing and item descriptions are wrong. Well, the 8-piece chicken wings is showing up as a 4-piece menu item on the cart checkout screen. Is it 4 or 8 pieces? Maybe in an earlier incarnation of their online menu it was a 4-piece menu add-on item and nobody told the design team that the offer is for eight pieces. In fact, if you were to increase the order size for chicken wings, the base number of pieces is eight. Makes no sense at all.

 Here is a screenshot:
2020-07-14 Screen Shot of Domino's Cart Checkout
Once you add the second item, the menu has a prompt that asks if you want to add a 3rd item for $5.99. Well. I don't know about your math skills, but $6.99 is a 15% price hike from $5.99.

 Also, your second (or nth) item cannot be another pizza. This is sad because two medium 2-topping pizzas for $12 would be a total steal, I mean, a good deal.
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The Juneteenth Branding Scramble

One of the crowd source outcomes of these #BLM protests is the public's reaction to state and city monuments regarding key figures of our nation's history. These are former presidents, politicians, and war "hero" figures who transformed our nation a couple hundred years ago...such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, etc., and pro-Confederacy monuments in the southern US states (e.g., Jefferson Davis). Here's a site that goes into detail about Juneteenth, celebrated annually on June 19. I'm pretty sure most people in the US have not really heard nor seen any cultural awareness festivals surrounding this non-holiday significant date; unless you live in Texas where it became a state holiday in 1980.

 Racism is a hot topic this year and legacy brands want to be seen as being culturally sensitive to its consumers. These companies have announced that they're changing their racial stereotype product images of certain branded products:

  • PepsiCo / Quaker Oats North America
    • Aunt Jemima (product features a black woman)
  • Mars Inc
    • Uncle Ben's (logo features a black man)
    • B&G Foods - Cream of Wheat (logo features a black chef)
  • Conagra Brands
    • Mrs. Butterworth's (a matronly-shaped bottle since 1961)
  • Land o' Lakes - changed its almost 100-year old logo earlier this year to replaced the focal image of a Native American woman with the text "farmer owned"
Do you think brands are overreacting to public sentiment? Why would it matter if a black man or woman is a spokesperson for a consumer product? To me, as an Asian consumer, these products don't appear to have a sinister, racist motive for featuring African Americans in their product packaging.

If there were really such a fervor over racism on branded packaging, why then are Aunt Jemima and Mrs. Butterworths the two most popular syrup brands by product revenue? 130.59 million Americans used Aunt Jemima and 51.8 million American used Mrs Butterworths in 2019, according to Statista. 54.86 million Americans consumed Uncle Ben's rice and rice dishes in 2019 (source: Statista), yielding $11 million in annual revenue.

Frankly, I'm not sure that a logo change would help you sell more product to the demographics that already purchase the product based on other factors: price, availability, taste, quality, etc. For brands that have been around for a long time, these announcements seem more like a PR stunt than anything else. IMHO. 

I suppose time will tell us if the logo rebrand has helped Land o' Lakes capture more consumer market share next year when they celebrate their 100th anniversary.
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Library Kindle Reading List

Here's what's currently on the Kindle. Eventually I'll get through most of these and maybe even write a review of it. The current theme revolves around negotiation and its related tools subset: influence, charisma, and competitive intelligence gathering. Marketing is a lot like that. In the product and services content we write, we try to get you (the consumer) to want our products and services. 

It is unlikely that I'll get through all of these in the 21 days the library lets me read these books. But, fortunately, there's the renew button. Unfortunately, there is a long wait list for many of these titles. 

