Pilipczuk dot com

As you might have noticed, I’ve been posting less frequently here.  While I’ll maintain Pilipczuk dot com for personal and family purposes, comments and posts in the area of marketing and business will be at MAP Consulting LLC’s site.  See you there!

Happy New Year! We hope that you’re off to a safe and prosperous New Year. One of the things you should be thinking about this time every year is your credit rating. You should check your credit every year and the good folk at CardFish have a quick and easy how-to article. I used their methodology and it worked just fine. It was easy and, oh yeah, FREE!

I’m at Utica College today and for the next couple of days, and had the privilege of speaking with a few classes. As always, I surveyed the students on their use of social networking sites such as Facebook and mySpace. While not a statistical sample, I found that the ratio of Facebook to mySpace users was about 70/30 or 80/20. It will be interesting to see how Facebook’s traffic compares to mySpace’s as the academic year progresses. Compete’s view of visitors to both sites:

I’m watching the Colts-Saints NFL opener right now and every time I hear John Madden speak, I expect him to degenerate into a bunch of Frank Caliendo/Madden impersonation babble. And the worst thing is, I’m disappointed when it doesn’t happen!

Apple caught some flack from the sudden price cut of $200 on the 8 GB iPhone.  I can’t imagine the blow-back was totally unexpected, given the way Apple has down a terrific job in getting virtually all the details right in the iPhone launch, going all the way back to the keynote speech in January.

For the record, I’m not upset at having paid $599 in early July for a product that’s now on the market for just $399.  You pays your money and you takes your choice, especially when it comes to technology products.  I knew the price would go down, but I do admit to being surprised as to the timing.  I thought for sure a price cut would come closer to Black Friday or maybe even in January.  But that’s the price you pay for being an early adopter of technology.

Apple did, in my opinion, a great job in addressing the blow-back.  Steve Jobs’ open letter on Apple’s website makes it right.  It’s not the full $200 refund that some have demanded and that would be completely unreasonable.  But a $100 credit in an Apple store strikes a great balance with me.  I would spend $100 with Apple anyway, so the credit is almost as good as cash to me and, I’m sure, most the early adopters who were willing to spend $599 on a phone.  And I can think of a couple of things to spend the credit on right now, anyway, with the leading candidate being a new 8 GB iPod Nano to replace Mary Beth’s 512 KB Shuffle.

The Marketing moral to the story?  Have your “red team” scenarios thought through and have at least the shell of a plan ready to execute should one of those scenarios transpire.  Contrast the smooth move by Apple to Mattel’s ongoing problems with tainted Chinese-made toys.  Why can’t Mattel seem to get ahead of this?  Possibly because of a lack of, or insufficient, contingency plans.

Nice work Apple!

Just when I think I’ve heard all the possible ideas to increase sales, another CMO comes along with a new idea. This time, it’s courtesy of KFC CMO James O’Reilly. This promotion involves including samples of the $2.99 Deal menu on mail carts inside your place of work around lunchtime. The idea is that the mouth-watering smell of the chicken wafting through the office will at least make you consider heading out to KFC at lunchtime.

Bonus points for creativity, I suppose. But this clearly hasn’t been thought out by the marketing folks at KFC, which violates one of the key rules of direct response marketing: Never test into a universe in which you can’t roll out. What this means is that, given a limited testing budget and resources with which to test, don’t bother with things that can’t go anywhere in bigger scale and where the test results can’t be replicated at scale.

So what’s the marketing problems with the KFC promotion? Let’s cover just a couple of the most obvious ones:

• Timing I’m guessing that most people in the target audience for KFC for lunch are going to want to eat somewhere around lunch time–say 11 to 1 or so for most office jobs. That means your promotional team has to ensure the mail guys are delivering mail around that time. Too early and the impact might wear off. After lunch and you’re just too early for tomorrow’s promotion. How do you get the mail guys–who eat lunch too, after all–to do most of their work right around peak lunch time?
• Internal Distribution In order for this promotion to provide a measurable bump in sales and to do so efficiently, you probably would be best going to the largest companies in a given area to put the scent in front of the most people. But a lot of large companies outsource their mailroom and internal logistics with another company, such as IKON. That means working with two companies in order to get the product placed on a mail cart. Double the negotiations and you’ve got to pay both companies for distribution, increasing your costs.
• External Logistics You’ve got to get the food while still hot and aromatic to the mail room carts or make sure there’s proper kitchen facilities available with which to heat the product. Now, multiple that by several employers at least. If you decide to go to the smaller offices in an area, increase the level of effort getting the food to the locations by at least an order of magnitude.  (Think of a lot of cars driven around, going to a lot of places, in a short amount of time.  That’s a lot of expensive manpower driving around to deliver the chicken for the day’s promotion.)

