By Linda Forrest
This week, Amazon announced that it would be introducing its digital e-book reader, the Kindle, to more than 100 countries. Canada didn’t make the cut, much to the consternation of Canadian authors and book lovers alike. What made the announcement even more difficult to swallow is that internationally contentious and little known countries are on the list, yet Canada is not. This is a PR nightmare for Amazon in Canada as every major outlet has covered this extensively.
Why exactly Amazon is so slow to roll out the Kindle to Canada is a matter of much debate – is it our copyright laws? Our telecommunications networks and service providers? The Globe and Mail seems to think it’s our carriers (Bell and Rogers strike again!) No official answers are available. Apparently Amazon says that a Canadian Kindle is coming, but offers neither timelines nor prices.
Our clients often subscribe to the adage “if I sell one in Canada, it’s by accident,” and this Kindle snafu may be a simple extension of that. Our market is relatively small, certainly when compared with the U.S., but if Mongolia and Kirabati (?!?) are getting the Kindle, it can’t be market size that Amazon’s concerned with.
Someone made an offhand comment a few weeks ago, comparing our home and native land with a little, out of the way country in South America. I scoffed a little bit and this Kindle fiasco has affirmed my guffaw somewhat, though entirely counter to what I had initially thought… You guessed it; that little South American country is getting the Kindle, but we’re not.
My family is taking a quick jaunt to the States in a few weeks, to buy things not available here. The purpose of our shopping trip is not to take advantage of the strong Canadian dollar, a nice benefit, to be sure, but to relish in the immense selection that is available in America. We have a particular affinity for a number of clothing brands not available in Canada. Oh sure, we can ship them here from the States, for an extortionate fee, but there’s no brick and mortar or even domestic shipping outlet for these stores. Our only recourse is to gather our passports and make the journey to the U.S. The lower prices, the lower tax rate, and the great selection draw us in.
That said, I’d happily shop at these stores if they were in Canada, pay the inflated prices and hand over roughly 10% more sales tax, in order to support local jobs, infrastructure, etc. But in cases like the Kindle, we’re utterly shafted. There’s no local support, no cross-border option, nada. Zip. Woe is us.
Credit: Image a mashup by Christopher Moran using copyright-free images.
By Leo Valiquette
A trip to the grocery store that inevitably ended up being an extended exercise in reading and comparing nutrition labels got me thinking about the importance of paying close attention to how you are perceived in the marketplace, what you consider to be your competitive differentiators and how they stack up against the offerings of your rivals.
It all began with soya sauce, or rather, the quest to find a sodium-reduced option, soya sauce being one of those things we sometimes like to apply liberally with little regard for the hypertensive consequences.
The first thing I saw on the shelf was VH, a well known brand for all manner of sweety and salty Asian condiments. One tablespoon of its regular soya sauce has a whopping 48 per cent of your daily recommended sodium intake. Beside it was VH’s salt-reduced alternative, still at 32 per cent.
Next was Kikkoman, the mainstay that seems to have the restaurant industry locked down. Its regular brew has 38 per cent, while its reduced-sodium alternative has 24.
And then there was the humble President’s Choice store brand. Its regular brew (there wasn’t a reduced option on the shelf) has a mere 22 per cent. It trumped both of the major brands with its regular offering.
And while the store brand is generally cheaper, when I saw that number on the label, I didn’t even bother to compare prices before dropping the PC soya sauce into the shopping cart. Neither price, nor brand prominence, was relevant to me as a consumer. What mattered was that the PC brand gave me the better option as a matter of course, rather than trying to pander to my health-conscious concerns with an alternative product that still didn’t cut the mustard upon closer inspection.
The moral of the story? At a time when at least some areas of the economy are starting to turn around and and prospective customers have begun to spend again, it is crucial to listen to your marketplace and invest the time and effort necessary to ensure you are giving it what it wants, not just on the surface, but deep under the hood. Because you can rest assured that your customer base will still hold any expenditures up to the harsh light of scrutiny for some time to come.
Your product or service must deliver what it promises on the label, not to your satisfaction, but in accord with the perceptions and expectations of your customers.
By Linda Forrest
MediaBistro put together a tongue-in-cheek list of the five most prevalent types of Tweets from PR people. While it’s meant to be comical, it hits the nail on the head in most instances. I, for one, have rolled my eyes more than once at some of the more absurd Tweets that fall into these categories.
