Colin Charles Agenda

This weekend was an example of pulling strings while in Malaysia, something that I completely do not like to do, and think should be unnecessary in a service-based economy.

The Samsung Galaxy SIII (S3) just launched in Malaysia. The ads have gone up and people have been queuing since 4am to buy phones. Generally stores sell up to 300 per day, and these are just at the telcos that have them. Samsung themselves do not sell it at their flagship stores. Mostly telcos are encouraged to sell it with a contract, but you can generally buy them outright.

On Saturday, we had to go to MidValley. I was told the best store to get it at would be the Celcom Blue Cube. Maxis had run out of stock for the day. I figured that while Sara sorted out the groceries, I would pay the store a visit. I got a queue number and waited. And waited. And waited. Thankfully I had my BlackBerry with me and was clearing a tonne of email. 45 minutes passed and the queue number did not move! It was not because people were buying the S3 alone, it was because the Celcom store just seemed very inefficient.

Groceries done and no phone in hand, I go home feeling a little dejected. I text my contact at Maxis, who says there will be no problem reserving a unit for me tomorrow (Sunday). Things are starting to look up. I tried it the regular way and failed; now it’s time to be a typical Malaysian and pull strings, right?

My friends and I go to the store at about 7pm on Sunday. We meet one sales guy who says they only have one unit available. At this stage, we want three. Apparently the daily quota had been met, and my friends would have to come back tomorrow. One more call to my contact and lo and behold, there can be three units available. Sales guy says that we have to queue to make such a purchase and it would set us back up to two hours. Two hours to get service?!?

Another call to my contact and we’re out of the store within minutes with three units of Samsung Galaxy S3 phones. In pebble blue as well, which is apparently the color that is a lot harder to get.

Why doesn’t everyone get similar service? Why must strings be pulled to get service? In an economy where one has to win customers, why is it that the focus is on frustrating the customer at every possible instance? Where is the customer centric nature that fuels a service based economy?

After blogging here for over eight years, I’ve decided to switch off comments. 

Its clear that there are many ways to keep track of comments now, especially with social networks. I thought that implementing Disqus would help. But when your blog post reaches Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. and it gets its own individual comment stream, it gets really difficult to keep track of where the conversation is any longer. I also get a lot of comments via email, which I get too much of to begin with. As I get busier, I certainly have less time to respond to comments anyway.

Surprisingly, disabling comments had nothing to do with spam. Akismet has been taking care of that quite well for the many years it has been used. I probably miss a few good comments here and there (because I never check the spam queue), but thats ok.

Something to sync comments across all social networks might be cool. I’ve yet to see that yet.

I just started reading Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy of Ogilvy advertising fame. I’m about half way thru it and I think that if you’re in the advertising, media, or the digital/social space, you should definitely read this brilliant book.

He lists four problems that advertising faces, and I highlight excerpts of problem one (highlighting is my own):

The first problem is that manufacturers of package-goods products, which have always been the mainstay of advertising, are now spending twice as much on price-off deals as on advertising. They are buying volume by price discounting, instead of using advertising to build strong brands. Any damn fool can put on a price reduction, but it takes brains and perseverance to create a brand.

Listen to a speech I made in Chicago in 1955:

“The time has come to sound an alarm, to warn manufacturers what is going to happen to their brands if they spend so much on deals that there is no money left for advertising to build their brand. Deals don’t build the kind of indestructible image which is the only thing that can make your brand part of the fabric of life.”

Andrew Ehrenberg of the London Business School has one of the best brains in marketing today. He reports that a cut-price offer can induce people to try a brand, but they return to their habitual brands as if nothing had happened.

Why are so many brand managers addicted to price-cutting deals? Because the people who employ them are only interested in next quarter’s profit. Why? Because they are more concerned with their stock options that the future of their company.

Price-off deals are a drug. Ask a drug-addicted brand manager what happened to his share of the market after the delirium of the deal subsided. He will change the subject. Ask him if the deal increased his profit. Again he will change the subject.

This was David Ogilvy talking about modern group buying sites in 1963.

Yesterday I asked on Twitter: Do you run a restaurant? Have you succeeded in running a group buying deal? Have you seen return customers? Comments like its a scam, anyone that wants a cut price deal is unlikely to return for full price, and even feedback from buyers whom don’t return due to disappointing experiences or how the food just isn’t worth the full price. I had some offline conversations about this and the ones that did return were basically already loyal customers saving money through a deal.

My own thoughts about group buying have been posted before: a Groupon before you close looking at the deal dynamics behind a deal, and some initial thoughts when they first started becoming mainstream.

Via Murdoch’s Pride is America’s Poison:

In the digital era of do-it-yourself news consumption, it is easier than ever to assemble an information diet that simply confirms your prejudices. Traditional news organizations, for all their shortcomings, see it as their mission to provide – and test – the information you need to form intelligent opinions. We aim to challenge lazy assumptions. Fox panders to them.

Brilliant article on ethics and the role media plays. In today’s social world with social feeds, you tend to get news that is influenced by what your friends read (Facebook has several such apps). On Twitter they don’t even necessarily need to be your friends, just people you choose to follow.

In the Malaysian context, this really means you need a balanced news diet. Mainstream media is pro-ruling party, while alternative media tends to be pro-opposition or sometimes have their own agendas. There’s no middle ground in the sea of tabloids.

Its worth noting that I’m no longer on the councils for the Malaysian National Computer Confederation (MNCC) and the Technopreneurs Association of Malaysia (TeAM). For MNCC, it was a retirement at the end of a term, and for TeAM it was a resignation during the term. Yes, both allow you to stick around for 2 years in general. I wish the organizations much luck in their future endeavors. 

I arrived in San Francisco yesterday (Easter Sunday) and my usual shuttle service to Santa Clara had some issues fulfilling my journey (some 1h45m wait). So I took a taxi. As soon as I arrived at my destination, and he knew I was a techie, he said: “Look, a San Francisco startup has this cool device that helps independent entrepreneurs like me accept payments by all kinds of credit cards.”

He didn’t know what the device was called, but I immediately recognised it as the Square app (I’ve recently written about this space). On an Android phone. Found it interesting during tipping: 15%, 20%, or 25%. No option to enter your own choice. Enter your email address for a receipt (there’s also a phone number option, which I am sure I can’t use). Then the taxi driver writes one physically for you as well. I presume the driver gets money in his bank account in a rather short period of time.

How did it use to work? A manual scan on carbon paper with a device the credit card company provided. Probably submit the receipt and get paid within a much longer period of time. Or it used to be plain old cash — most drivers would never accept a card, preferring only cash.

Square uses: CentOS, Puppet, Ruby, Graphite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis. They also build the service on the JVM orchestrating Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, JRuby, MRI and Java. Incidentally, love the way they hire people — tell them what is required of them, then ask them to complete a task/programming example.