Oct 2, 2011 | Customers, Marketing, Personal Rant
Earlier today, Sunday, about 4.45, just before the League grand final kicked off, I got a phone call on my mobile from Optus. Well, sort of phone call, it was an automated call, some recording telling me they had something important to talk to me about, and it would only take a few minutes. Once we got that far, the call was ended.
There are plenty of ways for Optus to connect with me, to market to me, after all, I have all my services with them, despite being “stiffed” recently by them, changing is all a bit hard, and the others are not any better anyway, so I just swallow hard. Like most of us.
These clowns spend millions on “marketing”, TV, radio, magazines, social media, spin doctors, franchising sales outlets, call centres, the whole 9 yards, but they clearly do not have any idea about marketing, they just know how to spend money on media.
Using an automated service to ring a customer and ask for his attention on a Sunday afternoon, any Sunday afternoon, but this one? to talk about “something important,” presumably to their revenue, beggars belief.
You could not make this stuff up!! How stupid can they be??
Sep 23, 2011 | Communication, Customers, Innovation, Small business, Social Media
Ask a SME manager in packaged goods, “would you like a phone call from Woolworths ordering stock of your new product for every store in the country?” and you will most likely get a tear with the nodded head.
Enter the “Orabrush” story, they got the call from Walmart without any of the usual begging.
There are many hurdles for SME’s in the packaged goods industry to jump before distribution in the major retailers can be obtained, and then the problems really start, because SME’s lack the resources to move the product off shelf before the trial period runs out.
Social media has helped over the past couple of years, you now have the opportunity to reach highly targeted groups of consumers, and deliver them a message, but generally it has not helped much to get the product on shelf in the first place.
Orabrush really broke the mass market model with a product I still find odd, but great creativity and lateral thinking combined with social media has turned the product into a hit, and can now be found in Walmart stores around the world
Have a look at the Youtube ads in the link, gems.
Sep 16, 2011 | Customers, Management, Sales, Small business
SME’s in the Australian food industry are up against it if they see their futures as suppliers to the major chains, who require a combination of utter commitment, globally competitive costs, and supply certainty requiring substantial scale and the attendant capital base.
Added to all that, small business has it all in front of them in any stoush with a large corporation. Metcash, the nations largest wholesaler, and effectively the third force in Australian FMCG via its supply arrangements with independent retailers seems to relish a fight.
They chose to fight Andrew Bunn, a small retailer in Canberra who went to the wall, and then accused Metcash of breaking their supply contract. The blue Metcash then picked with the ACCC over their proposed purchase of Franklins has been entertaining. Metcash informed the ACCC they would go ahead with their purchase of the Franklins chain from Pick n Pay before the ACCC delivered its decision, ballsy call, justified as the Federal Court gave them the go-ahead, but the ACCC is now appealing the decision. Who knows what will happen next, but the ACCC must assert its power in the marketplace or become irrelevant, but whilst the legal stuff drags on Franklins is bleeding cash, virtually removing them from the scene as an ongoing concern, whoever owns them.
I’m sure there is more to come, but none of it matters much to the SME manufacturer facing a small number of retail gorillas who exercise their power ruthlessly, and without any empathy with their suppliers. The ghost of Eric Bender who inhabits the memory of the few of us still around who dealt with him, would shake his head in dismay, and take another drag.
Sep 8, 2011 | Customers, Management, Marketing, Operations, Small business
The mulitnational Heinz has been in the news a bit recently.
First, they announce a restructure, which means closing plants, and consolidating production, in this case to NZ, and to a remaining Australian plant that will get a bit of a kick-along. Wonder how long that will last?
Then the worldwide CFO Art Winkleblack took aim at the retail duopoly in Australia, citing it as a reason for the difficulties Heinz has had, and as a basis of the restructuring decisions. I bet the local sales management loved him for it, the next time they had to front Coles and Woolies!
In a short period, the challenges of the industry are laid bare, the $A making imports cheaper, the power exercised by the retail duopoly, and the necessity of manufacturing and marketing scale to counter it.
If Heinz, a global business turning over close to a billion dollars in Australia, and many more globally has these problems, put yourself in the position of the SME, with little marketing leverage, a plant that needs capital, banks that are so risk averse, and so stripped of people who understand small business they simply choose not to engage, how can the little guy hope to sustain his business?. Pure bloody mindedness and determination is about the only answer you will come up with, mixed in with a spirit of being prepared to really have a go, and screw the buggars!.
