Hoi Polloi

Sri Lankan Tea firm, Dilmah, in Fortune magazine.

Kudos to Dilmah Tea, a Sri Lankan company I know very well.

I just picked up this copy of Fortune magazine (July '07) and there's a good feature on this maverick tea company. There's no link to the article on Forbes Online, so let me paraphrase. It's a story of how a independent company is making the big guys sweat. Big guys meaning the Lipton's and Twinings of this world. What's special about them? 

First, Dilmah makes a claim to product quality that no other tea marketer could -a single source of the leaf. Most people don't realize that when they dip a tea bag in boiling water, the tea inside  is 'blended' -- meaning it comes from several countries in one big, tasteless mash-up! I could attest to that -- as a huge tea drinker I stock and drink many varieties, including the real thing from Dilmah which I store and serve like, um, wine!

Which brings me to the second point in their marketing differentiation. They position the brand somewhere between a wine and a heath drink. As Fortune reports, the multinationals pooh-pooh the wine analogy, saying it is ridiculous. That's expected (beyond sour grapes!) because they don't appreciate the nuances of tea, the climatic differences, and the soil etc in Sri Lanka.

Third, and this has to worry the multi-nationals, Dilmah is getting into the experiential retail business of "tea bars" --hipster Starbucks-like hangouts for the other caffeine crowd.

The Fortune article didn't mention Dilmah's other major promotional thrust: cricket! The firm is a big promoter and sponsor of the sport, and in some ways synonymous with it in Asia and Australia. No accident, when you think about it. Tea and cricket. Two British exports that now have a distinctive 'Ceylon' flavor.

Thinking beyond the iPhone

Al Ries must be keeping his fingers crossed.

Now that the blogosphere and the media is all abuzz about the iPhone's activation problems, the Positioning guru must wonder if he is right, after all.

Before the launch, he had declared that the iPhone was was "going to be a major disappointment" not in the activation department mind you, but because it was technology going off in the wrong direction. He believed that technology that took the path of divergence would succeed as it had in the past, but this new gizmo on the 'convergence' was bound to fail.

With all respect to Mr. Ries, I don't think it's good to predict  the future on the past. Not with Apple, the company that's defied going with the flow. It's got to where it is by not been fixated on the rear view mirror. Its Graphical User Interface was its way of sticking the middle finger at the geeky DOS world. It's

A smart phone is a convergent phenomenon. I don't have a problem with that. It happens to look like a phone, but it is anything but.  Even before the iPhone, we were able to do a Google search, maintain contact databases, use text messaging and email, and play music on these convergent devices. Millions of users didn't think it was headed in the wrong direction. Why? Because the interface simplified their lives.   

If you've been awed by the iPhone's stunning multi-touch interface, Jeff Hann's multi-touch sensing demo will give you a glimpse of where we are headed. It's not on a phone. But it's guaranteed to blow your mind!

Crayon: The agency world is flat, interactive, multi-colored

"We're not interested in reams of data that says the world has changed. We get it." That's Maarten Albarda of Coca-Cola, the Director of Media and Communication Innovation. (now that's a new media title!).

All this talk about the world has changed may sound like someone's all fired up after reading Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat. It's however a statement about the new marketing propounded by Crayon, a company I mentioned a few days ago. Crayon, launched today.

This will definitely change the pace of things in 'old marketing' as these guys are co-opting everyone, and turning tables on the way marketing, advertising and PR has been practiced. Just to cite a few ideas from their 'Manifesto' (as opposed to a mission statement) they have thrown out quite a few sacred cows: They will never pitch for business, they'll "never downsize, rightsize, leftsize or upsize" based on mood swings (a not so subtle knock at the network agencies who hire and fire entire account groups based on clients they retain or lose), and all participants er, 'crayons', will be allowed to have a second life --and that includes blogging and podcasting during office hours.

And of course, they are headquartered in Second Life.

But being an open-source new marketing company, does not mean they are going to listen to everybody. There's a fine line here. "We are not superior, and we are not subservient' they say. Not the new media, subservient chicken version of the old agency.

SIDEBAR: Check how a new media guy is experimenting with a 'subservient human' idea as Steve Rubel describes it. You can even rename his website!

United Airline's miscommunication can cost ya

I used to root for United airlines a lot, because of some great experiences flying Ted from Phoenix and, of course for the domestic leg of a long haul to Asia every 2 years. When United filed for bankruptcy, I even switched from Southwest, my company's preference, just because some of us love the idea of having more choices...

Today that changed. Just beause someone forgot to tell me (and my 81 year old mother) that United had a new policy about baggage weight. Oh well, maybe the economy class isn't of much significance. I write a lot about employee communication and internal branding, and this was a case to behold. Pains me to write about this, but I would like to save some poor international traveler some grief.

