Media : Will Le Figaro Premium succeed in selling online news content?
Le Figaro, France’s first newspaper in terms of audience, announced last week it was launching a premium paying edition (Le Figaro Premium). This innovation is a huge challenge, like for all newspapers which have seen offline audience and advertising revenues decline. It’s today well agreed that advertising can’t entirely cover the costs associated to producing and diffusing news. This conclusion is valid in the newspaper industry, but also in TV (less so in radio broadcasting however)....
What do buyers of online news content look like?
Are people willing to pay for online news content? This question has been studied by many people, academic and auctioneers alike. The answer which has consistently been brought is that users are indeed willing to pay for content. But results have to be interpreted carefully. Most surveys deal with “purchase intentions”, which is not the same as “actual purchase”. You may well declare to someone you intend to buy something; but when the time comes to...
Fedex wants to take TNT over: will it happen or not?
In 2010 we predicted already that the market of courier delivery services would consolidate.Our prediction quickly turned true as UPS tried to take over TNT. This takeover was later rejected by the European commission, arguing that this would have restricted competition (read the press release here for more information). In some member states, the Commission argued, the competition would have been reduced to two players, leaving DHL and UPS head-to-head. What is happening today, with Fedex...
Brand image : Hublot store bets on new technologies
Innovation is the nexus of retail marketing, especially when it comes to the differentiation of points of sales (POS). Innovation often comes first from the top, i.e. from premium brands which have the money to invest in new technologies. Today we’d like to present you an innovation we spotted in the Hublot store of Place Vendôme, in Paris. Hublot is a watch brand that belongs to the LVMH group and is currently headed by Jean-Clauve Biver,...
This store window is interactional … but not digital
The Converse store in Berlin has a very nice and creative idea to make sure people and prospective customers are attracted in the store. Let’s have a look at what they did. The problem with most store windows is that they are very static. This is especially true for clothes. Windows look “dead”. Digital technologies enabled to bring some life and made windows more attractive for customers. Yet, going digital has a price that not all...
Data mining : visualize your data for better results
Doing data mining can become a quickly exhausting exercise if you don’t know where you are heading to. People can easily get lost and draw erroneous conclusions. Read further and discover a tool that will change the way you manipulate and represent data. Exploratory factor analysis The exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis (EFA and CFA) provide numeric ways to explore the data and to build tentative models. In the end, data mining remains a research exercise...
Marketing strategy: should banks charge customers more?
The boss of the National Bank of Belgium suggested that banks change their tariffs and charge customers for services like cash withdrawal, payments made by bank cards, yearly fees charged to have a bank account, … Is it a good marketing strategy ? Why were such proposals made when, at the same time, consumers keep losing purchase power each and every year ? If such proposals were to be implemented, what would be the consequences on...
5 Questions you should answer when doing your market research
When you carry out market research, there is one thing that you need to study very carefully : what are the factors influencing the market that you have no influence upon. Those factors are of different nature and it’s very important to identify them to avoid falling in a trap, and turning a business idea into a disaster. Across the years we’ve been faced with different stories of entrepreneurs who didn’t include this analysis in their...
Our new blog : +25% audience, +50% page views
Just before Christmas we launched the revamping of our blog(s). With a few weeks perspectives we draw the first conclusions and see what works and what doesn’t. Increase in audience, increase in page views The first striking improvement is that we experience a clear improvement of the audience. On average we’ve 25% more visitors than before Christmas. The most dramatic improvement however regards the number of page views and the time spent on the website....
International retailing of « Made in Italy » products
The results of a market research carried out in the UK and France revealed some interesting pieces of information about how brands leverage the “country of origin” dimension in the stores. This market study was presented at the International Marketing Trends Conference that took place in January 2014 in Venice and is the result of the work of 8 researchers. It starts by showing that the previously acknowledged COO (Country of Origin) dimension has been slowly...
Naked Wines: great service and amazing customer experience
We are always looking for the greatest customer experience on earth, service quality that will move you to the highest levels of loyalty. We found a new amazing example in the UK in the e-commerce industry : Naked Wines. Read below what those guys did. It’s just amazing. Dissatisfied customer ? Make him happy to regain trust You know we are very much following complaint handling practices in Europe and are especially receptive to companies showing...
France and Belgium : two countries lacking a culture for customer orientation
In a very inspiring article (in French) Frederic Klotz, former community manager of Rue du Commerce, describes all the problems an e-customer can face in France (don’t hesitate to read the interview Frederic gave us last year). He describes the lack of customer orientation in French firms and suggests that French customers are the most badly treated. Frederic, believe it or not, France is not a unique example of a country lacking service culture and drive for...
