Posted by truecreek on January 13, 2010 under More Dam News | 
Aiming to please too many different types of customers can be a fatal flaw. Focus on your core audience and don’t waste money on the rest.
By Steve McKee
Do a quick exercise: Take a minute and jot down three types of customers your company doesn’t want. Oh, and this is important: You can’t choose people like shoplifters or “sale-hoppers”—the kind of customers that no business wants.
If you’re like most business leaders, identifying customers you don’t want isn’t easy, especially in times like these. But it can be helpful to consider which of your customers are least important, if for no other reason than to help you focus on the most important ones.
We’re all familiar with the old saying, “you can’t be all things to all people.” Yet in business, too often that’s what we end up trying to be. General Motors is a prime example (and look where it got them). There was a time when each GM nameplate was narrowly targeted toward a certain demographic, leaving other company brands to serve their own slice of customers. But over the past several decades, as each GM brand expanded its lineup to serve as many different customers as possible—sports cars for the sporty, minivans for young families, trucks for working people—they ended up stepping on each other’s toes.
Consider one of those famous brands now slated for the scrap heap: Pontiac. Back in the ’60s and ’70s, Pontiac was defined by drool-inducing muscle cars such as the GTO, Firebird, and TransAm. The Pontiac brand meant power, styling and cool. Its appeal wasn’t for everyone, but it was powerful for some. Since that time, however, Pontiac has introduced a host of new models like the Trans Sport (a minivan), Sunfire (a compact car), Aztek (an SUV crossover), and Vibe (a hatchback). It’s unclear who, exactly, Pontiac has not been trying to serve, which is another way of saying it’s been aiming to please too many masters. And soon Pontiac will be gone, as will several other once-proud brands in the GM stable.
It could be that Wal-Mart (WMT) will learn from the GM example. The company has been attracting a lot more upscale customers of late, for obvious reasons. In the first quarter of 2009, 17% of Wal-Mart’s retail visits were from new customers, and they spent 40% more in the store than the average shopper. Will the company accept their business? You bet—branding is about whose business you’ll seek, not whose you’ll take. But if Wal-Mart begins catering more to those customers’ needs at the expense of its core target of “people who live paycheck to paycheck,” it will be making a mistake.
More about Customers Your Company Doesn’t Want here.
Posted by truecreek on November 10, 2009 under More Dam News |
By Stephen Shankland
Google said Tuesday it will subsidize free wireless network access in 47 airports from now until January 15–and indefinitely in the airports of Burbank, Calif., and Seattle.
The promotion, in cooperation with Boingo Wireless, Advanced Wireless Group, and Airport Marketing Income, is the latest effort to use free Wi-Fi to boost a brand. Among others: Yahoo is sponsoring Wi-Fi in Times Square in New York, and Google is sponsoring Internet access on Virgin America flights during the holidays.
Among the larger participating airports are those in Houston, Boston, Miami, Las Vegas, Nashville, San Diego, Baltimore, and St. Louis. A full list of the airports is at Google’s free holiday Wi-Fi site.
The move, though not cheap, is probably smart. Plenty of business travelers have a laptop and time to kill, and today’s consumers are increasingly likely to be equipped with laptops, iPod Touches, or other devices that can use wireless Internet access. Google is spending some money for an opportunity to give a lot of people the warm fuzzies when they encounter the Google brand.
And in the big picture, Google gets to show people what the world might be like if there were more high-speed wireless Internet access–something the company has been aggressively lobbying for in Washington, D.C. Many people are used to wireless networking in their homes, but it’s a different matter on the road.
There are downsides, though, too. Having been to dozens of conferences where the wireless Net access collapses as soon as the keynote speech begins, I’m acutely aware that providing large-scale wireless Internet access is technically demanding–and people get unhappy when a promised benefit evaporates. And public, anonymous places such as airports and urban population centers are great spots for hackers to launch main-in-the-middle attacks by offering “Free Wi-Fi,” so exercise caution when logging on to these networks.
Posted by truecreek on November 9, 2009 under More Dam News |
The battle between AT&T and Verizon is going to make for some great advertising in the near future…
Marketing Casts Verizon Device as Antithesis of the Ubiquitous iPhone
By Rita Chang
SAN FRANCISCO (AdAge.com) — Verizon’s droid is pitching itself as the anti-iPhone, and nowhere is that more evident than in the look and feel of its campaign — a blanket push you won’t be able to escape.
The integrated campaign, the largest in Verizon history, will receive an estimated $100 million in support, most of it spent before the end of the year. Within it, the new phone is touted as the robotic do-it-all antidote to the Apple handset’s shortcomings.
The TV spots set to hit airwaves Monday night are about as far from the iPhone’s cheery spots as possible. Visually somber and testosterone-packed, they could be mistaken for ads for “The Terminator.” But, like the iPhone spots, they also demonstrate what the device can deliver, such as voice-activated turn-by-turn directions, fast web-browsing and video viewing. The tagline: “In a world of doesn’t, Droid does.”
More here.
Posted by truecreek on November 6, 2009 under More Dam News |
Franchisee’s obscure idea turns sandwich maker into national phenomenon
By Matthew Boyle
Stuart Frankel isn’t what you’d call a power player in the world of franchising. Five years ago he owned two small Subway sandwich shops at either end of Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital.
After noticing that sales sagged on weekends, he came up with an idea: He would offer every footlong sandwich (the chain also sells 6-inch versions) on Saturday and Sunday for $5, about a buck less than the usual price. “I like round numbers,” says Frankel, a brusque New Yorker who moved to Miami in 1972 and owned a drugstore before opening his first Subway outlet in 1988.
Customers liked his round number, too. Instead of dealing with idle employees and weak sales, Frankel suddenly had lines out the door. Sales rose by double digits. Nobody, least of all Frankel, knew it at the time, but he had stumbled on a concept that has unexpectedly morphed from a short-term gimmick into a national phenomenon that has turbocharged Subway’s performance. “There are only a few times when a chain has been able to scramble up the whole industry, and this is one of them,” says Jeffrey T. Davis, president of restaurant consultancy Sandelman & Associates. “It’s huge.”
In fact, the $3.8 billion in sales generated nationwide by the $5 footlong alone placed it among the top 10 fast-food brands in the U.S. for the year ended in August, according to NPD Group. That puts the $5 menu’s success just a notch behind KFC and ahead of Arby’s and Domino’s Pizza. It helped privately held Subway, of Milford, Conn., lift U.S. sales 17 percent last year at a time when most restaurant chains, save for industry leader McDonald’s, struggled.
Read more.
