There has been a lot of talk about Foursquare lately, the popular site that allows people to notify select friends where they are with the GPS feature on their wireless device.    So if I decide to go downtown in Seattle to the wine bar Purple, I can “check in” to that location when I arrive there and send signals to friends that might be nearby.  It’s a pretty handy and as more of us get used to the ubiquity of GPS, especially as GPS can now be specific about a specific location in a mall, even specific to a floor (a la what Point Inside offers).

The challenge with Foursquare is that you have to remember to “check in” your location and depending on circumstances, that can be a hassle, and for the forgetful ones in the crowd, well . . .

Here’s what I think is going to happen.

If we start with the outcome of what people (not everyone, I realize) is going to want, it’s broadcasting to specific groups of friends where you will be, and when.

I actually think the longer term solution will involve less GPS, not more.

Most people already maintain online calendars, and for many of us, the location is already a part of what we include in the block of time.  If we simply specify which friends we want to know about it, it becomes pretty easy for the e-mail server to push the notifications to the friends, or for friends to poll who is nearby when they are looking for other people.  If someone is supposed to be in an area, the friend can text the other friend and ask them to activate their GPS so they can track them down (since most devices don’t broadcast persistently).

The other reason I think this makes sense, is that most of us are several people in one. There’s the work “me”, the Dad “me”, the workout “me” and then the social “me” – and it wouldn’t be too hard for me to select different groups of people to notify during the day, at night, on the weekend, based on which “me” I am – and having the mail service manage that and push it out to contacts makes sense to me.

I could see Facebook, or Hotmail, or Outlook being in a good position to do this, and I think this is the easiest “how” to achieve the “what” of notifying people where we are.  I do think a player like Point Inside is going to be pivotal for this to play itself out.

-Ric

The other day I was out on Amazon buying a book, something I do often, and when I got to the shipment choices, there was free next day shipping (a perk of shopping there a lot), and next day shipping for a fee, and another button for standard shipping.  It assumed I wanted the free second day air, and pre-selected that button, and I would have to select a different button for standard shipping (which I usually do, and they never remember that).

Now perishable things are one thing, but I have to tell you, I think Amazon and other retailers are making a big mistake by not asking us when we want it instead of assuming we want it as soon as possible.  Asking that question could be a huge help to online retailers like Amazon as well as the shipping organization.

A really simple example (and the first time I thought of this) was last Summer when my son picked out his Halloween costume.  Now of course Halloween is at the end of October, but kids of a certain age really look forward to it, so my little guy knew in July that he wanted to be a skeleton zombie.  What eight year-old wouldn’t?

So I went out to the costume site and placed my order and of course they assumed we needed the costume right away, but we really didn’t need it until late October, but there was no way to convey that.  Asking that simple question “when do you need it by?” helps everyone involved with the transaction:

1) It helps the merchant with the management of their time in terms of efficiency and schedule management.  They might wait until they have several orders for the same product so that they can be more efficient in pulling them off the shelf and packaging them.

2) It helps the transportation company (if they put a delivery date label on it) so that the carrier, whether it’s the postal service or a carrier like UPS or FedEx or DHL, they could be more efficient about scheduling drop offs to my house, as well as the houses around me – with greater line of site to what is due when.  Now they won’t want to stockpile things for long, but I am pretty sure some additional schedule control helps them a lot.

3) It helps the customer.   If I don’t need something until late October, what am I supposed to do with it in July?  What if I forget where I put it?  Yes I could wait until October to order it, but then there’s the risk that I will wait too late or that I will lose the magazine with the skeleton zombie costume (circled many, many times).  I want to order it when I think of it, and I should be able to say when I need it by.  Right?

So rethink the assumption of “how” people get their stuff in terms of assumptions about urgency – ask people when they want things and everyone wins.

-Ric

In the Sunday magazine section of The New York Times today, there was an article by Elizabeth Green called “Can Good Teaching be Learned” and unsurprisingly her conclusion, or more accurately the conclusion of Doug Lemov, is yes.    Lemov spent years watching and filming teachers and discovered 49 specific, simple techniques that result in getting kids to pay attention to the teacher, AND do what they are told.