If you want your mobile app to be a success, don’t follow this example
Digital marketing and in particular the role played my mobile apps is crucial. Who would dare saying that it’s not. Yet many firms don’t know how to articulate their digital strategies and in particular how to design successful mobile applications. RTL radio promoted the other day a mobile app which, at first sight, seemed to be build on a superb idea. Yet, our analysis shows that it is doomed to failure. Food spilling is a huge...
3D printed photo figurines: a winner-takes-all market ?
3d printing is hot. New applications pop up every day and we even saw last week a 3D printer that was 3D printed. One thing is sure. With each day that passes, the appearance of 3D printed objects will come closer to the original model. You may remember the post we published in 2014 on this stunning startup we discovered in Berlin: Twinkind. This startup stunned us. Their technology allowed to get a 3D photo figure...
Make your ads more effective with this very simple tip
I’m more and more interested in media and advertising and have recently read a lot to better understand consumer behavior when faced with advertisements. Today I’d like to offer you a lesson taught by researchers using eye-tracking to understand consumers’ reactions in front of ads. Exposure to ads is very brief As you may know exposure to ads is typically very short. It’s measured in milliseconds and researchers consider that people usually don’t spend more than...
How news consumption is influenced by the introduction of mobile apps
As everyone knows the rise of digital technology has changed completely media consumption. Traditional media have lost market share and news consumption has shifted to mobile content. The very business model of traditional media is at stake and the need to rethink the news offer has never been so high. Change is mandatory for those who don’t want to go bankrupt. A recent paper published in the Journal of Marketing (the most renown academic magazine in...
Belgian railways CEO attacks bad results of satisfaction survey
Trains’ punctuality is a strong indicator of customer (dis)satisfaction whatever the country. In countries where trains are still operated by public organizations (France, Germany, Belgium, …) operational objectives are usually set by the State to guarantee that efforts are put into satisfying travelers. In Belgium the quest for more satisfaction led to a “fight” between Belgian railways’ CEO, Jo Cornu, and Customer Defense Association Test Achats. The story Last week Jo Cornu, the CEO of the...
Vuitton creates once again attractive store windows
Louis Vuitton is an example for all retailers in terms of store windows design. You may remember what we called the most beautiful store windows in the world, displaying golden dinosaurs on the Champs-Elysees. The LVMH teams work not only on designing amazing widows, but also on having an homogeneous implementation worldwide and on changing windows often (see another example here). Never before have retailers put so much emphasis on store design. The quest for differentiation...
How will advertising look like in the future ?
A film producer came to my office the other day and wanted to interview me on the evolution of advertising. At first sight it seemed pretty odd to interview a marketer to get insight about advertising, but drew eventually some interesting parallels with marketing. 70 years ago : terra incognita Have you ever heard of the term “terra incognita” ? Wikipedia proposes the following definition : Terra incognita or terra ignota is a term used in...
iDTGVMax: What is the hidden agenda of the French railways?
The French railways company (SNCF : Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer) made the news this week when it announced the launch for an unlimited offer with its iDTGV. For 59.99€ per month, travelers would be allowed to take online booked high-velocity trains (called iDTGV) as many times as they’d like. This offer is called IDTGVMax and can be discovered on the dedicated website at IDTGVMax.com This unlimited offer was however limited in size and reserved...
How to get back in touch with dissatisfied mobile app users
In the last 10 years we have been in touch with many companies conducting satisfaction surveys. One thing surprised us. In many cases, these results were used for reporting purposes to the management but were not used to actually improve situation. In other words, dissatisfied customers were not contacted to understand what happened and to attempt to recover the situation. It’s like if companies were too shy (or shameful) to do it. Do the experiment for...
Sharing Economy : a new form of exploitation ?
I got a call last week from the TV : they wanted to know more about the sharing economy for a forthcoming broadcast and discuss in particular what it could change in our Society. After 1 hour of discussion I was more pessimistic than ever. I concluded for myself that the Sharing Economy was more of a threat to our model of Society than a real advantage. What is today’s perspective on the sharing economy? It...
Innovation & Design Thinking: 3 secrets to generate better ideas
You know I’m a big fan of design thinking. I’ve carried out many sessions and ideas have popped up that I’m sure, would never have come to mind with Design Thinking. As you know Design Thinking is a real methodology that helps fuel creativity and pave the way to innovative ideas. The purpose of this post is certainly not to deal with the whole method here (there are excellent books and really good trainings to do...
Merchandising effect around Charlie Hebdo threatens brands
The wave of emotion following the attacks of Paris led to a very strange marketing phenomenon : people tried to sell stuffs related to Charlie Hebdo popped up online and offline to profit from the worldwide press coverage the event got. Last Saturday I was interviewed by RTL on this very topic and thought it might be interesting to put my reflexions on paper. Why are people trying to take profit of the event? Greed. There...
Where is this crazy Society going to?
