$199 is the new $249
Just a couple years ago, $249 was the magical number that a consumer could purchase any product for themselves without having to justify the expense to their significant other, spouse, or household budget. Whenever I see manufacturers conforming new products to a specific price point, I have to wonder if they are looking at just the short term benefits for the price cut or at the long tail benefits of having the product out in the market.
Magazine Technology
While pulp-based paper is not that expensive and a lot of Pacific Northwest lumber is shipped overseas to developing economies, print has gotten rather pricey and not just for advertisers. And, with new(er) media in play, this opens up a largely untapped digital space for consumers to get information about your products and services. NPR had mentioned today that direct mail catalog publishers are making their content friendlier to tablets and other mobile devices. HTML5 is on the right track but it is hardly the end destination to how digital content consumers will be viewing the Internet in the near future.
Beyond all the pretty pictures and color-rich graphics, what remains the constant is the requirement of increased bandwidth and storage. For consumers to readily adopt such a technology and use it in their daily lives, content has to stream as fast as a plain text email.
There are a few approaches to how customers can view catalogs:
Here are a few examples of sites using online magazine technology:
Edible Portland
Visit Vancouver USA - 2011 Regional Visitor's Guide
eDrive Magazine (an industry publication for electric motor and drive technology)
Beyond all the pretty pictures and color-rich graphics, what remains the constant is the requirement of increased bandwidth and storage. For consumers to readily adopt such a technology and use it in their daily lives, content has to stream as fast as a plain text email.
There are a few approaches to how customers can view catalogs:
- as a physical mailer (pros: can customize pre-filled order forms with a customer's past purchases or giftees; cons: ultra-old school circa 1774, seen as junk mail, customers who shop online don't actually want a printed catalog since the catalog is the merchant's website, lead time requires a lot of planning and all your publishing components being on-time)
- with a web-friendly viewer (html or Flash, pros: a content standard; cons: limited to bandwidth contracts, Flash content can't be shared in the same way of just clipping out the content that a user wants to share rather than sending the entire presentation, requires specialized knowledge and software to look good)
- as a PDF (delivered as a web download or email attachment; pros: easy to use, many complementary "PDF" services to Adobe's standard from 3rd party vendors; cons: device manufacturers are slow to bring PDF-compatibility on-board due to licensing, software, and privacy concerns, limited or nil tracking capabilities for links embedded within PDFs)
- served up as email or web content (old school method circa 1995, pros/cons: easy to use, anyone can do it, an industry standard, not all email service providers allow rich-content to be served within an email, bandwidth/hosting limitations)
- within a rich-media, portable device-friendly reader (iPad, e-reader, smartphone, tablet, etc.; pros: new digital space, no standards for how or how much ad content should display; cons: closed ad networks with exorbitant pricing, few established software content builders, dual-payment system for advertisers and consumers--advertisers pay for ad content to be hosted/delivered to portable devices, consumers pay for the device, bandwidth, and hosting fees to get content, consumer mobile devices are not ad-free)
Here are a few examples of sites using online magazine technology:
Edible Portland
Visit Vancouver USA - 2011 Regional Visitor's Guide
eDrive Magazine (an industry publication for electric motor and drive technology)
Notable Guides (and Blogs) for Small Business Owners
These guides are awesome resources for getting started with a new business or learning about how the tech and social media savvy non-professional marketers get the word out for their products and services.
The Etsy Seller Handbook: All Our How To's About Selling
OPEN Forum (hosted by American Express)
Harvard Business Review Blog
Bootstrapping a Startup (hosted by Businessweek)
SmartBrief - industry news
HubSpot Blog and eBook guides for:
Infographics by Visua.ly - not a guide per se, but a good reference site for how different types of datasets can be represented as graphics.
The Etsy Seller Handbook: All Our How To's About Selling
OPEN Forum (hosted by American Express)
Harvard Business Review Blog
Bootstrapping a Startup (hosted by Businessweek)
SmartBrief - industry news
HubSpot Blog and eBook guides for:
Infographics by Visua.ly - not a guide per se, but a good reference site for how different types of datasets can be represented as graphics.
Holiday Marketing Ideas
And so it begins with Target announcing that it'll open its stores at midnight on November 25 (Black Friday).
Maybe you're just a small business or sole proprietor with limited shelf and store footprint, or you have an online business that's just starting up. Here are a few thoughts about making the upcoming shopping season the best experience for your customers:
Ease of use - make it easy and simple for customers to get in contact with you (telephone, email, Skype, Twitter, Facebook) or to shop at your store; make the research of the product with your online storefront easy to read on multiple formats (this means, no heavy use of graphics or Flash presentations); and add the personal touch of having a live person responding to these inquiries.
