Lost Luggage

Here is the scenario - you get off your flight, go to baggage pickup, and wait for your luggage to appear in the carousel. And you wait. And you wait some more. Rather than risk missing your bags, you pretty much have to wait until the last bag appears. Then, realizing that your luggage "did not make it", you get in line at the Lost Luggage Office hoping that your bags are still in this galaxy.

Of course the airlines knew long before you landed that your bags "did not make it". They are probably already queued up for the next flight or in fact are already on the next flight. So why make you go through the charade of waiting at the carousel? A little more information in the service supply chain would surely go a long way towards making it more convenient for customers, and mitigating service failures.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a IT guy at a big European airline. He was complaining that his server received so many hits from people who ended up not buying a ticket that he had to upgrade the hardware from time to time. Kind of like Macy's complaining about too much foot traffic.

The airlines have not figured out yet that they are information processing companies with airplanes. Until they do, the airport forecast for today, tomorrow and the indefinite future is for delays.

Difficult Interfaces

Imagine having to, by necessity, deal with a sophisticated, difficult technology. Think of this technology as a sort of personal helper for one or more biological systems. Specifically, this device helps you with the timing of an important biological function - sleep. The technology is of course, the lowly clock radio.

My wife and I are in our hotel room, the night before we are due to return home. We have an early morning flight so we need to set the hotel alarm clock. This clock has custom stenciled instructions. You can see a photo of this "interface" in this blog entry below. Note the last line of said instructions: "Press ENTER".

Huh? Where do you see ENTER? There is no enter key; the word ENTER does not appear anywhere on the front or back of the clock. How does a hotel employee or clock manufacturer manage to create instructions that require that the user press a non-existent key?

There is a fair amount of innovation going on in the economy as devices get smarter (Rijsdijk et al. 2007). More and more the economy is going to depend on the ability of people to explain tasks, procedures and interfaces to consumers. If this is any indication, we are all in trouble!

Further Reading

Norman, Donald A. (1994) The Design of Everyday Things, New York: Doubleday.

Rijsdijk, Serge A., Erik Jan Hultink, and Adamantios Diamantopoulos (2007), "Product Intelligence: Its Conceptualization, Measurement and Impact on Consumer Satisfaction," Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 35 (3), 340-356.

Academia 2.0

Here are some Web 2.0 tools I wish we business academics had:

• A news story exchange - to help alert us to stories relevant to courses we are teaching. I often run into a great story that illustrates, say, advertising but unfortunately I am teaching marketing research that term. You are teaching advertising but spot a nice example of marketing research. How about a platform for sharing these things, and letting people add discussion questions and feedback from how the class reacted?
  
  
• A social network-capable version of EndNote. This would be a personalized citation library that would allow sharing and user tagging and also support comments and dialogs on papers. Maybe something like Facebook's "Wall" application but customized to let people link to other papers, and to allow different levels and types of moderation.
  
  
• A version control system for academic papers. These systems have been in use for software development for years supporting groups who write code together. Despite this, people who write papers together are basically stuck with Word's "Track Changes" function.
  

With all the social network folks running around Silicon Valley these days, is it too much to ask that one, just one of them would turn her or his attention to college professors?

Social Science

It is understandable that entrepreneurs go for the most lucrative markets first. You expect that the first mass produced cars will be positioned for the average consumer, rather than for the "25-30 year old left handers whose names begin with A-D" demographic. Likewise, when the famous bank robber Willie Sutton was asked "Why do you rob banks?" he supposedly replied (he denied this in at least one later interview), "Because that's where the money is."

Of course Facebook and MySpace et al. appeal to the great mass of younger, computer savvy consumers. In the US alone, that target market is many tens of millions of potential users. Instead, just to pick an example off hand, let's contemplate the scientific community. How big is that? Certainly at least an order of magnitude smaller; maybe two or more orders of magnitude smaller.

Those facts of life do not prevent some entrepreneurs from trying to serve a niche market better. In fact, the "academic" market has some social networking sites available to it.

For example, Swivel is designed for sharing data and graphs. The graph options are relatively simple though, and certainly there is no army of programmers dreaming up new options for Swivel users.

Another academic networking site is CiteULike, which is designed to let academics post and tag journal articles. But it requires that each journal article be posted one at a time, and does not accept input from popular citation library databases like EndNote.

These options available to scientists are modest; some might say paltry. Of course there are numerous listserv like entities, for the most part manned by volunteer labor, serving the academic community. I help with one of these myself, called ELMAR. But the truth is, most of these sorts of platforms are about 15 years behind something like Facebook.

In my next blog entry, I will write up my wish list for social networking sites for academics. Do you suppose some entrepreneur will think about serving this niche?

Linked In

My blog for today is entitled "Linked In Linked Me In".

It appears as part of Sandeep Krishnamurthy's Marketing College blog.

