When I first saw the article by Joe Sharkey in the New York Times today “Airborne Wi-Fi May Soar Despite All the Doubters”, I was filled with optimism.  I remember as far back as six years ago using Wi-Fi on a business class flight to Europe and being delighted to get through so much additional work, and also do some last minute logistics with the group I was visiting.

So of course I was sorry to see it removed a year or two later when people said the airlines wouldn’t recoup their investment.

Now, even though the cost Sharkey reports is at least $100,000 per plane to install Wi-Fi, I was a little bit shocked to hear the thinking on how they will recoup their costs this time, charging the individual for the use.  I was just having a similar conversation with the manager of the new Pan Pacific Hotel in Seattle.  For a traveler, a hotel room has some similarities to a flight.  I am already committed to the flight or the room, I have already agreed to pay their fee, and while I spent some time looking for the best fee, I didn’t spend a huge amount of time on it.

So when I am sitting on a flight, or in a hotel room and I have to go through a series of screens and sometimes provide my credit card number for a $15 or even $25 fee (some hotels offer a cheaper daily rate if you pay for two nights instead of one), I get grumpy.  I get grumpy because I feel nickel-and-dimed, and because it’s a hassle to go through that additional transaction, which is going to be a hassle again when I go to fill in my expense report.  While I suspect some people aren’t this way, but if the fee were baked into the room rate or the flight rate, I wouldn’t notice or care at the $15 or $25 difference, and it certainly wouldn’t change my choice of flight or hotel.  For those who care, add a checkbox at the point of reservation to indicate whether you want to pay for it and then make the wireless access code the same as the confirmation number we use to check in for our flight.  This isn’t as hard as they are making it.

This is a “how” trap for the airlines where they are looking at adding an incremental service and they want to recoup that expense in an incremental, transactional way.  Think of the customer and their experience, and what matters to them, and you might just find that the solution pays you back a lot faster than the transactional way you are thinking about.

The same goes for hotels, by the way, which is why I was talking with the Pan Pacific.  Put yourself in the shoes of the customer, or even ask them what they care about and what they don’t care about, and I expect you will find you need to do some rethinking on these ticky-tacky transactional items.

-Ric

Even before my own book Rethink came out, there weren’t a lot of books I recommended.  In fact, people who know me well know that Scott Bedbury’s A New Brand World was the only book I recommended for many years.

I have added another book to that short list, and oddly, like A New Brand World, this one also has an egg on the cover.

NurtureShock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, a book that is just coming out now, takes several basic notions of parenting, and blows them out of the water with great writing, and compelling scientific research.  They also use the word rethink several times, which I applaud.

One of the things that I like about this book is that each chapter is about a very specific thing, such as how we praise a child, why teenagers argue with their parents, the impact of putting kids into highly diverse schools, and the importance of an extra hour of sleep, to name a few.  In every case, the subject is introduced, and you will find yourself nodding in agreement, and then they will share with you the research data (which is heavily backed up in the final 100 pages of this book) which is often shocking, as the title suggests, and they then carefully direct you to the why the results of the research make sense and how to change your parenting skills accordingly.

Now my work, which is typically applied to business, is about getting people out of their “how” traps, the ways we all get stuck in our day-to-day ruts, as well as being specific about the outcome of “what” we are doing to make sure we are measuring them the right way.  NurtureShock takes for granted that we all want to be the best parents that we can be, with the “outcome” being happy, well-adjusted kids that can leave the nest and chase after what it is that brings happiness and fulfillment to their lives.

Essentially what Bronson and Merryman are saying is that we are in a bunch of “how” traps in our parenting, not because we are stupid or have bad intentions, we just don’t realize that “how” we are doing things actually cause the opposite “outcome” of what we intend, we have simply lacked the evidence to see it so clearly.  One of the most glaring examples is the chapter on praise.  Lots of people have talked and even joked about how much we over praise our kids these days, but what we have lacked up until this book, was the evidence of the specific damage it causes (aversion to risk taking and trying new things) and how to correct it (greater emphasis on the effort than the outcome).  Very actionable clear guidance on how to be better parents. And it’s so well written, you will fly through it.

Shock on.

-Ric

When I first saw this article in the paper earlier in the week, I will admit that I didn’t quite get why people, let alone big league venture capitalists, would be excited about Fanbase, who in their words is “the web’s largest almanac of college and pro athletes built by fans.”  It’s sort of an intersection of classmates.com and Wikipedia, but with a narrower focus on sports teams.

As I went about my day, I thought more about it, and it started to sink in the Fanbase is not only a really great idea, it is also setting a great example for all sorts of companies.

Since the beginning of time, marketers have tried to understand the various groups or segments of people that buy, or might buy their products.  That’s one of the reasons social networking has so much potential, you literally have groups of people opting in to various circles of friends, and when people know, or know of one another, the potential to market into those groups not only allows you to be more targeted, even more importantly with things like referral businesses, you can see causal and correlation behavior based on your marketing investment.  In other words you get transparency into whether your marketing efforts directly cause a person, or a group to buy your products or services or at the very least see a correlation, where historically very little of that data has been available to marketers so a lot of marketing has either been guesswork.

