Furniture marketers clever by half
Last fall, advertising in the Greater Victoria area trumpeted "the Ashley Furniture Store is closing forever". People who liked Ashley furniture assumed it was no longer available.
Another store advertised that it could order Ashley Furniture.
Later a tiny mention in a newspaper suggested that the former Ashley Furniture Store was still in business but under a different name, and still carrying Ashley product but other manufacturer's product as well. How many people assumed it was one?
(Honourable mention for marketing stupidity went to Standard Furniture, who put a big sign on their store saying it was closing. What they were really doing was moving to a new location with a nicer building, somethng past and potential customers might like to know. How many people noticed that?)
Are furniture stores playing a version of "manipulative marketing", a tactic guaranteed to lose sales in the long term?

Selecting and monitoring your retailers
Hopefully the Sitka company, makers of surfboards and clothing for colder water conditions, selects and monitors retailers for service quality - the behaviour of some retailers is an incentive to shop online.
(Their owners live a self-fulfilling prophecy, little stock and poor service helps ensure the Internet will supplant them - if I have to wait days for a product I might as well order from the Big I, it will be on my doorstep just as soon with no more risk than dealing with the mismanaged retailer.)
The question for business owners is "how do you ensure good performance by your retailers, employees, and suppliers?" Keith his ideas.

Look outward
The book about "why" and loyalty reminds me of a key point I like to make:
While you must keep your house in order, most people fail to "look out there", consider the customer's perspective. Commonly people in organizations go theoretical, which not surprisingly leads to believing reality is in their own thoughts or worse in their own desires.
The classic expression of that is the claimed remark of a computer software specialist at a convention: "This would be a great job if it weren't for users."

Don't leave IT to the techies
(nor I suppose to project managers or sales people: Allied Irish Banks wants 84 million euros from two software companies for botched retail banking system - note the project was the first implementation on a different type of computer, a high risk situation).
How do you prevent such mistakes? Ask Keith.

Why can’t communications companies communicate?
I updated my cellular phone's software over the air, using Telus’ instructions, taking the risk to see if that would help improve connectivity which is poor where I live.
The phone's display said that the update succeeded, and showed good signal – but they had altered the user lock code from what I had set it to, so I could not use the phone. I tried several default and special codes I knew of, to no avail.
So I asked Victoria Mobile Radio, who told me what Telus sets it to instead of a usual Motorola default.
Repeating - why can't communications companies communicate?

Examples of the potential of really trying
Most of us don't want to change. Here are two examples of people who resisted, but finally realized they could.
- The Canadian government kept claiming that their new more challenging application procedures for a passport were necessary. But eventually they made radical changes, such as treating renewal of non-expired passports differently from new applications. In general it looked to me as though they had actually thought about where the risks actually are.
(Unfortunately they have not yet restored the 10-year validity period - the present period is effectively four years because much travel requires at least six months remaining to get an entry visa from another country, and in some cases requires one year remaining.)
- Over on the west coast, Boeing and the largest worker union (IAM) figured out how to make 767s more economically, by re-arranging the production line. Apparently it took the need for space to expand production of 787 airplanes and the pressure of competition for USAF's refuelling tanker purchase to motivate them to think harder and smarter. (Yes, we don't yet know for sure that the re-arrangement will work well, as they only did it recently, but they claim to have included the lower cost in their successful bid for the tanker purchase so have extra incentive to make it work. And for once the union is onside - funny thing how competition with someone who would build the airplanes in another state, one that doesn't encourage unions, focussed their minds.)
How can you enable rapid sound change in your organization? Ask Keith.

Missing the Big C
So I want to phone a theatre or three to enquire about a specific movie.
I bop into the commercial listings section of the telephone directory, under M for Movie. I see a cross reference to Video for movie rental, none for Theatre which is my next try. (Rental and theatre being two sources of movies, television, mail order, and Internet being others I can think of.)
Under Theatre I do not see one theatre set I know of, the one with "Silver City" in big letters above the entrance. But I see there is a listing for "Cineplex Entertainment Lp [sic]" on the street on the other side of the centre.
So to check the address I look in the white pages for Safeway, one of which is on that street, and find it is cross-referenced to Canada Safeway (which isn't the name on the store, but at least they pay to cross-reference).
For grins I look in the white pages for Silver City - none, but "Cineplex Entertainment Lp [sic]" is listed.
What are businesses like Silver City missing? Why are they missing it? Keith has ideas.

Sounds like another bureaucracy.
AVwebFlash web newsletter of March 24, 2011 reported that a spokeswoman for the airline Qantas claims “the company has had only positive feedback” about, whereas some Qantas crews are criticizing, their new safety video using John Travolta.
No matter who is right, the PR statement is out of touch with reality. How do you prevent that? Ask Keith.