Zazzle Dazzles

What would you get if you combined a Long Tail E-tail strategy with a user-contribution Web 2.0 strategy? It might resemble something like Zazzle, a site where artisans create designs for tee-shirts, mousepads, handbags. The Zazzle platform offers support for artist producers, and a collection of unique items for the consumer.

The long tail is basically the idea that one can also sell a small volume of a large number of products instead of a merely selling a large volume of a small number of products. Think about the number of titles sold at Amazon, as compared to the number at your local Barnes and Noble store. The idea was used as the title of a book by Chris Anderson, originally an article in Wired magazine, and it was in turn inspired by a paper by Brynjolfsson, Hu and Smith (2003).

The approach leverages what networks do best, which is perform the classic retail function of "matching". When you add to that the ability to empower small sellers to produce the goods that go in the tail, that strikes me as a very nice niche for Zazzle.

Reference

Brynjolfsson, Erik, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith (2003), "Consumer Surplus in the Digital Economy: Estimating the Value of Increased Product Variety at Online Booksellers," Management Science, 49 (11), 1580-1596 [PDF].

Locked Cells

According to Mike Elgan at Computerworld, one of the benefits of the iPhone might be that it will make US consumers aware that their cell phones in fact ARE locked.

Locked cell phones, and phones that are otherwise crippled, is something that folks from outside of the US would never put up with. We were living in Milan last Spring, and we needed to live in Valencia for 6 weeks. I just took the Telecom Italia SIM card out of my Nokia GSM phone, and put in a different one from a Spanish cell phone company. It took me all of 4 minutes and cost me all of 5 Euro, and the new SIM card came with 10 Euro worth of minutes anyway.

In the US, your cell phone and your cell phone service come strictly bundled. This raises switching costs which therefore keeps prices high for service.

The FCC is running an auction in late January 2008 for the spectrum vacated by TV channels 52-69, known as the 700 MHz spectrum. As part of the conversion to digital TV, by law this spectrum reverts to the FCC on 17 Feb 2009. The FCC is proposing that part of this spectrum be reserved for an open network, i. e. Internet-like, where any device or hardware can use it. So how did Verizon react to this exciting news? They sued the FCC (They have since decided to drop the suit).

It will be interesting to see whether the 700 MHz auction will enable someone (Google?) to free US mobile users from their locked cells. In the meantime, E' meglio essere in Italia (It's better to be in Italy).

Electronic Misnomers

I really hate the phrases "electronic marketing", "electronic business", "electronic commerce", or its derivative, "e-commerce". The word electronic focuses on hardware, which, at this point at least, tends to be electronic. This obscures the fact that the raw material of Internet business is software. Companies do not use electronics to create so called "electronic services", they use software to do so.

The defining characteristic of software is, of course, its softness. In other words, the most useful thing about software is its sheer arbitrariness. One can do anything one wants to do with it. This utter flexibility is itself quite challenging. At the design end, complexity forces programmers to build code so that it functions well within the Internet software ecology. At the user end, complexity impacts the consumer also, since that customer needs some sort of mental model or metaphor to understand how the e-service functions.

Software is becoming more and more ubiquitous in the consumer's environment. More and more, marketing is becoming a process of managing software. Marketers need to think about its design or acquisition, adoption, assimilation and implementation, all in way that furthers the firm's marketing goals.

Marketing departments need to absorb the fact that the physical, psychological, social and commercial worlds are increasingly constructed with software. It is not an e-world, it's an s-world.

Related Paper: Hofacker, Charles F., Ronald E. Goldsmith, Eileen Bridges and Esther Swilley (2007), "E-Services: A Synthesis and Research Agenda," Journal of Value Chain Management.

Tabula Rasa

Ah, a new blog! It feels like being a kid with a clean, blank piece of lined (college rule) paper, a sharp pencil, on a rainy Fall Saturday. All that blank space on the page, I mean what is my blogger.com disk space limit? I could write all day every day for the rest of my life and still not fill it up I bet. Unless of course I upload some movies, but that is not the point. The point is the pure flexible potential of it all; gigabytes of potential. Terabytes of it. And that is the potential of the Internet, isn't it? All that cheap disk space, all live, accessible online. What is the price of a gig per year these days? A buck? A quarter? I bet when I was in college, there wasn't a whole gigabyte on the island of Manhattan. Now, so much space just waiting for an inspired user to hit the save button and thereby make a brilliant contribution available to the whole world.

The pre-2001 crash Internet was pure potential, with everybody trying to figure out how to monetize those eyeballs wandering across the bits and bytes stored on all that cheap disk space. Sell banners! Of course, that is how you do it. By how much did all those newly networked disk drives add to the world's inventory of advertising space? Oh what a sudden glut of space.

OK, so my blog or your blog isn't going to earn anybody a ton of money, but the potential is great, right? I just have to figure out what to say.