diary, A new design!

After using all kinds of offline and online tools to keep my life (both professional and personal) a little bit less chaotic, I decided it was time to make up my own agenda layout.

Apart from the urge to create something random, the non-fit between the existing agenda-solutions and my specific needs pushed me into it 😉

I found out that I love to have something you can touch. And after my iPod touch falling down to hard and loosing all the information, that ’touch’ part needed to be paper. I love Moleskine agendas, but the thing is: they are too simple.
On the other hand, you have very specific tools like the superb printable CEO series, but they are not really day to day planning tools for everybody.

So I designed a tool that focuses on personal and professional stuff, that lets you be creative and is sociable (build around people). First version for this year, so feel free to check it out, share your idea’s or order it right now!

All info: www.joined.be/blog/agenda

Targetted communication.

Just a reminder: Targeted communication should be about giving a message that is relevant to every person you communicate with. This does NOT mean that you have to adapt your message to whatever the receiver wants. Only do this when you are still telling the truth.

Do not tell a story about your great after-sales service, flexibility or friendly salespeople to the guy you segmented in the ‘premium buyer’ category if you are in fact a discount seller.

Do what you do best and find the people that want what you do best instead of trying to convince everybody with whatever version of ’the truth’ they want. You end up with schizophrenic customers… Not to mention about the extra work you create for yourself without having actually business results.

The future of consulting?

Consulting is a wonderful thing. It basically embraces the global knowledge that is available when you need it, without the need for developing the expertise from scratch. However, reality shows that finding the right consultant/consultancy agency is not always easy. Off course, if you happen to be a major corporation that needs a complete turnover of a strategy, an SAP implementation or a financial audit, choice may be easy: You just go for a Big Consulting firm that your boss knows. Whatever they say will be accepted and makes things a lot more easy for you. The price you pay for this is that it will cost you a lot and probably end up with a “best case” solution that they also sell to other companies and is… well “best case” and not innovative.

Also, if you are a PME or have a specific product or want to target new markets and youngsters, chances are that you either cannot or are not willing to engage these guys and girls.

The problem is that with their model, you pay for a solution that already worked but does not necessary works in the future. That is why I believe consulting has to become more innovative instead of copy-pasting. However, to arrive at this level of creativity, traditional consulting structures are not working anymore. People who work in consulting day to day loose their ability to only work on the things where they are best in. They are forced to compromise.

Thanks to today’s communication possibilities, location is no longer an issue. Virtual consulting where specialist all over the world work only on projects when their expertise is really necessary is now possible. Too bad, pure virtual consulting has his limitations: Coordination is low and they forget the nature of human decision makers: They feel better when they have actually one person to talk to… as in really talk to, face to face. A combination where businesses can have real contact with a consulting firm that then virtually connects specialists from all over the world is what we are dreaming of. We called the project JOINED!

Do you believe you can add expertise? Do you think this is a model that can prepare firms for the next decennium?

Feel free to join the conversation.

Check out www.joined.be

Job lottery

An Italian supermarket chain has launched a new combined marketing and HR campaign: They give away 10 jobs to people who posses the lucky numbers. These numbers are obtained by every customer that buys for 30 EUR in one of the chain’s stores.

The winners get a job for one year and can be prolonged if they do a great job.

You can argue on the marketing effectiveness of this campaign. I have to admit, the free media space is huge, but which HR manager has signed off on this?

To your current employees, you say something like “Well, you are as important as any randomly selected guy (m/v)”.

To your future employees, you say something like: “Why trouble, getting a job is just a lottery”.

To your customers this may sound like: “Dear customer, the people that will help you may or not be qualified to satisfy your needs… you just have to be lucky”.

To the shareholders, the message is clear: “Who runs this place and why did I put money in it?”.

Sometimes what started as probably a great idea in a brainstorm session is a lousy when you do it…

Original article (Dutch): Deredactie.Be
Supermarket Tigros.

Underestimated sense: Scent.

