Customer Disservice

Customer Disservice

Mick McWillliams@BELTEDRADIAL+LoflytKULTURE 

If the first apple you bite has worms in it, there's a pretty good chance that in the future you will lean towards oranges.

Consider the true cost of giving your customers the warranty run around (AKA lost future sale).

Incidentally, Mitsubishi and Hyundai both come with a 5 year warranty.

Check out more of the Mitsubishi ASX on Instagram: #INSTANIPANDTRUCK

Google Plus TLDR

I've tried to endure the transition period, deal with the messy association of pages vs. accounts and the interaction of youtube comments and how frustratingly difficult it is to manage all these amazing options that make up the Google account but I still haven't got it right. 

I'm not a professional social media guru. I don't really have the time to sit down and organise every little privacy setting for every follicle of my social media being. The result is a bit of a mishmash of giving too much away, and, things that I want to share hiding in open browser windows, only to be discovered as I shut down for the night. 

Too many dykes, not enough fingers. 

So Google is learning more about me than I really want them to know (get out of my brain!) and so are all those other SM monitoring firms that I have no distinct knowledge of. Algorithms are building the perfect list of things for me to read, based on this leaked information. Links are made and interwebz neurons are fired in the marketed goal of getting me what I supposedly really want.

For someone whom likes to be surprised, I fail to see how that can work. 

I don't hold any great secrets, nor am I overtly protective about my identity, but I do have a massive dislike for homogeny and pop. Since all these companies are tracking my interweb movements, page views, click throughs and whatever, and, companies are paying big dollars for analysis of this information, I can only imagine that the companies that can afford such intelligence are going to have a fair amount of coin. 

Usually, those with said dolleros are peddlers of aforementioned homogeny and pop. Thus, they work out how to target me more effectively. Unfortunately for them, those dollars they spend trying to entice me, are dollars wasted because:

1) I know that clicking on a certain link is measured and contributes to my SEO (or whatever) profile, so I'll deliberately avoid links that I may only have a passing interest in, so as not to create a habit which will see more of the same related ads/products appear.

2) There is ALOT of stuff on the internet. I try to herd said stuff into appropriate corrals via tweetdeck columns and circles on G+ (facebook is just endless shit that I bare just so I can see if my family are still alive) I have so much shit on G+ it's like one massive tweetdeck column with way too much for me to keep up with. It's already TLDR. What chance do suggested pages and "what's pops today" posts have?

Zero and buckleys. It's not ADHD, I'm just too busy to not skip their ads.

If they could really read my mind, they wouldn't spend another cent.

If Ghost Busters Taught Us Anything.....

There are a whole raft of ways you can succeed at a business, but the universal essential key is to identify a need. That need isn't necessarily in demand right now (in fact perceived revolutionary products often hit the market right on the leading edge of demand) but that doesn't mean you need to wait for an ancient diety to open a multidimensional portal to create that demand either.

Take, for example, those poor souls who build anything related to iPhone. Okay so perhaps they're not exactly POOR souls, since they had a few good years already, following Apples products around as the key influence on their own offerings. However, how would you feel when the iPhone 5 comes out and all that new stock you had built in advance of the release, is instantly made redundant by a change in plug configuration?

Likely you'd roam through your warehouse flailing your arms like the staypuft marshmallow man wondering what you're going to do with what is now olde stock! You can't sell it to the kids; they've moved on!

Though there isn't much that could have been done in that case,  there are still examples of companies beating a dead horse for too long. These examples can be found anywhere you find heavy discounts. The product hasn't necessarily gotten any worse,  but the ads have stopped, it's no longer trending and your dad has one.

The speed of fad burnout these days is astronomical and proportionate to the increase in connectivity (which I'll discuss in an entry all it's own) which demonstrates the need for 2 essential ingredients relating to your product

1. Tie the longevity of your product to longevity of the source you used to identify the demand.

Memes for example, are only useful for nimble advertising agencies to produce reactive campaigns. You would not, however, go making ermagerd themed sheet sets.

2. Make/build/generate your stock in accordance with the forecast demand.

Monitor the strength of demand ruthlessly and most importantly, let that information drive the speed of your supply line. If you identify that your supply pipeline is too slow to get product to market in time to meet demand, the risk of being caught with dead stock should justify your investment in improving supply agility.

Remember, if you can't create or react to changes in demand, one day your customers are not going to call any more. They'll want He-Man......