Monthly Archives: January 2008

How much should you pay for a sandwich?

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sandwich How much should you pay for a sandwich?

Sandwich

Tuesday: up at 04.00 to leave the house at 04.30 to catch a flight from Heathrow.

I needed to fill up with petrol on the way to the airport. So I stopped at the 24 hour BP petrol station near my house. I needed to wait for the attendant to wake up to allow me to spend £50. I didn’t think much more about this poor level of service until I arrived at Heathrow.

The Iberia self check-in service failed so I had to queue for 25 minutes to check-in. The ritual undressing through security followed: shoes off, coat off, jacket off, watch off, belt off…then there was no convenient place to get dressed again.

In turn this meant that I arrived at the gate just in time to board the plane. No opportunity for breakfast, coffee or anything! Of course the plane took off 25 minutes late.

My Iberia ticket to Madrid was well over £600. Bought at short notice, fully flexible for a variable business stay, I could probably accept this. That is of course if the flight delivered refreshments! I’m being a little unfair here as there was a refreshment trolley. I was lucky, I was in the third row of economy, and when they got to me the sandwich choice was down to one only. So much for the glossy menu. The row behind me, still miles from the back of the plane, had no sandwiches at all. The really galling thing about it all is that a club sandwich (and not a very good advert for the genre either) and a coffee cost 10.5 Euros.

There was a chance that I could have just nodded off and put all this down to modern standards. But instead I started reading Market Leader, the journal of the Marketing Society: page after page of articles about delivering great service in service industries. I felt inspired by the thoughts of opportunities and at the same time depressed from my consumer experiences of the day.

Coming home was a British Airways flight. Guess what? Three choices of food, all available and all made quite recently…and they were free (well, included in the £600). Thank you BA! How daft is that…I’m thanking BA for a service level that I would expect.

Anyway, being a positive chap, I took it all as a learning experience. And I could have been trying to fly into Heathrow today after the Boeing 777 crash. I could have been hours late.

I’ve had a couple of meetings today about new business opportunities and I have to say that service delivery has been very much front of mind for me.

Banks and sales and charities

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sale Banks and sales and charities

Sales all over the place

Perhaps it’s just me, but I find the idea of banks running January sales a bit offensive. I’m not too sure why. I think it’s the naive idea I have that banks offer competitive terms at all times.

HSBC and NatWest are both advertising a ‘sale’ for their services this month. Are we expected to suddenly decide to borrow some money? And if we miss the sale opportunities are the prices reverting to normal?

These nagging thoughts made me look at the HSBC sale offer. Low and behold another one of my pet hates – deal with us and we’ll give money to charity.

The HSBC website and adverts proudly exclaim, “Every time you take us up on one of our Sale or other special offers, we will donate £2 to WWF to support the HSBC Rainforest Preservation Project in Brazil. Each donation will protect a whole acre of rainforest. So, as well as saving money, you’ll be helping to save one of the world’s most important and endangered rainforests.”

You read it right, get a mortgage or loan or pension and HSBC will donate an entire £2. I wonder what that represents as a percentage of the fees they earn on each of the products.

I’ve never liked this type of use of a charity to promote a business, product or service.

Anatomy of a successful social network

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shuzak com Anatomy of a successful social network

Shuzac

How many hours a week do you spend on Bebo, Facebook or MySpace?

I read this on Shuzak.com: “The Nobel Prize winning free-market economist, Milton Friedman, believed that when left alone, people will intelligently act in their own best interest, and that the market will coordinate their actions to produce outcomes beneficial for all. In other words, the wisdom of crowds depends upon the rational wisdom of the individual.
“Friedman was a genius, but he never came across MySpace or he would have retracted his belief on consumer rationality.
“MySpace and its cousins are bacteria feeding off the irrationality of the wisdom of the crowds. MySpace has taught us that even though the customer is not always right, it is, nonetheless, detrimental to prove them otherwise.”