 If you're more of an audiophile, you can see Chris Voss' presentations on TED, Talks at Google, or listen to the Armchair Expert podcast.
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How AR is Making Marketing More Personal and Engaging

There are a number of ways that companies are implementing marketing campaigns using augmented reality (AR) apps. Here are a few examples:

  • Product visualization: AR can be used to allow customers to visualize products in their own environment. This can be helpful for products that are difficult to visualize, such as furniture or home appliances. For example, Ikea has an AR app that allows customers to see how different pieces of furniture would look in their homes.
  • Instructions and tutorials: AR can be used to provide customers with instructions and tutorials on how to use products. This can be helpful for products that are complex or difficult to use. For example, Lego has an AR app that allows customers to see how to build their sets.
  • Games and experiences: AR can be used to create games and experiences that are fun and engaging for customers. This can help to build brand awareness and loyalty. For example, Coca-Cola has an AR app that allows customers to play a game where they collect virtual cans of Coke.
  • Discounts and promotions: AR can be used to offer customers discounts and promotions. This can help to drive sales and traffic to businesses. For example, McDonald's has an AR app that allows customers to scan food items to see if they are on sale.

AR marketing campaigns can be monetized in a number of ways. Some common methods include:

  • Selling advertising space: AR apps can be used to sell advertising space to businesses. This can be a lucrative source of revenue for app developers.
  • Charging for access to content: AR apps can be used to charge customers for access to content, such as games, experiences, or tutorials. This can be a good way to generate revenue from customers who are willing to pay for premium content.
  • Data collection: AR apps can be used to collect data about customers, such as their demographics, interests, and spending habits. This data can be valuable to businesses that want to better understand their customers and target them with relevant marketing messages.

AR marketing is still in its early stages, but it has the potential to be a powerful tool for businesses. As AR technology continues to develop, it is likely to become increasingly common in marketing campaigns.

For reference (company and app launch year):

  • IKEA Place: 2017
  • LEGO AR Studio: 2015
  • Coca-Cola Freestyle AR Experience: 2016
  • McDonald's Happy Meal AR App: 2019
  • Sephora Virtual Artist: 2017
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Supply Chain Disruption in Uncertain Times

What we are experiencing now is not the new normal. Uncertain times have always been around; some are triggered by macroeconomic factors (unemployment, inflation, economic output), others by the planet trying to kill off humans, terrorism, or poorly written/enforced retail and commercial <insert your industry flavor> industry laws at the state or national level.

 Notable Supply Chain Disruptions:

  • 20XX - global forest fires impacting raw materials sourcing and the construction industry
  • 2007-2008 - residential lending banking crisis; LIBOR rate collusion and fraud; foreclosure filings increased by more than 81% in 2008
  • 2011 - every company using Just-In-Time manufacturing was impacted, as well as all air travel within the US
  • 2015 - Avian Flu outbreak in the US; millions of chickens destroyed, egg production drops significantly to cause egg prices to skyrocket
  • 2017 - Cyclone Enawo struck Madagascar and wipes out 90-100% vanilla bean production in its Antalaha region and 80% of the crop in Sambava; price of vanilla skyrockets 4x its usual trading price; also, prior to the weather event, vanilla farms in other tropical countries had been cutting back on production in order to produce more lucrative crops such as coffee and palm oil
  • 2019 - African Swine Fever - shrunk China's global herd by 55%, expected herd to decline by another 25%, and China pork production to fall by 10% to 15% in 2020;  impact to soybeans produced and exported by US farms for animal feed
  • 2019-2020 - COVID-19 affects multiple industries everywhere
You might think that you're not impacted by vanilla bean production since you don't eat sweets, right? Natural vanilla products are in more than just dairy products (ice cream, yogurt, flavored milk), beverages, and baked goods. Vanilla flavor is in 18,000 global products including breakfast cereal, snacks, perfumes, skincare creams/lotions, and cosmetic products. Price per pound of natural vanilla was $300 in 2017, $600 per 2.2 lbs (1 kg) in 2018, and a slight improvement in 2019 as vanilla production gets better at $450 per kg. Remember when real vanilla extract was less than $10 per 16 fluid oz at Costco? Well that same bottle currently sells for $30 today. One ingredient can impact so many businesses.

2009-2019 Price of Vanilla
Image Source: Cook Flavoring Company
Fast-forward to today's supply chain issues among suppliers, distributors, and end-users (consumers, businesses).

 What's up:

  • companies that are deemed "essential"
  • retail stores that offer delivery, take-out, or store pick-up (grocery stores, restaurants, 
  • manufacturers of personal protection equipment (PPE) and ventilators
  • companies that managed to pivot their production from whatever to PPE and medical supply (e.g., GE, Tesla, GM, beer/spirits manufacturing)
  • subscription boxes w/ free or reduced delivery costs (e.g., meal prep kits, pre-made meals, DIY kits)
  • Amazon - has now removed the product ban on non-essential products shipping to their warehouses
  • Wal-mart - app downloads surpasses Amazon (14.4 mil in the US, 106 mil global uploads)
  • software companies that create/support online learning platforms and video conferencing
  • furniture and hardware companies that create/support remote office and work from home
  • pharmaceuticals working on a vaccine for COVID-19
  • distributed computing apps that rely on crowdsourced content, support, donations (e.g., Einstein@home, Folding@home)
  • fabric wholesalers or retailers (e.g., JoAnn's)


 What's down:

  • everyone else not "essential"
  • rideshare services (Lyft, Uber, etc.)
  • homeshare/rental services (AirBnB, Vacasa, etc.)
  • airport & travel services
  • outdoor event venues
  • movie theaters / entertainment industry
  • live performances
  • schools, churches, local government offices
  • regional seafood supply & production - since dine-in restaurants and schools are shut down; seasonal seafood has nowhere to go
  • consumer automotive sales (might have to transition to more online sales)
  • ridership on public transit
  • global oil demand & decrease in per barrel price
  • amusement parks
  • city/county parks that attract larger crowds
  • trade shows and conventions
  • indoor/outdoor festivals and parades (e.g., regional fireworks show)


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Startup Resources for Remote Work, Pandemic Response

Never in my lifetime have I seen 17 million people file for unemployment within a few weeks. Couple that with all the country-specific travel restrictions, and the shutdown of certain retail industry sectors: entertainment, in-store dining, travel, brick 'n mortar stores, and from a state mandate, closure of non-essential businesses such as daycare centers, hair salons, eateries w/o takeout or delivery options, etc. 

 Here is a compilation of resources that your small business or startup may find useful:

 Video conferencing. Alternatives to Zoom conferencing if user privacy is a concern:



COVID-19 Response Plans. HR policies and procedures that address health and safety of employees


Remote Work Policies & Tools (examples):

Grants and other non-money assistance:
  • Google - $340 million in Google Ads credits available to all SMBs with active accounts over the past year


Small Business Gov't Resources


WA State
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Data-driven diversity and inclusion

This was the topic of an HR.com webcast. Data and artificial intelligence are trending topics for human resources professionals. Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) has been a workplace hot topic for a number of years.

 Organizational impacts of D&I:

  • Organizations with inclusive cultures are twice as likely to meet or exceed financial targets than those without (source: Deloitte)
  • 21% of companies that have greater gender diversity are more likely to have higher profitability (source: McKinsey)
Measurable Diversity (examples)
  • ratio of male to female employees
  • ratio of white to non-white or mixed ethnicity
  • percent of leadership team is female
  • percent of board of directors is ethnically diverse

Workplace Inclusion
  • Why diverse candidates opt out of the recruitment cycle
  • Why high performing diverse employees leave after 2 year
Facets of diversity to consider include: gender identity, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, educational background, family or caregiver status, native language, physical abilities, and veteran status.

Read more:

 Visier's Big Book of People Analytics: D&I
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California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA)

This privacy act became effective on January 1, 2020.

The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA) is a law that gives California residents more control over their personal information. The CCPA applies to businesses that collect personal information from California residents and that meet certain thresholds, such as having annual gross revenue of $25 million or more, collecting the personal information of more than 50,000 California residents, or deriving more than 50% of their annual revenue from selling personal information.

The CCPA gives California residents the following rights:

  • The right to know what personal information a business has collected about them.
  • The right to delete their personal information.
  • The right to opt out of the sale of their personal information.
  • The right to non-discrimination for exercising their CCPA rights.

Businesses that collect personal information from California residents must comply with the CCPA. If a business violates the CCPA, it may be subject to civil penalties of up to $7,500 per violation.

The CCPA is a landmark law that gives California residents more control over their personal information. It is likely to have a significant impact on businesses that collect personal information from California residents.

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