Ian M Rountree

Copywriter, Project Manager, Digital Marketing

Archives for August 2009

Mergers (Marvel gets owned by Disney)

by Leave a Comment

So Disney just bought Marvel Comics for $4 billion in cash and shares, and I’ve spent the last five hours reading variations on “My Childhood, It’s Ruined” on every social network site I visit.

People. This may not be as bad as it looks.

Think about some of the recent mergers you’ve heard of. I know, there are a lot of bad examples, and part of this comes from bad press. Now, I want to turn your attention to some other, lesser-known acquisitions that actuall turned out fairly well.

HP gobbled up Compaq and now what we have is a fairly mixed bag of different looking computers for different prices that all do the same things. HP was decent before, and Compaq had its issues, so I’d say Compaq won out by sticking around as a sub-brand.

Rogers purchased Fido a while ago. NO ONE noticed. And I mean no one. The companies are still being run as separate in every respect, with separate branding and focus, and outside of having access to each others’ networks, there’s been no major changes.

And then you have Acer acquiring eMachines and Gateway over the past while. Four years ago, Acer computers sucked. They were horrible. But with Gateway’s great design paradigm, eMachines’ expertise, and Acer’s awesome screens, the company has started to close in on its nearest competitor, Dell. That’s saying something.

So which kind of merger will Marvel and Disney be? As I’ve just had pointed out to me, Disney is good at making things generic, which would kill Marvel and its innovative spirit and presense. However, considering Disney’s waning market force, its own change of direction lately… Well, for all we know, Marvel may end up getting the lion’s share, using Disney’s marketing abilities, its ability to franchise just about anything from nothing – well, we may just be seeing the rebirth of Marvel and Disney both as a totally new media empire.

But who’s to know? Until one or both start making moves powered by the faculties of the other company, we won’t actually see any loss or benefit from this, outside of Disney shelling Four Billion dollars back into the economy through the buy.

Wait and see. It’s the only way to go, at this point. I, for one, hope Marvel wins its own strong place without destroying Disney – more the way Rogers/Fido did, because I feel that’s the best strategy for diverse, sustainable business.

Choose Your Audience

by Leave a Comment

People who work in interface make some of the dumbest mistakes possible. This goes for anyone from customer service to high-profile public relations. Here’s an example. t’s a cautionary tale for anyone in any kind of public interface.

A couple of years ago, when I had just recieved my first upward-movement in the company I still work for, I had the honour of working with one of the company’s most experienced managers. The number of stories he had accumulated over the years was intense, his knowledge was phenomenal. In the midst of the christmas season, he told me about a time many years ago back when personal computers still required leases because they were that expensive.

Apparently, he had a customer ask if we sold tape backups for computer (we did), and this manager said so. Well, customer says another chain has the tape backup units we sold for half price, but were sold out. Naturally, this manager says, when I have none of them, they’re half price as well.

The point of this being that, if you’re out of stock it doesn’t matter what price the item sells for – you haven’t got it!

How times have changed. Armed with this wonderful, hilarious story, I returned to work – and within two days, had a customer ask me the exact same question:

Customer: “Store X has these for half price but is out.”
Me: “Well, when I’m sold out they’re half price as well.”
Customer: “Really!? Can I pre-order one, then? Because I’ll wait for it to ship!”

My only response was backpeddling, proving I had made a grave error. In the twenty years since that original story, public attitude and knowledge has changed. And as witty as the response was, it had ceased to be appropriate, in part because people are better educated, and in part because our cultural norm no longer accepts straight-faced sarcasm in the same way. I had responded in a way that’s foreign to the person I was speaking to. I had failed to recognize my audience.

This is a major stumbling point for anyone communicating with anyone else. Sometimes jokes work. Sometimes they fail. When they fail, it’s usually because there’s no common frame of reference for the two parties to be working on – and when this happens, the bigger the audience, the bigger the fool you look like.

I’m sure other people out there have been on both sides of this sometimes-sad, often-funny coin.I’m sure the world would love to hear some other examples, so we can all avoid this kind of thing in the future.

Mind The Gap

by Leave a Comment

We lay a lot of trust in our news sites, just as we do/did with newspapers before them expecting that when something appears in their space, it’s worth viewing and provides meaningful,concise information.

Then you get articles like the one @modernsusan dropped me today, “Time to drop the Netbook label.”

It blew me away, so much I’m having trouble expressing how frustrated I am trying to figure out their point in writing this. In the space of 949 words, the article meanders from being pro-notebook to anti-netbook, and somehow in between tries to explain the idea of the netbook class of computers by explaining where certain models fit inside the very gap that defines the difference between fully-featured laptops and stripped-down netbooks.

Netbooks DO NOT replace fully-featured computers!

They’re add-on devices. Pure and simple. Thankfully, CNN explains their original purpose:

The big PC makers, understandably, wanted a piece of the action too, but not at the expense of cannibalizing their budget-conscious traditional notebook lines.

So Netbooks were sold as a “companion device.” As in, if you keep some of your data “in the cloud” as with e-mail on Yahoo or Gmail or pictures on Facebook or Picasa, and you stream music on a service like Pandora or Last.fm, you can use your regular notebook at home and use something smaller on the road that still affords access to a lot of your stuff.

A good point. Totally ruined, later in the article:

Color, screen resolution, battery, Wi-Fi, Webcam? The same. And they both lack an internal optical drive. The differences, though relatively small, can be summed up in the 11z notebook’s 1.5 inches of extra screen real estate, a more powerful Celeron processor, 1GB of extra memory, and a larger hard drive.

Plus, by getting the notebook with Vista, you have an automatic free upgrade to Windows 7. With any computer with XP, it costs around $100 to get Windows 7 Home Premium Edition.

The specs are so similar that the average shopper would likely be confused as to why one is better than the other. And the way Dell introduced the 11z doesn’t clear matters up. Dell’s official blog notes that “the Inspiron 11z blends Netbook-like portability with laptop-like capability.”

Can you see where it is, this total blow-your-mind article-ruining realization that hit me after reading this passage? I did a count on the page, and CNN mentions the Dell 11z seven (count them, 7) times in less than six hundred words.

They’re promoting a bridge product! That’s why they’re writing this! Whether or not Dell asked, or paid, or they’re just using it as an example, the focus stands out, and it blows my mind because it ruins the whole thing. I feel like they’re trying to sell me one of these things, and I can’t help but be angry about it.

Netbooks fit nicely into the space between a laptop and a smartphone. By definition, they ARE a filler product! I’ve spoken before about why the market needs gaps, and I stand by it. So having CNN declaring the gap a non-issue really gets my goat.

A high saturation of what reads like product placement really doesn’t help either.

The Difference Between Pre-sale support and Post-sale support

by Leave a Comment

So you’ve done some research. You’re looking for something specific, and you head to whichever shop you’ve chosen to consult someone who theoretically knows what they’re doing. You hit the store, talk to your salesperson… And get met with scorn, denial of much of your research and a pitch for a product you don’t want. How much does that suck, right?

Here’s a better one. You bought something a while ago, and need a hand doing something new with it. Maybe it’s what this thing is for, maybe it’s not. Either way, you head back to your shop and talk to your people… And guess what? It’s not their job, they say, to help with this. The thing you bought has a support line, and those people know what they’re doing, so go home and call them, will you?

Sheesh.

I’m sure you share my frustration with this. It’s a perspective problem. Very often, people over-research purchases, or are unwilling to believe that staff are doing anything more than selling something. I know I’d rather buy something than have it sold to me.

Even worse, once the sale is made, lots of salespeople feel like they’ve made their dime from you and just don’t want to spare any more time or effort, unless you’re buying more. This has to stop, it’s the most horrible thing you can do, and it’s killing retail for everyone.

Lots of staffers everywhere feel like it’s not their job to help people, to listen to them or to help people when it’s in their power.

Well guess what. It IS your job. It is in your best interest to provide support beyond just sales. Stop being idiots about this.

Customer Service and Consistency

by Leave a Comment

How many times have you had problems with a thing you’ve purchased? Probably lots. The average person buys enough things in a month for the law of averages to kick in quite often and have something mysteriously break.

So what do we do? We get it fixed; everything has a warrantee. And while many companies’ warrantees behave differently, we can count on a certain level of consistency about the fact that, if we jump through all the hoops, they do in fact work.

How many times have you had an issue with the same store? Chances are you’ve had problems, but how often do you go back, in spite of problems in the past, and trust the same people with your money?

Yeah. Like you’re ever going to do that.

But why is there this disconnect? Well, for one things, policy never lies. It may be confusing, it may be tipped in favour of someone else, but it always behaves the same way. The problem with putting the same reliance on people is that they are people. People are, by nature, inconsistent. And no matter how deep our understanding of people and their foibles, there’s sometimes no predicting them.

Why is this an important thing to know? For one thing, it’s worth knowing that people deserve a second chance. Mostly good people sometimes have bad days. Mostly bad people may have knowledge worth digging for. It’s the same dealing with businesses as it is dealing with everyone else.

Dealing with eratic people sucks. I’m not condoning willfulness on anyone’s part. But it’s worth the effort of finding out a reason for inconsistency rather than writing people and businesses off for having a bad day.

How do you get past these kinds of situations? As both a customer, or someone behind the counter? What can we do, what tools and approaches can we use to lessen the impact of these situations where, failing all attempts at logic, people simply will not give us what we want, even when we know they can?