Marketing Without Advertising

The Kindle reader

The Kindle Reader has changed the electronic reader game.  It is a marvel of marketing and should be carefully studied by marketers everywhere.

Kindle has made ePub format the standard of the electronic reader game.  Kindle did it.

What is interesting from a marketing point of view is that there have been many e-reader standards for over twenty years including HTML and the various Adobe PDF formats. None have been accept as the industry standard before the Kindle.

It wasn't Kindle sales volume that triggered the conversion.  We have no idea what the actual sales of Kindle were in the first year, it was probably large.

What is significant to marketing is that Kindle comes from Amazon and Amazon is the primary outlet of the book publishing industry.  With the combination of Amazon and Kindle the publishers had to make their books available on the Kindle reading format: ePub won the battle quickly and hands-down.

I've had a Sony Reader for many years, mostly to read manuscripts people send me in HTML format.  Sony emailed me to upgrade my Sony Reader to the ePub format (a hardware change) free of charge.

Next time you want to introduce a new product or service and set the industry standards... make sure you have the industry by the balls the way Amazon does.

Business with no name on the door

While our book Marketing Without Advertising is aimed at discounting traditional forms of advertising (newspaper ads, radio, TV and billboards) the book does make the point that business should do everything to help the customer easily find the business.

So when a business (walk-in off-the-street clients) has no name on the outside, what can I say?

Great marketing!

First it means that customers love the business so much that they come back and bring their friends.  Second, the only customers are people who came because of a personal recommendation...the very best kind of customers.  Third, customers all have a sense that they are personally special because they know about the business.

If you thrive with no name on the door, or just an address, you are a master of Marketing Without Advertising.

Starbucks test markets

I'm impressed with Starbucks test marketing of wonderful new architecture.  I saw a beautiful new marble waterfall in Shanghai.  I also saw an early version of MacCafe in Shanghai.

This is a good summary of Starbucks playing with architecture in Japan.

Coffee and the Internet

I remember the old days.  What I remember about the old days that never comes up in the myriad sentimental 'Remember the old days' emails that I frequently get is that we used to get coffee served with every meal any time of the day FREE.

I don't know when that practice ended nor do I know the geography of its demise (it may still prevail in parts of Nebraska).  I still notice it in hotels and highway diners at breakfast where you can often start with free coffee.  But that seems to be the limit of my current experience. Nearly everyone charges for coffee.

When did this change?  Did fast food retailers start it? Did the change signify anything else such as the rise of espresso or more dinning out?

While we are on the subject of free becoming sold, have you noticed that for the past 25 years water that was once free is now sold in high priced bottles.  

Based on coffee and water I expect many of the things we get free on the Internet won't be free for long.

Nickel and diming didn't hurt

Hotels still have phones in every room.  I suspect the years of nickel and diming the traveling public with high hotel telephone fees, remember $1.00 to call information and for local calls, paid-off.  As soon as the public had cell phones that worked, they skipped the hotel phones.

Unfortunately, if the hotels had charged reasonable fees for hotel phones the public would have been just as fast to stop using hotel phones, because the cell phone had a consistent number to respond to.

Sometimes gouging the traveling public doesn’t have automatically harmful marketing consequences. 

Hard to understand

Market and 16th.

If you want to see and enjoy San Francisco low life with a high density of people at one place, this is the place for you....but only in the day time.

The weirdest piece of marketing I remember seeing is on this corner.  For many people in this neighborhood their cash is in their boot, underpants or being held by an armed 'associate' nearby.  Their drug inventory is in the crotch of a raunchy looking woman also standing nearby.

So here is this Pacific National Bank ad in a window with a high paying 2% CD for people who have $100,000 or more to deposit. 

What am I missing?  Or does this bank know something I don't know.

Grocery delivery

This is a stunning description of grocery home delivery...how far its gotten in Japan and how to do it right.

"the value of “net super” orders (groceries ordered over the internet) reached 23 billion yen in the same year—1.7 times the value of the previous year. The growing elderly population and increasing number households where both partners work are cited as reasons for presumed market growth."

"A popular example is the Co-op supermarket chain online Pal System that allows neighbors to form community purchasing groups, saving money on bulk purchases and receiving free shipping. To date, over a million shoppers around the country are enrolled in the Pal System."

Bing listing

I find the new Microsoft search engine to be wonderful.  I particularly like the fact that the search terms can be in 'natural language'.  Thus, in a photo search you can add the word 'ironic' and get interesting results.

To get your business listed accurately on Bing.com go to this site.

Looks tasty but isn't

I have been watching the genius of food styling on TV for about a year.  Every time I see one of those beautiful meals with shrimp, sizzling beef, squeezed lemons and steaming vegetables I get hungry.

Foolish as I am, I have tried three of these national sit-down restaurant chains.  First a disclaimer.  I live in San Francisco where even the lowliest diner has four kinds of lettuce in the salad, rarely serves fried dishes of any sort and tends to grill most food especially vegetables.

In each case in the national TV restaurant chain the food was poor (I won't mention the names because one of them may be the only restaurant in town for some of my readers). The meat was tenderized and still flavorless, fish was fried, the veggies were steamed and over cooked, the salad was iceberg with Safeway dressing. The service was just: I'm Shirley, I'll be your waitress today...and five visits from an unknown host interrupting 'Is everything fine, sir?' The waitress had ten buttons on her blouse promoting god-knows-what.  The table was cluttered with special drink promos.

Those brilliant food styling shots have misled me badly. Deceptive, if I have a vote.

Find the market first

I actually created a whole new world of perfume and get no credit, but when I walk around Tokyo, I am fully rewarded.

What happened?  In the early 1980s a 50 year old fellow was introduced to me and he hired me for consulting.  It was a simple consulting project. 

The gentleman had been an employee, what the Japanese call a 'salary-man', in the perfume business.  At the time very few Japanese women wore perfume because it was all Western and alien to native taste. Western perfume is a combination of musk and floral fragrances (rose, Camellia, citrus..).

My client said the Japanese would respond to a range of essences from trees and herbs such as sandalwood.  Herb and tree bark smells have been a staple in Japan for centuries.  Traditional 16th Century parties were focused on guessing the subtle ingredients in incense.

I suggested the gentleman package 100 bottles in an appropriate shape and design and ask his friends at the highest status department store to see how customers reacted.  

The department store turned out to be Odakyu in Shinjuku and the new perfume became the basis for the entire modern Japanese perfume business.