I started 2015 with a blog post about Love. Only 48 hours after that blog was published the attacks in Paris began. I must admit I felt so desperate when it all started on Jan, 7th that I just had no energy to write anything. How could I actually write anything about a secondary subject like marketing when such events happen? I wanted to modestly dedicate this first post to the victims of the three attacks....
12 years dedicated to protecting consumers … voluntarily
I had the pleasure to meet two weeks ago another customer satisfaction hero, the destiny of whom was tightly linked to that of Frédéric Klotz (read his interview). The man I met is Joël Guillon, someone I’ve indirectly known for years through the complaint resolution forum he launched in 2002 : LesArnaques.com Joël is one of those knights who fights against bad companies’ practices and who shares his knowledge and his time to help other consumers....
Food labels: keep it simple and stupid
In her weekly column in Le Figaro, French most visited online journal, Natacha Polony defended on 5 Dec 2014 the idea that food labels should not be simplified. We disagree. Read further to find out why and more importantly “how” labels should be simplified to benefit the customers’ interest. Is Mrs. Polony’s argumentation really worthwhile ? Mrs Polony was arguing that a recent law passed to simplify the labeling of meat was non-sense. This law requires...
Must-read : interview of a customer satisfaction champion
We are publishing today a very special post. You’ll find below the interview of someone I consider to be a customer service hero, a champion of customer satisfaction. Frédéric Klotz had worked for RueDuCommerce (one of the most renown e-commerce website in France) for 10 years and became known on forums, blogs, social media for his outstanding qualities. He kindly agreed to give us an interview where you’ll learn what he learned in terms of complaint...
Competition forces traditional taxis to change : finally !
The traditional press is full of articles regarding the legal procedures against Uber in Europe. In this judiciary fight, traditional taxis and VTC (Vehicule de Tourisme avec Chauffeur) have joined forces to fight Uber’s aggressive strategy to enter the market despite legal requirements (for more information read our previous article on this topic). Brussels minister for mobility was proud to announce that he had seized vehicles participating in the UberPop program (article in French). This is...
1/3 of hospitality firms could die. So what ?
A press conference was recently organized by the union of independents to denounce the expected negative effects of the black boxes in the so-called Horeca (HOtels – REstaurant – Coffee shops) sector (in other words the sector of hospitality). As a short reminder, these black boxes are devices to be implemented in the cash register of stores to eradicate the possibility to make black money. Jean-François DONDELET, the president of the union of independents (SDI), said...
Serving unfair customers: here’s what you should do
When a customer is unsatisfied, he/she sometimes engages in an interaction with the company to obtain redress. At that point frustration may combine to dissatisfaction and result in aggressiveness and outrageous behavior on the part of the customer. Marketing specialists are unanimous to say a firm should apologize and accept the responsibility. But doing so has also consequences for the employees. How would you feel, as a service employee, if you’d have to apologize and accept...
Idea in brief : rejuvenate your products with a new packaging
To follow up on our post dedicated to innovation in the food & drinks sector, we wanted to give you another example of how you can attract customer’s attention very simply, through a small innovation brought to your product. The idea behind this post was inspired by two very new products we spotted at SIAL 2014. Keep in mind SIAL is a must when it comes to food innovation and analysis of the trends in this...
Complaint management: an example you should NOT follow
As you may know our agency is working a lot on complaint handling and complaint management practices. Handling complaints well proves to be very rewarding in terms of customer satisfaction and loyalty. Make sure you listen to the podcast we recorded with Prof. Davidow in March 2020 on this topic. Prof. Davidow is one of the world’s most renown experts as far as complaint handling is concerned. To offer recommendations to organizations we study actual complaints...
Food & drinks : just remix to innovate
You may remember this old post we published on innovation : innovation is a remix. Well, it seems that in the food & drink business (we are just back from SIAL) some innovations are just about that : applying old recipes to a new sector. If you are European chances are high that you consume pistachios in one of those two ways : roasted (in the shell) or nature. For Setton farmers, a California-based company, this...
Retailing: fighting browsing shoppers is wrong. Here’s what you should do.
Browser consumers are not new. Academic papers dating back to the 80’s are mentioning this behavior and called for researching it. posing what retailers consider being a great threat to their business. Today however they actually pose also the question of the survival of the brick-and-mortar retail sector vs. online retailing; browser consumers are visiting stores and then buying online, an option which didn’t obviously exist 30 years ago. Retailers feel threatened by what may appear...
Internet: no privacy, freedom lost
To start the week I wanted to follow up on my latest post dedicated to the Google Glasses and their use in a business environments. I finished this post by saying that all the information on us was being aggregated, used and that eventually our freedom became restricted. I promised to explain my thoughts … so here they are. Google knows who you are It shouldn’t be surprise for anybody that we are tracked in everything...
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