We inmedianauts will try our best to avoid committing these Twitter sins in future. That is, when we’re not too busy surreptitiously pushing our clients, hanging out at lavish parties, squabbling, complaining or sharing our excitement about the next big thing!!!
By Francis Moran
For the first time in practically the decade-long lifespan of this technology-focused PR agency, I did not attend any part of the Ottawa Venture and Technology Summit held last week at the Chateau Laurier. Actually, that’s not quite true; I went to a packed StartUp Drinks in the Byward Market on Wednesday night and from there popped briefly into the thinly-attended Young Venture Capitalists OVTS networking event that was happening just a few doors away. But the point is, I didn’t see any of the company presentations, hear any of the speeches or, most importantly, glom onto any of the corridor scuttlebutt that is usually the most interesting aspect of these things.
In the days since, I have heard various reports from attendees from across the investor-entrepreneur spectrum and I have read what little reportage made the public record. Very little of what I’ve heard or read left me terribly hopeful that a new crop of exciting Ottawa technology ventures was about to get funded any time soon. The most consistent sentiment seemed to be contained in the comment VG Partners managing general partner Pat DiPietro made in an Ottawa Business Journal story on the fact that the OVTS and a similar event in Banff had a scheduling overlap. “But on the other hand there are no VCs investing, so it doesn’t really matter right now,” DiPietro said.
This caused me to wonder if venture fairs have passed their sell-by date. Can anyone remember the last company that could claim to have met at one of these things the connection that led to successful funding?
Then my pal James Smith weighed in on his newish blog, Startup Great White North. Unlike me, James not only attended the Ottawa venture fair, he also winged out west to the Banff shindig. Despite the fact he there witnessed “institutional investors focused principally on shaking off modest Thursday night hangovers and cradling Blackberrys and iPhones like long-lost friends” rather than paying attention to the entrepreneurs’ pitches, he decided in the end that investors don’t regard those pitching companies “with the attention my mini-van driving wife might give to passing picked-over roadkill on the road to our cottage.”
I’m not sure I’m as persuaded as James but he does go on to provide a solid list of techniques that serious venture-seeking entrepreneurs can deploy to improve their outcomes from such an event.
While we’re on the question of the utility of VC fairs, we might as well start asking questions about the utility of the VC model itself. We have begun work on a series of articles about this very question. We will look at who is actually funding startups in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. We’ll ask experts which pieces of the model work and which don’t. And most importantly, we’ll examine the state of the ecosystem beyond VCs that needs to be in place to help companies, especially those that will never be VC-fundable, bring their technology to market. We’ll look at the proliferation of new government funding here in Canada and compare it with what’s in place in other markets. If you believe you have a perspective on this, we’d love to hear from you. You can email me at fmoran (at) inmedia.com.
By Francis Moran
I write an awful lot on this blog about customer service, mainly lousy customer service. Like most consumers, I run into my share of companies whose customer-service posture screams at me that they just don’t give a damn about keeping me as a customer. Having a blog gives me a soapbox from which to rant about them but given that this is supposed to be a blog about marketing, merely ranting would not meet our editorial mandate.
So my preoccupation with customer service is based on what I have come to call my first law of competitive differentiation, the proposition that, in an age when almost any technological or cost advantage will rapidly and inevitably be eroded, the only sustainable competitive differentiation for most companies is to treat their customers like the centre of the universe that they actually are.
Sadly, far too many companies pay only lip service to this.
Last night, my wife and I had an experience that showed us the other side of the equation.
It was our ninth wedding anniversary on Wednesday but my wife was in Houston at a trade show so we planned a belated celebratory dinner for last night. We chose to go to Play Food and Wine, an Ottawa eatery we had heard a lot about, whose chef and founder we liked, but that we had not yet managed to try. Reservations were made, nice clothes were donned and off we went.
The first bit of unusual customer service should never have been noteworthy at all. We were greeted immediately upon arrival — a rare enough occurrence at restaurants these days — and they offered to take our coats! I know, that used to be standard operating procedure at restaurants but, upon reflection, I had trouble remembering the last time that had happened to me.
Upstairs we went, drinks were ordered and we looked over an imaginative menu of tempting dishes fitting Play’s tapas-style approach of small plates designed to be shared. We made a few selections, and our waiter brought out the first two, reserving the third one until we had finished off the first two.
