Clive Simpkins

My fave beverage's pricing angle sticks in my craw

You are looking at the packaging of the most divine latte known to tastebuds. I've been buying the Chilla brand for several years. I gave it a break for a bit and then last week bought two new packets, pleasantly surprised to see that it still retails at about R 42 a bag.

I've never done (until today) the math on how many lattes one gets out of the packet, but even with my truly excessive and over-generous portions of the powder, you'd get out 8 at least, really full-bodied, to daah-for as the Kugels would say, drinks.

Working out at roughly R 5 an extremely satisfying beverage, that's still only half the price of a halfway-decent decaf cappuccino. So, good value in any terms.

I've always joked that the Chilla manufacturers have included an addictive substance in the formulation, because once tried, it will take intensive therapy to wean you from it.

Here's my reason for this posting though: being the tres observant individual that I am, the first thing I noticed when cutting open the foil bag at home, was that it's lost weight. Perceptibly so. I flipped the package over and saw 250 grams as the given weight on the rear. But even my Alzheimer's-befogged memory recalled 300 grams, previously. Howzat for brilliant recall? At a subliminal level too.

I looked closely and noticed that a little 250 gram sticker very neatly covered the original, printed-on-pack 300 gram legend. And that made me feel uncomfortable. If every manufacturer or importer appeared to maintain the same price, but surreptitiously removed (in this case 50 grams) of the contents in order not to 'up the price', that would herald an unacceptable marketing trend.

I called the Chilla Beverage company and spoke to their very helpful Kevin Lipschitz. Kevin assured me that there was no intention or attempt by Chillas to be dishonest, but he understood that the manner in which the price retention had been handled, could be construed as unacceptable.

This is a premium product. It's never going to be aimed at (or be affordable to) the mass market. So why not use more inventive marketing? A flash on the pack, reading 'still less than half the price of a coffee-shop cappucino' or something like that? But give me the choice. To buy or not to buy. In my marketing and advertising-trained mind, the way this was handled has potential to do damage to a marvellous brand. Guys - go revisit your future pricing strategy and how you implement it, is my suggestion.

And hey, I'll continue drinking Chillas. I'll just keep checking to see if the pack heads for anorexia! ;-)

Piecemeal PR ineptitude

If you want to confuse people, then keep changing your position on an issue. Do it often enough and they’ll simply begin to ignore anything you say. Two organisations in South Africa have successfully gotten themselves into this invidious position in the last few months.

The ‘Biggest Loser’ on this score is power utility Parastatal, Eskom. Faced with the worst crisis in living memory, it employed a PR company to handle consumer perceptions and then promptly shackled them. See update 2nd May below...

The Afrikaner adage of ‘You don’t buy a dog and then sit on the stoep and bark yourself’ applies. In industry, particularly high-tech industry, you don’t necessarily want to put your engineers on show. Rarely are they blessed with adequate communication skills. When they are, they’re often cursed with a linearity and obsession with detail that can obfuscate the simplest issue.

They’re also typically poorly versed in the art of presenting an issue to best advantage. As an example, Eskom’s Dr. Steve Lennon (pictured), the poster-child for media ineptitude, displayed embarrassing naiveté when arguing that Eskom had very adequate coal reserves at power stations, whilst helicopter shots of empty coal storage yards featured with his voice-over on the TV screen. Ouch.

I’ve previously written about Nationwide Airlines’ ‘ground-hog’ policy of hiding away when anything went wrong - the worst possible thing for an airline, of all industry sectors. Forget your engine falling off in the sky. Forget your fleet being grounded. If you don’t have candid, credible, consistent and constant contact with your stakeholders in the face of such travails, you deserve to go bust. How do people retain confidence in you when you don’t tell them anything?

Jacob Zuma is also on the razor’s edge of becoming as vilified as our damp-squib president ‘no crisis’ Mbeki. You can’t do 180° flip-flops on issues in vain, if well-intended, attempts to please everyone, and expect to retain any vestige of credibility.

The quicker Zuma follows the lead of the pragmatic Gwede Mantashe (pictured), deputy president of the ANC, the better. This is the man who is comfortable in his Freedom Day speech, criticising power failures and baby deaths caused by contaminated tap water and (yet again) klebsiella bacteria. Let’s see (and I pray not) if this gets the ‘quoted out of context treatment’ or whether he flies in the face of party opinion and sticks to his guns.

The majority of the current crop of political 'non-leaders' in South Africa today have reached their sell-by date. What’s now needed is for more people like Mantashe to stand up and be counted. Let’s know that when he says something, he means what he says and there is meaning in what he says. What a sea-change in government communications that will be!

Even the redoubtable, well-oiled and slick PR machine at Vodacom came a cropper with its 'BMW a day' promotion and BEE partner issues recently. Complacency and big-company clout are not a compensation for good communication and conceding when you've made a cock-up.

For all organisations and institutions today – the era of having your PR people put out a fuzzy little press release to contain fall-out from your latest bit of poop on the doorstep, simply won’t cut it. Get with the plan and ratchet up the most vital component of your business – your communications apparatus.

