Pixies, the Tooth Fairy and Big Foot have got nothing on Apple’s word of mouth phenomenon. The iPad was finally revealed today and brought the myth to a glorious Steve Jobs crescendo.
Under-spec’d, over-priced, underwhelming? Whatever. This thing is a glimpse of the future and it’s exciting – for some.
It’s certainly another nail in the coffin of traditional newspaper business. Take The Guardian for example: sales of 350,000 daily printed broadsheets need to pay for the 30 million visitors to their website (plus online ads, granted).
The iPad is another bullet the industry must’ve hoped to dodge. With ubiquitous use of smart phones, eReaders and tablets just around the corner, the physical paper is in the ICU. Long live the tree.
Wednesday was also the 100th anniversary of the death of Thomas Crapper, the man who revolutionised the flushing lavatory. Timely metaphor anyone?
Unless you’ve been on Mars this week, you’ll know all too well that Kraft have now purchased Cadbury.
Well, it now turns out that Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and UBS, hired by Cadbury, are – thanks to the purchase – to be paid more than if they’d successfully defended the hostile takeover.
It’s easy to flow with the anti-bank sentiment at the moment, but throughout the process we were led to believe that Cadbury’s management were hell-bent on seeing off the greedy American and retaining a British jewel. Let’s remember, Kraft is only in buying mood because they think organic growth is unlikely and Cadbury has a bigger future ahead of itself. They sounded like a deer being hounded by a savage tiger. Now it’s apparent that they gave the gatekeepers strong odds to leave the door open!
Nice to see the basic theory of management is still alive and well: what you reward, gets done.
Warren Buffet, Kraft’s largest shareholder, felt their shares were undervalued so instructed 500p in cash make up the 840p offer. That’s around £7 billion in bank debt added to balance sheet.
I guess it’s only fair banks both sides of the pond maxed out, right?
Following their best Christmas to date, the very on-form John Lewis was recently voted Britain’s best shop by Verdict and its 6,000 shoppers. Let’s be honest, what’s not to like? The stores are upmarket but unpretentious. They’ve a quality product offering and peerless customer service.
John Lewis is different from normal retailers. They’re known as a bell-wether for high street trading, not because they mimic other retailers but because they report sales figures weekly as opposed to the normal quarterly results from the likes of Tesco and M&S. They are incredibly transparent; a throwback to being a ‘partnership’, owned by its 69,000 employees partners. This transparency and an old fashioned willingness to ‘serve’ clearly run through this business.
Although, that said, the latest ForeSee Christmas E-Retail Satisfaction Index tells a slightly different story of their online offering. In this brief but excellent study of the top 40 retailers (according to traffic), Amazon trump John Lewis as clear overall winners.
JL did come out on top when looking at the multichannel category, ahead of Boots and HMV. Most surprisingly of the pure plays (Internet only retailers) ASOS rank seventh, behind QVC and M&M Direct.
Regardless, both polls show JL is getting it very right where its customers are concerned. If I were Andrea O’Donnell, JL’s Commercial Director, I’d be very pleased but a little puzzled as to how a cold pure play like Amazon could best me when customers can’t even speak to an individual, let alone be impressed by one. Email updates obviously go a long way.
It’s pretty much a given that SMEs are more likely to be passionate about what they do than lumbering corporates answering to the City. Let’s be honest, most SMEs don’t tend to start a gardening business if they can’t stand the sight of grass.
Unfortunately, that passion can overrun into myopia where those in business only play to themselves – the People Like Us syndrome.
I’m sure you hear it in your office all the time: I’d never buy it for my home (so I assume my customers wouldn’t either)… my wife wouldn’t like it (so let’s leave it out of the catalogue)…. I’m not sure we’ve the market for that here (because they wouldn’t pay for it themselves).
It’s said that ‘me’ and ‘I’ are some of the worst words to use in a sales pitch because the customer doesn’t care about you or your likes and dislikes relating to that car, that printer or that fridge freezer. They’re not buying for a complete stranger (i.e. the salesperson); they’re buying for themselves to satisfy selfish reasons.
People Like Us is the other side of the same coin to be avoided in business.
Charging for postage is the perennial debate of e-commerce. I think Amazon’s decision this week to extend its free postage charge trialled before Christmas might favour a good deal more consumers than Amazon serves. I can see other retailers having to follow suit as they look to win a friend and gain a client from their competitors.
You can almost see it as a cost per acquisition – how much would you pay a 3rd party to get you a customer? Is it cheaper than banner ads and affiliate percentages?
Then again, when Amazon can charge $3 billion for a Discovery Channel CD-ROM, maybe taking the hit on their postage bills wont hurt the P&L so much.
I posted previously about how I saw the web unfolding in 2010. One of my pointers was about on-site search and how bad it is in general. I recommended that the big players team up with the search engines to get it right.
Well, Google beat me to the deadline and launched its Google Commerce search offering toward the end of 2009, not 2010. I’ll be really interested to see who takes this on and how the technology (and partnership) affects their sites.
At $50,000+, it costs more than most SMEs would have in their site development budgets and I’m not sure the M&Ss or Nexts of the world would ever really incorporate it, but what a great plug in.
Pixies, the Tooth Fairy and Big Foot have got nothing on Apple’s word of mouth phenomenon. The iPad was finally revealed today and brought the myth to a glorious Steve Jobs crescendo.
