Lush soaps and inspirational words

My wife is a big fan of Lush soaps and we were running low on our stock of bath bombs and soaps. This Monday, on our day out at Coventry city centre with our daughter who's having her Easter break, we took the opportunity to drop by the Lush shop at the Lower Precinct.

For your information, Lush was started by husband and wife Mark and Mo Constantine, who originally supplied cosmetics to Bodyshop. Their handmade soaps are really popular and they now have more than 600 stores in 43 countries. What we like about the company is that they are totally against animal testing, are hand made and they support a number of ethical issues.

After we got back home I was reading what was written on their shopping bag. I am not sure how many of you do that but as a marketing student, I love reading stuff written on packaging. Anyway, I really liked the part about

"We believe that our products are good value, that we should make a profit and that the customer is always right."

And I do believe them.

BMW's new marketing direction

BMW TV is today launching it's expanded IPTV offering online globally following the successful two-year beta-phase at http://bmw-web.tv/. According to a report I received, their German webpage and its international site registered a total of more than 70 million video views.

They plan to roll out thirteen other local-language websites shortly.

In case you were not aware, they also have an official BMW YouTube Channel. This is all part of their move to attract online consumers.

Check out this "teaser" clip of their new concept car featuring what they call BMW EfficientDynamics technology. I put teaser inside quotes because it's kind of funny. You only get to see the tail lights for a few seconds.

Ryanair and bloggers

As we all know, if you are a big company, picking a quarrel with a blogger is not really a good idea. However, Ryanair recently did that.

Web developer and blogger Jason Roe was called an "idiot blogger" when he pointed out a flaw on the airline's website. The response from other bloggers was predictable. The comments are hilarious and as someone who's in marketing, I simply couldn't believe it. Is it possible that one of the biggest low cost airline in Europe is that arrogant?

Read the Telegraph's article: 'Ryanair calls blogger lunatic'.

In spite of that, I was really surprised to find the level of negative perception towards the airline prevalent among my friends here. Not even one had a nice thing to say about the company. This is a case of extremely bad PR and they clearly need to do something about this.



I have flown with the airline only once to La Rochelle and I simply flew with them because they were the cheapest. I had no problems with the airline apart from the one thing - there was no information on the tickets on how to contact their customer service by telephone (do they even have one?) when we had problems.

They can learn a thing or two from Air Asia, a low cost airline based in Malaysia and one of the fastest growing the World. They start flying to London this year.

You just have to compare the websites of the two airlines to see what I mean:


Air Asia


Ryanair

This is an interesting case because I can always use it as an example of "what not to do" for my marketing students.

Anyway, enjoy this ad:

First Commentator
D

Top Entrecard droppers for Jan 09

Entrecards are a great way to drive traffic to your blog or site. I signed up with them sometime back and traffic to my blog has increased by several times.

Every month I will list down the top Entrecard users who dropped their card on my site the most.

Here is the top 10 list for this month:

1. Blogging resource and make money online
2. Life After Work
3. a malaysian abroad
4. Emila's Illustrated Blog
5. Art By Paul Baines
6. Doi Speaks
7. Nested Universe
8. Apple iPhone Blogger
9. Buy-Tees.net T-Shirts
10. josh q. public

Thanks a lot guys.

Buying 3 pay as you go SIM card

My sister-in-law who's just moved to London wanted to buy a pay as you go SIM card only, as she already has a phone. It was meant to be a temporary thing before she signed up for a monthly payment plan. Of course I suggested 3. So off we went to their store in Bayswater, London. However, I was quite surprised when I found out that they didn't have any pay as you go sim card in stock.

Further down the road there's a Phones 4 U shop and they eventually bought the 3 sim card from there.

This is yet another example of a 3 store disappointing me. My previous experience was buying a phone from their Coventry store. Yet another reason for interested customers to buy phones or SIM card from their online store.

Gift cards for this holiday season

The holiday season is almost upon us and the almost everyone I meet seems to be in a jolly mood. It's also the time of the season to buy gifts. Not really sure how the current recession is going to affect the sales. Most of my friends are looking for bargains online.

