Case study in how not to do marketing

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So I’ve been toying with the idea of getting an electric bike. These are all the rage in China, which makes perfect sense. But it’d be great for me on the short trips to the grocery where the thought of getting up and down the hill with groceries puts me right into the car (yes, I’m pathetic that way).

But that’s not the point of this article; instead, this is a case study in what happens when you haven’t thought your marketing all the way through to the point of sale.

I say all this, by the way, as a Best Buy shareholder. Sigh. Anyway, here’s the good, bad, and the ugly.

• The good: Articles about Best Buy carrying electric bikes surface in the blogosphere (see example article below). Good way to leverage social media to build awareness.
• Still good: My local store puts up a banner visible from US-101 proclaiming, “Electric bikes are here, come in for a test ride!”. Again, good: a direct, clear call to action in a place where lots of people will see it, including thousands of people stuck in commute-time traffic. Perfect target market.
• Here’s where it goes from bad to comically worse:
  • Attempt 1 to test ride a bike: Two weeks after the banner went up, I walk into the store for a test ride. Some of the bikes they are supposed to carry are not even on the floor; two models are in boxes. No one in the store knows when they are coming out of the boxes or when the rest of the models are arriving. Test ride? Nope, not sure when you can do that either. FAIL.
  • Attempt 2 to test ride a bike: Two weeks later, I call the store. They say, “nope, still not on out of the boxes — should be good to go this weekend”. Remember, at this point, the store has a freeway-visible banner up for at least a month with that precise call-to-action emblazoned on it. FAIL.
  • Attempt 3 to test ride a bike: Two weeks after Attempt 2, I drop by the store. Sure enough, the bikes (and the Segway) are on the floor out of the boxes. After asking a half dozen blue shirts for a test ride, I’m finally directed to the Appliances team. The Appliance guy makes a call, and says, “yup, it’s what I suspected. We only have one guy who can help with test rides, and he’s in once a week on Fridays. Please come back then.” FAIL.

Why generate the awareness and then the leads when you can’t deliver on the call-to-action? Looks like the bike-enthusiast bloggers who were dismissive about Best Buy being in this business at all were right.

p.s. Digging this Zemanta add-on, which I blogged about earlier. Definitely saves a lot of back-and-forth with other browser windows.

Related articles by Zemanta

• In China, Bicycles Are Back – But Now They’re Battery Powered (time.com)
• Best Buy to Sell Brammo Bikes (shoppingblog.com)
• Best Buy Will Start Selling Electric Bikes (keetsa.com)

Mind-blowing visulization of population data

I’ve been watching TED Talks and Hulu while treadmilling (wireless video inside the house seems more reliable now that we’re on Comcast’s super-fast Internet service) and randomly chose this talk from the Top 10 list by doctor and researcher Hans Rosling. Bottom line? It’s must see TV.

If you are a fan of data visualizations, population trends, government policy, comparisons between countries, or just even mildly curious about changes to our world in the last 30-40 years, prepare to be blown away by this video.

The TEDTalks site blurb has it right: 

You’ve never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called “developing world.”

After you’ve watched the video and are hungry for more, visit Gapminder.org, Dr. Rosling’s nonprofit venture to help people create visualizations like the ones you saw in the video.

Bad Bank

If you haven’t listened to This American Life’s coverage of the banking meltdown appropriately called Bad Bank, run, don’t walk to your nearest iTunes or Web browser and give it a listen. In less than an hour, you’ll understand how we got into this situation and what the main possible treatments are — and why the government has yet to decisively chose one over the over.

Like that? I thought you would.

If you liked that show, listen to This American Life’s two other great episodes about the financial crisis:

• A Giant Pool of Money
• Another Frightening Show About the Economy

If you liked all three of those, subscribe to NPR’s Planet Money audio podcast. And if you just can’t get enough of this stuff and want more advanced reading, try the Baseline Scenario blog.

I firmly believe that financial literacy — or illiteracy, as the case may be — has a role to play in this all-too-frightening debacle.

