The Morrisons Coca-Cola ripoff…

July 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I don’t what Morrisons annual spend is on marketing themselves as the supermarket which offers quality produce caught fresh two second ago and served by people passionate about being an in-store butcher or fishmonger, but they really should reconsider a couple of things.

Firstly, that marketing and advertising budget is seriously wasted when my regular trips (it’s the nearest supermarket to my house), seem to involve at least one item which has melted and then been refrozen, or has leaked, or has had some other disaster encounter it due to the disconnect between their brand identity and what actually happens to their products between supply and my shopping trolley.

And secondly, I know that all supermarkets have been exposed for ‘special offers’ which actually aren’t, but at least they could try and put some effort in. For example, the current special offer on Coca Cola, which is 3 bottles for £4.50. Rudimentary maths makes this £1.50 a bottle.

Except that the regular price for a 4 bottle multipack is £5.91, which divided by 4 and rounded-up makes £1.48 per bottle.

So their special offer is actually 1p per litre more expensive than the regular price – now is that going to make me more or less likely to trust all their other claims? I wonder how the additional £8 annual profit they’d make from that special offer compares with the cost of acquisition for a regular customer with a young family, plus a car to fill up at the petrol pump each week?

 

The marketing lesson here

It’s a simple lesson, but one which so many companies seem to screw up on a regular basis. If you’re marketing yourself around quality, you need to make sure you consistently deliver it first.

Filed Under: Business, marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

Client solves Ecommerce for WordPress via Open Source

July 14, 2011 By 2 Comments

I don’t often write about clients on my blog for various reasons, but I wanted to spread the word about Jigoshop, which is a great Ecommerce for WordPress solution that I’ve been working on for a couple of months now. One reason is simply that it’s a really good product which I can easily recommend – as part of research I played around with the alternatives and I can honestly say that I’d already decided to use Jigoshop to power a couple of future projects before working with them. And the other is that it’s one of the first times I’ve been working on a project which is delivering something via Open Source, rather than using OS products as an end user.

Jigoshop Ecommerce for WordPress

 

So what makes Jigoshop so good?

It’s worth explaining that the company behind it, Jigowatt, specialises in Ecommerce sites for a large range of clients, using both WordPress and Magento, so they’ve spent a lot of time working with all the existing ways to produce effective and attractive online stores, and have particular experience handling the backend admin side of getting lots of products uploaded and ranking in search for their clients. That means they’ve got a long list of all the features that they wish existed and eventually reached the point that they knew it made more sense to build something to answer all their problems.

It’s incredibly quick and simple to use – even I can get an online store up and running in about 20 minutes. But at the same time it’s also highly configurable when you want to get into setting attributes, localising your shop, and stock management.

 

The benefits of a true Open Source Ecommerce solution

I was lucky enough to start getting involved with Jigowatt and Jigoshop when they started discussing how to licence Jigoshop, and how they could try and ensure that it has the optimum chance of being the best possible product, and also how it can generate revenue to justify continuing to work on it alongside the masses of client work they’ve got at any time. They had already started discussing the open source model, obviously drawing from their experience with the likes of WordPress and other open source developments and plugins, and they’d also been open and honest on their blog about their ideas – which led to really helpful input from other WordPress plugin developers, for instance, comments and suggestions from some of the guys at RocketGenius, who make the great Gravity Forms solution.

I also whittered on about everything from the birth of the Free Software Foundation and Open Source to the business models used by the likes of Arduino, and slowly the shape of the Jigoshop business model emerged, which was to release the shop itself under a GPL licence.

  • That means that you can download it, get your store up and running, and take payments via Paypal without having to sign-up for a trial or submit a credit card.
  • And it means anyone can build on top of it, whether that’s additional features or themes etc.

The revenue streams are all around specific extensions to the main Jigoshop platform, whether it’s payment gateways or specific themes, as well as allowing donations. And that’s an approach I really hope works for this specific project, because I really want to see Jigoshop continue and evolve.

 

It’s not just me recommending Jigoshop

Obviously as a client, I might be a little biased, but the good thing is that absolutely loads of WordPress specialists and big independent sites have been giving positive reviews to Jigoshop, reinforcing the fact that it’s a really good product. Just some of the mentions since it launched include Mashable, ThemesForge, and Envato. And there’s a growing forum community on the site which is worth checking out.

 

So I figured there’s enough to justify writing about a client for once! And obviously if you’re interested in finding out more about the range of freelance content and marketing services on offer, then please do get in touch….

Filed Under: Clients, marketing, open source, wordpress Tagged With: , , , , ,

Quora with video – marketing dream and user nightmare?

July 11, 2011 By 1 Comment

The value of question and answer sites has long been shared by SEO specialists in terms of linkbuilding, and to some extent in social media for relevant traffic. But Quora may have just gone a step further in terms of allowing marketing material to be provided in answers.

The site is now embedding Youtube videos in answers, and converting any previous links to Youtube videos into the embedded version.

Quora includes video

Quora includes video

In some ways that’s a good thing, considering the value of relevant videos in answering the right questions. For instance, when the question relates to music, or sport. And being able to share a Youtube video explaining a technical point could be rather useful.

But at the same time, it also means an additional amount of content for Quora moderators to try and look after to keep the quality of their site up, and an additional way for anyone wanting to quickly push out a load of irrelevant spam videos to get some extra views. After all, the big reason why Google claims Youtube needs to post-moderate videos is that noone could ever manage to watch the huge amount of content being uploaded, and then decide what can and can’t be posted.

Now if enough spammers start flooding Quora with irrelevant videos, the much smaller start-up will have a similar problem.

It also means that you might struggle to load a page with 60+ embedded videos in it if you’re on a slow connection, but that’s probably something we’re just going to have to come to terms with as every site rushes to include video due to the huge rise in both video viewing and growth in video advertising…

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimisation, Social Media Monitoring, video Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Implications of the News of the World phone hacking…

July 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment

There’s obviously been a lot of in-depth intelligent analysis of the demise of the News of the World due to the phone-hacking outcry. So rather than attempt to add to that, I just wanted to throw three quick thoughts out there:

  • People still read print newspapers? Recent research has claimed around 50% of the UK population no longer read a daily paper, and that number is only growing – the demographic for the News of the World is likely to be one which embraces smartphones as later adopters, but closing the print product now is only likely to have pre-empted what would have happened in the future, and a digital title may or may not have succeeded, but given the content and the transitional chaos of mainstream news online, it’s not assured that a digital version would have been guaranteed to continue.
  • ‘Hacking’ has probably skewed so far to the negative connotations of the word that any positive associations will fade pretty fast, whether that’s the idea of improving an inefficient program, hacking together software for a positive outcome, or lifehacking etc. I’ve overheard several conversations recently from people way outside the computer literate world, all concerned with hacking, and all referencing phone-hacking and recent Lulzsec and Anonymous activities. That’s what the word ‘hacking’ means to most people now.
  • Journalism is likely to go the same way – the negatives get massive press coverage and analysis, whilst the good is rarely commented on. For many years bloggers have aspired to be accepted on the same terms as journalists, while some journalists have attempted to maintain an occupational gap even to this day, without clarifiying much except academic qualifications as a barrier. But now, maybe we’ll all have to put that to one side and become writers, when the stories of journalists using phone-hacking, or pestering people via email, social networks and in person are becoming widely spread online. I’m holding two training sessions as part of a journalism training course this month, and I wonder how, in the UK and U.S at least, the term ‘journalist’ is being perceived – I can only suspect it’s in a similar place as ‘banker’ except not paid as well.

Filed Under: journalism, newspapers Tagged With: , , , , ,
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