UPDATE: 2ND May. So Eskom has decided no longer to 'punish' us like recalcitrant schoolchildren, despite some in our midst having made no effort to save 10% on power usage. Albeit that it's common cause that industry is responsible for the real power consumption.

Now the asses at Eskom would have us believe that because industry's got its act together they don't have to engage any longer in cutting our power. It's no longer part of their strategy. Do they even know the meaning of that word, one wonders?

They clearly believe we have a collective IQ of room-temperature or lower. The real reason - and it's an open secret among the electrical cognoscenti - is that the bloody substations and switching gear can't handle the power on-off-on-off, that comes with deliberate blackouts. The switches burn, things explode. Just ask the poor souls in Kempton Park and elsewhere. A week or more without any power in the middle of a freeze...

Just watch the space between the collective Eskom ears for their next blinding solution to the big switch-on of heaters in Winter....

In any halfway-developed economy, the head of some dumb sod at Eskom would roll. Instead of course, they tried to vote themselves bonuses. They deserve bonuses only for being the most grossly incompetent, breath-taking, Guinness-Book liars that any country could have inflicted on it. We now wait with bated breath for their next disingenuous 'PR communication'.

Click on 'Continue Reading....' below for a Saturday Star article added 3rd May '08. Click on the article to enlarge.

 

How to be a good conversationalist

Conversation is the life-blood of social interaction. Like me, you may not class social events as your favourite activity. You may, like me, even be averse to them.

You may, also like me, actively avoid them. Frankly, I regard a cocktail party or similar function as a preview of purgatory. But if I have to attend such an event, I make a success of it. How?

No rules, but plenty of guidelines for surviving or thriving in a social setting:

1. Adage says: Shyness is ‘I’-ness. If you think everyone’s going to be focused on you and how you engage, you’re wrong.
   
2. They’re typically quite focused on themselves!
3. You can’t converse or communicate well if you’re excessively worried about what people will think of you or your ideas.
4. People are not psychic or telepathic, so the greatest response or riposte inside your head means nothing, unless you open your mouth and vocalise it! So speak up. The more frequently you do, the easier it becomes.
5. The greatest aid to developing a really interesting conversational ‘menu’ is to read. The more widely and eclectically you read the greater will be the range of topics on which you’ll be informed.
6. Good journalism has the essence of the story in the first paragraph. So learn to skim-read newspapers, magazines and online publications. You don’t need all the details, but you’ll at least have a grasp of the issue and its topicality.
7. Give up on the idea that you need to be or are expected to be informed on every topic imaginable. I know nothing about sport for example. But I can keep sport fanatics engaged for hours, by asking them questions. They love nothing better than an opportunity to re-populate the national rugby, soccer or cricket teams.
8. Having said that, I hate the idea that you go to a social function prepared to ask stupid things like, ‘How do you know the host?’ Or ‘What’s your favourite food?’ That tells me you’ve been on a ‘Conversational skills 101’ course.
9. If you do want to (sincerely) ask questions, then make sure they’re ‘open-ended’. Example of a close-ended question (the wrong kind): ‘Do you like chocolate?’ I’ll typically get a one word answer. But if I ask, ‘What are your views on chocolate?’ (open-ended) I’ll get at least a phrase in response. So use Why? When? Where? How? Avoid like the plague ‘Do you?’ or ‘Have you?’ The answers are inevitably just ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
10. I once attended a stamp exhibition in the Benoni Town Hall – not by choice I hasten to add. I was cornered by an 80-something year-old man. He’d spent his life collecting stamps with dogs on them. I’ve yet to see a stamp (do people still use them anyhow?) with a dog on it. I walked away from the discussion newly informed. I now know how to pronounce philatelic (as in exhibition) and philately (the art of stamp collecting) and knowing that I was talking to a philatelist. So don’t waste an opportunity. If you have to be there, then make the most of it. 
11. Go subscribe to ‘The Week’ It’s a superb distillation of the best of journalism in the  UK and elsewhere. It'll put your finger on the pulse of global events and issues that you'll reasonably be expected to know something about.
12. A tense and anxious brain doesn’t work well. It causes your body to produce cortisol, which  negatively affects short-term memory. Be prepared to be adventurous. Have fun. Treat the conversation as something of an adventure. Then your brain is optimally relaxed and will function at its best.
13. Finally, listen. Really listen. To what people are talking about in the room or at the event. Just by adding a conversational nudge like, ‘That’s a really interesting thought. What would you do to rectify the situation?’ can keep someone chatting away. Listen to how people you regard as good conversationalists keep the ball rolling - and learn from them.

Literacy on the ground?

Saw this on CNN's website some time back. Kinda hitting the tar with your reading program. Or could it be called a lack of traction, one wonders?

Born-Frees at it again...

Hmmm. Right-click to 'Open link in new window'. Read there or print it out if you didn't see it or read it. This is scary. It's some of the Born-Frees at it - again....

