Voyages-sncf.com en panne pendant 30 heures: cela arrive même aux meilleurs

Voyages-sncf.com est le site Internet commercial le plus visité en France. Cependant, bien que son infrastructure soit de tout premier choix, il lui arrive de tomber en panne. En effet, entre mercredi et jeudi le site a connu de graves problèmes techniques empêchant toute commande en ligne. Une panne qui tombe mal, alors que la période juillet-aout est la période la plus chargée en départ en vacances.

Ceci nous montre que même lorsque la technologie est maitrisée, même lorsque la structure est solide, les problèmes techniques sont toujours possibles.

Seesmic and Search Engine Optimization: my advices

Loic Lemeur, French serial entrepreneur that I often quote in this blog, has posted today an article on his blog where he asks for help in order to optimize Seesmic, his online company, in Google. One of his main mistake was to use a 100% flash version of the website. This is the first advice I can give: Never use 100% flash version while creating your website. Flash might be an advanced technology to create website, it might be pretty, but it is a real handicap while trying to optimize your website. The only people that could use a 100% flash version of their website would be luxury brands, like Gucci or Hermes, that have a great brand equity and don't really need a great exposure on the web.

Google loves text: all its indexation is based on text. It does not analyze video nor pictures. This is why it is important to provide him text in order to help him understand what your website is about.

Anyway, Loic has understood his mistake, and in a great effort of modesty, he is asking his community to help him improve its SEO (which is actually a real "2.0" behavior).

Here would be my main recommandations:
- First you need to pick the main key words you want to optimize: You need to make a research thanks to Google ad, to identify which of the keywords are more seeked by Internet users. For example, let's check if "video community", or "video service" have a high volume of search. Sometimes you think that some keywords perfectly match your website, and you would like people that are seeking them to land on your website, but these keywords have a low volume of search. You need to identify these words that both people search and correspond to your site and focus on them.
-Once you have these words, you need to ad them as much as you can on your website. You need for instance to add them in the title of your site: instead of having "seesmic" in your title, it is far better to have "online video community", if these words are the proper terms to optimize. You also need to add these different words in your meta descriptions, and the pictures of the site.
-Custom all pages titles and meta. In order to have a good Google Pagerank, it is important to customize each pages of the website, and not to have the same page titles for all the pages. Each pages will then be taken into consideration by Google.
- As you have said, Flash is a great issue while trying to optimize your site. Try to give as much text information as possible: give a name and a description to alll your videos and pictures, try to add as much text as you can, tagg the videos and so on.

For such a big company as Seesmic, based on the web, I think they need to seek for an expert, that will help them set up their SEO strategies. But with these simple advices, Seesmic should be able to have a great pagerank.

Censure de l'Internet utilisé par les médias lors des JO

La Chine a décidé de censurer l'accès à l'Internet par les médias internationaux pendant les jeux Olympiques de Pékin. Certains sites Internet ne seront pas disponibles par les journalistes, alors que les chinois s'étaient engagés à ne pas censurer l'Internet lors des festivités.

On ne change pas de vieilles habitudes aussi facilement. En tout cas, c'est très dommage est montre bien les lacunes de cet état en terme de liberté individuel et d'expression.

source: AFP

Cuil.com : the google killer still needs some improvement

On Sunday, July 27 was released cuil.com, a new web browser engineered by former Google managers Anna Patterson, Russell Power and Louis Monier, with Tom Costello (ex IBM) as a CEO.

The idea of cuil.com is to create a better web browser than the Google solution. Indeed, the new website indexes 120 billion pages, which is the biggest indexation effort on the web. But the main idea of cuil.com is to present the information in an improved way. You can see pictures and a summary of the web pages, instead of a brief description.

Still some available spots to compete with Google
Google is still dominating the market, thanks to its technological advantage. There is so far no other web browsers that can somehow give the same quality of results than Google. However, the Google algorythm, even though it is powerful, is far from being perfect. Therefore, there is room for a competitor that will be able to master another way to seek through the web.

My opinion
Is cuil.com the one? I don't think so. Not so far. We can't expect the search engine to be perfect right after having been released. I have done couple of research, especially with my name, and I don't think the results were good quality wise. I don't think either the summary was effective. But I think cuil has some great ideas, and identified where they could propose an added value.
I wish them good luck in this very competitive market, hoping they will come up with a serious alternative to Google, which domination is not positive.

And you what do you think about cuil.com. Have you tested it?

new disqus try

new disqus try

Un blog sur l'actualité du droit des affaires et des NTIC

Il est toujours important, dans n'importe quelle industrie vous êtes, de garder des nouvelles de l'environement juridique. Je suis tombé un peu par hasard sur le blog d'Olivier Santivi, avocat au barreau de Paris.

Vous y trouverez les dernières nouvelles du cadre judiciaire de l'Internet et des technologies. Je vous conseille d'accord son article sur la légalisation de l'utilisation des portables en avion. Le blog n'est pas forcément tenu régulièrement à jour (environ un article par mois),  mais en tout cas il y a de la qualité.

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France about to lose its first place as wine producer in 2015

The French wine industry is under siege. It has been many years French producers are experiencing difficulties to keep their leading spot in the wine market. Whereas new countries sprung up, France is struggling to develop a middle range production and to keep its sales figures. French production would drop from 52.9 million hl between 2000 and 2004, to 43.9 million hl in 2015, a 20% fall that will be a huge hit to this sector. As a matter of fact, Spain is expected to become the first wine producer in the world in 2015, according to French statistic institute CREDOC.

Here are the main reasons established by this study:

• Lower consumption of wines. This decrease has started 4 years ago due to more and more health concerns and a new generation that is consuming less and less wine during lunch and diner time.
  
• Exportations are expected to decrease of 1.1% per year between 2005 and 2015. The key problem here is the sales and marketing forces of other countries like the US or Australia.

My opinion
The main issue of French producers is their lack of marketing and promotional effort. Due to historical reason, French wines have a great brand equity, which secure the standing in the premium market. But the sales are decreasing because their problems of competitiveness for the lower and mid range products: French wines are sometimes more expensive, and struggle because of the massive marketing effort of other producers (especially Australian's).

Is it totally out of question to rethink the way these wines are marketed and sold? Culturally, French producers found hard to believe they should innovate with their packaging and marketing, whereas French wine are still known to be the best of the world.

But as the world market has changed, especially with new importing actors from Asia, so did the way wine consumption is perceived. Therefore, the innovative spirit of new producers is highly appreciated. Let's not forget we can not sell wine in other countries as you would in France, a country with a great wine culture.

Here will be my main recommendations for French wine producers:

• Keep the strong historical brand for top of the line wines: French wine are doing great on the premium market. Their product quality allied to their historical brands are some key. I believe the marketing strategies of these products is perfect and has not been affected by the competition.
  
• Dare to innovate with middle range wines marketing. Let's use new media, new colors, new display systems in order to stand out of the competition. What Australian do, we can.
  
• Find new ways to promote alternative way of consumption, in order to keep up with the trend. I know, it is very hard to think about it, but why not find new way to bottle wine, to promote wine consumption in night clubs, for instance.
  

Let's reinvent wine marketing in France!

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Is Marketing Magic?

I was reading one of the latest blog posts of Guy Kawasaki, famous entrepreneur and VC of the Silicon Valley, where he explains how marketing and magic are alike.

Guy Kawasaki  explains that "For good or for bad, misdirection and illusion are probably principles of marketing too". I totally disagree with his point of view. Marketing is for sure not about misdirection nor illusion.

Marketing is not an illusion
Marketing might be about creating an image (positive if possible of course), but it is not about an illusion. As a marketer, you can't fool your client. If there is a gap between the image that you have created and the product you need to promote you have no chances of success. This is also why the job of marketer is difficult: you need to create an image that matches with your products. I don't know any cases where a marketing campaign have fooled the customers and meanwhile experienced success. Customers know marketing tricks, and they would not be fooled for long. The best a marketer can do is be fair in his way of communicating.

Marketing is not about entertainment
Marketing might seek for entertaining medium, but this is not what it is about. The entertainment is not the purpose but the medium, to communicate with the targeted audience. Magic is about entertainment. For the magician, the illusion is the product. A marketer will seek for entertainment in order to establish a contact with the audience.

The magic of marketing is not about the illusion skills, it is more about picturing customers' thoughts.

I still respect Guy as a great Internet industry professional, but sometimes I really struggle with his vision of marketing.

Anyways, for your entertainment, here is a marketing trick;)

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Une technologie 2.0 pour des process très conventionnel

Popuload Software vient de créer un nouveau service aux entreprises appelé Digital Memo. Alors que les technologies web 2.0 sont sensées facilités les communications entre les différentes niveaux hiérarchiques, "Certains chefs d'équipe et responsables ne voient en effet pas d'un très bon œil la possibilité pour leurs collaborateurs de pouvoir répondre en permanence. Pour leur permettre de communiquer de manière unilatérale sans abandonner le principe du 2.0, Popuload Software lance Digital Memo, un outil basé sur la messagerie instantanée Windows, et qui permet à la hiérarchie de publier des directives auxquelles il est impossible de répondre."


L'avantage de la démarche est bien sûr de pouvoir clarifier la communication du chef de service vers ses employés. Il permet pour une direction d'avoir un discours clair et rapidement consultable. Mais on peut tout de même s'interroger de l'efficacité de cette initiative, alors que le monde de l'entreprise se transforme avec l'arrivée de toutes ces technologies permettant d'améliorer le travail collaboratif en entreprise.

C'est en fait un genre de Twitter à sens unique, puisque les différents collaborateurs reçoivent l'information mais ne peuvent pas répondre. Le système me paraît très peu "2.0" en fait.
Alors que ces nouvelles technologies devraient faciliter l'échange aussi bien vertical qu'horizontal dans l'organisation, on utilise ici une technologie participative dans le but d'assoir son pouvoir une organisation hiérarchique traditionnelle.

Je ne suis pas vraiment sûr de l'intérêt de la manœuvre, bien que je comprenne l'utilité pour les directions désirant garder le contrôle sur les activités de leurs salariés. Et vous qu'en pensez-vous?

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Icons design 101: The New York Times New Iphone Icons

You should check this blog post: it shows how the New York Times designed the new icons for their Iphone application.
This is always a difficult work, between creativity, simplicity and clarity.

the front page Today the iPhone/ nytimes app releases. I've drawn GUI before but this one was special. For my news of choice and another chance to work with renowned web wizard Khoi Vinh and designer Caryn Tutino.

Con go figure Here is the secondary, ancillary pitstop where you configure out what you want most.

More They had to work in old Grey Lady grey scale as well as black and white in 29X29 pixels. Once approved, the png art was integrated into the app (which is free btw).

icons in prog GUI is an ugly process, but an interesting one. Pixel reduction is a nice diversion from drawing my linear crap. I mean "art". here is a peek inside some of the process, which was considerably smooth.

morbid sketches there were some interesting things (concessions?) that happened along the way. Most notably, and my favorite was the icon for Heller's favorite gig, that of the Obituary section. I went straight to the grave initially. "Too morbid" they said. Then we landed on a single flower in front of the gravestone. Done. But wait. A week later the editors came back; "still too morbid". So we went with a single flower. I am still curious if a flower denotes death. I guess we'll wait to see if anyone finds offense.

done and done and here are the final "ready for prime time players". It was weird seeing them for the first time live on my iPhone. Would love to hear what you think of this often ignored form of information illustration.

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The blog of Carl Icahn

Do you know about Carl Icahn? If you are close to the Internet industry there is no way you could have missed the fight between this serial investor and Yahoo.

Indeed, Carl Icahn is favorable for the purchase of Yahoo by Microsoft, and has launched a great communication campaign in order to convince Yahoo's shareholders to help this deal.

Today I have just noticed on the Internet that Carl Icahn owns a blog, called the Icahn Report. I don't know if it is its true blog or somebody acting like him, but I found it very interesting.

The blog is mainly focus on investments and is very interesting. I recommend you to read his thoughts about golden parachutes.

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Great Commercial for Travelers Insurance

Great commercial for an Insurance company: You have an easy and powerful message: don't count on luck, get a great insurance coverage.

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How the Telegraph and the Internet changed the Information industry (1)

I am reading a fascinating book written by Tom Standage, called The Victorian Internet. This book explains in details the development of the telegraph and how it has changed the world at this era.

The book shows how the telegraph has been invented, and how it was improved throughout the time, to become an exceptional medium connecting continents as no technologies could before. What is even more impressive is how fast the network was set, weaving a web within 3 decades at most.

What I find particularly interesting, is how you can compare the development of both technologies and how it impacts our society. Especially, I wanted to share with you some thoughts about how the telegraph revolutionized the media (Newspaper) industry. Indeed, the metamorphose we are experiencing right now of the news industry is very similar to what happened two centuries ago.

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Is the Long Tail Profitable?

The long tail concept is probably the main economical new trend shaped by business on the Internet. Whereas for the longest time the Pareto law was ruling most of the industries, this new idea was that blockbusters were not as important as it used to be.

Laurent Flores, CEO of CRMmetrix and owner of the customer listening blog, share with us an article from Anita Elberse an Associate Professor at Harvard Business School. It discusses the profitability of business models based on the long tail concept.

Here is a long summary of the article, which gives 4 advices to producers and 4 to retailers willing to profit from the long tail.

Advice to Producers

1. Don't radically alter blockbuster resource-allocation or product-portfolio management strategies. A few winners will still go a long way, probably even further than before. It remains to be seen whether the new media environment will indeed make many previously unprofitable niche products profitable. In my most recent correspondence with managers at Nielsen SoundScan, I learned that of the 3.9 million digital tracks sold in 2007 (the large majority for 99 cents each through Apple iTunes), an astonishing 24% sold only one copy, and 91%, 3.6 million tracks, sold fewer than 100 copies.

2. When producing niche goods for the tail end of the distribution, keep costs as low as possible. Your odds of success aren't favorable here either, and they will probably become less so. The extremely low demand for the large array of products in the tail means that simply recovering the costs of producing them will be challenging.

3. When trying to strengthen your presence in digital channels, focus on marketing your most popular products. By definition, they reach the largest number of customers, and they are also appreciated more by those who consume them.

4. Leverage your scale to improve online exposure and demand for products across your product portfolio. The long tail consists of a mixture of true niche products and old hits resulting from blockbuster-focused strategies. Such products can now live forever online, even if they have long been cleared from physical shelves; thus the old hits may present a real opportunity. Larger producers have an advantage in that they can use new releases to trigger demand for old ones, previous movies in which a cast member appeared, for example, or earlier recordings by an up-and-coming artist. Companies can benefit from finding ways to regularly remarket products in their back catalogs and from bundling old with newer products.

Advice to Retailers

1. If the goal is to cater to your heavy customers, broaden your assortment with more niche products. My research shows that even when online assortments of videos and music are enormous, and thus even the most frequent customers could easily satisfy their appetites with products in the top decile, those customers are disproportionately active in the tail. They want a wide assortment, so offering one helps attract and retain them, whether they pay by the product or for a subscription (frequent customers typically opt for more-expensive subscription plans).

2. Strictly manage the costs of offering products that will rarely sell. If possible, use online networks to construct creative models in which you incur no costs unless the customer actually initiates a transaction. Managing a large number of products that rarely or never sell could easily pose a problem. Long-tail products may offer more-attractive profit margins for retailers than hit products do, in part because the latter are often used as loss leaders. But extremely low demand for long-tail products, coupled with whatever it costs to make them available, presents difficulties in successfully executing a long-tail model.

3. Acquire and manage customers by using your most popular products. Precisely because hit products reach the greatest number of consumers and are appreciated most, their value as loss leaders in traditional channels will carry over into the digital realm. The seventh book in the Harry Potter series, introduced by Scholastic at a suggested retail price of $34.99 in the United States, was a blockbuster loss leader: It was sold at sharply reduced prices by Barnes & Noble ($20.99, a 40% discount) and Amazon ($17.99, a 49% discount) in an effort to stimulate other purchases.

Like producers, online retailers can benefit from bundling hit products with obscure or older products that are cheaper to acquire. Another, probably more common approach is to direct customers to the tail with recommendation engines. A third strategy worth considering is designing the flow of web pages so that consumers, even those searching for hit products, are naturally directed into the tail. The list of recommended titles can be manipulated, often instantly and cheaply, to spotlight higher-margin obscure items or to smooth demand for sought-after titles over time.

4. Even though obscure products may have a higher profit margin, resist the temptation to direct customers to the tail too often, or you'll risk their dissatisfaction. Finding a good marketing balance between obscure and popular products is critical. Online retailers cannot expect their customers to prefer long-tail products to hits, in fact, the opposite is more likely. They should take this into account when managing customer expectations and satisfaction, which, after all, lead to long-term profitability. The continued dominance of hit products and the natural shape of demand suggest that efforts to fatten the tail by spreading consumption more evenly across titles may be fruitless anyway.

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Choosing the entrepreneurial path, by Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn

I am fond of Utunes, podcasts released by the main US universities, including Stanford. Today, I was listening to one of these free classes, called "choosing the entrepreneurial path" (you can find it easilly on Utunes), which special guest was Reid Hoffman, founder of Linkedin, the famous business social networking site. As a former undergraduate student of the prestigious university, he explains the entrepreneurial path to students, from his experience and his point of view. Here are some of the key points, that I found interesting to share with you.

• There is no sure bets: As Reid Hoffman explains, usually, entrepreneurship is highly risky. There is never a sure bet. An entrepreneur is "jumping off a cliff with some tools, and assembling the plains on the way down".
  
  
• A MBA is not a good predictor of succesful entrepreneurship: From his prospective he says most of the time people owning a MBA do not really insure success as an entrepreneur. Owning a MBA is in fact pretty far from the entrepreneurship mindset. A MBA is designed to insure a certain salary, and therefore some certainty, something that do not exist while you create a business. It is a way to prepare the future, but that is not taking a risk.

• Easy problem solver: You don't try to show that you can solve difficult problems. You try to solve problem once at a time.
  
  
• Financial strategy is central: People usually thing that what is important for an entrepreneur is the product strategy. But to develop a great product is not the key factor of the success. Your strategy has to reflect what your financial status is. If you are under capitalized you are screwed. If you can't raise money, if you are not up to date with the financing world, you could die because you have inadequate financing.
  
  
• In the Internet entrepreneurship world, the distribution strategy is crucial: the three keys are distribution, distribution, distribution: Team and technology are not valuable. If you did not acquire enough users to distribute your product, you are screwed. That is actually the whole idea of the business model of LinkedIn, where they have focused first of all on the number of users they had prior even picture a way to get money out of it. This is also an idea that drives Loic Lemeur with Seesmic: Prior to have defined any kind of business model, he is focusing on developing a community which will somehow develop the value of the business. In the corporate world, you don't notice how important it is because when you are in a big company, you already have a base of customers developed, which ease the game.
  
  
• The birth of ebay: Reid Hofman was part of the founding team of Paypal, a successful online payment service. He explains how it started and also how the initial concept moved to something totally different from the original goal. A friend of his came to see him because he had the cool idea to start a business about encryption on cell phones. Reid found this idea terrible. Indeed, even though encryption on cell phones was a very valuable thing, because very hard to do, there was no business model: who is going to use it? Nevertheless he accepts to be part of the board. So he advised them to focus on cash on mobile phones, to start a business model, which drove them to market with Palm Pilots. Then eventually they found out that they will make a payment service. Now the problem was that none of them had banking experience. And they had to struggle to explain to the federal government that they were not a bank. The main lesson is that you should solve your problems one piece at a time. That is what helped Paypal to move from cellphone encryption to payment service online.

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What cost the Vista fiasco?

Is Windows Vista a success? This is what Microsoft's managers try to show, despite all the critiques and the apparent weaknesses of the operating system. Businessweek explains how much the Vista fiasco has cost so far to Microsoft.

Here are some of the evidences listed in this article:

• Companies expect to install Vista on only about 10% of the PCs they already own, compared with estimates last year that they'd be able to do so on 27% of their machines.
• "Dampening" adoption of Vista by corporate customers will shave $395 million in revenues and 2¢ a share in earnings from the company's financial results for the 2009 fiscal year.
• companies expect just 26% of their PCs to be running Vista by the beginning of 2011, down from an estimate of nearly 68% of computers by respondents to a similar survey a year ago.
• Sales of desktop Windows fell 2%, to $4.03 billion, and contributed to flat revenues (BusinessWeek.com, 4/25/08) during Microsoft's third quarter, reported Apr. 24. Shares of Microsoft closed June 11 up 18¢, or 0.65%, to 27.89. The shares are down nearly 22% this year.

Windows persists to tell people Windows Vista is not a failure, but the launch of a new operating system version next year is a clear evidence Microsoft had to make changes. I understand that such a big company, with investors high interest on the stock exchange market, can't really admit a failure, especially that important (the operating system is the milk-cow of Microsoft).

I wish them to succeed with this new version though, and that they'll be able to make the proper changes.

This is a try of Disqus

Try 1

Just installed Disqus

I have just installed Disqus on my blog. Indeed, I was not really happy with the comment system proposed by Blogger (the only downside of this blog platform in my opinion). I wish it will work fine, and I will give it a try for a few weeks.

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Decoy Marketing

Do you know about Decoy  marketing? This is a marketing technique, very easy to implement in retails, which could result in impressive sales result, at very low cost. I found this article about Decoy Marketing on the blog of neurosciencemarketing.com.

"

Here’s a real-world example. The last time I needed a can of shaving gel, I found myself staring at a shelf full of options. Gels and foamy creams, with variations like “Sensitive Skin,” “Aloe,” “Cleansing,” and many more, lined the shelves. As I stood there befuddled by the choices, I noticed a taller can of the “Advanced” gel amidst the forest of shave products. This can was identical to several other cans of “Advanced,” but was an inch or two taller and held a couple of ounces more of product. Best of all, it seemed to be the same price as the shorter cans. I studied them for another few seconds to be sure I wasn’t missing something. Nope, I wasn’t - same stuff, same package design, same price, but 20% more product. My confusion evaporated. I had no idea how shaving gel could be “Advanced,” or how that might compare with “Aloe,” but I grabbed the bigger can, rooted around and found one more in back, and headed for the checkout with both cans. How did buyer befuddlement turn into a larger-than-expected purchase so quickly? The answer: decoy marketing. In this case, the decoy was unintentional, but there are lots of ways that marketers can use the technique to steer customers toward a decision.

In the shaving gel display, the inclusion of the extra-large shaving cream can was an accident - the store just had a few left from a previous promotion. But the principle worked just fine. In this case, the regular size cans were the decoys. As soon as I spotted a nearly identical product that was clearly a better value, that new find stood out as the right choice.

“Relativity” is the key element in decoy marketing. Our brains aren’t good at judging absolute values, but they are always ready to compare values and benefits. When used proactively by marketers, a decoy product or offer can be used to make another product look like a good value. Maybe even a no-brainer, so to speak. In Predictably Irrational (a fascinating read for those interested in neuromarketing and neuroeconomics), author Dan Ariely describes an experiment using magazine subscription offers. Like most of Ariely’s experiments, this one is deceptively simple. Two groups of subjects saw one or the other of these offers to subscribe to The Economist.

Offer A:

$59 - Internet Only Subscription (68 chose)

$125 - Internet and Print Subscription (32 chose)

Predicted Revenue - $8,012

Offer B:

$59 - Internet Only Subscription (16 chose)

$125 - Print Only Subscription (0 chose)

$125 - Internet and Print Subscription (84 chose)

Predicted Revenue - $11,444

Take a moment to look at this rather startling result. Both offers are the same, with the exception of including the “print only” subscription in Offer A. Despite the fact that not a single person chose that unattractive offer, its impact was dramatic - 62% more subjects chose the combined print and Internet offer, and predicted revenue jumped 43%. The print-only offer was the decoy, and served to make the combined offer look like a better value. While it’s true that Ariely’s test had the subjects make the choice without actually consummating the deal with a credit card, it’s clear that introducing the decoy made the combined offer look more attractive.