One thing that will not change will be the big queues in stores at the returns counter where people go to exchange unwanted gifts. I was wondering whether giving prepaid gift cards would be a better alternative. People could then go and buy things that they really wanted or needed.

According to a study by commissioned by Blackhawk Network, the creator of the Gift Card Mall™, 70% of the respondents felt that gift cards are a useful gift since the recipient can get what he/she wants. Further more, the National Retail Federation’s 2009 NRF holiday survey showed 54.9% of consumers would like to receive a gift card this holiday season.

I guess that's not really surprising. I would prefer to receive a gift card rather than a sweater that did not fit me.

I am sure some of you might be worried that with several retailers in financial trouble or even going under, they might not accept gift card. However, the fact is that most retailers are not going bankrupt and those that were are getting rescued and there is no evidence to show that retailers are not accepting gift cards.

So if you haven't thought about your gifts as yet, you might want to consider giving gift cards.

SEO Coventry

SEO is such a big thing right now and everyone is talking about it. For those who are not aware, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It is one of the key web marketing activities and is defined as:

the process of editing and organizing the content on a webpage or across a website to increase its potential relevance to specific keywords on specific search engines and importantly ensuring that external links to the site are correctly titled and in abundance. Source: Wikipedia.

Anyway, I was wondering whether there are any good companies specialised in SEO in Coventry and was quite surprised to find that in fact, there are none here in Coventry, apart from the National B2B Centre based at the University of Warwick. A search on Google for the search terms "SEO Coventry" also revealed that the companies in the top 5 results are based in Birmingham, London or elsewhere.

At a conference I recently attended, I was talking to some guys and they revealed that they did most of the SEO work in-house but their efforts were not effective and they have to consult some "SEO experts" from time to time, often at a huge cost. I was surprised at the amount that they were paying some of these so called experts.

Definitely puts some ideas into my head. I see a lot of opportunities for a Coventry based company or SEO Expert.

Introducing Nitro Digital

For several years, I have been helping people with establishing a presence on the net - this includes individuals as well as companies. Most of the time, I just point them to professionals who can help them set up a web site and in case they already have one, to market their sites online.

I always keep an eye out (and ear open) for companies specialising in web design and online marketing. It's quite hard to recommend a good one considering the fact that there are so many companies out there as well as freelancers involved in this area.

Among the criteria I look for includes whether the companies were established (when they started) and their portfolio.

One company I recently came across is 'Nitro Digital'. The compay was established in 2001 and started out as Nitro Ventures before changing to the current name. They specifically target pharmaceutical companies looking for agency to take care of their website - right from design and updating to marketing and driving quality traffic to it.

Nitro Digital is a succesful medium size Media Agency specialising in Web Design, Development and Online Marketing for Pharmaceutical companies (including PPC, SEO, Viral and Social Network Marketing, Online Display Advertising, You name it...)

Was quite impressed by their list of clients and case studies. I would defnitely recommend them to anyone looking for such services.

Consumer vs customer

NOTE: Latest update: 25 August 2010.
Updated 18 Nov, 2007 after consultation with my the marketing expert, my wife.

Last week, I was in charge of this undergraduate class and I suddenly realised that a number of the students were using the words 'consumer' and 'customer' interchangeably. Guess this is true for a lot of people on the street. However, I have on some occasions come across some academics making the same mistake at academic conferences as well.

As used in marketing terminology, there is a huge difference between the two concepts. The term 'Customer' refers to individuals or households that purchase goods and services generated within the economy. On the other hand, a 'Consumer' is someone who uses the products or services.

At a glance, there doesn't seems to be any difference but if you examine closely, there is. For example, A mother who does the shopping for the family in a supermarket is a customer. She and the rest of the family sit down at the dining table to eat the food she has bought and they are all consumers. The mother is a customer and a consumer at the same time.

You might have come across the term B2B and B2C. B2B refers to Business-to-Business transections. For example, Tesco buys goods from Procter & Gamble in bulk. On the other hand B2B refers to Business-to-consumer transection. For example, I go to Tesco and buy Duracell batteries. For those who did not know, Duracell is owned by P&G.

Did that make any sense to you?

Online marketing companies

The World Wide Web is the first truly new medium since television, offering marketers with several opportunities as well as challenges. In fact, a study by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers this year showed that online advertising is the fastest growing advertising medium. Thus, it no wonder that so many internet marketing companies have mushroomed all over the net. Even the traditional ad companies have got into the act.

So how do we know which company to choose?

I have a few simple tips: First of all look at their track record. The older they are, the better. Secondly, take a look at their own Alexa and Google rankings. If these companies claim to specialise in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), yet are themselves stuck with a low PR, it doesn't make sense.

Look at the companies that fulfils both criteria. They should have over over 10 years experience in SEO, Pay Per Click Management, Online Media Buying, and Website Usability.

Look at their home page - does it have a Google PR 3 and above? 

Making email interactive

Can email be interactive? If you said "No!" then you are wrong.

Leading email marketing company, iContact has launched a unique feature around email content, called the iContact Community. It allows visitors to comment, rank, and discuss email newsletters with their subscribers which opt in.

It works by allowing email marketers to create a public profile, publicly archive their newsletters and blog posts, tag and categorize their newsletters and blog posts in categories like Automotive, Business, Entertainment, shopping and more.

At first glance, it looks very much like Digg and it's not surprising as the community employs a similar model - more interesting and relevant the content published, the higher the chances for it to get votes.

This should definitely interest those publishers who are looking to get more visitors and subscribers, as the community profile will be indexed by Google and the major search engines.

When I last checked, the Community had already 213,458 Articles, 120,876 Members and 119,016 Publishers just a few days after launch.

iContact certainly has one of the best features and one of the best prices in the market. Their user-interface is quite intuitive and streamlined. You don't have to take my word for it as you can try it out for free. Use their service to create, send and track Email Newsletters, Surveys, and RSS Feeds. They have different pricing packages from 500 to 100,000 subscribers. Anyone can join as a iContact publisher by paying $9.95 per month. This is for 500 subscribers. However, you have to contact them directly for a quote if you have a huge number of subscribers, exceeding 100,000 contacts.

If you are a non-profit organization, you are in luck as iContact is now offering a 20% discount, provided you can prove your non-profit status.

Do check out the iContact Blog as well. They have a number of tips for improving email marketing campaigns and of course updates on iContact and informations about the Broadwick Corporation.

The Power of Gâc

Many herbs have been traditionally used throughout the World for medicinal or health purposes. Some herbs need to be cooked or specially prepared before they can be taken internally or applied externally. Some are taken raw without any preparation.

In Asia, traditional herbal medicines are widely used, as are other alternative medicinal practices. Slowly but steadily, these exotic and amazing herbs are gradually been introduced to the people in the West. Many of these herbs which have traditionally been used for ages in the Asian countries have been found to contain nutrients or other useful chemical compounds on testing in laboratories.

Momordica cochinchinensis (Lour.) Spreng., commonly known as 'Gac', is one such plant commonly found in South East Asia, especially in Vietnam. It has been traditionally used as both food and medicine there.


The plant grows as dioecious vines that bear abundant red fruits. The Gac fruit has been found to be rich in lycopene, beta-carotene and other potent antioxidants.

It is now available as a dietary supplement from various sites- mostly pure oil extracted from the 'Gâc' fruit.

Tricked into holding a contest

Warning: This is a long post.

Some of you might recall that I had organised a Nitro T-shirt contest on my auto blog. It was not as successful as I had hoped it would and even though it received a fair bit of interest, there were no takers for it except for two bloggers who were also the winners by default.

That's when the problem started. the Dodge Nitro T-shirts were supposed to be sponsored but I totally lost contact with the sponsors (or they cut me off).

How did this saga start?

Well I was approached by a Corrie Zielinski from a company called New Media Strategies. I later found out that this online advertising and Marketing firm is based in Arlington, Virginia.

Given below is her first e-mail to me:

Hi Adam,

My name is Corrie Zielinski, and I just came across Auto Lah. I’m working with Dodge Nitro and have some t-shirts available for a contest. Would you be interested in running one? I think your site is great, and I’d love to work with you.

Thanks!

