Best of the Worst: Best of the Words

Unfortunately, the motto was quite hollow. It was supposed to invigorate us and inspire our students, but it didn’t ring true in our hearts. Our flyers were printed on green A4 paper, and distributed community wide.What they really shouted was how pathetic we were. And our school was. Small classrooms, poor resources, lack of leadership, … to name but a few. When I realized the enormity of our mistake, I was determined not to repeat it. Why?

What was wrong?

If you really are the best, everyone knows it. There’s no need to tell it. It’s in plain sight. And if you’re not the best, it’s a lie. And again, everyone and their dog can see it. It’s that simple. It was the case with us. We were obviously not in the first category at all. So clients were left to draw only the latter conclusion. We really set ourselves up to fail by creating such high expectations. How could we really succeed?

Choose something tangible

We have been building our marketing campaign for our own business for some three years. But one of the decisions I made at the outset was to avoid making unverifiable claims. Instead, we would tell people exactly what we did, and leave it up to them to decide if we were good or not. Now our motto is exactly what we do: “Teach our students to use English and make it a part of their lives.”- It reads better in Chinese!

And that’s exactly what we do: students are greeted in English, classroom activities take place in English, even break-time activities require some English. We do use Chinese at times to make students feel comfortable in stressful situations, but for the most part, we encourage students to use English as much as they can.

Say it loud, say it clear!

It doesn’t have to be a complex message, it doesn’t have to use superlatives. But any motto or slogan you choose for your products should at least encapsulate the benefits of your product in ways that are tangible and identifiable. Make sure your performance matches your claims and be prepared to verify the claims. Parents hear our students using English when they arrive or leave, they call up and use English, too, when they have problems with homework. Classroom work is verified with all skills quizzes. And yet, sometimes we still fail to get our message across!

It ain’t lip-service

Many companies promise great service, but when you call up to find out about the ‘great’ service, you find out the truth. I recently was asked to telephone a local hospital in Taiwan that claimed it had an English answering service. Although it was just a survey, I was horrified to find out that if I had been depending on this service as a tourist, I might have ended up dead! I called the hospital’s ‘English’ hot line, was transferred in a bilingual telephone message to a center that picked up the phone for an answering machine! An English hotline had a Chinese answering machine! Wow!

Manage Expectations: Be realistic!

By managing expectations, the hospital could have avoided the complications, negative reports, and immense loss of face this caused some official when it went in the report that the hospital failed the assessment. By simply saying the line was only staffed from 10-4pm each day, the hospital would have got a lot of kudos for providing a needed service.

Unfortunately, the mistake this hospital made is one that many international companies make, too.

• Banks do it… HSBC made a great pitch about its services, its global standards, its quality of banking. I’m not surprised that HSBC ranked 89th out 113 companies.
• Airlines do it… British Airways claimed that they were the “World’s Favorite Airline” but provided poor service, broken cabins, and not infrequent strikes! I don’t know anyone who claimed it was their favorite airline.
  
• Even online companies do it!… Ebay made its name as an Auction website but the only place you can find the actual word ‘auction’ is in the site keywords. It’s now just a portal with cheap merchandise trading at less than 1/3 of its 2004 price. It actually drove its users away in many cases by increasing fees, and disabling accounts for no good reason.

When you’re a service oriented company, it’s vital that service is as good as you can make it. In other words, you have to walk the walk if you talk the talk.

What’s your experience marketing your business or selling products or even dealing with ‘big’ companies and their promises? How does it fit in with what I’m saying here?

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In fact, she used the software to create the following Chinese New Year notice, that we are placing on our school website and handing out to students.

In fact, she designed the funky notice. Then she exported the document using a PDF print driver called PDFCreator 0.95 (I think). The real problem came when we tried to order the software through the Interweb. I was quite surprised that the publisher called NewSoft which had an international website could run such a weird system. Rather than retype everything, here’s the email I fired off to the publisher.

