My bike shop is tucked in the back of a little strip mall not far from Santa Clara University. I say my bike shop, because this is one of those places that truly delivers a Word of Mouth recommendation for customer experience. I also say my bike shop, because if you thought knowing the In and Out secret menu or how to order at Starbucks made you part of an exclusive club, you're still probably SOL when it comes to making it into the inside circle here.
But this post isn't really a Rosetta stone for decrypting the inside language of the bike shop, this is about customer experience.
Not Much Walk In Business
If, by some strange twist of fate, you happened to walk into my bike shop from off the street thinking about buying a bike, they probably aren't going to sell you one. My bike shop doesn't carry a lot of inventory, so the first thing that they will probably do (assuming that they choose to recognize you) is to try and understand why you are there. Part of the fitting process is understanding what you're looking for from cycling, and if it seems like you're one of those people who needs bike Tour-stage winning bike to ride around the park, you probably won't find it here.
My bike shop often sells custom fit bicycles. If you're going to my bike shop to buy a bike, you're probably unlikely to walk out of the store with one on the same day. Also, San Jose has one of the only velodromes in the country, and my bike shop sells track bikes, but if you're one of those bike messenger wannabe's that thinks a fixed gear bike would be cool, they probably won't sell you a bike. The number of mountain bikes for sale in my bike shop -- zero.
My Bike Shop Does a Lot of Business in Repairs
Repairs. Ongoing bicycling maintenance. Relationships with the community. My bike shop understands old school cycling, bicycles and components that last for decades, that can be repaired (and have been repaired) for decades. My bike shop doesn't promote mechanical parts that will be EOLed in five years. From my Italian shift levers to the rubber pieces in my bicycle pump, I can go to my bike shop and get my stuff fixed. As I mentioned in a previous post, I often ride on sew-up tires. These days, most bike shops don't sell sew-ups and few people know what they are -- I trust my bike shop to glue on my sew-ups, and their sign about about sew-ups is probably what made me a customer almost ten years ago.
My bike shop makes you part of their family. They keep two repair stands close to the front counter, and a bench / bleacher seat on the other side of the counter. During the day, it's not uncommon for customers to be sitting around, hanging out in the bleacher seats, visiting with the guys working on bikes. Conversations range from cycling and club rides to politics and bad jokes. Sometimes the language is NSFW. The kid at Performance is just turning a wrench, but YOUR friend is actually fixing YOUR bike.
A Couple of Funny Things
When your a customer of my bike shop, you'd better be riding -- because deep down, you know that the only reason that they let you in the club and that they're willing to do business with you is because you are a cyclist. You aren't just one of those people who buy an off the shelf experience and logo-wear, you are serious about cycling and about the time that you spend in the saddle. Deep down, you and everyone at the shop knows that the only reason why you are allowed to be there is because there is a part of you that lives and breaths cycling. And that's why, if your not riding, you're a disappointment to you and all of your friends. If you're not riding, it means that you don't care, so why should they.
The second funny thing about this whole post is that this word of mouth recommendation isn't. While I stand by my comment that my bike shop is the best bike shop I've dealt with (ever), I'll leave you to guess what shop that I'm talking about. I mean, if my bike shop were suddenly flooded with goomers, my stuff might never get done. Can you imagine how many hours I might have to wait, sitting in the bleacher seats exchanging bike stories if all of you were there too?
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
TechCrunch Highlights Microsoft Site Photo Localization
Here's an interesting post from Michael Arrington at TechCrunch. It points to an image that's used on the standard Microsoft site and on their site for Poland. The image is of a meeting. In the US version, there is a black man sitting at the meeting. In the Polish image, someone has used Photoshop to replace the head of the black man with a white guy's head. Check out the blog post to see the images and for the full story (plus some interesting comments).
The translation world is packed with embarrassment horror stories -- it will be interesting to see how this one unfolds and how big it becomes.
The translation world is packed with embarrassment horror stories -- it will be interesting to see how this one unfolds and how big it becomes.
Mediocre Product Marketing Is Ruining Obama's Approval Rating
Continuing on the theme from my last post, I think it's important to recognize why we're not getting bold reform -- mediocre product marketing.
As a country, we didn't start out with the idea of a 'mediocre reform' product. During the ramp up of the election, there were a lot of promises made about making real reform. Since that time, the job of specifying the product and ironing out the details has fallen to our very own product marketing team, Congress. Acting like a consensus product team that's focused on making safe choices, Congress (with the aid of the White House) has gone the path of safe, uncontroversial features. And while we keep expecting Obama to step in like Steve Jobs, demanding innovation and insisting on a noteworthy product, instead he has chosen the passive management approach, determined to let the country sell what his Congressional product group has designed.
It's one of those great rules of marketing, compromises and safe product choices do not make extraordinary products. They don't engage and excite customers. They don't inspire passion.
Where's our Purple Cow?
Recent polls have also marked a decline in Obama's approval ratings. While conservative columnist David Brooks points to a decline in support from 'independent voters,' economist Paul Krugman writes about declining support among Obama's progressive base. Whatever your political point of view, the real takeaway from this is that nobody is passionate about compromise.
When the debate shifted from a discussion of principles and values, from a leadership discussion focused on the moral imperative of "the right solution" and the essence of the product to a discussion about compromise, a host of audiences instantly became unhappy. They knew that their interests were being sold out.
Instead of focusing on the essence of the design, our Congressional product marketing group is moving toward selling us a crappy product using a laundry list of non-essential features (look, it also has a calendar, a clock with seven different time zones, and an alarm with 148 different ring tones). This non-design approach to design, the feature creep / baffle-em with BS method, is why you get some of those products that are packed with features, but essentially unusable. It's also why Apple's iPhone, with it's 'one-button' interface marked such a design contrast to every smart phone that preceded it.
Crappy Product Marketing Meets Lack of Executive Sponsorship
Keeping everyone focused on the essence of the design starts with defining that core mission. Imagine, in the debate about health care reform, if the objective was defined more narrowly and more boldly. What if, instead of trying to patch the system, the objective was defined something like this: We believe that everyone in America has the right to essential health care and that maintaining the public health is a fundamental component of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Like "provide for the common defense", we are going to ensure that we provide for the common need for health care. By eliminating the costs and concerns of essential health care from individuals and businesses, we can build a better, stronger workforce, stronger companies, and a stronger country.
Perhaps, if we started with some core design goals, our Congressional product development teams could create a decent product and we might get some bold reform.
As a country, we didn't start out with the idea of a 'mediocre reform' product. During the ramp up of the election, there were a lot of promises made about making real reform. Since that time, the job of specifying the product and ironing out the details has fallen to our very own product marketing team, Congress. Acting like a consensus product team that's focused on making safe choices, Congress (with the aid of the White House) has gone the path of safe, uncontroversial features. And while we keep expecting Obama to step in like Steve Jobs, demanding innovation and insisting on a noteworthy product, instead he has chosen the passive management approach, determined to let the country sell what his Congressional product group has designed.
It's one of those great rules of marketing, compromises and safe product choices do not make extraordinary products. They don't engage and excite customers. They don't inspire passion.
Where's our Purple Cow?
Recent polls have also marked a decline in Obama's approval ratings. While conservative columnist David Brooks points to a decline in support from 'independent voters,' economist Paul Krugman writes about declining support among Obama's progressive base. Whatever your political point of view, the real takeaway from this is that nobody is passionate about compromise.
When the debate shifted from a discussion of principles and values, from a leadership discussion focused on the moral imperative of "the right solution" and the essence of the product to a discussion about compromise, a host of audiences instantly became unhappy. They knew that their interests were being sold out.
Instead of focusing on the essence of the design, our Congressional product marketing group is moving toward selling us a crappy product using a laundry list of non-essential features (look, it also has a calendar, a clock with seven different time zones, and an alarm with 148 different ring tones). This non-design approach to design, the feature creep / baffle-em with BS method, is why you get some of those products that are packed with features, but essentially unusable. It's also why Apple's iPhone, with it's 'one-button' interface marked such a design contrast to every smart phone that preceded it.
Crappy Product Marketing Meets Lack of Executive Sponsorship
Keeping everyone focused on the essence of the design starts with defining that core mission. Imagine, in the debate about health care reform, if the objective was defined more narrowly and more boldly. What if, instead of trying to patch the system, the objective was defined something like this: We believe that everyone in America has the right to essential health care and that maintaining the public health is a fundamental component of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Like "provide for the common defense", we are going to ensure that we provide for the common need for health care. By eliminating the costs and concerns of essential health care from individuals and businesses, we can build a better, stronger workforce, stronger companies, and a stronger country.
Perhaps, if we started with some core design goals, our Congressional product development teams could create a decent product and we might get some bold reform.
Monday, August 24, 2009
The Economic Downturn and The Recovery
When you're a marketing pro, you're always monitoring the ebb and flow of economic currents, markets and trends. Recently, there's been a lot of news coming out about promising economic indicators that seem to point to a possible end to the economic downturn. While we're all hopeful that the economy has turned around, one trend that hit my radar centered around news stories about people who are still struggling to find a job.
While the economists can debate whether the downturn has ended, how fast things might ramp back up, and where things are going from here, the job-struggle story fits in with something I've been thinking about lately. Politics? Perhaps, but I think it also touches on a couple of good Silicon Valley marketing themes.
Has there been any real change?
While the Economic Stimulus package focused on 'shovel-ready' infrastructure projects and the TARP bailout was an "all hands bail", throw-buckets-of-money-over-the-side in an effort to right the sinking financial industry, neither of these efforts focused on core transformation or revitalization.
During the past eight years, the government kept pushing the meme that Wall Street was profitable and therefore the economy was strong. For the Bush crew, job statistics were Yet Another Inconvenient Truth. While some may buy into the economy is great message, for most of us that work, the job market is one of our key economic indicators. There are a bunch of us out here in Silicon Valley who remember a time about ten years ago when it wasn't uncommon to have two or three companies fighting to hire you.
These days, the job boards tell a different story. Beyond the few opportunities, what's also telling is the kinds of opportunities that you see listed -- a lot of the openings are administrative positions, openings that may be there from turnover and consolidation. You don't see a lot of the types of positions that you'd associate with growth and new product development.
Reform Takes More that Duct Tape and Chewing Gum
While some may see the 'dot-com' bubble as a result of a land grab across the emerging Internet, the real driver behind all of the dot-com growth was free-flowing investment and the push to develop new opportunities. The build-out of the Internet -- that investment didn't simply represent web sites with sock puppets and pet food, it also included broadband networks, infrastructure, and all of the tools needed to build those next generation platforms.
And while a lot of the growth was written on bad paper that was funded by our retirement savings, the opening of a newly accessible market with broad reach spanning across a range of economic sectors -- network infrastructure, hardware, software, and even the potential for an average goomer to create a web-based business -- combined with some easy entry points and little personal risk for entrepreneurial failure meant the dot-com boom was big for everyone.
If you want to see another example of a new market opening up, look at what happened with Apple launched the iPhone application store. According to Apple, it now receives 8500 new applications and application upgrades every week for review -- and they've reviewed over 200,000 applications. That's over 200,000 entrepreneurial ventures.
Bold initiatives. Whether that means eliminating the risks in being an entrepreneur through programs like eliminating the fear of losing health care coverage or whether it means programs that open opportunities and markets (like a mandate to transform the nation's broadband network infrastructure, increasing bandwidth and making availability to everyone equivalent to lifeline phone service) are what we need. The goal shouldn't just be to bring the economy back to the point where it was at just before the banks started to fail, it should be to bring it back to a time jobs, investment and innovation were the norm.
While the economists can debate whether the downturn has ended, how fast things might ramp back up, and where things are going from here, the job-struggle story fits in with something I've been thinking about lately. Politics? Perhaps, but I think it also touches on a couple of good Silicon Valley marketing themes.
Has there been any real change?
While the Economic Stimulus package focused on 'shovel-ready' infrastructure projects and the TARP bailout was an "all hands bail", throw-buckets-of-money-over-the-side in an effort to right the sinking financial industry, neither of these efforts focused on core transformation or revitalization.
During the past eight years, the government kept pushing the meme that Wall Street was profitable and therefore the economy was strong. For the Bush crew, job statistics were Yet Another Inconvenient Truth. While some may buy into the economy is great message, for most of us that work, the job market is one of our key economic indicators. There are a bunch of us out here in Silicon Valley who remember a time about ten years ago when it wasn't uncommon to have two or three companies fighting to hire you.
These days, the job boards tell a different story. Beyond the few opportunities, what's also telling is the kinds of opportunities that you see listed -- a lot of the openings are administrative positions, openings that may be there from turnover and consolidation. You don't see a lot of the types of positions that you'd associate with growth and new product development.
Reform Takes More that Duct Tape and Chewing Gum
While some may see the 'dot-com' bubble as a result of a land grab across the emerging Internet, the real driver behind all of the dot-com growth was free-flowing investment and the push to develop new opportunities. The build-out of the Internet -- that investment didn't simply represent web sites with sock puppets and pet food, it also included broadband networks, infrastructure, and all of the tools needed to build those next generation platforms.
And while a lot of the growth was written on bad paper that was funded by our retirement savings, the opening of a newly accessible market with broad reach spanning across a range of economic sectors -- network infrastructure, hardware, software, and even the potential for an average goomer to create a web-based business -- combined with some easy entry points and little personal risk for entrepreneurial failure meant the dot-com boom was big for everyone.
If you want to see another example of a new market opening up, look at what happened with Apple launched the iPhone application store. According to Apple, it now receives 8500 new applications and application upgrades every week for review -- and they've reviewed over 200,000 applications. That's over 200,000 entrepreneurial ventures.
Bold initiatives. Whether that means eliminating the risks in being an entrepreneur through programs like eliminating the fear of losing health care coverage or whether it means programs that open opportunities and markets (like a mandate to transform the nation's broadband network infrastructure, increasing bandwidth and making availability to everyone equivalent to lifeline phone service) are what we need. The goal shouldn't just be to bring the economy back to the point where it was at just before the banks started to fail, it should be to bring it back to a time jobs, investment and innovation were the norm.