We wonder why we have more imports of packaged food products into this country than we produce, the position Heinz finds itself in demonstrates why.
Sep 7, 2011 | Collaboration, Communication, Customers, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Chatting to a very successful distributor during the week at Sydney’s Fine Food trade show, he said he simply did not “get” facebook and Twitter as marketing tools. “I will wait till my 14 year old daughter gets interested in the business, and does it for me” he said, “but I guess I should be doing something, just too busy to think about it”
Pretty typical in my experience of SME’s and their relationships with social media, just something else to do, and no more time to do it in!
So here are a few thought starters, simple things to do with facebook to turn it from something else to do, to the most important tool ever put in your hands to engage with your customers.
- Change the “face” regularly, the picture on the landing page, the animation, put up some simple recipes of the day, week, or season, just make it interesting. Even Google changes their landing page almost daily, putting up some design that is topical for some reason .
- Have a page where visitors to your site can engage, you just become the facilitator. In the case of food marketers, a place to exchange recipes, cooking techniques, photos of finished dishes, and people enjoying them seems like a sensible idea.
- Make sure you have a spot where other platforms that may be of interest to visitors can be reached, allow them to add their own links to spots they like.
- Have good quality, relevant content, and make sure you keep it fresh.
- Have a range of incentives rolling through, these might be anything from samples and deals, to points type accumulation programs for a prize.
- Make giving easy. If we are talking food products here, and I am, create seasonal hampers and gift to a friend offers, a Xmas hamper delivered to a customers friend with seasons greetings will always go down well.
- Enable Q & A pages, and conversation streams. This may be on the page, or in a linked blog if the topics are a bit more serious. In the Australian food game, SME’s are struggling for survival in a retail oligopoly where housebrands are being pushed by retailers, and imports are growing on the back of the high $A. There is plenty to talk about, some of it commercial and perhaps not engaging for consumers, so keep it linked but separate and do not be afraid to tackle serious stuff, just be a bit careful.
- Be responsive to posts fans put up, engage in the conversations yourself, just don’t try to dominate it.
- Make sure you have a strong call to action, not too overtly commercial, but the point of it is ultimately to get a sale, so find creative ways of asking for the order.
- Ask for visitors ideas, views, and thoughts. Where better to test a new product idea, and do some focussed qualitative mrket research than with those already engaged.
- Watch and learn from what others are doing, the web is a great big learning experience. Social Media Examiner is one site that often puts up very useful information, here is a list of the top 10 SME sites from around the world they have just judged, some good pointers in there.
- And last of all, make it fun, and never let down someone who visits and engages!
This is all pretty easy stuff technically, it just takes time to plan, assemble the content, and make it happen. My distributor friend can probably get his 14 year old daughter to do it for fun, you don’t have to pay someone big bucks, you just need to engage in the conversation as you would over the back fence to your neighbour.
Aug 11, 2011 | Customers, Lean, Sales
Last week I spent over 2 hours on the phone to Optus trying to fix something they had stuffed up, the third try, after speaking to their techies and emailing the bloke who “signed” a form letter to, thanking me for taking on the service they stuffed up. Annoying? no, bloody irritating, being shuffled around their departments, nobody taking any responsibility for the stuff-up, but reciting how important my call was to them.
With the emphasis on speed nowadays, how quick is the connection, how rapidly fulfillment happens, how quickly the email is answered, we are used to “quick” and when it does not happen, we get angry very quickly indeed.
Clearly Optus are cutting costs, employing people in their call centres who have no authority to fix a problem, or even suggest a solution, and anything not on the printed frequent question/appropriate response list gets shuffled elsewhere. They wasted a lot of time, across several departments, and I wasted a couple of hours, and need a new head gasket. No wonder these Telco’s have a lot of customer churn, how easy it would have been for the first person to whom I spoke to be allowed just a little bit of initiative and it would all have gone away in 5 minutes.
It may cost a little bit of money to enable staff to deal effectively with customers, but how much would be saved in time, customer churn reduction, and reducing the advertising and deals necessary to attract the annoyed customers of other Telco’s to come to them to replace those leaving?
This is a challenge for every organisation, as the speed of things increases, the expectation is the effectiveness of the response will increase at the same rate, and it doesn’t, so we get pissed, and everybody wastes time, effort, resources, energy and perhaps most importantly, hard won brand loyalty.
What a waste.
