Monthly Archive for July, 2005

The experience of moving and saying no to Uhaul

Published
by
Karl
on July 22, 2005
in Marketing
. 0 Comments



alternative to uhaul

Originally uploaded by mrkook.

Last time I moved Uhaul screwed me so badly that I will go to any lengths not to use that company. Their sin was to allow me to “reserve” a truck online for the day of my move from a specific location, only to show up at the specified day, time and location to be told that they didn’t have the truck. So What was the reservation for? Just to give me some false hope that I could have a truck on my moving day. Anyone that has moved knows that everything hinges on “moving day”, if the truck doesn’t’ show up it is an absolute disaster layered upon one of the most stressful experiences of your life, a real shit sandwich.

Enter moving, they drop off containers at your house for 5 days, you load them up, put a padlock on them, and they come and pick them up. When your ready to move, call them up and tell them where to drop them off.

It’s going to cost a couple of hundred to store the containers for a month, and about $2000 to move them to Florida. A Uhaul truck would cost about $1000 and that doesn’t include a towing trailer for my car, the horror of driving a Uhaul for 1500 miles, gas etc.

So the moving experience for me is going to be, loading my containers, a nice little road trip in my Mini Cooper, some temporary accommodation while I find the best place to live in Fort Lauderdale, a phone call to order my containers, unload them at my sweet new pad and enjoy.

Sorry Uhaul, U have screwed me for the last time.

Han Solo Delivers for Amazon

Published
by
Karl
on July 15, 2005
in Marketing
. 0 Comments

Holy shit, how cool is that, Amazon is celebrating their 10 year anniversary by having some celebs do some of their deliveries. The shot below includes Harrison Ford delivering the Star Wars trilogy to some lucky person.

Unfortunatly for geeks like me, i’ve had that trilogy, in all its forms since they came out, so I missed out on this opportunity.

What a fantastic experience for those customers though. It’s a great example of doing something unexpected to get some buzz going. I heard a story about a restaurant owner that would, on a rare basis, pick up everyone’s check in the restaurant on a random night. Even if he did it once a year, people would talk about it all year. The buzz it generated was far more valuable than 100 plates of food. The important thing is that it was a surprise, and people didn’t expect it, that’s what generates the buzz.

Please Cingular, let me buy some data services - Part 1

Published
by
Karl
on July 15, 2005
in Marketing
. 3 Comments

I’m the proud owner of a new phone from Nokia, a 6682, the upshot being it’s got a 1.2 megapixel camera, that when combined flickr’s super cool ‘post via email feature‘ I could really be getting into some hefty data transfer on my cell phone service. Which leads me to the task of shopping for data services from my carrier. (on a side note Seth has posted recently that people generally don’t “hate” their phones, they “hate” their carriers)

Now it’s clear to me that a significant amount of marketing dollars has been spent on marketing the various data services that the cell phone companies have, ‘mMode’, ‘MEdiaNet’, ‘TZones’, and ‘picture messaging’. So they’ve coined a new brand name, and spent money on making people aware of that brand name and trying to differentiate themselves from the competition. I mean, surely MEdiaNet is somehow different from TZones…. not.

The major flaw in this marketing strategy ie. investing in advertising, awareness, branding and differentiation, is that data services are extremely novel and not well understood by the customers so awareness and differentiation is actually a bad thing for the customers. I mean when ATT says mMode unlimited for 24.99 and Cingular says MEdiaNet unlimited for 19.99 (believe it or not Cingular also sells Data Connect unlimited for 39.99,. WTF) it is really confusing.

I think TMobile might have got the hint though, on their web site they sell “The T-Mobile Internet Unlimited plan” for 29.99. Now doesn’t that make more sense.

Wouldn’t it be better for customers if all the companies stop trying to differentiate services that customers are having trouble adopting?

How about this:
Cingular Unlimited Internet Plan: 19.99
ATT Unlimited Internet Plan: 24.99
T-Mobile Internet Unlimited plan: 29.99

This is a great example of ’service companies’ using FMCG (fast moving consumer good) branding methods to brand complex services. Luckily for the cell phone companies, they are all using FMCG branding methods so they are all equally as bad at manageing the entire customer experience.

(I know ATT is owned by Cingular now, in fact that’s why this post is part 1, because it is a far longer and more painful story if you’re an ATT customer…)

match.com vs. consumating.com

Published
by
Karl
on July 7, 2005
in Marketing
. 5 Comments

I should be embarrassed to have had as long and unsuccessful experience with online dating as I have had, but I’m not, it’s just another channel to meet people and it seems every channel is as mundane as the next right now, or maybe I’m just getting jaded. Anyway, what has this got to do with customer experience?

Well, match.com has been pissing me off for some time, most recently with it’s mandate that you can’t be wearing sunglasses in your “main” picture. This is just an indication of match’s authoritarian view of its customers, you’d better listen “because match knows best”. Lot’s of guidelines, lots of bureaucracy, and everyone’s profile sounds the same as everyone else’s, I mean, who doesn’t like good food and watching movies. Somehow matches control over the “profile” creation process has stunted their customers creativity as opposed to enhanced, encouraged or motivated it.

Enter consumating.com, a dating concept from Austin, and in keeping with Austin’s freewheeling attitudes, you don’t get the feeling that this is a dating site that will try and squeeze you into a palatable shape for the rest of the internet community to consume. One of the interesting aspects of consumating is it is a dating site that asks questions of the community on a regular basis, in some ways, encouraging its customers to contribute to a community blog on different topics, so instead of a stagnant profile to get to know people you get to see their answers to some more interesting questions. For example, the week that the crazy woman escaped to las vegas and faked rape to escape a wedding, consumating.com asked “what would you do to get out of a wedding?” And, yes, people do use swear words on the site, and also give some answers that might lead you to believe that they are sociopaths, but at least it gives these profiles a human voice and a chance to cut through the veneer that most of us have.

And of course note the obligitory Folksonomy, although this is the first folksonomy I’ve seen that contains the term “mexicancandy”

Here are some of the questions they ask: