Kevin Harrington // marketing // blog

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.

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?

Petrol price surveys

I  was waiting in a line to pay for some petrol at my local BP garage. The delay was caused by the usual number of people buying sausage rolls, milk, cat food and occasionally petrol.

The phone rang and a member of the staff answered the phone. The caller, presumably a competitor or their agent, asked the price of unleaded petrol and diesel per litre.

The BP cashier looked out of the window at the gantry sign with the price indicators and answered the caller by adding 1p per litre to the price.

Does this go on all the time? Is this kind of lying ethical? Whose interests are served by these tactics? Should a retailer allow themselves to be observed employing these tactics?

I personally feel that it is bad for the retailers brand image and it is unethical. It also serves to hold prices higher. This is unless everyone knows the tactics and it is all a daft game.

And what if the caller were a consumer or a price comparison website? This would then result in less business for the retailer that makes their prices appear higher than they actually are.

All very odd. Any thoughts on this?

Contract Publishing

“I’ll send him a message and hopefully he will get back to you.” That was the response from the girl that answered the phone to my new business enquiry this morning. Fantastic! In fairness I’m sure he will.

The point is I’m trying to spend money here: a 40,000 production run of a 40pp quarterly glossy magazine through a contract publisher – give me some confidence!

“Hopefully” I’ll find someone that wants the business. I’m going to make this one a bit of sport. I’m going to phone two more contract publishers and see what happens.

UPDATE:

It appears endemic – a rather “oh, hello, we’ll see” type of response. But I’m pleased to say I seem to have managed to engage with a contract publisher of note. We’ll see!