Hermawan Kartajaya on CNBC

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Hermawan Kartajaya is one of Asia’s leading marketing scholars and one of my mentors and partners in marketing. If you’re looking for good quality advice on marketing from both experience and scholarly work, he is a real source. 

Catch his main nugget of wisdom in the above video as he talks about a key ingredient still ever important in marketing in the new media age.

Easy Billing

Moments ago I was at Al-Ameen coffeeshop located somewhere near Upper Bukit Timah Road, munching away on a Nasi Pattaya and a glass of milo peng (ice milo). 

After the meal, I walked to the cashier located at the end of the stretch, and told him my table number (36 I think it was)…

“36… 36… oh, billing for 36 is on the other side….”

My head turned, spanned across the entire stretch of seats and lo and behold, there was another cashier right at the end. Apparently the one i was at were serving table numbers 1 to 30 (something like that), and the other one 31-60.

As I was about to turn and grudgingly walk to the other side with a sort of “you’ve got to be kidding me” kind of mood, one of the staff stopped me in my tracks and insisted that I need not travel to the other side. He told me that I could pay at the cashier I was near at, as he shouted to that cashier exactly what I had ordered and how much I had to pay. So I paid, and walked away.

From slight dissatisfaction to positive referral (hey, I’m blogging about the stall name here). The conversion was in a split second, the results lasting, all because of some quick street-smart thinking to go pass beureaucracy to prioritize customer positivity. 

This article was about easy billing, and how you should try your best to make the payment process (the most painful part for your customer but the happiest for you) as easy as possible. It’s painful enough to pay, even worse to pay difficult. But more than that, the above story highlights why a dose of street smarts is important in the running of your business; having the edge to bend the rules alittle to facilitate what’s important.

Kudos to that dude.

Learning a New Language: The One Big Secret Thing

I was reading MM Lee’s comments on Singapore’s bilingual education policy and how it was benefiting our citizens venturing in China. You can find the article here.

The article hits it in the nail when it comes to learning a new language. Think about how you know English, Malay or any other language. Yes, you might have learnt one or two quite naturally by speaking the language at home, while others you had to memorize your way tons of language rules and terms. But when you reduce them all to one single denominator, what do you get?

This is an important lesson for brand managers and those concerned with the brand strength of their products. Learn this art and your customers may sing yout product name as easy as you can read this sentence in English without much difficulty. So what is that one big secret?

Immersion.

When Recession, Do Marketing On…

People. Yes, people. Too often when times are tough and cost cutting comes into action, persons are viewed as variable costs rather than assets. Of course, this would be understandable… but the problem is while all the retrenchments are going around, marketing is shifted from People to other stuffs…

• You run full page ads with the aim to remind people that you’re still number one
• You continue to maintain (and even renovate) that company pond, field, unnecessary gardening
• You explore costly technology (which you’re not sure really what it does anyway) instead of keeping talent

Times like these, it’s important to emphasize the People aspect of your marketing. Cut their salaries, reduce their bonuses, keep the trust…

The company garden can come later.

The Tribes Q&A eBook is Here

With Seth Godin as its project initiator, dozens of volunteers working together have compiled this amazing ebook. Learn about the art and science of social groups and their influence in marketing here:

Tribes Q&A

David Scott Answers the Ultimate Marketing Question

How do I convince my boss of the Return on Investments (ROI) of new marketing?

Be Careful of Sincere Scammers

With tough times ahead, more and more quick rich schemes are appearing on the net. These too have evolved… gone are the days of some bozo-looking email asking you to cash in some money first. Nowadays they may come in the form of quick courses promising a wealth of success, 1-2-3 easy steps to getting instant success, even a "train trainers" angle of approach.

The new wave of scamming all have one thing in common: to empower customers who have little product knowledge, the in-depth insight required to see behind the quick tips and promises, to promote the scheme itself… as trainers. Afterall, what could be more tempting than becoming a perceived expert in literally less than a day, by buying some course or going to some fancy seminar where thousands go to? Crowd size… that does symbolize something, right?

Personally these schemes are big headaches for practitioners like myself, who have been trained, who cannot begin to tell you how damaging these schemes are. And the fight for truth can be messy… because these "trained teachers" hold on to those quick-tips so tightly… they won’t barge and listen. And why should they? They are now experts… and here comes along some guy telling them that what they’re doing… is structurally hollow, based on quick easy tips without holistic understanding, using the latest well disguised fad /trend labelled "Millionaire-Marketing" or what have you. Of course they won’t listen.

And what then stops them in their tracks? Ironically, it’s another of such schemes promising easier, faster, better results… often packaging with ready-made courses and all. So they abandon the previously popularized thingy they’ve been doing… and switch allegiance.. switching ships…

Seemingly still lost at sea.

As far as history and my own experience has taught me, becoming successful has no one-off recipe, but a few are essential:

1. Right conditions (You could call it luck)
2. Hard work
3. Patience
4. Education (From a mentor, teacher, institution, a well guided trainer.)
5. Strategy (This requires an understanding beyond the tips. It requires a discipline of knowing where the tips were derived, when did they work, when should they be applied, when should they be changed and improved)
6. Purpose

The net is now flocked with what I cal "Sincere Scammers". Bright yet ignorant, optimistic yet misguided, they are riding off latest fads and tactics on disciplines that do not require much high-learning on the language side. Which is why you don’t see anything like "3 Easy Ways to Becoming a Neuro-Surgeon" (due to the many specific terms and facts required) … but you see tons with the word "Marketing", like "Easy Marketing" or "Make Millions with Marketing E-Couses" or something like that. The language is simple for sincere scammers to use.

Why do I call them "Sincere" ? It’s because they genuinely think they’re doing something right. It’s because if they go through the checklist above, items 2,3,4,5 they would just skip over, brush aside or not address.

A terrible plight. Because it’s such a well disguised trap, how then do we ourselves try to avoid it? There is one Razor’s test I know best, something which is written well in our Islamic tradition, and for good purpose:

Take knowledge with credible teachers, with the transmission of knowledge you know is sound. Look at the teacher himself and see if he walks the talk. Look at where he has learnt the knowledge from. Question his sources, his expertise. If you detect laziness in his methods, if he promotes material gain more than the spirit of learning itself, if he does not touch your heart more than your wallet…

Then time to shift.

Reading Equals Country’s Safety and Defence?

Interesting poster found in some buses (strategic choices of bus routes too). A good example of how you can market powerfully with extremely little budget…

Changing the story (angle) of your product.

Why Influential People Make Good Motivational Speakers

I’m not really thinking in terms of position or standing here, so terms like bosses, presidents, managers are not in play. The influential are those whose words you remember, whose voice can motivate you, whose thoughts you love penning down. A very recent new phenomenon is none other than the new president elect himself, Barrack Obama.

Why are they so motivational? Here’s my take:

• To reach that pinnacle of influence, they first must rise up against criticisms. At the onset of their first wave of speeches, some might be taken aback. Herein is the fear of unfamiliar. These influencers then have to have the ability to motivate themselves to rise up against these voices. The absence of self-motivation will severely cripple the effort for change.
• Once they’ve seeded that hard rock self-motivating mechanism, the next step is to then be able to convince others of their stories. The poetic genius, the ability to persuade comes into play. Efforts must be made, either through skills learnt or that natural ability to move others with words, to encourage others to agree with the influencer. The skill of motivating others is a survival element should he choose the path of the influencer.

When all this is done, and when the time comes for him to find other areas to contribute… giving motivational talks would then be of second nature. He has equipped himself with the necessary skills, both internally and externally in terms of communication, to be able to move the audience.

Now you know.

Queues Encourage Corruption

In the dispensing of public services, officials should do all that they can to reduce and, if possible, avoid the queueing system altogether. At face value, queues are a sign of inefficiency and excess demand over supply. However one of its major spillovers is corruption. You don’t have to look far for a familiar example…

• You line up for a drink at the vending machine
• You see a familiar face already in line
• You request he purchases the drink for you

Is this corruption? Absolutely, because you are gaining an unfair advantage, often for your own self, at the negative expense of others. The above is just a small simple example, but when you look into it deeper in other contexts, you open up a pandora’s box…

• Work overloads, you put em all in the intray
• You clear some, miss some
• When it gets too much, you choose to conveniently remain silent. ‘Pending’ becomes ‘Silence’

Keeping it simple: Reanalyze the systems you’re in, and reduce queues where possible.

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