Keeping up with my running activities, almost back home from my run, 2 people on a bike passed me. My speed is not high at all, so they passed me rather quick. But in a split second a perfume of one of them hit me and in that same split second, my brains brought back the memories of my first girlfriend (whatever that may be in a first relationship ;-)).

Off course, this blog is not about my personal (love) life, but it is striking that scent can lead towards memories and feelings so quick: I did not notice who passed me, and being honest, even if I would see my first girlfriend back now, it would probably take me more than seconds to even recognise her.

I reckon it is harder to introduce scent into marketing campaigns (you cannot easily print a scent for the time being) than your average flashy visuals, but the power in it is great.

Something to keep in mind!

Some info to start with:

Scent blog marketing blog.
Harrods introduces scent marketing.

…and our friends at Google of course.

(A-)social?

This morning, I went jogging. No big deal of course, but whilst running, I realised that before I ran of, I posted on my Facebook account that I was of for a short run… Which is a strange contradiction: We use social media to let everybody know… we do something alone…

Not to mention the number of sites that let you share the details of your run (pace, distance, route,…) with the rest of cyberspace… What happened to sporting with your friends?

Speaking of contradictions…

An incomplete sollution

Carrefour just launched it’s own discount product-line: A limited set of low priced, widely needed products for households. With this, Carrefour hopes to counter the loss in customers that they suffer from real discounters like Aldi & Lidl.

Will it work?

High level analyst from financial institutions have their doubts and say that the product range is too limited. If Carrefour wants to pull this off, they need a much broader product range of discount products.

I do think the depth of this product line is not that important as these analysts say it is. Off course, you need more than 10 products, but I guess it is not’s Carrefour idea to really go into direct competition with real discounters (talking about a bad idea…). The main idea probably is to make sure that the most price sensitive customers (but that are still no real discount-lookers) and the people that – forced by the crisis – become more price-sensitive, stay shopping at Carrefour. This of course without cannibalizing on the business model of Carrefour that is still premium-branded supported.

If they arrive in convincing their customers that there is no need to go to Aldi for a part of their shopping bag content, they succeed. And for this, the number of products is irrelevant, it is just the client perception.

This said, they are not there yet in my local Carrefour. The discount products are put in the middle of the shop real messy. I understand that it is discount, but Carrefour could easily makes “discount” more sexy… and thus creating a competitive advantage towards discounters.

What really should be revolutionary is to create the inverse: A shop in the shop with only a very limited offer of premium and own brands (one product in every product group) for the people that value time more than cash. Because also this is a scarce good… even in times of crisis.

Retailers that are interested in having a talk on this can always contact me 😉

Happyness is a structure of the mind.

Ever wondered why you are happy? Because of the things you own, because of the ‘special’ moments you have, because of the lack of bad experiences,…

Dan Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, arguments that happiness is just a state of our mind to help us cope with the bad things in life. If what he says is true, it would mean that in 5 months from now, a person that lost his legs or just got his hands on the newest Iphone can be as happy… just makes you think…

See the full explanation from Dan Gilbert.

Consumers unite for a sustainable world.

Are consumers really controlling demand and hence decide on what is happening in business life? A lot of people will argue with that theoretical (some will even call it naive) idea.

Instead of wasting time on this rhetorical question, the guys of CarrotMob are trying it out. By uniting a lot of consumers who care about sustainability and then letting business compete on their mutual investment, they may really give power back to the consumer.

Check it out at http://carrotmob.org.

Twitter as only news source.

A few days ago, US government admitted that they asked Twitter to postpone a planned maintenance operation because they wanted to make sure that the only communication media between Iran and the outside world would remain available in the hectic days just after the elections.

I am not going to start the discussion whether that was a good thing to do or not, but it should give an important wake-up call to news agency’s and marketeers all together… If Twitter becomes a matter of ‘national security‘ you better at least take the effort to take a close look at what it can mean for your sector and company.

Twitter will or will not be gone in 5 years, but the evolution that is behind it may last for a very long time…