Getting Fruugo
February 23, 2009
Yesterday, I was among a group of people given an overview of Fruugo by their VP of Marketing Janne Waltonen.
I’m not 100% sure why a group of Nokia employees were invited. It seemed to be just a chance to build the word of mouth about the service in a positive way, and also to manage the somewhat unrealistic expectations of the service.
Janne was not selling too hard, and instead he used a jovial and relaxed manner to convince the audience that, although Fruugo was on to something good and it could and should acheive something of value, we should not to expect this to be new Google – contrary to what was quoted recently.
Oddly, there was no coffee or any other such niceties, which seemed a bit…frugal. But anyway, from what I could gather, Fruugo is building something of value.
I don’t think this is going to revolutionise the social side of shopping. Contrary to the “Web 2.0″ look of the beta site, Fruugo is not a particularly social experience at all. So far there is only a comment field, a simplistic rating score, and … that’s about it. So it is certainly not revolutionary in the social sense.
But what it does do is allow SME’s to sell their products to other European countries. It allows consumers to understand what they are buying, and to trust that they will get it. In a nutshell: that’s it. Fruugo are trying to become the lubricant for SME e-commerce, starting in EU and then for the world.
I haven’t done a thorough analysis of the business potential here, but suffice to say the big name investors must realise that 99% of businesses can be defined as SME, and that these business make up 40-50% of GDP globally right now. These SMEs all suffer from the same barriers to trade: linguistic, logistic and legal. Fruugo will attempt to remove these trade barriers, or at least make them leapable hurdles rather than 10m high walls.
If they succeed with this, then they get a piece of the long tail. But this is not all about niche products. Many of these products are useful, fairly mass-market products that just cannot easily make it across the borders. Yet.
The good news for Fruugo is that, if it succeeds, it will have built something which will be very difficult and expensive to replicate, which is the essence of a sustainable competitive advantage.
These are not easy times to be starting a business that relies so heavily on consumer spending. But perhaps by reducing the barriers to trade, they may actually be one of the companies that gets us out of this financial mess we’re in. So, for that reason at least, I think we should all wish good luck to them!
How to do Social Media Marketing without access to the internet.
February 18, 2009
Social Media Marketing is an an interesting mix of marketing, PR, sales and customer service, and is about engaging with communities. Famously, Dell now does this well, and are no longer in Hell. My friend Mr Whatley does a great job of this for SpinVox, IMHO. To do this, of course you need access to the internet.
But there is another way. It just takes doing something brilliant, like making your store front completely kick ass.
So you make something that rocks, ahem. Then you add the extra piece of genius, which is to make the dials go all the way to 11.
The design and the comic flourish disrupts expectations and connects with a shared passion.
You have created a piece of Social Media without access to the internet.
Then someone takes a photo and puts it on Flickr. And you have yourself a piece of awesome internet marketing without even turning your computer on.
Job done.
Pro-active Customer Service
February 2, 2009
A couple of years ago, a LSE study called advocacy drives growth showed that a 1% reduction in negative word of mouth resulted in £24.8 million additional revenues. Also, a 2% reduction in negative word of mouth correlated with just under 1% growth of the company.
With all this talk about Social Media Marketing, I wonder if actually Social Media is best used for Customer Service (as Dell have been doing well after their previous hell - that’s a lot of rhymes) rather than blogger outreach of the PR kind. Just because it is called Media doesn’t mean it is an advertising channel.
Most of the time advertising agencies just want to use Social Media as a channel to promote the microsite that they are building. Instead, the opportunity is really in getting to customers when they are just beginning to get frustrated and engaging with them in an open social way in their spaces before they have really felt the need to complain. Even better is energizing existing customers to become an army of volunteers who will answer questions for behalf of the company.
And then when it comes to marketing communications, a thorough understanding of the actual consumer issues should help identify what needs to be communicated. People are discussing brands online, so this should be the bedrock on which any advertising is based. Most of the time it is not, and instead we are treated to rather random insights which have no connection to creative which makes for ineffective advertising. Great advertising should be rooted in known consumer wants and needs, should have KUDOS and should be made with propogation in mind.
But at the very least, I wonder how many calls to customer service centres are for similar problems that could have been solved pro-actively?
