Scrap Value of Service

I went to my native place last weekend. I was waiting for a bus to take me home (I ventured out in the evening to get a glimpse of my regular world, i.e. check my e-mail). I was customer watching or behaviour watching to kill time. I saw an old lady hail an auto rickshaw. The driver asked for Rs. 30 for a distance which should be about 1 km or so. The lady said “I am sure you’ll not be able to pick up any customer till that point, that’s why I hailed you, hoping you’ll charge me something very low”. The driver gave a sarcastic answer and looked at me and smiled. I smiled back and was wondering how shrewd, the old lady should be.

But on something really struck me, I believe the lady was right. The money that the lady was ready to pay is “scrap value of a service”. We all know what a scrap is, i.e. _________________(of course take the liberty to give your own definition).

Why shouldn’t a service have a scrap value? After all a service is the most perishable commodity someone can ever come across. It can’t be stored, it can’t be moved, in some situations it can’t even been seen. Hence I believe service is the most important commodity that should have a scrap value. In this auto rickshaw, example, the scrap value can be the fuel cost, wear & tear and a small profit. If all this put together came up to 7 or 8 rupees and I am sure the lady would have paid the money. If the driver has done that, he would have utilized an irrecoverable resource (time) and made some money. Now if this is not scrap value of service what else would be?

Lets Zoo Zoo our customers

The world is talking about it, at least the world I know of is.

You can't find a better show stopper, At least I haven't found one in the recent past.

It's all of 30 sec or less, but you don't want it to end or you sometimes wait for it.

If you know something interesting about it, you jump with joy to discuss it.

I know you are clueless as to what i am talking about. but it was an important part of the IPL. The zoozoo effect was a fresh air in the ad scene for a change. you might have heard a lot about it and every marketer worth his dim would have spoken about it. I have read some great things about it and read some not so great things about it. Few have written about it from the branding perspective and few have written about it from the ROI perspective. My argument is appreciate something good for its goodness, of course it's not charity, they might not even be focused on the right set of people.I was also thinking from the same point of view of ROI. I came across this statement " New age companies are not measured by the ROI, It is all about Return on imagination". well that gives a whole new dimension to the zoozoo returns. I am a Airtel user and I have opted for DND facility. Now the ZooZoo Ad's are really giving me questions about Airtel features. In addition to all this I would watch the zoozoo morning, noon and midnight compared to the Madhavan and Divya balan ad by Airtel. I feel we should all donate Rs 100 per head to Vodofone for saving us from the misery of such ads.

But my primary thought is why don't we carry this forward to our day to day transaction and exchanges with our customers?
why don't we make our customers go gaga about our service and product?
why should we surround ourselves with mediocre products and service, when we have the ability and capability to zoozoo the world?
What is stopping us from doing so, is it our customers attitude or our belief about the customers attitude?
Are we milking the cow for its worth, before someone comes up with a purple cow and changes the rules of the game?
Why are we not buying the purple cow or bringing about a new breed entirely?
I believe when there is a will, you'll have a whole new highway for your personal use.
so lets ZooZoo our customers.

Shoeist & Shoeism

I happened to stumble on this website Addictionary (http://www.addictionary.org/).

My first reaction was …. Please don’t do this to me. :) !

I am a self proclaimed handicap when it comes to remembering all those fancy terms and words. Imagine the plight of such handicapped people.

To date it was some known and unknown intellectuals who coined such words. This website gives a formidable tool in the hands of the public.

Let’s assume that this site becomes a hit, imagine the amount of words that will get added to the English language. People are getting jargon savvy and websites like these tend to increase the number of jargons floating in the academic and work circuit. Even tough I am not a supporter of such jargons, the following thought kept staring me in the face…

Jargons reduce the number words you use to explain something to others. It’s also cool and gives you a feel of being in the league.

Let me explain this thought with an example,

Shoeist: A journalist who throws his shoes at someone, preferably a celebrity or public figure, when he or she disagrees with that person.

USAGE: He is a Shoeist. I am tempted to become a Shoeist.

Shoeism: The part of journalism where the prime motive is to insult the celebrity by throwing shoes at the person concerned.

USAGE: Don’t make me practice shoeism.

Now think of a situation where these words don’t exist.

Instead of saying jarnal singh is a shoeist, we have to get into the details, i. e jarnal singh is a journalist who threw his shoes at the Indian home minister because of his discontent ….. on and on.

Addictionary makes our word simple isn’t it?

The answer is subject to your judgement. :)

P. S: Wondering why I am so obsessed with these two words, well I have created these words in that website. Just Visit the site and find out the meaning for the following words Shopdrifter, photox, santatized, tipocrite, volunturd, mindsmack.

Managers & Politicians

This seems to be rather an odd association. Taking the liberty of not matching every move and character with each other, I believe certain similarities do exist.

A manager will exaggerate things, make tall promises, give a feel that he is everything in the old company and he will be everything in the future company. Does that not sound like a politician’s campaign speech and promise?

The risk he takes is jumping the ship and starting a fresh in a new company, the victory is the 20% to 30% hike in salary. The politician’s victory is a MLA or MP tag. Remember both have vested interest and both have made some investment, so both looks for R O I.

