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- Chocolate and Books Equals More Sale - (by @baekdal)
Scientists in Belgium has found that the scent of chocolate in a book store increases the sale by 20%.
Of course, they could just have asked fashion stores about this, where scent has been an element for the past 15 years... or the car industry ... or ... the dating industry ... or... (this is not a new discovery).
It's all about matching your brain patterns with an action. People usually have a positive association with chocolate as being something you enjoy when you relax. Books cover the same area, so mixing the two produce positive results.
It's not just chocolate. It's the emotion that a specific scent induces.
What is interesting, thought, is that they found that mixing chocolate scent with books made people less goal-oriented: "A field study with 201 participants shows that a chocolate scent positively influences general approach behavior and negatively influences goal-directed behavior in a bookstore."
BTW: On a somewhat related note, many fashion stores have abandoned the use of scent because of the potential allergic reaction people have to it. Scents is generally speaking a chemical 'perfume' that is introduced into the air. And some people have an allergic reaction to it. And, at least, when I was working for a fashion company, we started to the question the long-term health effects of having store assistants exposed to these chemicals all day.
Переслать - Targeting Marketing Behavior - (by @baekdal)
This morning, I was reading +Avinash Kaushik wonderful post "See-Think-Do: A Content, Marketing, Measurement Business Framework" - http://goo.gl/yZqmln
In it, Avinash presents a very simple framework for targeting your marketing campaigns and help you understand why you might be missing a huge opportunity.
And since I was felling a bit silly today, I decided to visualize the concept with this image:
In my illustration I have added 'enjoy'. I like the strategy of creating enjoyment (as a separate focus) and how it encourages sharing and word-of-mouth by others. So in this version, I have added all Avinash's points while taking the liberty of expanding it with 'enjoy'ment.
The overall point, of course, is that too many brands only focus on 'do'. E.g.: "buy this now! 10% off". But, if you really want to shine and reach your full potential, you need to expand your thinking to all the other areas as well.
Переслать - NSA/Snowden Story Not Profitable for The Guardian - (by @baekdal)
Alan Rusbridger, editor in chief of the Guardian, did one of those AMA (ask-me-anything) on Reddit yesterday. As always, it's a delightful form of questioning. Unlike most interviews, which are either agreed on in advance, or focusing on a certain editorial angle, Reddit questions are whatever people have on their minds at that moment.
And one person (Dave Molloy) asked the all important question if the Guardian made any money from the NSA/Snowden story:
Business question: The news business is notorious for not making money. Do these big, global scoops have any noticeable effect on circulation or any positive business impact?
Our are they part of the civic duty element of news reporting, to be investigated no matter how much they cost in man hours, legal fees, and so on? Or, put another way: what do the accountants make of these big investigations?
To which Alan answered:
Complicated answer: huge readership on mobile and website. Hasn't made much impact on print sales. So, no direct revenues. It has also been very expensive: it's involved a considerable number of reporters, several lawyers, a great deal of cost in travel/hotels etc etc.
Happily, the Guardian has been owned by a family Trust since the 1930s. That means that the main imperative for what we do is journalistic. The business side of the operation completely support this kind of editorial endeavour because they understand that's the mission.
Having said that, we do have to make money. And this kind of reporting does - hopefully - reinforce a perception of the Guardian as a paper that still does proper journalism. And that, in the end, builds a readership and a reputation. And that's being reflected in our digital revenues (grew last year 28.9% to 55.9m). So, in the end, good journalism = good business. That's the theory, anyway!
And Happy Cake Day!
As we all know, the Guardian, while being a great newspaper with a staggering 78.3 million monthly visitors, is losing money every day.
Things are getting better. In 2011 (for the first time), the loss in print revenue was made up by the increase digital revenue (although with an added huge costs associated with the change). In 2012, as Alan wrote, performed well digitally, but the overall revenue only increased to 196.3m from 194.4m in the year before.
In other words, they only increased revenue by 1.9 million, and, at the same time, Guardian Media lost 53.5 million in 2012.
I don't know about you, but the math doesn't add up. The Guardian still believes it can grow enough to offset the cost, through increased digital traffic (readership and reputation), but at the same time Alan clearly said:
Huge readership on mobile and website. Hasn't made much impact on print sales. So, no direct revenues. It has also been very expensive.
In other words: Free digital traffic is mostly useless.
I think it's wonderful that the Guardian is at least getting better. But they are already one of the most visited websites in the world, with one of the highest levels of reputation. To break even, they will have to double that without any increase in cost.