Friday, August 21, 2009
Fun Post - A Low Cost Sports iPhone Accessory
I'm getting ready to head out for a ride on the bike, but I've got a quick, non-marketing iPhone tip that I thought I might share with you. If you work out or do anything active, you might have considered some sort of water resistant sports case for your phone.
Save your money. My secret - Ziplock Snack Size bags. They are the perfect size for your iPhone and you can actually use the touchscreen while the phone is in the bag. They work great and you can't beat the cost.
Save your money. My secret - Ziplock Snack Size bags. They are the perfect size for your iPhone and you can actually use the touchscreen while the phone is in the bag. They work great and you can't beat the cost.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
TweetDeck may be my new favorite iPhone Twitter Application
Recently, one of my colleagues was talking about the idea of rolling out an internal version of Twitter, and that lead me to some recent exploration into Yammer, a closed "enterprise" tool with some Twitter-like functionality. While doing a bit of experiment with it, I came across a feature that I've heard about with Twitter, but been unable to figure out how to take advantage of -- specifically following hashmark tags.
While researching that, I came across another Twitter client, TweetDeck, that makes it easier to do things like following tags. Tweetdeck features a handy multi-column interface that makes it easy to view and manage multiple Twitter accounts at the same time. So far, I'm pretty impressed. While the user interface takes a little bit of time to get used to (very tiny buttons), once you get the hang of it, it seems pretty powerful. It has a lot of cool functionality built in too.
I also loaded the iPhone app -- I love the interface on the iPhone, but I was able to get the app to crash pretty quickly, just by trying to open a link. There were a bunch of comments about the app crashing, so the jury's still out on the best Twitter iPhone app. Tweetdeck is free, so that is one plus!
TweetDeck is definitely worth checking out.
While researching that, I came across another Twitter client, TweetDeck, that makes it easier to do things like following tags. Tweetdeck features a handy multi-column interface that makes it easy to view and manage multiple Twitter accounts at the same time. So far, I'm pretty impressed. While the user interface takes a little bit of time to get used to (very tiny buttons), once you get the hang of it, it seems pretty powerful. It has a lot of cool functionality built in too.
I also loaded the iPhone app -- I love the interface on the iPhone, but I was able to get the app to crash pretty quickly, just by trying to open a link. There were a bunch of comments about the app crashing, so the jury's still out on the best Twitter iPhone app. Tweetdeck is free, so that is one plus!
TweetDeck is definitely worth checking out.
Can You Make Money with Blogging and Adsense?
It's funny how some 'mainstream' technologies find their way through the cracks, eventually permeating even the most conservative business cultures. I've had several recent discussions with business people about the potential benefits of social networking tools like Twitter. I've also provided a couple of tutorials on Blogger, Adsense, and affiliate programs. I want to highlight one question that stood out though
Can you make money from Adsense through blogging?
One thing to keep in mind with Adsense -- part of the reason why Google's Adwords are such a great program -- is that they are designed to add value and relevance to a search. When you are searching for a keyword and the ad shows up, it's related to what you're looking for.
Now compare that to being part of Google's content network. When you write a blog post, the people who visit are coming there because they've been drawn by your content. In fact, your content could be at the end of their search, not the beginning. If they got there from search, they may already have seen the ads that appear on your blog. And while it's possible that your visitor may have searched "category, widgets" and came across your review of the "ultimate widgets in that category", then saw an ad for the "top widget" and decided to click there, what you're really talking about is a very long, unique sequence of consumer behavior. How many times do you really expect to hit that profile?
That's not to say that including Adsense advertising in your blog is bad or that it's impossible to make money -- it's just important to remember why you're visitors are there and adjust your expectations accordingly.
Can you make money from Adsense through blogging?
One thing to keep in mind with Adsense -- part of the reason why Google's Adwords are such a great program -- is that they are designed to add value and relevance to a search. When you are searching for a keyword and the ad shows up, it's related to what you're looking for.
Now compare that to being part of Google's content network. When you write a blog post, the people who visit are coming there because they've been drawn by your content. In fact, your content could be at the end of their search, not the beginning. If they got there from search, they may already have seen the ads that appear on your blog. And while it's possible that your visitor may have searched "category, widgets" and came across your review of the "ultimate widgets in that category", then saw an ad for the "top widget" and decided to click there, what you're really talking about is a very long, unique sequence of consumer behavior. How many times do you really expect to hit that profile?
That's not to say that including Adsense advertising in your blog is bad or that it's impossible to make money -- it's just important to remember why you're visitors are there and adjust your expectations accordingly.
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