Unfortunately, my wife, who had risen at 4am and had been spent much of the day traveling home on bumpy little planes, unexpectedly developed a wonky tummy just as our first courses were being served. She bravely tried to eat a bit but I ended up clearing off both plates as she waited in vain for her stomach to settle. Since it was clear she wasn’t going to be feeling better any time soon, we explained the situation to our waiter and asked him to hold off on our third plate if he had not already ordered it. Clearly thinking that I still deserved to have dinner, he said he could get it on our table within five minutes but I declined, saying it really would be best if we just grabbed our bill.
He was solicitous and attentive at every stage, occupied solely with our well-being, and so he should have been, given the consummately service-oriented business in which he worked. But then he went above and beyond, and here’s why I must sing the praises of Jordan, our waiter last night at Play.
He brought our bill, telling us that he had not charged for the glass of bubbly my wife had barely touched. Very nice gesture.
But wait, there was more.
When he brought back my credit card and slip to sign, he also brought me a small sampler of the hanger steak I had been very much looking forward to having as our third dish. Just enough for me to relish the dish; not so much that my wife had to wait more than a few minutes for me to finish it off.
With a few small gestures, Jordan raised our experience at Play, disappointingly foreshortened though it might have been, from the merely satisfactory to the extraordinary. As soon as I publish this post, I intend to call Play and bring all this to their attention. Meanwhile, my wife has made us a fresh reservation for Saturday night, when I hope we get Jordan again. Although, given the generally fine service we received from everyone else at the restaurant plus the fact that Jordan was empowered — that’s the key word, by the way, when it comes to superior customer service — to go the extra mile for us, I’m sure that whomever is our waiter at Play will deliver the same exemplary customer service.
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Give great writing its due
September 29, 2009 by Leo Valiquette
By Leo Valiquette “I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I did not have time to make it shorter.” Whether this quote is more appropriately attributed to Mark Twain or Blaise Pascal is beside the point. What matters is that it aptly sums up the delightful, frustrating and fulfilling struggle that is […]
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The secret to PR success, exposed!
September 28, 2009 by Linda Forrest
By Linda Forrest I sent out a news release last week for NetCentric Technologies, an Ottawa company launching a new product, their PDF Accessibility Wizard, an MS Office add-in that makes documents accessible to people with disabilities. I spent spent considerable time developing the right media list, one that contained many niche and specialty publications, […]
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Show me the money
September 25, 2009 by Tim Redpath
By Tim Redpath (Tim Redpath heads up Train of Thoughts, working with clients on strategic marketing, campaigns and communications as well as trying to measure value from marketing budgets. He is an occasional lecturer at the Sprott School of Business and is vice chair of the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce.) Eighty-four percent of business professionals […]
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Marketing in a downturn: how the best do it
September 23, 2009 by Danny Sullivan
By Danny Sullivan We’ve written on marketing in a downturn a few times over the past couple of years – unfortunately, it’s a topic that is close to everyone right now. But I had to come back to the subject again after reading an excellent and insightful article by Beth Comstock, CMO of GE in BusinessWeek. It’s very […]
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The news industry’s PR problem, and why it shouldn’t be bailed out
September 22, 2009 by Linda Forrest
By Linda Forrest I read a controversial piece yesterday on Mediabistro. Apparently, President Obama has been quoted as saying that he’s open to looking at bailing out the newspaper industry. My personal opinion is that a bailout isn’t what the newspaper industry needs, for reasons I’ll get into shortly. But first, I’d like to talk […]
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“Did your Rogers iPhone on the Rogers network work at the Rogers Centre tonight? Mine didn’t.”
September 21, 2009 by Linda Forrest
By Linda Forrest I dipped back into my former life for a night last week when I went to Toronto to see U2 at the Rogers Centre. It was incredible. We were lucky enough to have general admission tickets that enabled us to get as close as we wanted to to the stage, which was […]
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Neptec: A pony that knew better than to rely on one trick
September 17, 2009 by Leo Valiquette
By Leo Valiquette When Iain Christie, president of Neptec Design Group, took the stage this morning as the keynote speaker at OCRI’s first Technology Executive Breakfast of the fall season, he made one thing clear: he wouldn’t presume to tell his audience how they should run their business, since it was challenge enough to run […]
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Perspective, common sense break out at Social Media Breakfast
September 16, 2009 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran I went to Ottawa’s Social Media Breakfast this morning and an intelligent session on strategic customer engagement broke out. The above paragraph is the calmest of the leads that came to mind as I drove home from the breakfast; the others were far more excitable, reflecting the deep personal enthusiasm I felt […]
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