Do they have web sites?

Would you like to know automatically when they change the way they sell their products?

Would you like to know automatically when they announce new products or specials?

Google has just made that much easier. If you use Google Reader, they can now create a feed from any web page – not just blogs that provide feeds. That means that simply by putting the URL of your competitors in the “add a subscription” box, you can instantly have Google keeping an eye on your competition for you – 24 hours/day.

Full details straight from Google here.

These cookies are distributed to our service men and woman at home and abroad, as well as Veteran Organizations and wounded soldiers.

The Girl Scouts suggest that you consider at least a case of 12 packages of cookies for our service personnel. They will pick out and send the most popular cookies so you don’t have to worry about which flavor to pick, and the case will be delivered at no extra charge.

A receipt for the full tax-deductible amount of $42.00 per case is available for “Project Troop to Troop” cookies. Half cases of 6 packages are also available for $21.00, with all the same benefits.

Can the Girl Scouts and our troops count you in? If so, please email me at jd at avendi.com and I’ll provide you with the mailing address. The deadline for orders is 1/30/2010. The girls, the troops and I greatly appreciate your help.

Of course if you’d like a box or two for yourself at $3.50 each, that’d be perfectly fine as well!

Frequently asked questions about Girl Scout cookie sales.

The drive will be held at Valley Creek Church at 5800 Long Prairie Road, Flower Mound, TX 75028 from 8am to noon.

We know times are tough, so we’re not asking for money, but we are asking for a donation that could literally save one or more peoples’ lives. Please help if you can.

In the last year my family has had two starkly different experiences with local retailers. The most recent was yesterday, and as I recounted the story to a friend of mine, I realized that all of our businesses are constantly writing stories. Stories that our customers will tell, one way or another. Write a meaningful enough story for a customer and she’ll write it large – on Facebook, Twitter, ePinions, Amazon reviews and more – and that’s both a fantastic opportunity and a warning for those who aren’t thinking about how the story reads.

Story 1:
For those who have never experienced it, Braum’s ice cream is great. They own their own cows on their own farms and ship it in their own trucks to their own stores. I’ve been a fan since my teens, and my wife and I grew to value their milk enough to make an extra trip out of our way to get it. Great story, right? That’s exactly how I used to tell it and it was. Here’s how it ends now:

It’s in the middle of last summer, which in Texas means the temperature is north of 100 degrees fahrenheit. I’m going to visit a friend, which means the closest Braum’s Ice Cream and Dairy Store is only a mile out of my way instead of several miles out, so I stop by and buy two gallons (enough to last us a week or so).

Well, I don’t get home for hours and the heat has had its way with the milk. The next day my wife goes back to Braum’s – several miles each way past several grocery stores – and explains what happens. They flatly refuse to do anything other than let her buy two more gallons of milk. She thanks them, leaves, stops at one of our many grocery stores closer to home and buys two gallons of milk.

We’ve never been to a Braum’s since, but whenever the subject comes up it always makes for a good story, so we share our “2 gallon” experience. Sure, it wasn’t their fault we didn’t go straight home with their milk and they didn’t owe us the $7 or whatever it was. What they missed, though, was the opportunity for us to share a fantastic story instead of one where we felt they failed to meet us even part way or in any way recognize that we were loyal, life-long customers.

Story 2:
On the other hand, there was yesterday. We have company coming for dinner and my wife is making her fabulous ribs. We have two guests, so true to form she buys 10 racks of ribs. Somehow only 9 of them make it into the refrigerator and the other spends 24 hours in the car. I take it back to our neighborhood Kroger, explain what happens, and they cheerfully offer to exchange it with our choice of other rack of ribs. They’re not even sweating whether or not there’s a price difference, and they know full well it wasn’t their fault the ribs spent the night in our car. Of course I pick the smallest rack and refuse their ridiculously generous offer to refund me the difference in price between the one I brought back and the one I picked out. That too is a story I’ll be sharing for years, and one that’ll make it easy to favor Kroger over the slightly closer, newer other grocery store in our neighborhood.

What kind of stories are your people making it possible for your customers to share? Are they the stories that help your business grow, or are you saving a few dollars and killing your golden geese, forgoing years of hundreds of dollars of revenue per year?

On Windows it was just too hard and too expensive. An upgrade was easily $99 for the OS software alone, and inevitably needed more ram and more hard drive space and by the time I looked at upgrading all of that, the time involved, and the likelihood of some software incompatibility, it was literally cheaper and easier to buy a new laptop.

Not today. Today I installed Apple’s Snow Leopard OS upgrade on the 4-year-old MacBook Pro that I use as my primary machine. It took less than 1 hour (during which none of my attention was needed).

