A reasonably educated person trying to make sense of it all, and a little tormented as a result. Thinking aloud, mostly. These opinions rarely reflect the ideas of any of my employers.
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
Google ads: Clever enough
I'm not complaining. I get relevant advertising and great speech recognition.
I'm not making a statement. I just made a choice.
Saturday, February 20, 2016
Yesterday's wine trip with wine business students
Many thanks to old friend Justin Cohen of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science for your brilliant organisation, and the Uni of Adelaide people who allowed us to use their tour tickets.
Hormone free beef: a non-advantage turned into a selling point

Wednesday, February 17, 2016
The "If" series: Stoop and Rebuild
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools
Saturday, February 13, 2016
"Smashed Avocado" instant success
Wednesday, February 10, 2016
Product design: Big necks matter
Dollar Shave Club - love 'em
Service is part of why I paid twice the price
I have bought so many bikes in my life that I shudder to think how much money I've wasted. At least from my position as a non fanatic.
And many of those bikes I have bought as cheap Kmart bikes in a box that I need to assemble for myself.
It's fine - nice and shiny on the first day but I have another thing - I hate repairing bikes.
So for last Christmas instead of spending $100 I spent $200 and bought from a bike retailer. I presume that the bike would be better quality and I told them at the time that I was doing this so that I would not feel embarrassed about asking them to service the bike later on.
Imagine my surprise when a month later there was a minor mechanical issue - something I can fix myself - and I took the bike back to the retailer.
When I was met with "on no I don't think we'll have that part" I hit the roof.
My words were something like:
"So here's the thing. The bike is 1 month old. I bought it from you rather than paying half the price at Kmart because I was counting on the after sales service"
The sales guy then begin to try a little harder to help but it was still a fairly unsatisfying experience. If I need someone to scratch themselves, look at it, and say "oh I think it should be too hard" I can do that myself and save 100 bucks.
Now I know how Grumpy Old Men get that way.
UPDATE 1
I got a call four hours later saying the bike is fixed and ready to go. Good news.
Tuesday, February 2, 2016
Cullenofadelaid classic: Mistakes, not accidents
Murphy was right.
Content marketing: Where you earn your TARPs
Marketing Communications and more specifically advertising is about getting your message in front of a whole bunch of people. Sometimes you want that whole bunch of people to be very broad for a product with a very broad possible usage. Other times you may wish to target your advertising message.