Last week, TechCrunch ran a story that only 38% of TiVo users watch live TV. The rest of them watch their favorite shows whenever they want. They pull the content off the box.
With much more people spending their time online, tradition media trends don’t look great. Who likes to be interrupted by TV/radio commercials, direct mail pieces, or cold calls from telemarketers? Hardly anyone.
TiVo alone is not the killer of a live TV — it is the abundance of set-top boxes, apps, or services connecting our TVs to the internet…
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Posted in Adding Value, Think Long-Term on Dec 19th, 2011
A few months ago, I had to take my wife’s car to a shop. Car was running super loud — the exhaust flex pipe has broke. I took it to the dealer-recommended garage, where they took care of everything in less than 30 minutes, charging me $100, mostly labor. My first thought was “since it took so little, can you charge me less,” but I kept quiet.
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When you shop for yourself, does it take you long to buy something? Usually, not.
When you shop together with a spouse, how long does it take you now? (Let’s say you want to get a great gift.) You may be a great shopper, but it would still take longer than shopping for yourself and making decision on your own.
Having a particular problem in mind (a gift), deadline, responsibility which comes with your selection, and another decision-maker increases your time-to-purchase and begins to look a lot like business’.
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Over the past few weeks, my wife and I got to travel to my home country Latvia and had our second wedding (this time in Romania.) It was our first trip after getting married — so we tried to show each other the best, including lots of museums, castles, and palaces.
While visiting your typical tourist places, one thing kept striking me — if you want to take pictures, you need to pay.
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I love to run AB tests. They are great for measuring impact, good in preventing bad decisions, and good for the continuous improvement. Whether it’s a big, high-impact project, or a simple change, doing an test is always a good idea: in theory. I’d like to point out 5 things which you’ll need to consider before committing to an AB/N test or multi-variable test (MVT), whether you’re a small business owner or working for a large company.
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We all know that in order for companies to be sustainable, they need to focus on something they do best — their core competency. Sometimes it is tough to stay focused because of the short-term savings you could pursue by doing some of the non-critical functions in-house (such as surveys, design of marketing materials, building your own CMS, etc). Each of those activities, however, pulls your company away from focusing on what it does best.
American Express and Dell are using OpinionLab for surveying their customers. With an annual cost of half of a web developer’s salary, these companies make a right, long-term decision. Why try to be in a business of creating surveys?
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If you’ve been shopping online for shoes or clothing, you know Zappos. Zappos loves to WOW its customers, provide amazing customer service, be a little weird, etc. Many of us know that.
Recently I became a VIP on their website…
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It’s been exactly 6 months since I started as an SEO for a promotional products company. Since then, Google has changed its search engine results page (SERP) quite a bit. Personalization for everyone, social circle, inclusion of Google profiles, real-time search with tweets, facebook updates, blog posts, news sites; Similar Pages where Google gives 4 [...]
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Couple of weeks ago, I was catching up on the podcasts. If you saw my post about sources of information (audio edition), Marketing Over Coffee podcast is one of them. How glad was I that I haven’t missed a special interview episode with Simon Sinek (author of “Start with Why”)! Simon says that every business should [...]
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A year ago I had a great professor, Bob Cline, for the Strategic Management class. His main objective for the whole class was to teach us one lesson–no matter what you do, make sure you Add Value. He repeated this concept every single class, because it’s so applicable and important. Adding Value to Customers thru [...]
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