We dropped off my mother at Phoenix airport, on a return flight to Sri Lanka. The ticket agent informed us that we would have to pay $25 each for both her check-in bags since they were each over 50 pounds allowance. This was odd. Just last evening, doing a final check, calling United's 800 number, I went through the details. Stopovers: Phoenix, Lax, Narita, Singapore, Colombo: all confirmed. Passenger assistance, confirmed. The final thing I asked was if the baggage allowance was the same as when she came in --70 pounds. The agent paused, and then said yes, as this was  an international ticket. I knew this had to be fine as she had arrived in December last year with bags that were well over 50 pounds, each. Also, I flew United to Lax last July and returned in August with with two sixty-five to seventy pound seventy pound bags. But as frequent fliers always do, we ask the same old questions from the agent on the phone, just to be sure. To us, they are the airline. Not the ads. Not the brochures, but the invisible person thousands of miles away who give you the feeling that everything is ok when you put down the phone.

But all was not Ok when I placed that call.

Mysteriously, United had changed its baggage policy and not communicated this to us.

I have more back up: Two weeks ago, I stopped at Sky harbor airport to check on my mom's ticket as she had confirmed return dates with a travel agent in Sri Lanka after she got here, and this was not reflected on her ticket. The agent kindly printed me the new return itinerary, and said even this was not necassary as her details were all updated in the system. Then too, I asked how much baggage allowance, and got the same answer: seventy pounds. Yes, all was OK when I left the building.

This morning, when I brought this to the attention of the counter agent, he would have none of it, and started getting rude. I was hit with the famous 'company policy' stuff, and the fact that all airlines now only allowed 50 pounds. (He may be right. But FYI: we also dropped off someone last evening catching a British Airways flight, and her bags were 70 pounds each. The web site confirms this. I told him this, but it surely did not help the situation.*)

When I said this was United's mistake --giving me the wrong information on the phone, he got rude and said he could not deal with me anymore –asking my mother to go and stand at the next counter to be served by someone else. She’s 81 years old, for goodness sake. This was not the way I wanted her to leave the country. I can be sure she will not be on United the next time.

I did check this afternoon, and sure, that 'policy' is on the United web site. But does that become the de facto B-to-C communication channel? Is everyone who flies an airline suposed to hop over to their web site and check all the details of the flight, just in case the nice lady on the phone got it wrong? What if you were to apply this to another industry? What if you had a travel agent to book you into the MGM in Vegas and when you get there, the person at the counter tells you that your room now costs fifty bucks more because of a company policy your travel agent hadn't been alerted to? What if you rented a car from Avis for a weekend at a certain cost (quoted on the phone) and when you brought the car back on Sunday, you were slapped with an extra charge for not getting the car washed --a new policy only posted on the company web site? Should you feel guilty for not having checked the Avis web site sometime between Friday and Sunday?

My stand on all this is simple: the person on the phone is the final frontier. The true face of the company. Undermine him/her and what you have left is an empty shell. We travel with, dine in, buy from or subscribe to brands because of the people within. (The people who listen, that is) not the text on the pOlicy page of the web site.

My mom's on the long flight right now. Hope she experiences an ounce of the 'friendly skies' hospitality --not available on the ground, as of this morning, here in Phoenix.

*I can go on about the chap at the counter (and how there was disagreement with the other staff about how much to charge us) but that is not the purpose of this post.

GoDaddy's soap opera: where's the Big Idea?

By now the GoDaddy Super Bowl commercial has probably run out of steam, and one wonders what all the fuss was about --by GoDaddy, not ABC. Meaning, why would a company go to such lengths to defend such a lame commercial? If the whole 'malfunction' issue is the only idea, then it is not only out of date, but irrelevant. This could very well have been a Super Bowl beer commercial from a time when agencies and clients didn't know better. (Anyone remember the 'Swedish Bikini Team' and the Miller Light's 'Catfight' commercial?)

But Bob Parsons supposedly knows better, judging from the media statements and blog that insist this unnecessary controversy has garnered the company more advertising than the the ads could have achieved. If anything, the strategy to get people to come to the web site to watch the banned versions of the dumb commercial, may pay off. It's a domain registrar, after all. But GoDaddy wants to be remembered as a company who is pusing the buttons. See how someone has cleverly included the window-washer girl in this Wikipedia entry which obviously has been updated today!

I can hardly fault GoDaddy for the poor taste in the commercial. This is, after all the product of an advertising agency, who ought to know better --about branding. As a marketer, where is GoDaddy really going with this? If you have the moolah to splurge, there is a more responsible way to build your brand than spend it on old story line about a broken strap that is irrelevant to your product offering, anyway.

Speaking about storylines, take the FedEx commercial, 'stick' which was both entertaining, and still focused on what the brand stands for.  The caveman tries to air-ship a stick using a pterodactyl, but the courier is snapped up by a dinasaur, mid flight. The caveman's boss fires him, and he protests that he could not have used FeDex since it does not exist. "That's not my problem," replies his boss. The poor fellow sulks outside his cave only to be squashed by a massive foot of an anonymous beast. The message: use FeDex (even if it does not exist in your cave) or else...

Ironic, isn't it how the window washer seems to have predated the caveman?