Comparable benefits - if you can't match or beat a competitor's low pricing or free shipping offers, then the next best alternative is to have better qualitative benefits such as superior customer service, faster turnaround times (from ordering to delivery), or alternative methods of shipping (maybe time isn't that big of a factor just as long as it gets to its destination within a reasonable amount of time; there is however, a big difference in shipping costs between FedEx, UPS, and USPS).
Get and respond to feedback whether it's positive or negative - Publishing a customer satisfaction survey link using Google Spreadsheet Forms or SurveyMonkey are a cost-effective way of capturing things you want to know about your products and the consumers that use them. You can use a free URL shortener like bit.ly or tinyurl to save on character printing space. Bit.ly even allows you to make custom urls if you have an account with them, for example: http://bit.ly/mktgurlblog
Final note:
Take industry revenue estimates with a grain of salt before comparing the potential of its impact to your niche market. In 2005, Forrester Research estimated that online retail sales would grow from $172 billion in 2005 to $329 billion in 2010. Then, in 2010, Forrester Research suggested that US online retail sales would grow by an average of 10% per year until 2014 from $172 billion to $248 billion. However, the US Commerce Department reported that 2010 e-retail sales in the US to be $165.4 billion.
ComScore draws on online purchase data from its panel of about 1 million U.S. online shoppers. Commerce Department estimates are based on a quarterly survey of more than 11,000 U.S. merchants.
Maybe you're just a small business or sole proprietor with limited shelf and store footprint, or you have an online business that's just starting up. Here are a few thoughts about making the upcoming shopping season the best experience for your customers:
Ease of use - make it easy and simple for customers to get in contact with you (telephone, email, Skype, Twitter, Facebook) or to shop at your store; make the research of the product with your online storefront easy to read on multiple formats (this means, no heavy use of graphics or Flash presentations); and add the personal touch of having a live person responding to these inquiries.
Comparable benefits - if you can't match or beat a competitor's low pricing or free shipping offers, then the next best alternative is to have better qualitative benefits such as superior customer service, faster turnaround times (from ordering to delivery), or alternative methods of shipping (maybe time isn't that big of a factor just as long as it gets to its destination within a reasonable amount of time; there is however, a big difference in shipping costs between FedEx, UPS, and USPS).
Get and respond to feedback whether it's positive or negative - Publishing a customer satisfaction survey link using Google Spreadsheet Forms or SurveyMonkey are a cost-effective way of capturing things you want to know about your products and the consumers that use them. You can use a free URL shortener like bit.ly or tinyurl to save on character printing space. Bit.ly even allows you to make custom urls if you have an account with them, for example: http://bit.ly/mktgurlblog
Final note:
Take industry revenue estimates with a grain of salt before comparing the potential of its impact to your niche market. In 2005, Forrester Research estimated that online retail sales would grow from $172 billion in 2005 to $329 billion in 2010. Then, in 2010, Forrester Research suggested that US online retail sales would grow by an average of 10% per year until 2014 from $172 billion to $248 billion. However, the US Commerce Department reported that 2010 e-retail sales in the US to be $165.4 billion.
ComScore draws on online purchase data from its panel of about 1 million U.S. online shoppers. Commerce Department estimates are based on a quarterly survey of more than 11,000 U.S. merchants.
Fast & Frugal Webinar - Running a Lean Startup with AWS
This was a multipart webinar series that Amazon AWS hosted. I thought that the speakers would shed some light into a few notions that are critically important to small business owners, primarily what a lean startup is, how these startups are using AWS for their business, and how to take this knowledge from webinar to execution. Some parts were way too technical for a mixed business audience.
"Lean" is a concept that is closely associated with manufacturing, and according to Wikipedia it is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Working from the perspective of the customer who consumes a product or service, "value" is defined as any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for. Essentially, lean is centered on preserving value with less work.
Recommendations for Lean Startups:
Use innovation accounting with three learning milestones. (1) establish the baseline to build a minimum viable product and measure how customers behave right now. (2) tune the engine and experiment to see if we can improve metrics from the baseline towards the deal. (3) pivot or persevere when experiments reach diminishing returns, it's time to pivot.
Leverage AWS. Why? Your server infrastructure needs will change. If you are able to run on the same infrastructure at launch and a year later, you overbuilt your launch infrastructure, or even worse, your business is not scaling. Goal: find a Scalable Business Model.
Build your Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Toss the vanity metrics (ones use in frilly reports to senior management, shareholders, or key stakeholders) and instead measure key assumptions that answer what we are trying to prove with this startup. Use 3rd party SaaS metrics or Amazon's elastic mapreduce. Goal: learn from the process, iterate or pivot in a new direction.