Re-inventing the wheel
So running applications on the Internet is The Big Future, especially according to Google.
But apparently someone at Google asked "what about when a user is not connected to the Internet? (Which I say could be while hiking or in a small boat somewhere, or when your ISP has problems, for example.)
So now there is "Google Gear", which seems to be intended to store a copy of data and perhaps mini-apps on your own local device.
(Nope, I don't grasp the difference from downloading PDF files etc. and using your traditional apps.)
Am I missing something? Or is this just the computing version of "Future to the Back"? (my comment on automobile designs).

Read carefully and ....
So I am in a grocery store, noticing the Quaker Life type of boxed cereal.
But becoming puzzled as to why the box labeled MultiGrain says it is made with 100% oats.
(Perchance someone copied the printing master for the standard product and neglected to remove the 100% line. But it's been that way for over a year that I've noticed, and I presume the product in a volume grocery store isn't that stale.)
Read twice then think is a good maxim for all of us.

... especially when changing the product.
Then there's the Moonrays solar light from Woods Industries Canada, a good configuration of product.
Complete with very helpful measurement of distance between mounting holes, and explanation of switch position, molded into the housing.
Except the important rubbery moisture guard covering the switch looks the same no matter which position the switch is in.
Clever users will either figure out that they can lightly press the guard to feel where the switch is, or block the solar cell which will turn the light on (but their hand is not enough blockage unless they are in a dark corner, placing the light against their clothed thigh works).
Others will never buy more of that product.

The biggest groups are ill with inefficiency
The article by Luke Johnson, Financial Times of April 5, 2011 suggests reasons why emerging companies often outperform established ones despite few resources. (The article does not cover the many small entities that fail due incompetence and misbehaviour.)
Honest performance is what counts in reality. (Which is "out there", not in your head nor cushy office.)

From one extreme to the other
Some clever person figured out that those gobs of sticky hand soap from washroom dispensers could be replaced by foam.
So that became popular - foam so thin that it is ineffective. Foam that users pile on their hands with repeated squirts, and still wonder if it is going to disinfect their hands.
And when automatic sensing devices slow them down, they put a hand under each of two dispensers.
Do decision-makers every use their schemes themselves?

(What impressed me years ago was the airline switch to pump bottles for soap, but with a bottom that made them difficult to use at home (thus not likely to be stolen). Replaced purpose-built mechanisms (always an expensive thing in airplanes) that had to be cleaned occasionally (at mechanic's wage rates).

Root Cellar store "gets it"
The Root Cellar produce store on McKenzie Ave in Saanich BC has cash register displays that face the customer, with large character size so quite readable.

They get "The Big C".

"You have to change your software to use our web site" ....
.... is common advice from web weenies.

To which the obvious response is "I don't have to use your web site"

What failures in thinking are behind the advice to increase cost, and risk of software update interfering with other applications? Keith knows.

Compartmenting large packages
I like good packaging.
Sitting in a small room one day, I idly noticed that a huge package of toilet paper rolls contained smaller packages inside.
Great for storage (your cat may have less fun, but.... :-).
And in the kitchen, a jumbo box of dry cereal contained two bags, each the same size as the one in a standard box (a logical way to make a jumbo size product).
But in both cases there was no identification on the inner package - perhaps a missed brand communication opportunity (with the cost of simple printing).
....Pondering Keith (hey! no smart remarks about where I am gazing ;-).

Steve Jobs in Four Easy Steps
is an interesting article on Steve Jobs, a co-founder and for years the leader of Apple computing company.
Of particular interest to me is the notion that specialties should work together to make a system. A rather basic notion so often overlooked.

Jobs was accused of arrogance in Apple’s earlier days, in which it failed to effectively communicate its product advantages to many potential customers. But his insistence on high user value in products seems to have led to business success.

One of my favourite stories is that Apple put the iPod digital music player concept on the shelf because adequate storage capacity in a small enough size to be a truly usable product was not available. Then Hitachi developed a 1.8” hard drive, and the rest is history. (An obscure story I know of only because I own a compact laptop computer with a version of that hard drive, which is too limited for a computer.)

(Let's give some credit to the producer of the Sony Walkman portable cassette tape player, who also was a visionary insisting on quality.)

How to turn away business
A side story to the success of the Bentley family is why they stopped selling Mercedes-Benz cars.
The factory was arrogant, shipping them the wrong colours and refusing to change, and pushing them to sell one DKW and one Uni-Mog for every three M-B cars sold.
While the Bentley's probably knew people who could use the type of vehicle the specialized Unimog was supposed to be (an all-terrain light truck), they were probably very expensive and were under-powered. The DKW was a small car very different from Mercedes cars, probably better sold by others.

So the Bentleys switched to selling M-B's big competitor, very successfully - a lesson in unintended consequences and the power of the free marketplace.