As my initial 10 minute consideration of the promotion shows, there’s a lot of logistics and executional problems associated with the promotion. There’s no way this idea scales into a more wide-spread promotion that sells a lot more fried chicken. And I haven’t even dipped into the obvious problems of targeting the audience properly or–aside from the aroma of the product–providing a compelling reason for the consumer to act NOW and actually go to the local KFC for lunch.

The lesson for marketers here? A promotions agency can do literally anything either you, they or your general advertising agency can think up, as long as you’re not too concerned with the cost associated with the promotion or the ability to measure the impact of the promotion on your sales or the ability to execute at scale. But I’m assuming you actually do want to measure the impact and use your marketing budget as efficiently as possible, right?

If all your channels aren’t working together efficiently to sell more of your product to more people, then you need to reconsider your objective, channel selection or target audience. Don’t make the same mistake as KFC and YUM Brands.

I’ve started adding accessories to my iPhone. It really doesn’t need very many, as the combination of ITunes and the phone gives you just about everything you need. There’s just a couple of things that have made my life as an iPhone user just a little easier and I thought I’d share them today.

First, I needed something to protect the shiny metal surfaces. I can’t bear the thought of having the nice aluminum dinged in my pocket by my keys. I also needed to keep the phone slim to fit in my pocket, so I couldn’t have a thicker case. After some hunting, I found a couple of sources for skin-type cases, which cover the phone with a tough 3M film. The best source was bestskinsever, which offers a full skin for the iPhone for just $7.99. I should add that they are a great company to work with. My first shipment was apparently lost in the mail. I emailed the company and received an email from the owner the next day with an apology and a dispatch of another skin. A great purchase experience and great customer service. I’ll be using them for future purchases of skin cases for all my gadgetry.

How’s it look on the phone? Not bad:

The view of the top corner shows how the edges of the front and back pieces align.  It’s a bit of a trick to get the skin on in a more-or-less square fashion, but is doable as long as you take your time.

The angled view of the front of the phone shows the skin’s impact on the touch screen.  As you can see, it adds a bit of orange peel effect, but it’s not bothersome when using the phone at all.

The trick to applying the skin is to make sure you leave yourself enough time.  It took me about 35 minutes to apply it, with the majority of the time spent working on the corners, which take slightly longer to push down while waiting for the skin to dry.  Overall, it’s a great product and if you want to maintain your iPhone in pristine condition while still being able to fit it into your pocket, I recommend the use of a skin case.

The other accessory I purchased for my phone is the Griffin PowerDuo to enable me to charge the phone in my car.  I recommend the PowerDuo kit over the one that just includes the car charger because the Duo also has a spare power block for charging the phone from a wall socket.  I keep my Apple-supplied cradle in the office, the Apple power block at home and keep the spare Griffin block in my bag, so I can keep the phone charged while traveling.  As battery life on the iPhone has been my only complaint, I think you can’t go wrong having a few extra ways to top off the battery with you at all times.

I thought I’d hold out for a while longer, but my will wasn’t strong enough and wasn’t able to fight the temptation to buy an iPhone.  I was at the Tyson’s Corner Apple store last Saturday, where there was about 12 or 15 people playing with all the demo units.  Even though it was 4 pm in the afternoon, they still had a few 8 GB units available.  So I grabbed one.

Having had it for four days now, here’s my initial take.  Overall, I really like the product.  Is it worth $599?  Well, it’s really a great smartphone and better than anything I’ve used including my Treos, Blackjacks and BlackBerries.  It might be worth $300 or so.  The other $299?  If you’re a gadget guy, it’s the best $299 for a gadget you’ll ever spend.  If you’re not, you might want to wait until the price comes down in a year or so.

I like the overall ease of use.  Setting it up was a snap and it synched perfectly with my MacBook Pro.  Adding all my email accounts from AOL, Gmail and Yahoo took about 2 minutes.  I like the fact it can do HTML email, so all the complex stuff that people send me renders perfectly–no more plain text emails on my portable devices.  I’ll never go back to WAP browsing after using Safari on the iPhone.  Now that I know I can have a real web experience on my cellphone, it’s a non-negotiable on any future phones.  The weather widget is one of the best feeling applications I’ve ever had the pleasure of using.  Lastly, having all my music, pictures and video with me at all times in a set of apps that feel like my Mac, but scaled down for the phone, is priceless.

I think improvements can be made on the keyboard entry.  There’s a couple of cases–for example, when writing a new email–where being able to rotate the screen 90 degrees would be a great help to entering text.  If rotation was allowed, the keyboard app could have slightly larger keys, which I think would help with text entry speed.  Having just a little more real estate would improve my confidence and speed.  I’d also like the ability to add some custom apps.  I’m not much one for YouTube or SMS and would prefer to be able to add things like immediate links to my del.icio.us bookmarks with one click, for example.

Overall, I really like it and think that we’ll be seeing a lot of changes to the norms in smart phones as the direct result of the innovations developed by Apple on this product.

I thought I’d wait for a while before upgrading to an Intel-powered MacBook or MacBook Pro.  Well, I broke down and upgraded a couple of weeks ago, unfortunately not long before WWDC in June when the next generation of Apple laptops might be announced.
The reason I upgraded was that the “old” PowerBook (circa April 2004) was acting strangely.  As in really strangely, as in maybe logic board failure.  And I had some presentations to do and couldn’t get it to work properly, even using all the usual tricks short of formatting and reinstalling the OS.

So I sort of panicked and decided that this was maybe the time to get a new machine.  So off to the store in Tyson’s Corner to look for a new laptop.  I seriously looked at both the MacBook and the Pro.  The price and form factor of the MacBook were both really appealing to me.  What made me pop for the 2.33 mhz/2 GB MacBook Pro though was my stupid eyes.  I’m just starting to have some issues seeing text on the screen and the larger screen of the Pro is just a bit more comfortable to me.  Plus the fact that I’m using it for a few hours every day and decided the extra power and speed would be worth it.

So, how do I like it so far?  Well, as far as speed and the built-in iSight, this is a great machine!  I thought my 1.5 mhz G4 was fast.  This thing makes the old one feel like a tortoise.  Plus the fact that the form factor hasn’t changed very much means that it’s comfortable to me.

What don’t I like?  Minor nits.  The trackpad is bigger and gets in the way of my typing.  I don’t like the feel of the base of my thumbs dragging over the trackpad.  I thought the trackpad on the old G4 was just perfect as-is.  I also don’t like the fact that I (apparently) can’t run SideTrack on this.  While the two finger scrolling is pretty cool, I preferred using SideTrack to set the very right-most side of the trackpad for scrolling purposes and having a single tap on the trackpad act as my right click.  When I figure out what I’m doing wrong, I’ll get SideTrack reinstalled.  Finally, the bezel is wider due to the built-in camera.  It makes the screen look a bit less sleek.

What about the G4? Grrr (&(&##A#.  After doing an archive and install, I think it’s back to running, although the fans are crunchy loud now (and it’s out of Applecare…).  So, I keep it down in the basement and use it while I’m watching TV down there as a spare laptop.  I might try to sell it on eBay, but haven’t yet decided.

Bottom line is that if you’re in the market for a fast laptop that can also run Windows (blecch), check out the MacBook Pro.  Recommended!

And for my next toss of cash Apple’s way, the iPhone is coming soon…

It’s interesting how a piece of simple hex can turn into an Internet meme in just a matter of days.  Or in this case, hours.  Google the above string to see how many pages and references to it have popped up recently.  It’s a textbook case of the concept of how Web 2.0 has converted the world into a giant marketplace, with information and conversation taking place at the speed of light.

And today’s market, unlike that of ancient Greece, Babylon or Timbuktu, shares information, like the hex in the title of this post, that doesn’t even make sense to a human being.  A market, with conversations in which the key information being exchanged in base-16.  Who could have imagined this when I was born?  How exciting!