Dangerous Thinking

I’m a bit fanatical about coffee and tea.

Along with a couple of friends and acquaintances, I’m forever on the trail of the perfect dense, syrupy, short expresso. That’s cool. Coffee is a brilliant part of Lifestyle with a capital ‘L’.

My tea fixation places me somewhere amongst those who choose to fart in enclosed public spaces. You see, I insist on having leaf tea. Now, that just isn’t cool.

Have you tried to buy leaf tea in a supermarket? There’s about a shelf and a half at floor level, if you’re lucky – and you know the significance of the positioning? Yep. If it ain’t at eye level, the product is marginal, at best.

None of the supermarkets are stocking my favourite Ridgways Organic tea any more – except in those dreadful teabag things that make the brew taste like cardboard. The range (I shan’t honour the supermarkets with the word ‘choice’), in most places, is PG Tips, supermarket own brand and Twinings.

And now Twinings are losing the plot. Not only are they getting Stephen Fry to pitch us the benefits of Builders’ Tea Teabags (or whatever it’s called) on TV, but along with the box redesign, the loose tea is now in a plastic inner bag, not the metallised (or was it waxed?) one they had previously. Whatever it was, it jarred.

This may be akin to the wine buff’s revulsion at plastic corks and screw tops, but I’m left feeling that the experience of getting some nice tea has been devalued. And, to give this piece a proper marketing focus, I think Twinings are probably misunderstanding the people who buy their leaf tea.

People who care enough to mess about with with leaf tea almost certainly need to be engaged with, flattered, understood. Or we will go off and find a specialist outlet that sells loose tea.

End of market?

This morning, after a night of torrential rain and high winds, I opened the curtains to heavy skys and continuing gales. Just the day to have booked some time with my friend, designer, marketing expert and photographer, Mike Halsey to have some photographs done for my forthcoming site at davidrosam.com.

The rain passed, and we had a great, if tiring, day.

Looking forward to seeing the pix next week.

Our latest site, ITcopy.com, went live this week.

It’s very much V1.0, with a lot more content to come, along with the new Chamaeleon online identity, and Search Engine Optimization. But, with this one, I’m practicing what I often preach to clients – get the site as good as you can (against a deadline) and make it live.

You get little benefit from a blank or greatly outdated site. You can then return to the site and upgrade it to make it work harder for you.

My piece, Controlling the Customer/Enterprise interface, appeared today in the Chartered Institute of Marketing Technology newsletter.

Thomas Power e-mailed to point out Business Week’s listing of the world’s Top 100 brands.

Business Week (PDF)

Geoffrey Moore’s chasm concept keeps popping up recently, for some reason.

It seems some people support the ideas; while many more don’t.

But, in the early 90s, the book and the ideas were the hottest of poop in the IT industry, but they, like countless other accepted – and useful – concepts got pushed aside by the dotcom goldrush.

Now, so many people think it’s old hat; a fashion from the times of Baggy.

I’d have to disagree. I have a client whose business situation is described so accurately by the Chasm that I was shocked. It had kind of slunk into the back of my mind and gone to sleep somewhere comfortable.

Of course, that’s because the Chasm concept doesn’t apply to the whole of the technology industry and its products. It applies right there at the cutting edge.

If you’re a start-up looking to find a large market for your products, the book is still worth a read.

I have some pretty good spam filtering in place these days. So do most people, I guess.

So why do so many of the newsletters I subscribe to fall foul of such filters? Some time ago, we put some tests in place to ensure our newsletters don’t get caught in spam filters.

I’m amazed that others haven’t done so. It takes time and a little ingenuity in rewriting content sometimes, but it’s well worth the effort to get the newsletters delivered.

Think about it – do you test your newsletters for spam ratings? If you don’t then they could be suffering the same fate as the four I unceremoniously dumped from my spam folder this morning.

When I’m pushed for time or have reading matter mounting up, it’s as good a way as any to decide what gets my attention.

I was talking to some designers last week about what I knew about Web Accessibility – not a great deal, as it happens, but more than they did

And then this pops up on the on the Brighton New Media list. Certainly worth a read.

Web Accessibility and UK Law: Telling It Like It Is: A List Apart

I was only saying recently that we’d see the resurgence of junk fax as UK-based companies aren’t allowed to send unsolicited e-mails.

Looks like I could be right. We haven’t received any junk fax for months, but we’ve had two today.

The only good thing is that it’s costing them more to piss me off with their irrelevant communications, so there should be less of this interruptive garbage.

Apple is on a roll. Not just because it’s got some sexy products out there, but also because it’s turning one of the industry’s givens on its head.

It’s making money out of hardware, rather than software. This, from one of my favourite daily doses of marketing stuff, Reveries Magazine:

Apple is leading a trend into a “post-PC era in which silicon, not software, will be king.” If Apple gets its way, the traditional (i.e., Microsoft) model in which hardware is sold at a loss and profits are made on the software will be replaced by a new approach that is exactly the reverse. Apple’s iPod is the test case for this new approach — and a highly successful one, so far. In Apple’s fiscal quarter of 2004, it sold a quarter of a million iPods for about $400 each, in addition to some 30 million songs for about 99 cents each.

Apple ceo Steve Jobs has made it clear that profits are made on the hardware, not the software. So the old razors-and-razorblades notion that you lose money on the “razors” and make it up on the “razorblades” has effectively been scotched by Apple. Some observers see this new reality as “likely to bring wrenching changes to the technology world, largely dominated by Microsoft for the last decade. Richard Wallace of Electronic Engineering Times recently wrote about the implications of Apple’s new business model: “The irony is that while software gets the glory, it’s silicon that’s at the heart of the industry’s next darling…”

1/20/04 Apple’s Razorblades – Next Teletubbies – AT&T’s Cathy Constable