One problem with a lot of social networking sites is that just because someone is a “friend” of someone else on a site like Facebook, you don’t really have insight into how well those people know each other, and thus it’s potentially a very loose connection, so it may not really be meaningful that a given person is in a specific network.  A site like Classmates.com has some additional benefits where you know that people are the same age, and there’s probably a good chance that they have a lot of common demographic characteristics (like income and personal interests).  The downside of a site like classmates is that it’s mostly involuntary.  I didn’t pick my classmates, and there are a lot of them that I am not friends with, either in the conventional sense, or in the evolving Facebook definition, so there’s still some risk there in getting to a “pure” segment of customers, if such a thing exists.

Sports teams are great because they are likely to be a much more tight knit group, I would assert that the members of the teams are much more likely to actually like each other, and they probably still behave like a cohesive group.  In my case I was on the rowing team in high school and college, and I still keep in touch with both of those groups, I have a picture of my rowing team on my facebook page, I still know all of the names of the people  I rowed with and I have kept in touch with more than half of them over the years.  So not only is Fanbase going to be a valuable thing to me and my rowing friends, it also puts us in the cross hairs of marketers, because between my schools and the sport, the demographics tend to be very consistent, so my guess is that Fanbase is going to be very successful selling ad space to marketers.

The larger point for companies, and I have talked about this in previous blogs, as well as the Rethink book, the more you can know about your customer and what they value and don’t value, the much easier it is to get more targeted and tailored messaging for them.  I expect to see more sites like Fanbase that combine opting in, with groups that have similar demographics, who actually stay in touch with each other, but Fanbase sure seems to have a lot of potential, and if you read the article, it also sounds like a great management team.  I am a fan.

-Ric

It’s common, especially on Sunday, that the New York Times will have articles in different sections of the paper that arguably have nothing in common, but in reality, do overlap in some way or another.

Today on the front page there was this article about the safety of drinking water as a result of pesticides people put on their lawns, and how drinking water is especially at risk in the Summer because of how much lawn care goes in the Summer months.  Wonderfully illustrative graphs supplementing very thorough reporting.

Then as I worked my way to the Business section, there was an interesting aticle about how complicated it can be to introduce a new germ killing product because of the tendency of the public not to trust the safety of a product.

The article talked about a company called PureGreen24 and a number of other points of the issue, but what really got my attention was the photograph of the CEO of PureGreen24 essentially drinking the germ killer as a demonstration, very much the sort of thing you would expect to see in an infomercial at 3:00 AM.

Something that I talk about is the importance of a company to really be clear about the value proposition of its products and services, while at the same time being very clear about what is most important to its customers.  It’s unsurprising to me that national water safety levels made the front page, and despite the theatrics, I have to give PureGreen24 credit for understanding how critical that issue is to their customer base.  Well done.

And well done to the New York Times for continuing to put in these unrelated, but somehow related stories in the same paper.  That’s one of the things that’s fun about the Sunday paper.

-Ric

When people say “necessity is the mother of invention” they usually mean that someone invented something new out of a need or desire to make it easier or better.  Whether the person needed an easier way to turn on and off lights (a la The Clapper), or help customers get cash whenever they need it (the ATM, automated teller machine), there are lots of examples.

But in recessionary times, when people are laid off, jobs are scarce, so the “necessity” in their case is income.  What’s different in cases like those written up in this article, is that in a lot of cases people already have the idea for a product or a business, what they lacked wass the courage or the funding or the confidence to take the chance – and getting laid of provided the motivation, the necessity to get off the couch and do it.  People who fall on hard times have their backs against the wall, so they have nothing to lose, so why not take the chance on the idea.

One of the things that I particularly like about some of the stories in the article, is that the people are very practical about the risks they are taking.  In the case of Lisa Marie Grillos, she hasn’t gone out to raise venture capital money for some big idea, she has set it up so that every product she sells turns a profit.  This isn’t so different from the micro-loan idea you hear about that has been so successful in emerging markets, especially with women.  These people are, in many senses giving themselves micro-loans, and with so low risk, if they fail, their failure isn’t catastrophic.

I am not at all surprised to hear that these people are successful.  My question is how we can encourage more people to think in micro-loan mentality in terms of pursuing that idea they have and taking small, low risk steps to move them forward.  I am confident there are lots and lots of great ideas for great little (and in some cases big businesses) and if we could motivate people to take that chance, even to partner with people to execute on their ideas, we would see a lot of really interesting and useful products, and I think that would go a long way to reviving the message that anything is possible in this country, if you just take a little risk.

It would be very interesting to me to hear your thoughts on how we can motivate more people to pursue their ideas.

-Ric