How Decoys Work

According to Ariely, decoys change behavior when a subject is choosing between alternatives that are more or less equally attractive. He gives an example of choosing between a
trip to Rome and a trip to Paris, both of which include free breakfasts. One might expect a slow decision making process with a more or less even split between the two alternatives. Ariely suggests that introducing a decoy, a trip to Rome with no breakfast, would make the original trip to Rome more attractive, and that given those options the trip to Rome with breakfast would handily beat the similar Paris trip.

So, jumping back to the shaving gel topic, if a drug store received a shipment of promotional cans with an extra 20% of product inside, their first reaction might be to remove the regular cans from the shelf until the promotional stock was gone. What customer would be dumb enough to buy the small can when the bigger cans were the same price? According to decoy marketing logic, however, the store would be well advised to leave a few of the small cans on the shelf with the bigger ones. As counterintuitive as it seems, the presence of some small cans so would likely boost sales of the larger promotional cans - perhaps even taking market share away from competing products that came in the larger size to begin with.

Decoys in Real Estate

It’s been a while since I’ve been home shopping, but in my experience real estate agents often set up a tour of several homes in the same price range, leaving the most desirable for last. This seems to me to be another form of decoy marketing, particularly when the next to last house is a particularly bad comparison with the one the agent hopes to sell you (e.g., the same price but in need of more repairs). Ariely suggests that this will be most effective when the comparison is between superficially similar homes, e.g., two-story colonial-style homes with the same number of bedrooms. Buying a house is a complex, risky, and expensive process, and getting a buyer to make a decision - even when he/she knows it’s necessary - can be difficult. Clever real estate agents learn that comparisons are a key part of the buyer’s process, and that selecting the right homes to visit is a key part of moving toward a decision.

Could a Decoy Help Your Sales?

I don’t advocate any techniques that push a customer into buying something he doesn’t need or want. But sometimes, customers have difficulty deciding between alternatives and, to get the product they need, require a small nudge in one direction or the other. For example, I was going to buy shaving gel in that store no matter what, but the unintentional decoy got me to the decision point and on my way more quickly than if I had I spent another few minutes considering the weighty issues of gel vs. foam, aloe vs. sensitive skin, cheaper small size vs. expensive big size, and so on.

When creating their product offerings, most companies try to come up with the best and most attractive offers they can - a practice I wholly endorse. But, sometimes adding a less attractive offer to the mix will close more deals on the better offers without disadvantaging the customer in any way. So, next time you are coming up with your “good, better, and best” packages, consider tossing in a “not so good” package that’s similar to (but not as good as) the one you’d like to drive the most traffic to. If that boosts sales of that item, you’ll know your decoy is working!"

My Opinion
From my prospective, I have already seen in the US some brands using this techniques (actually, it was Gilette, same example than previously). What is great with this technique is that you change the focus of the shopper while he is comparing the different product to keep it on your brands' product. This actually a great tool to boost your market shares.

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What I would do if I was the CEO of Seesmic

Do you know Seesmic? This is the new company started by Loic Lemeur, French entrepreneur and star of blogging. The service is a video on-line community. In one of his last blog entries, he asked to his community what it would do if it were the CEO of Seesmic.
I think Loic Lemeur has done a great job promoting his new company: the whole web was talking about it even though it was in its Alpha version.
Here would be my action plan:

• Develop the communities: Not the community (sing), but many communities that user would create depending on their . This is the main challenge of Seesmic in order to get out of its "Beta" stage. Each online community has developped their own services to develop personal communities (groups on Facebook, hubs on Viadeo, communities on Youtube...). This is very important to incentive the creation of community, that could
  
  
• Focus on the partnership with companies: Now that the service is operational, counting a large community already, it would be good to start focusing on how to monetize the business. I know Seesmic hired a person dedicated to this service. But as a CEO, this would be my priority N1. Will I be able to develop some focus groups via Seesmic, advertising programs? This is a large question that should be consider at this stage of the development of the company.
  

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