Another person (Tipsilon) then asked:
Can The Guardian stay open without a paywall? I want to support the paper but don't want to buy the dead tree edition. You're providing a public service we really can't afford to see cut.
To which Alan answered:
We believe so, yes. We have a detailed business plan and some extremely talented commercial colleagues - and so far we're beating our own plan.
Is this possible? Can the Guardian succeed? Well, it depends...
The fascinating thing about the internet is that it's basically divided up into two models. The short head and the long tail.
The short head is hugely profitable because you are the best. And, in being the best, people are more than willing to pay for your products ... just look at Apple.
The long tail is also hugely profitable because your sheer size makes up for the lack of revenue per person. Google, for instance, is doing incredibly as a platform for the entire world.
We call these vertical and horizontal businesses. The problem is when you try to do both at the same time. The short head demands that you focus (which brings up the value) while the long tail means that you spread yourself thin for the sake of scale.
With services and networks, this is a no brainer because the scale easily exceed the cost, but that's because they merely provide the platform for others to use.
The Guardian is trying to create a global news platform for their readers, but keeping with their editorial focus of writing all the stories themselves. That is hideously expensive to do in the long tail.
And more to the point, the more you scale, the less relevant you become for the individual. Meaning as they scale, their limited staff would have to focus more and more on global generalized stories. Stories that might be very good and create a lot of traffic, but doesn't make the newspaper itself worth paying for because it has almost no impact on the individual.
The way to fix this is with individual targeting. But in order for that to work on a global scale, you need a serious amount of focused and targeted stories to choose from. That is simply not something you can do with a limited staff.
Of course, the Guardian is one of the few newspapers who may actually be able to build enough scale to pull this off (with their global appeal). Unlike, for instance, a Swedish newspaper who are geographically limited to only the 10 million people who can speak Swedish.
Переслать - Google Glasses Concept Approach - (by @baekdal)
Never let a person who don't need glasses design them. You might have seen the Google Glass design concept create by Sourcebits. It has been shared by quite a lot of sites lately. And most of these sites praise them as being more stylish.
More here: http://goo.gl/hpUO0a
The problem is that these glasses appears to have been designed like sunglasses. As something that people should focus on instead of something that blends with the rest of your face.
You see, for people who wear glasses all the time (like I do, just look at my profile pic), you want a pair of glasses that look like they are a part of your face. What that shape is depends entirely on how your face looks.
In my case, my eye-brows are very light, so wearing glasses with a thick black frame wouldn't work. They would take away all the attention from me and put them on the frame itself.
Think of it like this: When you meet someone face-to-face, you want your eyes to meet, not the frame of their glasses.
For other people, especially if you have heavy black eye-brows (and a beard) thick glasses might work well because then the frame creates a focus area for your eyes to look.
It's all about eye-contact. When people see you, do they see your glasses or do they see your face?
Переслать - Writing about Change - (by @baekdal)
One of the most frustrating things I know is to write articles/reports about something that people need to do, but aren't going to.
One example: It didn't really come as a surprise to anyone that Blockbuster went bankrupt when they failed to do what Netflix did. Here we had a business renting videos in physical stores in an age where people could just as easily stream it via the internet.
It was obvious to everyone, even for the people working at Blockbuster, that their model was failing. And it was equally obvious what they needed to do about it.
Many people, including me, had written detailed articles about it. The future is not that hard to predict.
But Blockbuster still went bankrupt. Their resistant to change, and the their fear of disrupting old business contracts preventing them from acting ...and so they failed.
And the strangest part is that, if you asked one of the blockbuster managers about their future, they all agreed on what needed to be done. They weren't stupid people. They could see the signs just as clearly as the rest of us.
So even though every single employee within the company knew what needed to be done, they still didn't do it. The resistant to change was not the change itself, or the risk involved. It was the risk of taking responsibility for it.
We see the same with newspapers. Every editor I know can see the signs and the changes needed as clearly as the you and me. But when it comes to actually changing, they opt for the most conservative solution of all. The one that involves as little personal risk as possible (and thus doesn't really change anything).
And they only make real change when things get really desperate (when it's often far too late to act).
So ask yourself this: What is the biggest risk? Not taking risks and most likely lose your future, or risk it all and possibly succeed? Including disrupting and invalidating old business contracts that keep you in the past.
Don't lose your future because you are too afraid of losing your future.
Another problem is that when change is disruptive the solution can't be solved with small incremental projects. But most companies only change a tiny part of their business.
