People with my political opinions often make arguments for the latter based on either practical or moral arguments. Richard and I had a online discussion about this recently. But maybe there’s another, more silly, question that’s missing: which is sexier: business or government? A quick look at the primary US government portal compared to Wal-Mart’s homepage leaves me in no doubt who hired the better web designer, at any rate (and Wal-Mart is hardly an example of glamour). Which corporate body makes you want to interact with them? Anybody who’s spent any time at a UK local council, with their cuppa-and-rich-tea-biscuit image, will know what I mean (that’s an example of non-sexiness, if it’s not clear: not that I have anything against rich tea).

I’m semi-serious, actually – this does matter – it’s an issue of marketing. Clearly a company cannot actually be sexy – only people can be that. But the Virgin family of companies gets pretty close – and not just because of the suggestive naming. It’s an image that has been carefully cultivated by the folk at Virgin. Virgin is a company that you want to like (well, I do, anyway), irrespective of the fact that their trains don’t run on time.

I think the reasoning behind this is simple. Companies have to be sexy – or at least, they have to project an image which is aligned with values their customers want them to have. Sometimes this is sexiness – and Virgin is a prime example of a brand that’s attacked several markets with that technique and won some new custom. Sometimes, to be fair, there’s another image to be conveyed (UPS brown vans and brown uniforms are not alluring; but they do project an image of reliability). Conversely, government has no such motivation to project an image of anything – or at least the vast majority of unelected officials don’t. There’s no requirement to improve, no motivation to act like a marketer, because there’s no competition. Thus, government will always continue to project an image of dull and incompetent, whether that be the case or not. As Seth says, ‘[people] lose their jobs because of boring marketing’ – except in government they don’t, because they rarely lose them at all.

It’s probably not the most pressing problem the world faces right now, but wouldn’t it be nice to stop worrying about global warming for five minutes and think about how to make the institutions we deal with on a daily basis more appealing?

At some point, probably once I return from San Jose, I plan to sign-up with Amazon instead, who now seem to be their largest competitor, and stock 2/3 of the titles that LOVEFiLM do, so might still stand a chance of fulfilling my sometimes unusual taste. Amazon have generally provided excellent service in the past, and it’ll be interesting to see if their foray into DVD rental hurts or helps their brand.

Safeway (now Morrisons) scrapped their loyalty scheme in 2000, citing that it wasn’t worth the money to run it. They may have been right. Nevertheless, Tesco, now the UK’s biggest grocery retailer, still retains their scheme, and as the Economist states, the information goldmine (the only reason the supermarkets run loyalty schemes) is lucrative – although they don’t say exactly how lucrative. Safeway’s decision indicates the margins can be thin. Despite the low return on hassle I mentioned above, though, there are still plenty of takers – empirical evidence would suggest that more shoppers have loyalty cards than don’t.

There have been other issues; for example, loyalty cards came under fire from David Blunkett in 2004 in a fairly obvious attempt to draw away attention away from the problems surrounding the ID card debate:

Mr Blunkett said the cards produced key details about people’s shopping habits but were accepted because they were run by private firms. People should not distrust ID cards because they are a state idea, he said.

…

Holding up a Nectar card, he said people voluntarily signed up to allow such details to be collected through such loyalty cards by private firms. “There is a real issue about how that should be overseen and supervised,” said Mr Blunkett.

Mr. Blunkett presumably ignored the fact that voluntarily signing up to handing over data about tomato-buying preferences was a more respectable practice than being forced to hand over more medical information to travel. Fortunately, his illiberal idea didn’t seem to gain much traction. In all fairness, though, it’s quite likely than many folks don’t know that their data is used in this way; for that, The Guardian deserves some praise for educating the public.

Maybe reward cards will die out eventually. It’s hard to back that up with public data, although I’m sure Tesco have a hard time quantifying the exact benefit they get from theirs (how do you measure repeat custom accurately – with and without the card?). If I’m right, though, I hope they die because they don’t make business sense – not because the government regulates a harmless practice out of existence. Interestingly, Wikipedia alleges that this has already happened in California.

It’ll be interesting to see where the reward industry is in five years time.

And so I’m afraid this post is another whinge about airports. Why o why do they ever put interesting stuff (i.e., shops) before security control? OK, sure, some relatives come to see people off, so a coffee shop or two might not go amiss in larger terminals. But apart from that, why bother? Doesn’t every rational person proceed through security control as soon as they’ve checked in – and don’t they check in as soon as they’ve entered the airport?

I’m sure my mind is missing an airport use case.

However, not everything it’s used for involves cats falling off trees as per You’ve Been Framed, or actors fooling people. One of the best uses has been the huge amount of compelling video that’s been released free from conferences this year. I’ve absorbed tens of hours of it this year, on subjects as diverse as life coaching from legend Tony Robbins (Alexander Kjerulf has been to one of his seminars, and I want to go too), the marketing of spaghetti sauce, and curing aging. ‘Catch-all’ conferences such as Gel, TED, and LIFT have all got in on the act. This, of course, is an alternative to physically travelling, and will surely produce more super-star conferences that attract bigger names, bigger audiences, and grow in stature.

