One of the megatrends I’ll be talking about at an upcoming speech is the idea of “FREE”. The word is taking on new meaning in our digital landscape as the web delivers so much to us as consumers than at any point in our past. However, there is a danger that our expectations of value begin to change and we expect everything to be “included”. Chatting with a web start up the other day (who will be selling goods on-line) they planned to have a delivery charge of around £4.00 below a basket value of £40. Makes complete business sense to pass through your cost and retain your margin integrity.
However, at that level of basket I’m pretty sure the buyers expectation will be “free delivery”. Now it’s OK if you have a really high margin item, however on lower margin items, you’re on a hiding to nothing. My central point is that the major transational platforms Amazon and e-Bay continue to go from strength to strength. Why? Because they have seamless – end to end – trading platforms which make it easy to keep going back and ordering and a large proportion of the “buy it now” items are now coming with free delivery. The marketplace is moving on again, customers are thinking differently and we all have to think about ways of recovering our on costs without reverting to Ryanair tactics. So, I wonder what goods or services which you want to charge for have a notional value to your customers and you should consider giving away? What is your premium product, service or content where you could make that margin up? Have you defined it? Definitely worth taking a spreadsheet to.
Life is becoming more cluttered. More communication platforms, more interruptive market, more internet shopping aggregators, more information. Overload. The winners are the businesses that make life more simple. That take the clutter, shake it up and down and only show you the bits that matter. We are becoming more irritated when our time is wasted. Take a minute about how you think, shop and search. Are you impatient? How long is a reasonable time before you get your answers? 2 mins, 5 mins, 30 mins? I bet it’s a shorter, rather than longer period of time. So, apply this to your communications and buyer journey. Make it as a speedy, short and relevant as you can. The simpler you make it, the more customers you’ll attract.
Following on from last nights blog, I wanted to touch on the issue of the
six degrees of separation and how transient technology platforms are making the world a very tiny place. Let me put something into perspective for you, that is, how fast technology is moving. If you look at how long communication platforms have taken to attract 50m users. Radio = 38 years. TV = 13 Yrs. Myspace = 2 yrs. (Factoid: If Myspace were a country, it would be the fifth largest in the world). Point being, 50M people suddenly became digitally connected in 2 yrs, that’s just for starters. So, the theoretical idea that you can (within six steps) be connected to anyone in the world, doesn’t seem so unreal. Now think about why traditional advertising is in such turmoil. If one well worded Twitter message can be re-tweeted by six people with 1000 followers each, you message would be seen by 43,000 people, for FREE. A blog post can be picked up by anyone in the world via Google. As of today, my blog posts on the Business benefits of Twitter are ranked #2 and #3 Globally on google, not bad for an evening blogger. So, getting your message out there has never been easier if it’s engaging and relevant and you get involved in the conversation.