I call this the 10%'ers: http://www.baekdal.com/opinion/failure-at-10/
I'm currently working on a Plus report about what book publishers need to do to fix their future. It's a good report (I really like it), but for every sentence I write, I'm constantly reminded that nothing I write is likely to ever happen. The book publishers of the world are simply too entrenched to be able to risk that change, especially since what I'm suggesting would be highly disruptive to their old markets ... and it can't be done without making huge investments in the long term.
It's Blockbuster all over again :)
Переслать - Failure is Not a Problem - (by @baekdal)
Note to big brands: There is a reason why consumer products are called 'low-margin products', and enterprise products are called 'high-margin products'. You are paying too much.
In fact, let me tell you a story from my days as the digital media manager of a big fashion enterprise:
Fashion companies are very graphic intensive companies. Everything they do involves some kind of graphic file. From the designs made by the designers to the fashion shoots done by marketing, to the presentation kits used by sale. As such, it quickly became apparent that we needed a much more effective way to handle it.
We needed to create a media asset management system, and we hired a developer to make that happen (note, the cost savings alone was in the millions).
But one day we ran out of hard disk space. So I called our enterprise IT department and told them to figure out how to get more. We only needed a couple of terabytes, so it wasn't that big a of a deal. A few days later they came back with a quote for an 'enterprise level' SAN storage solution with an enterprise level backup solution (because they had found that the extra space would max out our existing backup solution as well).
Total price? $98,000
In the enterprise world, this doesn't sound that bad. Enterprise SAN's has built in redundancies, a high level of reliability, and includes all kind of management features.
To our enterprise IT department, this was not only a good solution but also a cheap solution, and, as they pointed out, several other brands had already bought just this type of storage server.
But paying $98,000 for a couple of terabytes of storage is just insane. I had 1TB of space at home, for which I had only paid $299.
So after a lengthy pissing match with IT, I decided to ignore them and instead buy our own storage solution. Something that was heavily frowned upon (you were not supposed to go against the mighty IT department). And I needed the backing of our CFO.
Here is what I did:
First, we looked at how many of the files people used on a regular basis. The answer was about 5%. So why go out and buy a hideously expensive storage system that can keep all the files active, when only 5% of them ever needed that level of access? Why not divide the files into 'files we use often' and 'files that we only use occasionally'.
This way we could use our old storage server (which was fast and reliable) for the day-to-day stuff. And use a second storage server as an archive (which didn't need all the enterprise features).
What did we buy? Well, I bought the same thing that I had at home. a consumer level NAS device, like this one from Synology (http://goo.gl/8ulW0). It costs only $310 + 4 2TB hard disks priced at $98 each.
Note: We actually started out buying NAS from Lacie, but they weren't as reliable as the ones from Synology.
In other words, for a total of $700, I could get not just 2TB of storage (as needed) but a total of 8TB of storage.
Of course, our enterprise IT department was pissed. This was just a toy. It wasn't secure (which it was), it wasn't reliable, it couldn't be managed by their enterprise level software, and so forth... so they outright refused to allow it to be included in their enterprise level backup system.
Hmm... yeah... okay... So, I just bought two of them.
One would serve as the main storage server, the other serving as a backup. And then I asked our developer to write a script that would make sure they were always in sync.
In fact, I decided to buy four of them. One would be the main storage server, the other the backup, and two more just standing by in case something went wrong with either of the first two.
Total price? $2,800 ... or 35 times less than the enterprise IT solution (which only had 2TB of storage).
With this in hand, it was very easy to get the backing of our CFO and shut up our IT department.
Over time one of the hard disks might fail, but we would just swap in another. Sometimes the entire NAS would fail, but remember I bought four, so we would just unplug it and plug in the new one and everything would be fine again.
Over a six year period we actually ended up buying a total of 8 of these at the total cost of about $5,600, but that's still a lot less money than $98,000.
Yes, they failed more often, but that's the whole point. With enterprise level devices, you have one device that has to have 100% reliability of all time. As a result, you pay a hideously amount of money for a lesser solution in exchange for what you believe is a slightly better build quality (in reality the difference is minuscule).
My approach was different. I said, "I don't care if something fails. I want to create an environment in which failure is not a problem." So instead of buying one enterprise level server, I bought four consumer level servers. If one failed we would have three more ready to go.
And this is where we come back to the question of high and low margins. The only reason why this works financially is because enterprise level products have such a high-margin.
Think about it for a moment:
- A 8TB consumer level NAS = $700
- A 2TB enterprise level SAN = $98,000
Yes, the enterprise level SAN is more fancy, but that's just insane. $90,000 is roughly the same as two full-time employees
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