“So there is Warm/Strict, technique No. 45, in which a correction comes with a smile and an explanation for its cause — “Sweetheart, we don’t do that in this classroom because it keeps us from making the most of our learning time.” The J-Factor, No. 46, is a list of ways to inject a classroom with joy, from giving students nicknames to handing out vocabulary words in sealed envelopes to build suspense. In Cold Call, No. 22, stolen from Harvard Business School, which Lemov attended, the students don’t raise their hands — the teacher picks the one who will answer the question. Lemov’s favorite variety has the teacher ask the question first, and then say the student’s name, forcing every single student to do the work of figuring out an answer.”

The title of Lemov’s upcoming book is Teach Like a Champion: The 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College) Like most of these sorts of stories, the “solution” to the problem is really simple, and is usually the result of a simple rethinking of the problem.  Lemov did something that I advocate in my book Rethink, which is to get your head into the mind of who you are talking to (whether you are selling them something or teaching them, the same principle applies),  understand what they want and value and be direct with them about what you want them to do.  It worked wonders.  I also expect that a lot of corporations will also benefit from applying some of the 49 techniques to they lead training classes.

But Green’s article glossed over something that I think is the other half of the education and training.  The first half is getting the kids focused and doing what you want them to do – the other half is defining what it is you want them to learn (beyond the basic reading, writing, math skills).  That strikes me as a tough nut to crack.  What is the real outcome we want for these kids?  We want them to grow up to be productive contributors to our society and that includes things like social skills, musical knowledge, knowledge of history, geography, and lots of other disciplines, some of which show up in standardized tests.    Is the goal to prepare these kids for college (as the subtitle of Lemov’s book suggests) which is largely decided by a math and verbal test on the SAT?  Is the goal to teach kids how to memorize things or is it to really switch on their brains so they can really decide what they get (and give) out of life, be it a lot of money, or a lot of free time, or solving some hard problem, or having a big family, or something else?  I would be interested to hear what Lemov thinks about that and whether he thinks the outcome of education also needs some rethinking.

-Ric

For those of us old enough to remember Garanimals,  they were fun and funny ways to figure out which pants go with which shirts, for kids.  The tiger tops went with the tiger bottoms, giraffes were in there as well, and I think rhinos.  For kids who didn’t yet have a sense of fashion, it was a way to help them make decisions about what goes well together, though I suspect somewhere, the young Isaac Mizrahi’s and Tommy Hilfiger’s of the world were already radically mixing their Garanimals with their Toughskin jeans.

But Garanimals are not the only example of successful “choice” bundling.  The combo meals that are offered at most fast food restaurant are in the same vein – most people want a drink, a main course, and a side (for breakfast, lunch, or dinner), so they offer specific combinations of them, so you just say “A” instead of a Coke, a Big Mac, and large fries.

This happens to be a rare case that touches both of the transactional sides of the “how” trap.  The consumer has to make decisions about what to wear and what to have for lunch every day, and if “how” they make the decision is the result of a simple combination suggestion, that makes the day a little bit easier, not to mention that it doesn’t really matter “how” we go about making the decision.  The other side of this is the merchant (or in the case of Garanimals the manufacturer), the “choice” bundle helps them in more ways than one. First, it’s an immediate up-sell, when you buy one Garanimal, you ought to buy the rest of the “outfit”, or at least another tiger.  The other sales-side benefit is less time explaining choices to customers, which isn’t huge in some cases, but in others, it’s a lot of time.

That’s why I was so interested to learn of a the company/site Polyvore.  Polyvore has both of the consumer and merchant/manufacturer benefits of choice bundling, but it takes both even farther.  Polyvore is a site where people can post favorite clothing “outfit” combinations, with photos, on the site (very wiki-oid), and people can then click through them to see where they can buy them.  But these aren’t just matching two tigers, these are higher fashion, shoes, skirts, tops, jackets, purses, clothing head-to-toe, which for the fashion minded grown-up, is very interesting.  This offers a creative outlet for the shop-a-holic to assemble various creations and recommend them – and for the too busy workaholic, a time saver.  On the merchant/manufacturer side, this is free advertising with strong up-sell messaging, and in the fashion world, the time saved on the store floor offering guidance to customers, could be substantial.

I suspect that we will start to see more of these choice bundle wiki sites across industries and I think that’s a good thing for everyone.

Now I am off to work, I will probably stop in at my favorite breakfast spot and have “B” this morning.

-Ric

On October 23rd last year, I wrote a piece on this site called “The great ADP lie and other brand illusions” where I talked about companies that outright lie to their customers and get away with it.

As the head of Toyota talked with Congress yesterday, he said that the things that caused the issues that have led to the recall of over eight million vehicles were basically the result of their push to unseat GM as the world’s leading car maker (which they did).  Their principle of relentless pursuit of the highest quality product, the core of their brand promise,  took a back seat, if you will, to their growth goal.  It was the first time in their 52 year history that they had a recall compared with over 100 recalls just last year among the major US auto makers, by the way.  This shouldn’t be such a big deal.

I don’t have any proof of this, but I think that explanation is hogwash, and I think they know it’s hogwash, but I think they felt they this was the best spin to put on this story to minimize brand damage.  Part of their problem is that they aren’t 100% sure the fixes they have come up with will solve the problems that have led to the recalls.

Why aren’t they sure? Well, depending on who you listen to, these problems aren’t really problems – they are partly operator error and partly a misunderstanding of the product.  It’s unsurprising that the US press is all over this – it’s a huge boost for the US automakers to paint Toyota in a bad light, and that’s just the way it is.  And if a problem isn’t really a problem, then you can’t be 100% confident of your fix, right?  But you can’t really come out and blame your customer, so you are stuck.

If you listen to another crowd and there really are issues, then it still wasn’t the result of the entire company relaxing their quality standards in pursuit of GM, it was one or two, or a handful of people that did a poor job of engineering, and testing the parts in question.  Individuals with names, not the entire corporate entity, as Toyota seems to be trying to make us think.  It almost has the same ring as the Tiger Woods apology last week – when he said, look, I am not perfect, I made mistakes, and I am taking actions to fix them.

In a very different way, Toyota had that same perfect image that Tiger had.

People bought, and liked, the narrative when Tiger delivered it, so why not reuse it to paint Toyota in a better light.  It leaves the door open for (more) Toyota errors, but it has the promise that they are working to prevent them in the future – it would be silly for Toyota to say it’s never going to happen again.

The point is that when companies deliver a message to their customers, facts may or may not play into the message – and assigning blame will rarely happen because that implies the problem will never happen again.  It’s not a matter of lying to the customer, it’s saying things that will minimize the damage, but also maintain (or try to regain) their trust that you will do what you can to avoid it in the future.

-Ric

It doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes I hear about a new company and slap my forehead wondering why I didn’t think of it first.  Netflix was a little bit like that, but I heard about alice.com today and that one in particular bugs me because I have been writing about the basic idea behind Alice for nearly three years, I just hadn’t thought to turn it into an actual Web storefront.

So what is Alice and why is it such an a great idea?  Well, Alice (named for the Brady Bunch character – good move), is a site that sells consumer goods over the internet.  Things like soap, toilet paper, laundry detergent, and so on.  The clever part about their model is that they don’t make any money selling the products that they offer.  They make their money selling advertising on the site, and selling purchase data back to the manufacturers (which the manufacturers have wanted, but lacked forever – Louise Story wrote a fantastic article on this subject here).  Data is king in the world of sales, and Alice is positioning itself to be the impartial third party that sits between the customer and the manufacturer.  As long as Alice doesn’t compromise the identities of their customers, I don’t see how they can lose.  Customers value price and manufacturers value richer customer data (what they buy and what causes them to buy), and everyone wins.

This model is in some respects like Costco in the sense that they also don’t try to make any money selling the products in their stores.  It’s no secret that Costco’s profits come from their membership dues and that model has served them (and their shareholders) very well for a long, long time.  Counter intuitive, but brilliant in retrospect.

I love the spin that Alice is putting on this, and with such a great name, the only way they can fail is in execution, and with two seasoned leaders, that seems pretty unlikely.

This is the kind of rethinking other organizations need to be doing right now. Instead of just optimizing business models that are based on the old fashioned brick and mortar models (like narrow margins on markup), there are so many opportunities to solve age old problems (like manufacturers not getting good data on who is buying their products – and what advertising actually causes customers to buy their products).  People need to figure them out like Alice.

I am half tempted to start a site that sells meat at cost and call it Sam (after Alice’s boyfriend, the butcher), but meat’s a very different animal, if you will.

-Ric