Dear NewSoft…

I recently had a frustrating experience trying to buy Chinese language software from your company… Your Website for Taiwan is terrible…

1. it doesn’t work with Firefox? And that’s really not very professional…

2. when I opened it in IE7, I successfully managed to order, but the software CLOSED my browser, tried to popup a new window without my permission, and caused me to wonder why I bothered trying to order
anything from your site.

3. then when I accessed your website again, I was told that my browser (IE7) was out of date, and to download new crap onto my system… If you want customers to come into your store, do you really ask them to change their shoes and coat first… ?

I’m sorry but your e-commerce site is really awful, and I’ve done a lot of shopping online in the past: It’s not friendly to non-IE7 browsers (let’s not mention Linux!), isn’t friendly to people who can’t read Chinese fluently yet (and the buy button is so ridiculously small), and then crashed my browser, and left me wondering whether or not I had successfully completed the order.

Overall, it created unnecessary demands on e-commerce users… I wonder how many customers would bother to even try the second time, or the third time…. Like I did. Or how many would even bother to write this email… Perhaps I’ll just post it on my blog tonight…

Best Wishes
Kenneth

Unfortunately, in Taiwan there is a huge assumption for local websites that IE6 or IE7 is the ONLY browser in use. It’s like most companies are unaware of the need to develop websites that have core functionality that is accessible for non-IE6/7 browsers or systems. A kind gentleman called Frank that responded promptly to my email admitted as much. But he didn’t care to explain the sense of that.

Is your site browser friendly or browser neutral? Have you checked? With mobile blogging and e-commerce likely to become a big phenomenon, designing websites that are cross browser compatible is a necessity if you wish to be taken seriously in the e-commerce world. And Apple which uses Safari and Firefox as browsers is also growing its PC market share above 5% of late. Linux installs are also growing. Opera is also multi-platform as a browser, and is very standards-compliant. At the very least, functionality should degrade in a way that is not obvious to visitors.

But in the website I used, even the dropdown menus didn’t work in IE7 as well as Firefox. It just seems that if a company is serious about online business, the website needs to respect as many choices as possible, it needs to be properly tested, and it needs to be maintained. You can’t just build your website and forget about it.

There were other usability issues including the a javascript error, and popups to documents that can be printed out, but which may crash your browser.

So, do test your e-commerce website as much as you can before, during and after the launch. Keep it uptodate and make it as user friendly as possible. Otherwise customers will experience errors and simply close the browser, click away or enter a URL of one of your competitors, instead. All of these result in lost sales.

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Pandora is a music discovery service designed to help you enjoy music you already know, and to help you discover new music you’ll love. It’s powered by the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken, the Music Genome Project: a crazy project started back in early 2000 to capture the complex musical DNA of songs using a large team of highly-trained musicians.

Unfortunately, citing the DMCA, they have pulled almost the entire service for those outside the geographic USA. Recently, their chairman wrote:

Dear Pandora Visitor,

We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for most listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.

We believe that you are in Taiwan (your IP address appears to be ***.***.***.***). If you believe we have made a mistake, we apologize and ask that you please contact us at pandora-support@pandora.com

If you are a paid subscriber, please contact us at pandora-support@pandora.com and we will issue a pro-rated refund to the credit card you used to sign up. If you have been using Pandora, we will keep a record of your existing stations and bookmarked artists and songs, so that when we are able to launch in your country, they will be waiting for you.

We will be notifying listeners as licensing agreements are established in individual countries. If you would like to be notified by email when Pandora is available in your country, please enter your email address below. The pace of global licensing is hard to predict, but we have the ultimate goal of being able to offer our service everywhere.

We share your disappointment and greatly appreciate your understanding.