A teaser: here is a graph mentioned in Bad Bank. In this century, there have been only two years when US personal household debt has exceed the GDP. Yup, you guessed it: 1929 and 2007.

Recession chocolate

We’ve been doing our part to help bailout ailing companies. In particular, we’ve been buying gifts for ourselves from all the frou-frou mail order places we’d heard of but never actually bought from. I imagine these poor retailers had a desperate holiday season — at least, if their 70-80% off promotions were any indication.

So far this recession, we’ve enjoyed recession popcorn from the Popcorn Factory, a recession gift basket with fancy pears and chocolate-covered cherries and such from Harry & David, recession sausage & cheese from Hickory Farms. Up this week, Fedora’s favorite: recession Godiva chocolate. We also got recession pants at Target, but that’s another story.

Our conclusion: at 70-80% off, these gift food places are tolerably priced. We don’t know how they sell things at full price or even mild discounts.

We’re still working our way through the bounty, so come on by if you want to sample some.

How bad is this stock market decline?

I saw this fabulous graph (well, the news that is graphs is terrifying, but the way the graph conveys the information is fabulous) on the Baseline Scenario , a blog about the financial crisis I started following a few weeks ago. 

It compares four bear markets in terms of both how far the markets dropped and how long the bear market lasted. This one is already the 2nd worst by percentage decline, but it’s no Great Depression. Yet.

(Click the graph to see the bigger version.)

The 7 Deadly Sins of the Financial Crisis

I taught a Sunday school class about the financial crisis last weekend. My presentation was packed with charts and included a crash course on mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps (not our typical Sunday school fare, in case you were wondering.)

In retrospect, this cartoon which I found on Digg, pretty much sums it all up without the financial mumbo-jumbo:

Visualizing our national debt

I am a big fan of the well-designed visualization. The good folks who publish the Mint.com blog just published one I particularly like. It visualizes our national debt as a series of credit card balances drawn against the financiers of our runaway government spending — the Bank of Japan, the Bank of China, the OPEC nations, etc.

The amounts are normalized to the median income of a typical American family ($50,233). Very illuminating.

By the way, if you haven’t tried the Mint service, it’s definitely worth a whirl. I think they are probably within 6-9 months away from enabling to kick my Quicken habit of over 10 years.

The way they visually show you:

• How you’re spending
• How your portfolio compares to the major indexes (even though no one wants to see that these days), and
• How your spending compares with people in your own or other cities is astounding.

Intuit ought to buy these guys and put the (now free) Quicken.com out of its misery.

The mortgage meltdown via cartoons

OK, if the slide presentation stuffed with graphs was a little too much information, try this stick-figure cartoon. Here’s the first panel from the very instructive set:

Warning: it’s got profanity in it, though I have to say that in this case, the profanity underscores the narrative. You’ve been warned.

The numbers behind the mortgage meltdown

If you want to understand and see the trends behind the mortgage meltdown, check out this presentation. It’s dense, but probably the single best presentation I’ve seen explaining the mess. Stay tuned for my next post, which takes a very different approach to teaching you about what happened.

Making Sense of the Mortgage Meltdown

From: pkedrosky, 1 day ago

Making Sense of the Mortgage Meltdown

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: kedrosky milken)

Great slide deck untangling the mortgage meltdown from a seminar today at the Milken Institute in Los Angeles.

SlideShare Link

Genius Idea #2

While I’m thinking about it, here’s another example of harnessing the creativity of entrepreneurial-minded people — in this case MacArthur “genius” grant winner Amy Smith — to solve problems in the developing world. I heard this one on the way the work last week as I slowly work my way through the astounding podcast archive at the TED site.

This one could help eliminate the leading cause of death in children under 5, which Amy tells us is respiratory disease caused by indoor cooking fires. I was shocked to hear that (I would have guessed malnutrition or maybe water-borne disease). Here’s is Genius Amy’s solution: