Archive for April, 2006

I like trees.
I use the web (like nearly 70% of All Americans)
I don’t want printed phone books.

Today, a loud thunk on the front porch signaled the start of a very efficient, yet wasteful process that I suspect is repeated in households and businesses across the nation.

1. Phone book arrived on my porch.
2. Phone book was picked up by me.
3. Phone book was put in recycling bin (or worse, trash)

How many others out there do this exact thing? The Always-On Internet and local marketing online are killing the usefulness of the phone book, at least in my household.

I don’t get it, but surveys show phone books seem to be holding their own, the Kelsey Group reports some interesting stats:

A random sample of 500 teens and 1,000 adults in the U.S. were asked to indicate where they would “turn to first” when looking for a business in their area. Print Yellow Pages was, not surprisingly, the No. 1 choice among all consumers surveyed. The one exception was teens, who indicated they would first turn to search engines when looking for local business information.

• All consumers surveyed – print Yellow Pages, 61%; search engines, 12%; directory assistance, 12%; online Yellow Pages, 7%
• Annual income over $75,000 – print Yellow Pages, 51%; search engines, 27%; online Yellow Pages, 14%; directory assistance, 6%
• Teens – search engines, 47%; print Yellow Pages, 28%; directory assistance, 13%; online Yellow Pages, 9%

I think that you’ll see the population as a whole using search engines 50% of the time within 3-5 years as their first choice.

I like Marshall Brain’s blog post about phone books also.

I want to OPT OUT… I’m going to find out how. I will post it. Please, if you do what I do, opt out of receiving phone books and save some trees!

In the months since I wrote this original post, and its rise to the top of Google, Qdoba’s service has improved dramatically here in my city and so I have decided to strike out my post.

We think the food they create is awesome. I don’t know if my post about their grumpy employees made a difference, but SOMETHING did, and my last dozen visits have been increasingly satisfying. I hope they continue to take care of their regular customers and that the managers keep on recognizing the importance of keeping us coming back.

Nice Job Qdoba.

In the past 12 months, my trusty Quicken report shows that I spent around $900 at Qdoba Mexican Grill. We love the food, and even call it “Qdoba Night.”

This is a shining example of successful brand loyalty. We have built the brand into our daily routine. It’s the holy grail brand managers and you know that Jack in the Box, Inc (owner of Qdoba) spends countless hours and dollars working to achieve just this effect.

But something is wrong.

When I buy my “standard” $26 order for dinner to take home, why do they charge me $0.79 to substitute a spoonful of Guacamole for a spoonful of Sour Cream on one of my meals? The rest of my meal is prepped as-is, and we never grumble. I usually leave a tip. Probably costs them less than a dime to make and serve this spoonful, minus the cost of the sour cream. So, perhaps 5 cents.

Jack in the Box is failing in the education of franchise managers in the art of caring for their Qdoba brand at the customer level. Where I’d calculate the average order price probably around $13-14, my near-$30 purchase and worn out Qdoba card should indicate my status as a customer-to-keep. Perhaps they should have unwritten rules about it, pehraps they should be empowered to make the call. At least they shouldn’t act mad I asked (they always seem to get grumpy when I make this simple request.) Very, very dumb.

I could have a story to tell about great food, freshly made fast in front of you, but instead, I have repeated encounters with grumpy employees charging me for tiny adjustments. And now, I’m blogging in front of several thousand people.

The company brand can be developed and polished to a shine at corporate headquarters, but easily marred at the last minute. And when that happens, nothing can save it.

Seth Godin’s post speaks to a similar issue - Also check it out.

I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while, but the ZDNET At The Whiteboard page is probably one of the coolest, geekiest marketing ideas I’ve seen in a while. I found myself chomping to figure out how I might be able to use it someday. Why I like it?

a) it’s all content. No fluff.

b) it talks to me in a mode that I’m used to.

c) it’s well paced.

Check it out.

When my daughter was in a car seat as an infant and we drove our car through town in the Summer, other drivers would roll up their windows because of the piercing noise of her screams. Well-fed, changed, and gently coddled in the softest blanket, her protests mocked it all.

I took to keeping a set of squishy earplugs in the ashtray for tricky city traffic. In a three hour drive to visit grandparents, we’d endure 2:50 of this. One upside was our confidence we’d never hit a deer because of the high-pitched ultrasonic waves sent ahead of the vehicle.

Then, in the last 10 minutes, drenched in sweat, she fell into blissful sleep. Cheerful and welcoming, my parents would probably wonder why we had odd twitches and complained of ringing in our ears for hours. “Why is she so sweaty?” they’d say, “don’t you guys turn on the A/C when you’re driving?”

The bold segue I’ll make here is that of constraints. In split testing, we must constrain variables while we test others. We must be rigid in the control groupings and how we use results. To many clients (and designers) this is just like being strapped down for three hours.

While protests may not come in the form of blood-curdling squalls, they come in other ways. It’s so hard to deploy split testing without there being a complete and total understanding of the protocols and methodologies involved. And that is incredibly difficult for a consultant to achieve.

Thank goodness for PPC. With PPC, marketing consultants like myself can design landing page variations and produce some evidence that we actually can improve the performance of the site. That evidence then serves to fuel discussions of wider tests. Without PPC, split testing simply wouldn’t happen in my world.

The other day, someone said something to me that drove home the difficulty in using split testing in a smaller project situation. “You mean you’re going to design the same page more than once?” they said. While experience will help us get closer with an initial test group, we simply cannot hit it first pass. It’s sad because many of the companies who would be best served by split testing are the ones most resistant to it.

After this, there is another level of misunderstanding. That split testing is a design-time task. “Once you’ve got the split testing done…” started an email I got a couple of weeks ago. I am a believer that as long as the split tests are resulting in a business gain (profits, branding, long term growth) minus the costs of my doing the tests, you should continue doing it. Split testing is like printing money when done right. You don’t stop the presses.

I’m busy developing materials to address some of these issues, and at the same time working on my certification in such testing. For this reason, I’m also working on a 12 week split testing plan for clients - using Google Calendar for the first time! This will let clients know what’s happening in the testing cycle.

I’m going to be looking at some new software for split testing use in the next 4-6 weeks and putting into action on some sites I’m operating.

I’m reviewing the following

www.offermatica.com
www.memetrics.com
www.vertster.com
www.sitespect.com

…and some other scripts out there as well as some “by hand” methodologies I might use.

Those with opinions I welcome your comments!