Gus Johnston was walking past his local bakery in the Melbourne suburb of Elsternwick – Franks. It’s a 40 year old local business. He told me about a great little piece of marketing which inspired the title of this blog post.
On the bakery door, hand written was a little sign with the the words Opening Hours. Under it was: 8am until sold out.
It’s nice story which is perfect for what they do. Better hurry.
I once worked in a consumer goods company which went from Individual offices to open plan.
I now work in an advertising agency where we have moved from individual offices to open desks.
What happened at these two firms is interesting. The first office (consumer goods marketing) sent out a mass email banning iPods (and any other brand of personal music device – this is seriously what the email said). Claiming that the idea of open plan was to encourage open communications, and it was rude to listen to music while working. That we couldn’t do our jobs while listening to music as it was distracting. While at the same time the directors had offices with doors.
The second office (advertising) did something much different. Firstly, all the directors have the same size desk and space as every employee. On our first day in the new office we all had a gift on our desk wrapped beautifully with a ribbon. Inside the pack was free coffee vouchers (for the cafe across the road) and a brand new iPod nano. And it had a note which said the following:
“The iPod nano – this is good for a few things. Moving to open will at times be challenging. If you feel it is getting on top of you, then feel free to bung in your iPod and listen to your favourite tunes. We’re also into the idea that we can all play part in creating our new vibe. So we’ll be asking you to supply the music each day. We’ll place a sign at the reception that says “Today’s music thanks to Ant Shannon.” Please make your playlist and get it on the dock. The iPods you’ve received also take video – get in the habit of recording the stuff you like or think about. Keep it, play it, share it.”
A massive difference in attitude, culture and resulting creative output. The culture we create in our startup or any business is a result of what we do, and we can change it at any time with a bit of effort and humanity.
There are many things we’ll implement when we get big enough. When our footprint is big enough to deserve the investment of the bigger, game changing idea. When we achieve X, we’ll implement Y.
Maybe we ought implement Y now and skip X altogether?
I’m developing a new website which is an on-line supermarket. Here’s some of the features I’ll be building into it in terms of usability.
If you want to place an order for milk, you must first look at all the items you don’t want to buy. They will pop up on the screen one by one. You’ll have to click past all of them. Then the milk will pop up after you’ve seen every other product for sale to click on. But after this, you then must click past all of the goods for sale again. The same ones we already showed you. When you want to proceed to the checkout, we’ll make you wait for maybe 5 or more minutes and show you many of the items you already saw on screen, again, just in case you changed your mind. If you decide to shop late at night at our on line supermarket, only one person can buy at a time, because we will restrict our ‘server’ so that all of our customers cannot buy their supermarket items simultaneously. This is because we will be trying to save a few dollars on serving people. A few people might leave and go somewhere else, but it will be a great expense saving idea.
Sounds pretty ridiculous right? Well, this is defined as ‘retail strategy’ in the physical supermarket world. Maybe it’s time they re-thought how they do some things. Right now there is tremendous opportunity for smart startups in the retail space employ on-line usability best practice to show some dinosaurs how it’s done.
Here’s some surprising statistics about those over 65 in Australia.
Yep, the former young male demographic bias we love talking about on the web is now truly busted. The web is everywhere and everyone.
Web startups, you’re market may not be tech savvy, mac fan boys after all!
Our brain is programmed to collate, categorise, and organise all it sees and hears. It does it without us even realising it. If you’re finding it hard to generate new thoughts then try this:
Clean out your living and work space
Make your physical space minimalist
Allow things around you to be as bare as possible.
When our brain has less stuff to organise and work on, it can wander and imagine. When it has space, it can invent concepts and cool ideas simply because it has the RAM (unsued processing capacity) available to do it.
This talk by Hans Rosling on population growth in the world is incredibly insightful. It goes for about 10 minutes and is worth the investment. His contention is that raising living standards in the poorest countries is the only way to reduce population growth.
Another thing I love is his presentation method and props. Very engaging and a method all entrepreneurs and marketers should consider. Enjoy!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTznEIZRkLg]