Ian M Rountree

Copywriter, Project Manager, Digital Marketing

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.

Proof of Concept

by Leave a Comment

Yesterday I saw an ad on TV, where someone got on a yellow podium and spoke, loud-speaker, to a crowd. She asked a question, and the crowd answered. The ad was for Best Buy, and touted their efforts through Twitter through their @twelpforce initiative.

This is brilliant. I just spent half an hour digging through the questions asked of @twelpforceand the answers they gave. While, granted, a number of the answers were fairly “Buy this and fix it” centered, a lot of it is also kind of useful and funny.

It’s really good to see businesses catching on – at least visibly – to the idea that informed people tend to make better purchases, rather than treating we of the researching kind as a danger to their sales techniques. Even if it turns out to be totally self-serving, it’s visibly an awesome effort.

Way to go, Best Buy. You’re Doing It Right.

The Commission Problem

by Leave a Comment

Best Buy has a long-running ad campaign taking advantage of the fact that their employees aren’t on commission. This is just about the most desparate, jerk-driven campaign I’m aware of for a number of reasons.

If it doesn’t pay me, why should I learn about it?

On the flip side of this pressure problem, there are situations where it’s beneficial to the customer. Commission in many of the longest running retail companies is seen as an incentive – not to sell the biggest TV or best computer (which have the lowest margin and make the salesfolk the least coin) but to ensure that whatever gets sold, stays sold. If I sell you something I make commission on, and you bring it back for whatever reason, more likely than not I’m going to lose the money I made on that sale. It’s fairly logical, and it means that commissioned salesfolk have a direct interest in ensuring you get what you’re actually going to use. If they fail to do this, they’re doing it wrong.

Not all commissioned salespeople are pressure salespeople!

Yes. In a lot of places where the employee takes a cut of the profits, there’s an attitude of competition and a certain feeling of pressure for the buyer. Some of the worst experiences people can have are at the hands of greedy salesfolk who are solely interested in how much money they can make from you. We get that, Best Buy, it’s a unversal truth. You can stop beating the horse, it’s dead.

It’s easy to recognize the high-pressure salespeople.

But only if you’re paying attention! Listen to what you’re being told, and if in doubt, ask for proof of the salesperson’s claims, or do some research on your own. It’s that simple. Call over one of the other salesfolk in the store – there are bound to be more than one – and see if the stories match up.

Salespeople enjoy loyalty just as much as you do!

When I began working in commissioned retail, my mentor explained some of the best ways to use commission as an incentive for knowing your product, knowing your customers, and knowing how to put the two together in the best possible way.

Now, I’ve got a customer who’s followed me around for the last four years, because I was nice to him and listened for twenty minutes the first time we met. He was new to Canada, and didn’t speak English very clearly. He had spoken to five other staffers in my store, and was persistant enough not to up and leave when they didn’t help. As a result, I’ve sold him perhaps dozens of things he’s needed – and gladly accepted returns for what he doesn’t need, because by and large, they’re not actually returns! He trusts me enough to re-explain what he wanted, and in most cases, we can find something that will work, even if the process takes three or even four exchanges before we get it right. Because I’ve been loyal to his needs, he has been loyal to me as a salesperson.

We can’t get enough of this kind of behavior! And if Best Buy had their way, commission would be gone, and I’d have little to no incentive to make sure that when I train new staff, they learn appropriate habits for keeping people happy with what they buy, and not snowblinding them with dazzling displays of awesomeness. At the end of the day, the only business worth doing is business that’s beneficial to everyone in volved. Abused, commission can ruin retail and other kinds of businesses more effectively than any other kind of abuse. In the right light, it enhances interaction by providing incentive and fair compensation, making it even more possible to be useful to your customers, and encouraging customers to be loyal to your company, and even to you personally, as a salesperson.

We’re all trying to win. There’s no reason we can’t.

Smoke and Mirrors

by 2 Comments

A marketing guru friend of mine, @modernsusan who’s also a consumer advocate passed along an article from Lifehacker that demonstrates something I absolutely hate about salespeople.

Article: Watch for In-Store Lighting Tricks When Purchasing Electronics

By cranking up the lighting levels as much as 50 times typical home lighting conditions. According to HDGuru, “these intense levels can make the best displays with the blackest black levels and highest contrast levels look inferior to cheaper, lower performance displays.” As a result, customers may purchase cheaper sets that aren’t as good as advertised because they’re basing their decisions on brightness levels.

The comment stream under the article is awesome, because a large bulk of the comments are derailed and filled with complaints about a store’s display looking like junk. It’s nice to hear that someone messed up and people see through it, but that’s not the point, is it?

Specialized lighting and “theatre rooms” are some of the most used tools in the showman’s kit. This is sideshow trickery at its finest, and it’s ruining retail. I do this for a living, and I have to say, specializing the TVs is a bonehead move – but it’s only boneheaded if you don’t tell people!

The skinny is that, where I work there’s a wall of televisions. Plasma sets sitting beside LCDs both looking just about the same, both of them looking fairly good in our twenty-foot-ceilinged mall-retail hole in the wall, with the same amplified HDMI-fed BluRay loop move on all of them. Why? Because we played with them!

If you go into a shop – the worst for this are big box retailers – and the screens are hidden in a room aside from everything else, you’ll see one of three things. Either the room has a low ceiling with very little lighting, which makes the TVs pop out of the darkness, lending them a certain amount of mystery and wow factor; or, the room will be evenly lit, with televisions spaced well apart from each other totally eliminating side-by-side comparison; or, you’ll have a dimly lit room with spotlights directed at the televisions, usually light bars about ten feet up, making the whole set glow as if it had just been handed to you by the Gods of Hollywood.

Pop quiz time, you all set? Which of these tactics is the greater trick?

The answer is all of them. Chances are, in the first room you’re looking primarily at plasma screens. This is because plasma TVs are built of glass, so natural light or diffused lighting makes them look junky, glass reflects and the cleaner you keep your plasma screen, the worse this gets. These retailers do this to make the sets look good, mostly because if you’re buying a plasma, chances are it’s going into a basement where you can control the lighting just like they do, and you’re making a theatre or theme room. If they give you any other reason for this setup, they’re lying or they don’t know their product, and in either case, run for the hills… Or the next convenient store.

Dimly lit showrooms with eve lighting are the best for displaying both kinds of television, LCD and Plasma. Since plasma is far better at producing sharp contrast and dark colours (Remember they’re usually used as theatre TVs? This is the edge for that use, movies are usually dark) and LCD televisions are best at sharp colour and reproducing fast movement (Sports, animated movies and cable TV are their key uses) the middle ground between the usual home setup and a dark theatre room is perfect for mixed crowds. You’re likely to find the most expensive cables in these showrooms, hooked up to the best audio systems, because what these rooms do best is show you what the whole package will look like in the perfect home. If you’re not shopping for the whole package, or you don’t have the perfect home, ignore these setups, because they’re smoke and mirrors just like the first.

Lastly, the spot lit, dark caverns are probably LCD-heavy displays. LCDs are excellent with bright colours and sharp pictures, not so good at dark contrast and shadow. They’re getting better, but they’re just not there yet – and LED or OLED screens are totally expensive at the moment, five or six times more than the usual cost of a Plasma or LCD. These screens are also covered with a special plastic film which reduces glare. This means, in short, that shining a light (of certain kinds, from certain angles and at certain intensities known only to the retail gods, I guess) at an LCD TV bizarrely makes it look better! Treat this as a preview for what the set will look like in your south-facing home with the sun shining on it at noon. Useful, for some people. For the rest of us, it’s usually just an annoyance, because how often do we spotlight our TVs?

So, retail has all these tricks.

And we’ve got the internet. What good is that? Well, for early comparison, it’s like anything else – look up some stats, compare some prices, and if you still aren’t satisfied, dig into some consumer reports websites and hope for some community response. If it’s on sale, someone bought it before you, and chances are they know its ins and outs far better than most retail sales droids.

The other option is going to a service-oriented store and hoping you grab a salesperson who actually fiddles with every little thing that comes across their counter. Feel free to test these people with inane questions and ask about stats you’ve already researched. If you’re really feeling ornery, get those consumer responses you dug up earlier and ask the salespeople the questions, to see if their answers match up with what their customers actually say. It may not get you any new information, but it will certainly lend you insight into the salesperson you’re dealing with, and the kind of selling they’re trying to foist on you.

And when in doubt, buy it later. More information on a purchase is ALWAYS better than less, and don’t ever let anyone tell you differently!

The Return of Fix-It Culture?

by Leave a Comment

There’s been a huge shift in the last couple decades toward replacing things when their optimum function disappears, rather than fixing or upgrading existing stuff. Can’t play a new game on your computer? Forget getting a better graphics card, just buy a new computer. Camera not taking just the right shot? Why get a new lens, there are whole new cameras on the market. Digital media device running out of space? Don’t prune your library – buy a bigger pod!

This behaviour has put a lot of strain on people who no longer take advantage of more economical options, and companies who have had to change the ways their warrantees work to cut the per-unit cost of coverage, and as a result, warrantees aren’t as customer-friendly as they once were, which makes it even harder to consider repairing something we own, even if it’s relatively new. Six to eight weeks without our toys – especially critical ones such as a personal computer or a cell phone (for which most of us get charged monthly fees, whether we’re using the thing or not, but that’s a rant for later) can really ruin our routines.

So we buy new, and toss the old stuff. What a waste!

Earlier this week, I had a customer at my store who brought in what had to be a thousand dollars worth of camera lenses for SLR (synonymous with “high-end” and “pricey” for the rest of us) cameras. Apparently, he had found them after a period of neglect, cleaned them up, and wanted to test to see if they worked with current DSLR cameras. And guess what! They do! It’s a standard connection, in most cases, that hasn’t changed for years, which means instead of buying a whole new set of lenses, or settling for a lesser camera, he can use his old stuff with new purpose. How brilliant is that?

At the risk of turning this into an environmental rant instead of a treatise on patience, I need to mention that we’re in danger of ruining our planet because we are, in part, too impatient to consider fixing the old. At the end of the day there are only so many things we can make out of the materials we have on-planet, which means if we don’t find ways of recycling or repurposing our disused toys/cars/computers and so on, eventually we’re just going to run out of gold and petrolium and so on. We, the people who buy, need to step up to the plate and demand warrantees that work better, recycling programs that include electronic waste (So it can be pulled apart and recycled, not so that it can be sent to Asia and burned. Seriously, where’s the disconnect there?) and any number of other ways of ensuring that, even if we can’t convince ourselves to use what we have until there’s a real need to replace it, that it at least goes back into the stream of production somehow, rather than sitting in a pile until the sun explodes.

We need to weigh in. Change our habits. Make a ripple here. Because if we don’t, we’re just going to run out of toys. No one wants that.