Tag Archives: Consulting

April 7, 2015 · 10:58 am

You Could But You Shouldn’t

You might have missed an item last week although you might very well have been the subject of the report.  Do you know about ad injectors?  I’ve written about them before, most recently when some genius at Lenovo thought purchasers of their laptops would want to have Superfish bundled with their machines.  Besides being a massive security risk it was annoying as hell, as a plethora of ads cluttered up users’ screens.  Well, it turns out that Lenovo doesn’t have a patent on either stupidity (at best) or maliciousness (more likely).  To wit:

More than 5% of Google site visitors have at least one ad injector installed. Of those, half have at least two injectors installed, and nearly one-third have at least four installed, per a study Google conducted with researchers at University of California Berkeley.

In other words, millions of people have code installed that will insert new ads, or replace existing ones, into the pages those people read.  You may be one of them.  How did this happen?  Generally, some miscreant bundled the ad injector with some other desirable piece of software which the user installed.  Tool bars (don’t install them!) and certain software download sites (download.com, for one) do this routinely.  As the Google Security Blog put it:

Unwanted ad injectors aren’t part of a healthy ads ecosystem. They’re part of an environment where bad practices hurt users, advertisers, and publishers alike. People don’t like ad injectors for several reasons: not only are they intrusive, but people are often tricked into installing ad injectors in the first place, via deceptive advertising, or software “bundles.”…Ad injectors are problematic for advertisers and publishers as well. Advertisers often don’t know their ads are being injected, which means they don’t have any idea where their ads are running. Publishers, meanwhile, aren’t being compensated for these ads, and more importantly, they unknowingly may be putting their visitors in harm’s way, via spam or malware in the injected ads.
So why does this happen?  Because it can and because some executive doesn’t have the moral courage to say “no” to an easy buck.  Any of us in business make choices like this all the time.  We could do things that are evil but profitable but most of us choose not to.  We should not be afraid to point out and shun those who do.
Business is hard.  Making the right decisions is part of what makes it so.  We don’t do some things just because we can.  Besides being immoral it’s myopic and as Lenovo found out the backlash can be worse than the original problem.  Make sense?

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February 24, 2015 · 9:27 am

Self Delusion

An article caught my eye the other day. Big headline – Consumers Actually Like Airline Fees, Analyst Contends. You can imagine my skepticism but you also know I’m a staunch advocate for keeping an open mind until we learn all the facts.  Turns out my instincts were pretty good but let’s see what you think.

Stewardess, circa 1949-50, American Overseas, ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

An analyst from Wolfe Research named Hunter Keay wrote a report called Every Time a New Fee is Announced, a Fairy is Born.  In it he states the following:

Inconvenient truth: customers like fees. Maybe that sentence would be better received if we had said “customers like paying only for what they use.” Well, guess what…that’s the same thing.

He goes on to chide the airlines for not being more like Spirit Air (on whose planes you couldn’t pay me to fly) which charges relatively low base fares and then proceeds to layer on fee after fee.  Mr. Keay believes it’s a huge missed opportunity for airlines to improve their bottom lines.  As one report about this notion said

There is certainly some logic to the idea of saving consumers money on base airfares by stripping away everything but the seat you are required to sit in (though some carriers have discussed making passengers stand), but the problem with this a la carte approach is that the fees rarely match the savings.

In other words, we have yet another example of someone advising businesses to focus solely on their bottom lines rather than on their customers.  I think we’re all aware that fuel prices have dropped.  Anyone heard about an airline revoking the “fuel surcharges” they put in place when prices were sky high?  That’s because they haven’t.  Imagine how you’ll feel when you’re charged a fee to offset the costs of the pilot and flight attendants, much as a restaurant might charge a fee to help cover the costs of service.  Of course in the latter case the need to tip usually goes away.  You won’t see lower fares.

I hope some airline follows this analyst’s advice so we can see how well it works (or doesn’t).  His shining star – Spirit – is consistently rated as the worst US airline and is one of only two airlines flying in the US – Cubana being the other – with a two-star rating.  Profits over people has turned this analyst self delusional.  Customers don’t like fees.  They like excellent service at a reasonable price.  Value, in other words.

That’s my take.  Yours?

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February 11, 2015 · 12:26 pm

Aligning The Wifi

Suppose you were staying the night at a hotel and got hungry. Let’s say there is a lovely restaurant down the block and you wander out to sate your hunger pangs. As you walk over you realize a game you wanted to watch comes on in 20 minutes so you get the order to go figuring you’ll eat in the room.  You turn on the game and unwrap your food when there’s a knock on the door. It’s hotel security who confiscates your food. “We have room service here, and if you want to eat you’ll use our service.” Ridiculous?

Substitute “high-speed wi-fi” for “food” and it’s true. There is an ongoing battle in the lodging world over charging guests for wi-fi and forcing them to use it by blocking guests’ access to the guests’ own hotspots. No, I’m not kidding.  You might have read about the FCC fining Marriott $600,000 for blocking guests’ hotspots in their convention centers.  I can tell you from personal experience with clients that hotels force you to use their service (and it’s not cheap and not good) in their convention halls even when you have your own.  We can argue the merits of the hotels’ case (it’s expensive to provide, they’re not running a charity, etc) but there is a broader business point.

This is yet another case where a company’s interest and a customer’s interests are not aligned.  That has to impact the value proposition to the customer.  Contrast the hotels’ thinking with Amazon’s.  This from a shareholder letter:

 I think long-term thinking squares the circle. Proactively delighting customers earns trust, which earns more business from those customers, even in new business arenas. Take a long-term view, and the interests of customers and shareholders align.

We need to take every opportunity to align our interests and those of our customers.  The $10 “resort fee” (since when is mid-town DC a resort?) we charge today may be the last revenues we ever take in from the disgruntled customer.  Foregoing it is an investment in my book.  Yours?

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