I’d love this video-based content to be one more nail in the coffin of the box in the corner. TV still seems to hold an now-unworthy position, primarily because of the culture of FUD around copyright that scares studios away from the network and causes them to avoid doing anything more adventurous than releasing restriction-encumbered shiny discs. I don’t think this can last, though; despite the nonsense that’s spoken about the ‘ethics’ of ‘owning’ content by those think they’ve bought more than a license, as Cory Doctorow rightly points out, DRM is fundamentally a broken business model. Whichever way the details of the market go, I’m sure we’ll eventually be able to chalk up another win for the long tail. I certainly hope so.

PlusNet, who also failed on the customer service front a while ago when they failed to fix my broadband for almost two weeks, have just published some fairly detailed statistics on their claimed improvement in problem turnaround time. Whether they are true is difficult to say, but it’s certainly interesting to see them being so open for once.

Update 2006-12-23: Some people still don’t like PlusNet much though.

Correction 2007-01-05: You can suspend your account for longer than two weeks, but LOVEFiLM charge £1/week for this – plain cheek, since the cost to them is obviously next to nothing.

Of course, I barely use my printer these days, but that’s another story.

Update 2006-11-30: It appears Epson is trying to pursue some manufacturers and importers of cheap ink cartridges via the US legal system, alleging patent violation. It’s well known that printer manufacturers make a large portion of their profit from cartridges, so this shouldn’t be too surprising. I’m not sure I have a clear opinion on this issue.

To my mind, WHSmith have a bigger problem, though – they are getting boring and desperate. My stationery purchase was accompanied by two exhortations to buy other, totally unrelated, products. As Seth Godin has explained at length, this kind of marketing out of context just doesn’t cut it any more – and it annoyed me. I’m not really clear any more what it is that WHSmith sell, but I rarely go there – certainly high street branches – to buy anything, and this kind of behaviour doesn’t endear me to them. As their product set begins to die out (CDs are dying, DVDs will, papers and magazines will, books will, stationery will), it becomes hard to see what areas that can invest in.

Do WHSmith have a strategy for the future?

• Mr. Google, please develop a podcast search engine. So much interesting content is now being released as podcasts (quick plug for my favourite: EconTalk), that it would be useful to be able to search them. All you have to do is invent a speech-to-text interpreter that actually works reliably. Simple. [Note: as I sometimes do, I wrote this post in advance of it being published. I've since discovered that such a tool already exists. However, I thought I'd leave the original prose here: Google, if you get one out soon, you could still corner the market]
• Mr. Google, please stop developing so many interfaces – and plug them all together. If I want to do an exhaustive search for something, I now have to search Google Web, Google Images, Google Groups, Google News, Google Video, Google Blog Search, Google Book Search, Google Scholar, and possibly others. This is not a good thing – you’re straying from the simple search you started with. Some of those searches do show up in the main search results, but you could do a better job of tying them together to show what I’m actually looking for. This could be a real competitive edge, especially since the basic searches that MSN and others provide are now actually quite reasonable.

Google still have an edge in providing what people want – for a company so technically-focused, they either have talented marketers or are just lucky. Please, Google, keep it up.

So here’s a question: does how you’re dressed and what you’re doing affect what you buy? Do you feel compelled to buy more expensive stuff because you look like you should be able to afford it? Do you allow yourself to buy budget baked beans when you’re sloping down to the shops in a scruffy t-shirt on Sunday morning? Or are you unaffected by such self-imposed peer pressure?

(Spot the deliberate oxymoron).

Chevy seems to be upping the ante with a controversial new advert for their Silverado truck – with an admittedly catchy tune (video; I’m not sure what Stephen Colbert has to do with it). A recent Slate podcast deconstructs this in detail; suffice to say that images of Katrina and Vietnam are hardly likely to avoid heated discussion. A slightly blunt and clumsy parody is already doing the rounds.

This is all particularly interesting at a time when alternatives to petrol-guzzling SUVs finally seem to be becoming viable. David (site down at the time of writing) recently discussed an In Business podcast that looked at the Tesla Roadster, the first electric car that seems to actually have both a realistic marketing and engineering story. Tesla claim a 135 mpg equivalent energy consumption and 0-60mph in 4 seconds: not a bad combination. The car is currently being marketed only in California due to EU regulatory problems (please, government, get out of the way of the entrepreneurs saving the world). But it looks like it might finally herald the start of a more sustainable future.

I don’t think it’s an unreasonable prediction to say that the car industry will be one to watch closely over the next decade.

This is clear and obvious – they know what they want you to do, you know what they want you to do. But it still works, because the product is good – the ‘ad’ just acts as a reminder at the right time (when I’m settling down for the evening). Seth Godin talks about this notion a lot – having a good product and marketing it in the right context. See this presentation he gave at Google for more.

One of the reasons I like working for IBM is that it’s happy to allow me and my IBM colleagues to blog externally. Of course there are guidelines – obviously I can’t give away confidential information. It’s still a brave act for a company like IBM, however, and many others of equivalent size are rightly nervous about allowing the same – what happens if the PR and marketing folks lose control over companies’ images? This may or may not be a good thing, depending on your opinion of PR and marketing as disciplines, but it’s clear that there’s a risk of exposing non-alignment – people have different opinions, after all, right? Sure, yes, there’s that risk. However, although I hope our customers can see that IBMers are working together to produce good quality products and services for them, at least we have the reassurance that we’re being judged on our merits.

I’d encourage any other IBMers who aren’t already doing so to blog externally. You can find more information internally in the usual place (how’s that for keeping a secret, huh?).

This looks like a pretty clever marketing detail.