Ladies Fashions - off the rails
This is a sign I saw at the Royal Berkshire Hospital: Today, ladies fashions, off the rails.
I bet that gets people queuing up with expectation. How many people want fashion items that are “off the rails”?
And the mixed message of the grumpy looking train that has come off the rails sets it all off wonderfully.
I guess the prospective customers have been warned.
Should we complain about the cauliflower?
Well, it was a shock to Jo, one of my daughters. In one of her rare encounters with the kitchen she was dismayed at how small the head of the cauliflower was in comparison to the leaves surrounding it.
She was so horrified she got me to take a photo of it and weigh the evidence. The pound coin and the baked beans are for scale reference only.
The edible head of the cauli was 288g and the leaves alone weighed in at 548g. I’m not sure who she thinks we should complain to.
Through a very narrow association (supermarkets) this got me pondering on recent supermarket adverts. ASDA were claiming that they had over 2,000 items lower in price than Tesco. At the same time Tesco had just over 200 items cheaper than ASDA. On this basis ASDA were making themselves out to be the best.
This is a very interesting bit of positioning. You can see how the ASDA cauliflower got me here now.
The point firstly is do I want the 2,000 cheap ASDA items? Perhaps it is the 200 Tesco products at a better price that I want.
My second point is, are we after cheap or good value or a good experience. If the ASDA price claim is as powerful as they make out why are people going elsewhere? Why aren’t the queues always out the door?
Tesco were recently not advertising. This was to let word of mouth deliver their message virally. And here I am contributing to it! Good old Tesco.
Royal Berkshire Hospital waste
I think our local hospital, The Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading, is excellent. That said, at a time when we are all concerned about bugs being transmitted through wards I think they could manage the message a little better.
This photo shows waste bags piled up in a main thoroughfare. The yellow bags on the floor, and the overflowing yellow bin, are potentially infectious waste.
I have no idea whether this is a safe or good practice. My point is that it makes it look as though the hospital doesn’t care. My experience is they do care. Therefore they damage their image by this practice.
Photo taken 28 February 2008 at 18.56.
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.
Dot co dot uk
The thinking had always been that a dot-com domain name was more credible than a dot-uk one.
I do hate salespeople that lie.
Children In Need
It takes long enough for a charity to develop a trusted brand name. Protecting it can be even harder.
This BBC Children In Need collection box, seen in a fish and chip shop in Reading is labelled 2006 (last year) and uses the BBC Children In Need logo.
On closer inspection it appears that the funds are being collected for some local toddler group. There is a label on the top that has been added.
Misrepresentation or what?