Everything works perfectly, and faster. Kudos to Apple for proving that even in the high tech world not everything needs to have a short life cycle if it’s well designed and well built.

My presentations tend to be image-heavy, so I’ll probably need to come back and add speaker notes for much of it to make sense, and I produced it in Google Docs and couldn’t figure out how to do a slide build so I did that by producing multiple versions of the same slide, each with additional information on it.

But in case you missed the presentation, or were there and would like a copy, here it is:

Consumer demand is depressed both for the short and longer term, driven by reduced access to credit, but also by declining wealth, focused reduction of debt and increased savings, and new sensibilities that find excess inherently less attractive.

Business demand is also depressed due to reduced access to credit, reduced sales, and an increased focus on margins. This reduced business demand is seen primarily in reduced discretionary spending, reduced future hiring and reduced current hiring and capital spending. Other expenses are seeing reductions as well, but to a lesser extent.

According to the Marketing Leadership Council,

the primary drivers of Brand growth are:

(these are important in any market, but particularly so in difficult markets)

1. Predictive ROI-based investing – only helpful to bring a company up to the median in terms of performance. Once a company has reached median performance, a focus on ROI in investing is actually counter-productive.
2. Future Needs-based investing – making decisions based on educated judgement about where the customer needs will be in the future. This is more important the higher the company is outperforming the median.
3. Aggressive segment orientation – dividing customers by segment (other than purely demographically-developed segment) was equally important regardless of the company’s relative performance, and was the single biggest contributor to brand growth success overall. Particularly important was a knowledge and implementation of segmentation outside of just the marketing and sales departments.
4. Generalist-first talent strategy – the more companies focused on building a broad range of talent into all employees, the better the impact on brand growth.

Key priorities during the downturn, then, should be to:

1. Maintain budget/ROI discipline.
2. Stay on top of changes in what drives customers to buy.
3. Improve implementation of and focus on customer segmentation.

The tough thing in this environment in maintaining budget discipline is anticipating uncertainty and incorporating it into your plans. It is difficult to do so because we inherently gloss over uncertainty and actually are more likely to make uninformed decisions the more uncertainty exists. Make the effort to work against this tendency and have pre-established triggers to warn you of and contingency plans for unlikely but important events should they happen.

The easiest way to stay on top of changes in drivers of customer purchase behavior is to incorporate consumer feedback. Some

critical guidelines for a successful key consumer co-development program

are:

• Special Treatment for the individuals in the program – make sure they know they’re appreciated and their participation is considered valuable.
• Mutual respect – make sure the company and customer participants interact in an environment where each group/individual’s opinion or suggestion is respected.
• Clear ground rules – make sure they know that not everything will be adopted, and even those that do may not happen on their time preference.
• Veto rights – apply sound business logic to the suggestions received and implement those that truly add value to the organization.

There was much more presented of value, and of course the specific examples presented by the attendees were particularly helpful. For both space limitation reasons and confidentiality, though, I’ll stop here for now.

I highly recommend the Marketing Leadership Council to any firm looking for great ideas, case studies and best practices. Being a member for the past two years has certainly helped me, and I’m sure it will help others as well.

How Many Ways Can We Communicate?

One of my contacts and I started to list the ways I could communicate with him. As of right now, I can:

1. Call his work
2. Call his home
3. Call his cell
4. Mail something to him at work
5. Mail something to him at home
6. Send a text message to his cell
7. Send an email to his work address
8. Send an email to his web mail address
9. Send him an Instant Message
10. Send him an “@ reply” in Twitter
11. Send him a “Direct Message in Twitter
12. Send him a message in Facebook
13. Post a message on his “Wall” in Facebook
14. Post a comment on his blog
15. Post a comment in a Forum we both frequent

The Downsides to Too Many Communication Methods

The negatives to this, for both of us, are fairly clear:

• I have to decide how to send him the message. This takes thought, which takes some time. Each method has its own unique pros and cons. Defaults are quickly developed, but that takes some effort nonetheless.
• If I’m communicating professionally as a marketer through all these different methods I have a much bigger challenge. Each communication needs to be integrated and coordinated, and the complexity involved in managing that has increased by an order of magnitude.
• He has to pay attention to many more incoming streams. This means that he has to take some time away from other things, and that each gets less of his attention than it did before.

New Communication Methods Mean New Opportunities

I see two major benefits from this new world of communication:

1. Deeper and Broader Relationships: As the communication venues have opened, so has the complexity of my relationship with the customer/prospect/friend. We now see multiple sides to each other. Particularly in B2B selling, this means I can connect on many more levels, and learn more about prospects and customers – and relate in more ways – than may have even been possible a decade ago.
2. Indirect Reputation Building: More and more (as seen in the last few items on the list above), our communications have a semi-public nature. I can talk with you in a means that allows others to see our interaction. If my message is compelling and well-delivered – or simply shows positive characteristics – there will be some spill-over benefit to me in the form of increased brand awareness or brand preference.