Use the building blocks AWS provides. It is on demand, available, elastic (use as much or as little as needed), pay as you go, low cost, no contracts, no upfront payments, and no cap-ex.
Vertical scaling - increase hardware, cpu, memory
Horizontal scaling - increases instance number, master/slave replications
Database sharding - indexes partial customer datasets
Goal: stay lean by using only what you need and reduce costs.
"A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty." --Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup
"Lean" is a concept that is closely associated with manufacturing, and according to Wikipedia it is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Working from the perspective of the customer who consumes a product or service, "value" is defined as any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for. Essentially, lean is centered on preserving value with less work.
 |
| The Toyota Way, an example of a lean process |
Use innovation accounting with three learning milestones. (1) establish the baseline to build a minimum viable product and measure how customers behave right now. (2) tune the engine and experiment to see if we can improve metrics from the baseline towards the deal. (3) pivot or persevere when experiments reach diminishing returns, it's time to pivot.
Leverage AWS. Why? Your server infrastructure needs will change. If you are able to run on the same infrastructure at launch and a year later, you overbuilt your launch infrastructure, or even worse, your business is not scaling. Goal: find a Scalable Business Model.
Build your Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Toss the vanity metrics (ones use in frilly reports to senior management, shareholders, or key stakeholders) and instead measure key assumptions that answer what we are trying to prove with this startup. Use 3rd party SaaS metrics or Amazon's elastic mapreduce. Goal: learn from the process, iterate or pivot in a new direction.
Use the building blocks AWS provides. It is on demand, available, elastic (use as much or as little as needed), pay as you go, low cost, no contracts, no upfront payments, and no cap-ex.
Vertical scaling - increase hardware, cpu, memory
Horizontal scaling - increases instance number, master/slave replications
Database sharding - indexes partial customer datasets
Goal: stay lean by using only what you need and reduce costs.
TED Talks "How to spot a liar", Oct 2011
"Lying is a cooperative act. A lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance. Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie." --Pamela Meyer, author of Liespotting
Attitude indicators are just behaviors. They're not proof of deception. They're red flags which don't mean anything in and of themselves. However, when you see clusters of these red flags that's your signal.
Patterns of Deception:
#1 non-contracted denial (e.g., Clinton's public statment about ML)
- People who are overdetermined in their denial will resort to formal rather than informal language
- Use of distancing language to distance self from another person (e.g., "that woman")
- Use of qualifying language discredits the liar
#2 body language (use science to temper your knowledge)
- Fidgeters freeze their upper bodies when they're lying
- While smiles convey honesty and sincerity, a real smile is in the eyes (wrinkled crows feet can't be consciously contracted)
deceptive person: withdrawn, look down, lower their voice, pause, their story is peppered with way too much detail in all kinds of irrelevant places, blink rate changes, point their feet towards an exit; will take barrier objects and put them between themselves and the person that is interviewing them; will alter their vocal tone, often making their vocal tone much lower
Related articles:
"The Truth About Lying" by Allison Kornet, Psychology Today
"Lying in Everyday Life", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology [PDF]
Radio Lab: Into the Brain of a Liar
Infographics 101
While text and data are standard methods of communicating concepts, infographics do it better. Many infographics shared through social media sites are often intended for humor or satire, and others illustrate market or demographic trends. One should keep in mind how that research was generated because the dissemination of data from a poorly constructed research study is still bad data, regardless of how pretty of a graphic it can be turned into. An infographic can be as simple as showing the different types of clouds relative to the elevations they are typically found at. Infographics can be used to illustrate any data set with meaningful attributions. More data on a picture is not necessarily better or adds more validity.
Notable Infographics
Data Viz Challenge (Google partnered with Eyebeam to sponsor the Data Viz Challenge: Visualize Your Taxes using data provided byWhatWePayFor.com)
Infographic World's The Life and Times of Steve Jobs
Interactive Map: Costs of Hunger
Social Media / Marketing
Randall Munroe's xkcd illustration about Online Communities
Michael A. Stelzner's How Marketers are Using Social Media in 2010
Social Media Facts & Figures for B2B Sales (2010)
NetProspex Social 50
Notable Infographics
Data Viz Challenge (Google partnered with Eyebeam to sponsor the Data Viz Challenge: Visualize Your Taxes using data provided byWhatWePayFor.com)
Infographic World's The Life and Times of Steve Jobs
Interactive Map: Costs of Hunger
Social Media / Marketing
Randall Munroe's xkcd illustration about Online Communities
Michael A. Stelzner's How Marketers are Using Social Media in 2010
Social Media Facts & Figures for B2B Sales (2010)
NetProspex Social 50
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