Bad Marketing Done Badder

 

Rumors of Radio Shack's demise may be premature. At least according to CNBC's websitehttp://goo.gl/AY5hnR

For those of us who soldered together Heathkit crystal radio sets and constructed multi-stable flip flops on breadboard, Radio shack was a great place to visit for all those electrical and electronic parts needed to build those devices. For those who don't know a flip-flop from a inductor coil, you may not think so highly of Radio Shack these days.
Somewhere along the way, Radio Shack seemed to lose its way. Over time personal computers, boom boxes, Walkman knock-offs and cell phones pushed electronic parts and tools to the low traffic confines of the back corner of the store. Computers were sexy. Commodities were not.

But what really killed of Radio Shack for me was the silly insistence on giving up personal information in order to make a purchase. 'The system requires you tell us this in order to ring the sale', a clerk once told me. Well, one phony name, address and phone number later I was allowed to go free with my two dollar battery purchase vowing to never return.

Whatever the Radio Shack Big Brains expected to learn from gathering phony data from unwilling customers is still a mystery.

Point of sale systems could surely provide deeper information about hot items and not-so-hot items, or sales per square foot of sales area. But tracking someone who was already in the store contributed little to getting other non-customers to show up, as well. It was a stupid program and hurt the company in many ways.

I just hope that the new owners of the brand elect to not repeat this ugly piece of marketing history. Now, back to my ham radio set.

#radioshack   #bankruptcy   #micromarketing

Virtuous Cycles and Making Electric Cars

On Virtuous Cycles and Apple Cars..

On occasion, a little hyperbole can make one feel better. But malaise gives way to molar grinding when slavish sycophantism is offered up, instead.

Now that Apple has run out of roadmap for its flagship computer/smartphone/tablet hardware line, it makesperfect sense for the company to go make a car.

You know: if eBay money qualifies you for space travel, then iTunes lucre should get you at least a car company. And the sad thing is the press buying into this hook, line and sinker.

MarketWatch writers have even coined a new term to serve as the mantra for the We Must Be Smart or We Wouldn't Have All This Money dogma: Virtuous Cycle. Read here: http://goo.gl/Nud0K2

Now, I am old enough to have witnessed a couple of these virtuous cycles come and go. Not the least of them was Enron whose black box model for changing a gas pipeline company into a virtual energy company (their words, not mine) which could do no wrong in business was certainly a virtuous cycle. Of course, we know which square Enron landed on when the cycle's end became inevitable.

Forget that Apple has no experience making big things. They'll find folks who do, right? Sure.

Forget that we are nowhere close to being able to supply electrical power- from any combination of sources- to power a complete transition to electric vehicles in the next one hundred years.

And, forget the fact that a company which has never, ever successfully operated a commercial software initiative is expecting to enter into embedded, life-critical software applications development?

Must miracles abound to make this happen? Or just properly shaded glasses?





#apple   #applecar   #enron   #virtuouscycle   #iphone  #ipad   #macbook   #elonmusk

Is Apple's retail store doomed?

 

My first experience with Apple's retail store was in Timonium, MD. I went there to pick up a new PowerBook Titanium laptop.

Waiting for my order to be filled, I strolled between the stylish tables bearing laptops, towers, massive displays like a newly arrived Cardinal swaggering through a Vatican library. The deities were surely smiling down upon this place.

I admired the boxed software arranged neatly into wall shelves as I would have a Pollack or a Raphael. Yes, the current selection was slim but I knew this would be remedied as this new OS X operating system surely became the industry standard. Software providence would abound.

Cue Reality
Apple hardware suffered the same failures as any PC did; OS X wasn't really that much better than Windows and most business software tools we wanted never showed up for the Mac platform.

In the Apple stores, software shelf space shrank and computer hardware gave way to iPods, iPhones, iPads and headphones. The word entertainment made more sense than computing.

Changed World
Since Apple opened its retail stores the world has changed in ways which leave these outlets less useful.

Android has devoured the mobile market leaving Apple with but 12% of the global share. This means consumers are actually choosing between the three major platforms - iOS, Android and Windows - and this is being done at Target, BestBuy, the carrier's retail store or online. Not at the Apple store.

Adding to these woes, Google's Chromebookecosystem is chipping away at Apple's market share in the hardware channel. Microsoft's beta release of the cross-platform Windows 10 is experiencing record-setting downloads which may foretell a shift of Apple hardware users back to the PC fold. Happened to me!

Bricks & Mortar No More
Apple seems to be guiding itself toward revenue streams which offer little to draw consumers into their retail stores. Apple Pay and a new music delivery system won't need bricks and mortar to thrive.

Considering the costs to maintain these properties in high traffic, upscale areas, a shrinkage of the Apple retail system is inevitable.

The deities may no longer be smiling down on the Apple retail stores, perhaps.






#apple   #appleretailstore   #android   #chromebook  #windows10   #ipad   #ipod  

Snuff Dipping Man Stories

Ninety-nine Year Old Snuff-dipping Man Stories
Or, 150 Years Is a Long, Long Time

As a five year old, I met a ninety-nine year old man who enthralled me with stories about his days as a boy drummer in the Confederate army.

He was born and lived his life in a hand-hewn log cabin where he claimed to have hidden gunpowder and ammunition stolen from the Union soldiers underneath the gray, weathered porch boards. There may be some literary license in that tale, I caution you.

The old man reminded me of Popeye the Sailor with his long, jutting, stubbly chin and crooked toothless smile. I was also mesmerized with the little snuff dipping stick lodged in the corner of his mouth floating up and down against gravity with his every spoken syllable.

I have to come to realize that my life stands squarely between two extremes. Behind me I can reach back to the year 1853, or so, through the remembrances of an old man, and before me is a seven year old child who could live to be ninety-nine, too, carrying with him these same stories: crossing a 150 year time span.

I was among the last people to hear Uncle Elijah tell his stories before he died sitting in his rocking chair, creaking across those same gray porch boards of his childhood home.




#civilwar   #conferedatearmy   #drummer  

Note: While I am waiting for my nueropathways to re-map, I am recycling some very old blog posts from the past.