Are there more benefits I’m missing? More downsides? How do you manage the spiraling complexity, both as a recipient or as a marketer?

I need to upgrade my computer. Since I’ve started using Microsoft OneNote a lot I thought I’d try a Tablet PC.

Self-Service

I immediately checked Dell’s website, and on the Dell Latitude XT2 Configuration Page the first item to configure was the processor.

In the introduction to the section, the last sentence said, “Choose the DLV (daylight viewable) display for maximum brightness.” But there were only two options, and both mentioned an LED LCD panel. Neither mentioned a DLV LCD panel.

Since the “daylight viewable” display sounded like a valuable option, I tried to find out how to get it (rather than just giving up in frustration or taking the lower-cost option). But after checking the help files and searching through every option on the system, I realized I could not find it without help.

Live Chat

Dell’s web site offers live chat support, so I selected that, and after a short delay, was greeted by a representative. He had to inform me that because I work for a large customer, he could not even answer my question, but had to refer me to a specific phone number and extension.

The Phone

So I called that number. I almost laughed when the recorded message told me that it would probably be faster and easier for me to get any answers I needed at Dell.com, but I waited it out.

I had to work my way through three different people on the phone. Each one of them, like the chat representative, insisted on knowing the name of my company before they would even listen to my question. I understand that Dell has different divisions and specialties, but as a customer (or in this case a prospect), it still comes off as rude to refuse to help me – or even listen to my request – because of that.

Finally, after 39 minutes on the phone – and a total of 56 minutes invested – I was informed that their back-end system showed three options in the processor selection, the two that the public could see with LED LCDs and one with a DLV LCD.

The Final Straw

Mystery finally solved, I suggested to the phone representative that he might want to let someone know about the absence of this option on the public web page. His response was, shall I say, something less than enthusiastic.

As a Dell fan and marketing strategist, this concerned me more than the lack of attention to detail. More than the missed opportunity to display a desirable $100 add-on to however many thousands of people viewed the XT2 configuration page since it was released. More even than the likely significant boost in profit on each shipped XT2 they were forgoing.

It concerned me because I had interacted personally with four people at what has been a great company and not one of them was interested in fixing the problem. Each did exactly what they had been told/taught to/required to do and nothing more. That does not bode well for Dell, and I sincerely hope my experience was very, very rare.

Photo of U.S. Declaration of Independence from Flikr by Chuck Coker (Caveman 92223)

Certain Ideas Have Power

There are some examples of ideas that are so powerful and compelling that simply voicing them to enough people – letting them see the light of day – is enough to spread change. “All men are created equal” seems to me to be one of those. It not only helped rally the colonies to the cause, it helped spread democracy then and now.

From a business standpoint, there’s only one example I have heard of a business idea so powerful simply in its conception – Free e-mail accounts that can be accessed anonymously, over the web and that automatically promoted itself – that VCs were willing to pay a significant premium just to be in on it. It’s certainly easy to see now how powerful that idea was and how important it was to be a first mover on it.

But Ideas Alone Are Never Enough

Even looking at just these two ideas, which were the most compelling I could find for the stand-alone power of ideas, it’s easy to see that execution – the successful implementation of the idea – is still absolutely critical.

The Declaration of Independence – and it’s codification of the idea that “all men are created equal” would mean little had the colonies not persevered in their revolution and won independence. The idea had power, but it was still a few thousand men living with hardship led by a few dedicated, talented and lucky leaders, with help from Holland and France and others that made it an example others could and would follow.

Hotmail had just as many possible points of failure. Had Sabeer Bhatia not managed his VC meetings as well, had Hotmail not worked well enough, had he held out too long or not long enough, things could easily have turned out differently. Indeed, GMail may have now overcome Hotmail, showing finally in the market that the idea is not the critical factor, but the implementation.

From literature and advertising there are even more examples “1984″, both the book and the Apple Commercial, were great concepts, but had they not been well executed there’s no way we’d still be talking about them decades later. There have been dozens of examples of works about star-crossed lovers, but Romeo & Juliet is still the best execution of the concept, and the standard all others still strive to meet.

What Do You Think?

What examples do you have of ideas of such power that their implementation is basically not a factor? I’m truly at a loss on this – I can’t find any. Truth is, while a great idea helps, I’m more convinced every year that good ideas can and should be given away freely because the implementation is all that matters and 99% of the population won’t or can’t implement the idea at all or as well, so there’s no reason to fear theft of the idea.

I’d love to be proven wrong.