A special note on people who jump the ship and join a competitor (hoping for a minister post). Now that’s exactly what poaching from the competitor is all about (the minister tag can be equivalent to the creative new designation, senior manager of first floor second room last desk).

The politician swindles as much as he can to make sure that he earns from the current tenure. Similarly the manager does everything he can to boost up his resume value. The politician’s tenure is one term in office, the mangers term is one quarter in office. How about all the case filed against the last government. Now we can rest assured our new manger will throw all the old strategies and make way for his new ideas, remember all the repositioning and advertisement changes. If I continue with the old mans positioning and brand building ideas where is my contribution to the company, so ditch his ideas. Let’s do a brain storming.

Who is to be blamed for all this, well how about the citizens for a change for political issues and the management culture and pressure for all manager related issues. We have a vision and we have strategy, but we always act with a short sightedness. We get jittery if we don’t keep up with the industry growth standards. We don’t think long term, reason shareholders pressure. You get worked up because some fool in the share market is selling his shares at a low price, because he wants to extend his bathroom.

Stay put, think and align with the vision, profit will find its way into your statements.

Let us play. guess the insight

Everything has an insight, your advertisement, branding, positioning, product et all. If you get the insight right, everything else is spun beautifully around it. The insight comes out of your market research, observation of your environment, trends, even your personal needs. Some one in the shop floor had a need for a portable, personal audio device, the walkman was born. Hence insight is everything. If the sources of insight are so obvious, why do we have failed products, boring advertisements and wrong positioning?

The million dollar questions are, how trained are your eyes and senses to spot the obvious? Can you pick it up intuitively? Can your gut feel guide you to the insight?

Somewhere in our career or studies, someone might have asked us to guess the insight for a product, advertisement or positioning. We might have done it with a grudge or with lots of interest for the first time. I request you to ask yourself why haven’t I continued doing it (i.e. if you have done it with enthusiasm)? Or why was I asked to do it (if it was a torture)?

The answer to the question will vary from person to person. I believe the exercise has a lot of meaning in it. To put it in a nut shell, it will help you give a confident and positive answer to each of the million dollar question. If you do this continuously, insights will jump at you, from financial statements to the way a child laughs.

I believe the PCRA ad that is titled “pump”( where the petrol station helper tells a customer that he is eligible for a 20% discount in price) is a great advertisement. If you refer to my earlier blog on great advertisement, it satisfies most of the criteria’s. The most interesting part is that, it has the right mix of recognition and surprise.

So lets play, guess the insight!

The problem: Right from green peace to the environment conscious person staying next door, everyone knows that petrol and petroleum product is drying up fast. Hence we should make a conscious effort to save petrol. But we don’t do it.

The insight: people are worried about petrol and LPG prices. Everything related to money is of interest to us. People love to hear the word free, discount and sale.

The solution: communicate to people that not wasting something is as good as getting something for free, or on a discount.

Just recollect how often we would have seen the word sale and petrol conservation in the same page? How often we would have come across advertisements emphasising energy conservation followed by a sale advertisement? But why did it take such a long time to correlate (at least in India) both?

Neither the problem nor the insight is new to us. But the way this person spotted it is new.

SO LET’S PLAY, GUESS THE INSIGHT! J

How to make great AD's

• Never accept your dog’s admiration as conclusive. - Bernard shaw. This is a very important point when it comes to creativity. Let not your bias be the judge, and don’t get carried by your friend’s appreciation.

• You should have the guts to be critical and should be ready to reject a bad advertisement or idea, irrespective of the costs involved or deadline pressures.
• The ideas should be fresh and not run of the mill.
• The creative intelligence or the wit portrayed in the advertisement should be a massage for the mind. It should make you take notice and say ah! That’s nice and interesting.
• A good advertisement often takes cues from jokes, clichés, or daily happenings.
• Creativity is looking at the same thing as everybody else, and thinking something different.
• A good advertisement should have equal measures of recognition and surprise. Too much recognition and little surprise is a boring ad. Too much surprise and little recognition is a baffling ad.
• Visual puns and metaphors should be used wisely and creatively.
• Using of pictures and words need not be done the same way, all the time. Sometimes words become pictures and pictures become words.
• When it requires a little bit of thinking from the viewers side, then the advertisement is remembered.
• Get your problem right.
• Get your insight right. Insight is nothing but the observation about the user or consumer (behaviour).
• A great advertisement starts with a great brief. Remember a brief is not about the client’s grief.
• Think from the viewer and consumers point of view. Understand who is it for? Personify the audience, try to relate it or use people as examples, someone you might know or some characters in the movies.
• Use extreme words to describe the benefits and ideas.
• Get your point straight with regards to what you want to say thru the advertisement, benefits, attitude or something else.
• Use people along with emotions to create an insight.
• Think of a branding idea. A branding idea is an idea which can proliferate into a number of ideas, put across in a variety of situations.
• If you get a chance play with the product, touch and feel it, handle it.

Thanks to Indu balachandran. Most of the points are from a session taken by her. Her passion for advertisement will rub off on everyone; it has on a non believer like me.