Corrie

I told her that I was interested and asked her to tell me a little bit more about the contest and what I would be required to do. This is her reply on Feb 22:

Hi Adam!

The contest process is pretty simple:

I provide you with the number of shirts I can make available to you, pictures of said shirts, and some additional picture assets you can use for the contest if you want. Then, we usually suggest a simple "enter to win" contest, where people email you and you can randomly pick a winner.
You send me the address, and I'll send the t-shirt to the winner or winners. That way, you don't have to pay for postage - we ship a LOT of stuff, so we have a pretty well honed system for getting stuff out the door quickly.

Does that sound good?

I told her what I planned to do and she wrote back on Feb 23:

Hey Adam!

That is the best idea - I love it!

I can give you one Dodge Red Long Sleeve T-Shirts and One Short Sleeve
Black "Can" T-Shirts. (If you look at the "Can" picture you'll totally
get why I call it that. I still can't figure out how they do it.)

I'd really appreciate it if you could include a link to official Dodge
site at (http://www.dodge.com/en/nitro/index.html). I'm also sending you
a link of a bunch of assets that we've collected from Dodge - pictures,
logos, magazine articles, etc. You're free to use whatever you want! The
asset links are available here: http://www.media-file.net/dodge/nitro/

Thank you so much, and let me know when the contest is live - I can't
wait to see it AND read the stories (have been personally drooling over
the Nitro since we get this project).

Thanks!
Corrie

The contest ended and on March 26 I informed Corrie about the results and that I had two winners.

I received the reply dated Mar 26 :

Corrie Zielinski

Hey adam - go ahead and get their addresses o we can get those sent. No worries on the parcipitation, it happens. I have no internet right now - thank god for blackberry!

Thanks, corrie
--------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

That was the last time I ever heard from her.

I obtained the addresses of the winners and sent them to her ... No acknowledgement! I had a bad feeling about that.

Then early this month, I learned that the winners hadn't received the t-shirts till date.

Sent Corrie another e-mail from an alternative e-mail address as I was afraid that the one sent from my Gmail might have landed in her spam filter ... No reply!

I then contacted the company through their website ... No reply! Sent email directly to them ... Still no reply!

Finally I realised that something was definitely wrong.

Searching on the net, I found out that a similar contest had ran on Kineda.com. On contacting Terry, the webmaster of the site,he informed me that he had had no problems with Corrie and

She delivered everything as promised.

I am not sure what happened. One thing is sure. I am never going to have a sponsored contest on my blogs again unless I have full control.

In the end, I had to send the winners Don and Doris a T-shirt each from my own online store.

Let this be a warning to all bloggers out there.

UPDATE:
I am really happy to announce that everything turned out great in the end. The whole fiasco was due to e-mail problems.

Tags: Contest Corrie Zielinski Dodge Nitro New Media Strategies Scam

Fast implementation of CRM

Implementation of a typical customer relationship management (CRM) system can take weeks (and sometimes months) to complete. However, AIMpromote claims to have customer relationship management implementation for your entire organization up and running in a matter of days.

One major advantage of the AIMpromote system over other CRM software is that it doesn't have the unnecessary and confusing options. These are completely eliminated so that your marketing staff won't have to spend unnecessary time on it and get on with the marketing job.

A properly configured AIMpromote account will require that only key administrators have full access, and other users will use only specific pieces of the software. This of course can be changes at any time. In other words, your sales force in a position to focus more on making sales, and less on learning software.

In fact AIMpromote is setting new standards in online sales management software and is changing the way that businesses are managing their sales teams.

You can try it out (full featured version) for 14 days, if you sign up now.

Google is #1 brand

Google has been named as the most powerful global brand of 2007 beating others such as Microsoft and Coca-Cola.

The ranking called 2007 brandz, Top 100 most powerful brands, was carried out by market researcher Millward Brown Optimor.

Is it that surprising?

Related link: Google beats Microsoft, Coke in brand stakes

Social networks and my psychographic profile

I recently joined Orkut, another online social networking site. BTW, Orkut is named after its creator Orkut Büyükkökten, and is owned by Google.

