BCS = Customer Abuse
By David Golding
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If you haven’t heard, the Bowl Championship Series for College Football has once again disappointed the masses with a controversial championship game match up. The scenario is somewhat complicated, but all in all, most people agree that we don’t know for sure if the Ohio State Buckeyes versus the Florida Gators is an accurate battle of the number 1 and number 2 teams in the country. The BCS system is a total blunder in this respect.
What is the clarion call of fans, players, coaches, and even some university presidents? Playoff. The only ones in any sizeable group that want to keep the BCS system as it is are university presidents directly involved in the BCS, bowl committees, and conference commissioners (some). The BCS favors schools from big-name conferences and occasionally even messes them up.
Who matter most in the market for college football? Those that finance the whole operation. And those that provide all the financing are the fans. They are the ones that buy the tickets, purchase the TV packages, consume the advertising, and pay for the memorabilia. They are also the ones who are most irate. In this climate, it is clear that BCS is a textbook example of customer abuse: not only avoid delivering what the customer wants, but purposefully deliver what he or she does not want in an effort to make money.
Controversies like these expose the BCS for what it is, a system that help the rich get richer and deprive the fans what they want. In the end, it only hurts them worse. Companies that engage in customer abuse almost always fare worse than if they would strive to meet customer desires. I may be wrong, but keep your eyes peeled in the future for a shake up of the BCS. In the end, it always happens to companies that abuse the customer, even if it takes a couple decades, but it does happen.
And if you’re wondering if you employ abusive tactics in your marketing and business, take a look at the BCS and see how you compare.
Direct Competition Is Most Difficult
By David Golding
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By now I’m sure you’ve heard of Microsoft’s new Zune player. Whether or not it is any good, I really don’t care. And even if it beats out the iPod in terms of features, etc., it’s been one of Microsoft’s biggest blunders if you ask me. First of all, they tried to out-do the market leader, Apple. They came out in direct competition, calling the Zune the “iPod killer” with the hopes of stealing away share from Apple. Well, if you’re going to go head-to-head with the market leader, remember, you have to exploit a weakness inherent in the strength.
For example, and I’ve used this one before, Avis rent-a-car in the 80s advertised: “Rent from Avis. The line here is shorter.” Would Hertz, the market leader, start to kick folks out of their line to do battle with this? No way. A weakness inherent in the strength of Hertz’s position was that their line was long, and Avis successfully attacked it.
Marketers need to remember to keep their offensive attacks on as narrow a front as possible. In this example, Zune right now is going all out, trying to grab hold of any and all distribution channels. Their push is to dethrone the iPod, pure and simple. Big mistake. The iPod will always win because it occupies the higher ground in the battlefield of the consumers’ minds. Zune would be wise to hunt for exploitations in the iPod’s strength, attack one, and stick it out.
One might be guaranteed stock. Many iPod retailers run out quickly and take orders; Zune could make the guarantee that when you want one, you can always walk out of the store with one.
Another could be piggy-backing on Windows. Honestly, for Mac users, the iPod works seemlessly with the OS. Right now, Microsoft is trying to catch up with the Zune. Not only should it be compatible with the Windows platform, it needs to be so fully integrated with it that you literally just plug it in and it works. Then Zune could be pushed as the definitive Windows MP3 player.
Instead, Microsoft is doing what it has done in the past: brawl out in some kind of feature war. But in this, they cannot possibly win. Other players with better features have surfaced in the past and gone the way of all the earth in the wake of iPod’s mammoth market strength.
Next year: Zune, R.I.P.
Need for Speed
By David Golding
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Recently, I decided to make a go for a really intriguing e-book. I’m usually skeptical of e-books because the authors don’t have to really suffer the typical wrath of publishers and editors like traditional print authors do and really anything goes in the electronic world. So how do you know that a particular e-book is going to live up to its claims, have good research behind it, etc.? Well, I took the dive and was impressed by the content, but not by the process.
I ordered the e-book nearly 6 months ago. I got the completed 2nd edition today. Now, in all fairness, they did say when I ordered the 2nd edition that it was not complete. But there was a promise I would get the book I ordered and in a timely fashion.
Let this be a lesson to all of us: there is a need for speed, and the internet only accelerates that desired speed. The response time on this one was a little over 6 months and in internet years, that’s like a decade. Well, maybe not that much, but it’s way too much time, especially if the book itself involves internet development tutorials. When delivering a product online, it ought to be instant, where possible. People generally expect some kind of instantaneous result. I learned this principle with a site I started back in 1999, Piano Public Domain. The site had some static links to PDF files of classical sheet music. Not long after I started the site I realized there needed to be income to finance the hosting, domain name registration, and everything else, so I started selling options to customers. It wasn’t instantaneous, and I made hardly anything. In fact, I made more from advertising cause customers were leaving for greener pastures. This year, we rolled out with a powerful site that serves this need for speed better than before, and sales have increased over 1000%.
So whether it’s an e-book or an online service, make sure that you provide something, anything, instantaneously.
