Selling on Value

Posted on 4 July 2010 by kylejbritt

“Value” marketing pushes are big right now. Unfortunately, most marketers are pushing the wrong kind of value. The prevailing winds of the advertising world are pushing consumers towards price preference. The distasteful side effect of this push is price awareness, a trait that devalues your brand in the long run.

Take, for example, a quick lube shop. This shop pushes price preference which drives immediate sales. They are offering oil changes for $2 less than their competition. There is little perceived quality difference in most quick lube places so this works out in the short term very well. However, the quick lube has now established what it will take to lose their customers. $2. Whereas the nearby quick lube plus is not pushing a price preference value model, but instead a service value model, emphasizing that for the money, you get the best and friendliest service in town. Look what quick lube plus has done: they have established quite a different situation for what it will take to lose their customers. Better and friendlier service. They’ve created a subjective advantage instead of an objective one.

Now that’s harder to beat than $2.

Posted in branding | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Thoughts on Thoughts on Flash

Posted on 29 April 2010 by kylejbritt

I titled this post like I have the authority to legitimately comment on a divisive situation in Silicon Valley. I don’t, but I’d like to try.

Steve Jobs posted his Thoughts on Flash. The Social Web immediately lit up. Some defending Jobs, some critiquing either his motives or arguments.

I’d like to point out, first, that I am not a developer, nor do I purport to be. I am, however, very mindful of the processes and technologies that drive the internet forward. As someone who quite literally hangs his hat on the exploitation of the opportunities created by technologies developed by other people it is crucial that I stay on top of the waves of the future, lest I be swept beneath them.

That said, HTML5 is that wave of the future, for now. I have thought for a very long time that Flash was at best passé, at worst a distracting side effect of the abundance of developers and the relative simplicity of Actionscript compared to, say, C#. That is to say, there are a lot more crappy applications and games developed in Flash than in virtually any other programming language. What I am saying sounds like a sweeping generalization and to my many friends who are Flash literate, I apologize. Flash has served the web well and has driven it forward in a way no other technology was prepared to five years ago.

The ride is over, Adobe. Not your technology, but your platform. The people standing on the sidelines crying that Flash provides a fuller web experience are of the same mindset as the people who cried that MySpace shouldn’t have been losing relevance as the network continued to grow. Flash has been overtaken in features, in speed, and in universal usability by HTML5. It’s time to step up to the microphone and make the difficult concession speech or you risk shutting down your Flash division 10 years after it became irrelevant.

The web has so much more to offer now than when Flash was necessary just to embed video. Although 75% of web video is still Flash, as Jobs pointed out, most of it is available in other formats. When CBS, CNN, the NYT, ABC, Netflix, Facebook, and even your darling YouTube abandon your format, it’s dead whether you want to fight it or not.

I am a Mac user, but I don’t have an iPhone or iPad, so I’m not even commenting on the mobile web as Jobs did, I’m talking about the web in general. The web has grown up and Flash is still drawing stick figures on the bathroom wall.

Adobe, you have so much to offer in terms of talent and technology. I know that several recent advancements have made your platform more robust and feature-rich, but if the developers aren’t taking advantage of it, the content producers aren’t utilizing it, and the Operating Systems are disallowing it because of the poor average quality of the applications developed on it, then please take the hint.

Posted in tech | Leave a comment

Let’s Talk About Facebook and Privacy for a Minute.

Posted on 23 April 2010 by kylejbritt

The F8 developers conference was just the other day and in the same moment that developers cheered, thousands of users shouted in outrage.

At the center of the debate is the issue of privacy, something we have been taught, conditioned, and sometimes threatened to protect. The impetus for the reaction is in Facebook’s new integration with outside websites, which allows certain sites to know who you are based on your Facebook account and attempt to provide you personalized content alongside the website in question. This effectively extends Facebook’s 41% of the social media traffic worldwide to other, traditionally non-social sites.

As both a user and as a social media professional I love the direction this is heading. Everything in social media is edging towards making search engines obsolete and making relevant the businesses who have high volume, high quality followings. This particular extension of the social web is a great step in that direction and really puts all businesses that create a quality product or experience on equal footing when it comes to reaching out to customers.

But more relevant to the comments at hand is the issue of sharing your information outside the bounds of Facebook. What this issue comes down to is the average user’s misunderstanding and lack of knowledge of both the function and capability of the technology at play here.

The outside site, say Pandora Radio, will only pull your info if you are logged into Facebook and, like Facebook, you will be the only one to see this personalized info despite being on this well-trafficked public site. Pandora does not have the capability to access your account, or discover any info about you that Facebook does not release. You simply end up with a more personalized web experience. Additionally, your friends will see your Pandora activity, but not random users of Pandora.

A deeper issue perhaps is the stigma of privacy. It’s clear that I’m not particularly worried about it, with me using my full real name on my website, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and nearly every other site of which I am a member. As a personal anecdote, consider my three most public profiles: YouTube (which I used to have 50 or so videos on), Flickr, and Twitter. Between them I have had roughly 1.6 Million interactions using my real name and have had nary a privacy scare. Sure, there are real threats out there but, like with products on social media, you hear about every bad experience and precious few of the good experiences.

We all use our real names on Facebook (or at least Facebook believes we do according the Terms of Service). What Mark Zuckerberg is trying to eliminate is the anonymity about the internet that causes so many problems. What it will take is a massive shift in the online mindset that yes, you should always shield info like your address and phone number online, but using your real name throughout the internet will actually make us all more accountable. It’s comfortable standing behind the veil and knowing what you do and say online is unlikely to have a real effect on your offline life, but as we’ve seen with people getting fired over comments online, Facebook is narrowing that veil, intending to sweep it away and impose the openness of reality on the secrecy of the Internet.

I, for one, think it’s a great idea.

Posted in branding, tech | Tagged , , | Leave a comment