Marketing Homocide

The Tang Dynasty City in Singapore is going to be flattened. It deserves to be.

It doesn’t even have a website, or at least a website easily searchable on Google. There is no Buzz, no excitement. I’d forgotten it’d even existed.

I went there ages ago. It doesn’t have the atmosphere, everything just looked like a replica. It cost a fortune to enter. It doesn’t have a concept. The park next to it is better. The location is bad, I know, but so are a slew of other propular places of attractions and shopping centres.

It doesn’t give visitors the experience. Customer usually don’t pay a premium on the product they pay it for the experience. If there is none, its overpriced and overrated.

A victim of ‘Pratical Business Planning’, instead of going all out to WOW its visitors.

Opera and Its Marketing Reach

While Opera has a good Post about the way it does marketing, it does leave a question. Why does Opera have less than 5 percent share of the browser market? Make no mistake, I love Opera to bits and use it as my main browser of choice. Never mind the fact it makes my life a living hell on some websites, it has grown onto me ever since the bad old days of banner advertisements on its ad ware version.

 

I offer two answers

1. Its focus is on the mobile market and not the browser market, although those involved in it seems to be trying their darnest to make it popular. If the overall corporate focus isn’t there it won’t penetrate too deeply into the browser market.

2. Opera is a ‘nowhere’ Internet browser. It’s not built for the corporate users who fear change or the mainstream users among many whom fear change as well as download. No one really care about the zillion of security alerts with regards to Internet Explorer. Its there, its familiar, Just use it. Its sad but true, Microsoft has successfully used its monopoly position in OS to infect our PC with the incurable blue “e” program.

Plus, I cannot run feature rich websites such as those from Korea and Japan. Every multimedia app ends up stalling or not loading. That’s two big markets they’ve not gained. maybe a modified localized version is in order.

Opera is nowhere the brand that the IE is, it has somehow weakly chosen to go along the ‘geek’ path which is dominated by Firefox and its phalanxes of Extensions. Yes Opera has widgets, but somehow widgets don’t cut it among the Geek users. It sounds very uncool.

Until Opera decides what kind of browser it is and focus on being either a 1. Mass Market user tool or a 2. Geek Toy, it will go nowhere. IMO, its proberly easier to cut into the Internet Explorer Market since the Firefox market is more loyal to its FF. If Opera choose to target the common internet users, it should improves on its functions which are most helpful to them (Inline spell checks, a proper module for Google Calender might be great, a functioning PIM, etc) while maintaining the features which makes it popular among people who have known better. (Ease of use, Lightweight but feature rich, Notes, strong webdesign standards and free)

This only emphasize how much dependent Marketers are on the product and its purpose . A bad product can turn months of Marketing planning into bad PR. Opera browser isn’t bad, in fact, it works well for me and I am delighted with it.

However it isn’t enough for the two biggest demographic markets mentioned above. Opera needs to invent a new direction of expansion. Bittorrent is cool, but the geeks have dedicated torrent downloading programs such as BitComet.

PS. I love my Opera and I encourage others to download it and give it a spin.

I am sleepy…

On Price and Competition

I am reading an interesting piece of article “How to Beat a Lower-Priced Competitor” which I can clearly relate to because I am currently working in such a very competitive industry. Here is the digested read.

Everyone has this vague idea that price wars will bring about utter destruction to everyone and potentially destroy an industry or survivor takes all.

“When customers prefer the lower priced of two items, it’s usually because they believe the cheaper item is a better value. To compete, you need to get the customer to value your product more than the competition’s — regardless of the price.”

Ed: How True… This statement should be embossed to the bottom of every boss’s and manager’s head.

Action Plan

1. Lowering your prices = Changing manufacturing and distribution 2. Building a uniquely better product = Changing design and engineering. 3. Creating a hassle-free experience = Changing sales and marketing. 4.Taking ownership of the customer’s results = Changing customer support

Reposition, Readjust, and Reallocate

1. If you offer lower prices, mimic the competition’s go-to-market strategy. 2. If you build a uniquely better product, target your advertising. 3. If you create a hassle-free experience, generate positive word of mouth. 4. If you take ownership of the customer’s results, create a presence as an industry insider.

Blogger’s Evaluation: Why does so many company fail then?

These are the summary of the author’s points needed to basically survive in a heavily competitive industry or deal with a cost cutting rival. These are very good points but ultimately many companies fail to create an ideal business strategy to counter competition due to the following reasons.

1. They try to do all of the above all at once instead of priorities on the most important things to do. A house has to be built from the base up and not all at once. How are they going to built the 3rd floor when the first floor is left uncompleted? First things first. Shore up the Core Competency of the company.

2. Usually, companies see cost cutting (especially shedding employees) as the easiest solution to reduce price instead on the emphasis on enhancing the value of the product). Cost cutting just leads to more cost cutting and will cripple a company fatally if the other companies improve productivity to increase volume and lower prices instead of cutting costs.

3. Politics. Management at odds with how to deal with this situation and the company ended up doing Point 1 or none at all. A Classic factor.

4. In many industries, efforts has been made into business planning but in the end, whether a company succeeds or not depends on whether its strategy is better than the other. Its like an Olympic race, every athletic does his homework, hires specialists to the hilt, trains every day but only one will win simply because the winners simply has the better preparation strategy.

5. Great product, great price. Bad PR, bad customer service, Terrible Online Shopping page. Turns customers off straight away.