The Lines are open, but no-one is listening

I rarely watch Free to Air TV, not because it doesn't sometimes (okay hardly ever) have good content, but because of the quantity and (lack of) quality of the advertising - most especially those ads which aren't.

I really question, having sat through the Blackadder marathon last week on one of them, whether the advertisers actually think they are getting value? I'm sure the metrics are telling them yes - but if I was an Advertiser, I'd be querying it anyone remembered my brand halfway through a 4 minute ad break? Maybe that's the sweet spot for someone coming back from a piss or getting another Beer?

Anyway, I turned off most of Blackadder, as even that humour was getting abused by the shit it was being associated with.

I say, let them put as much cross-promotion and advertising as they like all day every day. The 'majority' of the population which currently watches these channels will soon realise there are myriad alternative ways to get Blackadder which no longer involves having to sit through 7 or 8 ads in one break for every 5 or 6 minutes.

Having an online complaints mechanism is very modern, but if there are no penalties and the outcomes are ignored, what's the point? Let them all kill each other anyway, they're all dead already. They advertisers which keep them alive just don't know that yet.


Fuck it, lets just cross-post our twitter hastag for Hey, Hey when it comes back to the Online complaints page.

That'd be awesome!

Balancing Need and Want in the Product Development Process

I just read Matt Moore's most recent post over at Engineers without Fears.
I was inspired enough to comment as I felt his argument covered a key challenge of the Customer/Product Relationship.

As organisations which develop and Sell Products and Services, we need to sell to make ourselves relevant. In order to ensure we get and keep our customers we sometimes have to perhaps emphasise parts of the service which we know are going to appeal more to specific customer segments. That's called Marketing and PR, I think. The question is though, is that a form of prostitution, or just fulfilling a real need which actually exists?
As with most things, the challenge is to find the balance between creating a need, filling a need which exists. That's probably more sustainable than creating 'wants' in order to fulfill over zealous forecasts to keep the Shareholder happy.
(note: Image sourced from http://www.zazzle.com.au/)

The Pillars of Retail

Sometime ago, I wrote about the segmentation of markets and the inherent gaps there are in that Segmentation when people don't 'fit' the model. In my day job recently I've been doing a lot of thinking about Retail, which is not really a subject I know much about. And recently I've had the experience of some hideous customer service (which I'll write about at length in a follow up article). So I've been thinking about how all those thought processes overlap.

I conceptualised some time ago in an earlier draft of this article what I thought where the definitions of a successful retail offering. While this article is semi-educated OPINION, developed by being a customer for well, a few years now, I think it is important to defer to experts in the field. So I have been canvassing directly or indirectly input about Retail (i.e. Bricks and Mortar) sales outlets. Especially when it comes to the Key Pillar of that channel - Customer Experience.

As part 1 of this piece, let me share my opinions on what I believe a retail business should, at the very least, offer a customer.