UPDATE: A wise commenter has just pointed out that I could have put in the web URL. To be honest, I was dumb enough not to think of that. If you wanna read it online, go here!

Memorable way to remember a number!

This is on the concrete support beam as you drive from the middle level to ground, in the Hyde Park shopping centre parkade. Fun. To help you remember - it's the Flying Squad number...

Dealing with Depression

The wonderful Marika Sboros published my article on 'Satyagraha for the Soul' a.k.a. Dealing with depression, in Business Day's 'Health News' today. Read online here. Below is a link to download the PDF of the text article for your use.

Download satyagraha_for_the_soul.pdf

If you're having a gloomy day, here's one way to help deal with it.

Standard Bank generates biased info

Standard Bank produces a cutsie 'business' ezine/e-newsletter with punny subtitles (see visual below) built around a cup of espresso.

This is bad enough. But it also gets into providing info on generators reconstructed from an article in Farmer's Weekly. It incorrectly defines a generator (they don't all run on diesel, dear Standard Bank) and instead of 'warns' it has an early copy typo in the article reading 'wards' (see below). You'd think that a megalith like Standard would have someone able to do decent proof-reading in their comms.

Why my beef? 1) Inaccurate info. 2) If I were (and I'm not) a Standard Bank client involved in any shape or form with importing generators or allied equipment, I'd be pretty pissed at their giving one firm a punt of this nature. Conspiracy theorists might just wonder if there's a familial reason for it. 3) If this is seriously intended as a business-to-business communication, it's going to be ignored by a lot of time-pressured, impatient people who want a concise, useful and usable snapshot of info. Go revisit the strategy folks and ratchet it up from Comms 101.

When are some South Africans going to geddit?

I read this snippet from The Times of today, Monday 4th March, with genuine disbelief. Then re-read it. Not yet April the first.

A chunk of the catalyst article is below. I think this Nagel dude should go to jail.

I also think it's time Afrikaner church leaders, academics and community leaders started discussing the ramifications of the emerging wave of racist comment and behaviour from some of their young people. Before it's irreversible and creates a sociological backlash.

Losing out in the comms race

RISKsa March edition is out. Here's my article.  Right click and select 'open link in new window' if you want to print this out. Text version below the visual if you'd prefer to read it that way.

Loser in the comms race

I still run across businessmen (I’ve never heard a businesswoman make the claim) who proudly announce that they can’t use computers and that they dictate their e-mail. That’s simply pathetic. In five years time, if you’re not reasonably tech-literate, you won’t be able to operate your banking card.

This year sees the large-scale commercial introduction of so-called ‘smart cards’ for banking. They operate on the same principle as the SIM card in your mobile phone. That little gold-coloured fella is a micro-processor. Whilst not foolproof, it’s not going to be quite as easy to skim or otherwise extract information from your card. But given time, the criminals will undoubtedly get up to speed and we’ll be driven to yet another level of security.

As technology becomes ever more pervasive in the work and business place, we have to take care that our older or lower-tech type customers aren’t alienated because of the technology. A day before writing this article I called in at Old Mutual’s client service centre in Sandton. I was asked by the receptionist for my full name and ID number. I assumed it was for security purposes. In fact, she was entering it into an automated customer service system. I sat in reception and as soon as a consultant became available, the LED board readout indicated ‘C. Simpkins, cubicle 8’. I dutifully went off to cubicle 8 and got helped. It would have been even nicer if the sign had read, ‘Welcome Mr. Simpkins, please go to cubicle 8’. But maybe Old Mutual will get there.

Just by the by, the helpful assistant didn’t introduce herself, wear a name badge, or have a sign with her name on the desk. I played it in observation mode, until she wrote her name on a document and then I used her name to address her. Detail, marketing people, detail! Get the training right. The tech’s great, but don’t forget the interpersonal touches.

That’s the thought behind this article. In the midst of all the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and other information capture and manipulation systems, we run the risk of the client becoming a statistic. Having all the demographic (age, gender, occupation, location of home, language, number of children, etc.) data, or indeed, even some psychographic (lifestyle, attitudinal, preferences, biases, affiliations etc.) type information, doesn’t do a single thing on the interpersonal contact front, if we don’t compel personal engagement.

As John Naisbitt so presciently said twenty years ago in his book, Megatrends, the higher the tech the greater will be the demand by people wanting ‘high touch’, as he described it. That excellent book has now been superseded by his ‘High-tech, High-touch’, in recognition of the enduring principle of getting the balance between the two correct. If you haven’t read it, go visit kalahari.net, amazon.com or exclusivebooks.com, but buy it! It’ll give you a marvellous insight into the dangers of your client-base drifting into the arms of a more personable competitor.

All of us in a client-orientated business need to examine the ratio of tech contact to interpersonal contact. Ask yourself when last you picked up the phone, or pressed the flesh (the hand, of course!) of your clients? If they’ve been reduced to getting only your e-zine, your newsletter, e-mails, voicemails and your text messages on promotions, then beware. Make 2008 your year of high touch.

Feel free to use and share if it has relevance for you.