Suddenly realized that I am now a member of almost every social network out there on the net. This includes MySpace, Friendster, MyBlogLog, SpicyPage, among others. Not sure whether they can be called a social network, but I am also member of Flickr, YouTube, Textamerica and Yahoogroups.

My wife who's specialized in Marketing, tells me that I fall into the "Innovator" or "Thrill seeker" segment of the market. This refers to my Psychographic profile. The first ones to try out anything new.

So are you like me?

Flippies making a comeback

I am sure that all of you have come across or even owned a flippie at one time or the other. Flippies (or Flip books ) refer to "books with a series of pictures that vary gradually from one page to the next, so that when the pages are turned rapidly, the pictures appear to animate by simulating motion or some other change" (Source: Wikipedia).

Their popularity died out with the advent of movies and later TV. However, they are making a come back as an effective and unique advertising tool.

Recently, this company called Flippies has re-engineered the novelty into a bona fide promotional advertising tool. Now, commercials, sports moments, product demos and even your own video clips can be transferred into print as a flippie. Check out the Flippies Custom Flip Books


Among all the advertising mediums available today, I am sure you will agree that this is certainly a unique yet simple way of promoting a product or service. Presents a range of marketing possibilities - from product launches to conference giveaway items.

SEO charges based on top rankings

There are a lot of Search engine optimization (SEO) companies out there on the net and choosing one for your company can be a tough choice. After all, how do we know they can deliver after we have already spent the money.

Well, looking around the net, I came across this incredible offer from a search engine optimization company called eTrafficJams.com based in Tampa Bay Florida. They promise top 10 organic search engine placements on Google, Yahoo!, and/or MSN completely FREE of charge for a month. This means that you are not bound to a contract regardless of the results as is the case when you sign up with other search engine optimization companies.

I was thinking that might be a great way to instil confidence in your customers so that they can try you out. However, they are not cheap - their monthly fees are based on the number of top 10 rankings they get for their clients and start from $500/ month. I liked the fact that they had four different SEO packages to choose from, to suit your needs and your search engine marketing budget.

Quite impressed with what their clients have to say in their testimonials page. One of their clients, says that they received top 5 rankings on AOL, Google and Yahoo in just a few days. As I have always stressed, before you go for any SEO company, it is always advisable to look at their Google page rank. I checked and found that their home page has an impressive PR 6 and Alexa rankings of 143,059.

On the other hand if you are looking for an affordable option, I might be able to help you. Just search on Google for SEO Expert Coventry.

Video marketing site

Selldeo.com (http://www.selldeo.com)is an online classified listing site with a difference. Instead of just old fashioned text and photos, this site carries user-generated video ads.

Usually that kind of video marketing was only reserved for big companies with huge marketing budgets. This is another indication of the fact that the internet has totally changed the way we do business as well as marketing products and services.

This service is now available to artists, home run businesses and even you. The video ad hosting makes video marketing widely accessible to the public. It also gives rise to a wide range of possibilities - virtual tours, video reviews and so on. In case you are not that tech savvy, don't worry, the site allows simple text ad listings too.

For your information, the site also has homepages that are focussed at several local markets so that local sellers can target their specific target segments.

There are two things I really like about this classifieds site. First of all it's totally free for both sellers and shoppers and secondly, there is no limit to how long an ad can run.

If you do want some extra attention, you can opt for the Featured Ad space for a nominal fee and get featured prominently in the center of their homepage. Another Adam ok recommended site.

Article on Internet ads and SEO

I have got a lot of people interested in blogging, particularly after hearing that I made money out of it sitting at home. A lot of them went ahead and created new accounts with Blogger. I had to show how to choose a template, add links and post. However, that was the easy part. Explaining how online ads work and more technical stuff like optimizing their sites for search engines proved to be tougher.

There are numerous blogs and websites explaining all these things but I found some great short articles on the worldmarketsystems site. The site mentions that World Market Systems was founded in 2002 and currently hosts over 50,000 websites. I am not really sure as the site doesn't have any further information about the company.

Anyway, I found the articles "How to use Banner Advertising" and "How does Search Engine Optimization affect me?" quite interesting and am going to send the url of this site to my friends.