Sincerely,

Tim Westergen

This is an open letter to Tim Westergen,

Dear Tim Westergen,

You may share my disappointment, indeed. Unfortunately, turning away millions of customers in this fashion shows an incredible failure of both leadership and vision. When you turn away customers in this fashion, you unleashed a number of problems the consequences of which may very well come back to haunt both your company, and the US entertainment industry (which currently seems bent on extracting every possible ounce of flesh without understanding the long term consequences of such actions!) in general.

I think this decision, while understandable, is perhaps one of the most short sighted decisions I’ve ever seen, and is typical of companies in the US who resort to dealing with a technologically changing environment by employing lawyers whose sole function is to cover their own asses. I think this decision is bad for your (former) customers, your own company, and bodes ill for the US economy; and here’s why.

First, I realize as a small company that you have little choice; however, you have no idea of the goodwill that you are giving up now, that will be VERY hard to recoup or replicate, and that (when you do decide to reenter international markets) it will be MUCH harder because each of the markets you intend to enter will have developed indigenous competition that will give your company a run for its money or simply roll right over your company. Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and China all have hungry technology companies that would LOVE to have one less competitor to worry about today, so that tomorrow they won’t have to fight so hard once their market is established.

Secondly, it is clear to me and many billions outside the US who would like to download music legally, pay for it, and listen to music that isn’t otherwise available in their countries, are being denied choices by corporation lawyers who fail to find imaginative ways to solve the problems created by poorly framed laws. In many cases, many such individuals will resort to the P2P networks that have been the bane of IP laws everywhere. It’s only when companies realize that failing to serve such a market is WORSE for their profits and their business models that these customers will start to be treated well by companies such as yours.

Thirdly, the legal framework of the US is now such that more companies are now choosing to list their stocks in Europe (in London or one of the other large European bourses – they are shopping for legal frameworks that they find conducive to doing business, to making money, and to serving their customers. How long will it be before companies start shopping for countries with more favorable regimes for IP laws. With increasingly restrictive IP policies in the US, how long will it be before even US companies feel so constrained by the legislation that they have to move offshore.

Fourthy, Pandora.com has so much goodwill in its international customer base that I cannot believe you wish to throw it all away. Haven’t you any idea how much it will cost to buy such customers in the future? You have what many companies can’t buy, no matter how much money they throw at the problem, customer trust. If you turn your back on your international customers now, you will likely never get them back.

It’s one thing to say upfront who your customers are and aren’t. It’s another to turn your back on them, once they are your customers. I don’t believe that Pandora.com will recover internationally from this decision; I believe that internationally Pandora.com is now dead as a dodo. Other competitors in Europe (nearly 810 million potential listeners!), Asia (over 3.7 billion potential listeners), South America (371 million potential listeners), etc, will step in, they may not fill exactly the same void, but fill it they will.

Doubt me at your peril: in Taiwan, Kimo set up a long time ago, was recently purchased by Yahoo! and had built up an unassailable lead in online auctions over that time, such that when Ebay finally decided to enter the local market directly, they couldn’t shift the leader, no matter what they did. In fact, last year they bowed out gracelessly of this market and several others in Asia. They couldn’t buy an audience with their advertising budgets; the local market already loved Yahoo! Kimo auctions, even though Ebay had a better service, it was too late.

In effect, Pandora.com is giving up its real and tangible international business in exchange for the chance to create lots of national businesses as they license country by country. Internationally, Pandora.com could garner millions of listeners as a userbase to sell CDs to, make money from an affiliate relationship with Amazon.com (etc.), but as a series of national markets, some or many of these countries just wouldn’t have the population mass to justify the effort. In those others that are big enough, competition will prevent Pandora success, because Pandora will lose its lead.

So, thanks Tim, thanks for Pandora and all its wonders. It was a great service, but now the lawyers are running the company; I’ll be tuning to one of the other 10000 online radio stations. Thank god the internet is available outside the continental US, otherwise the RIAA would try to close that down, too.

Yours sincerely,

Kenneth

The license for this posting is granted to all but the lawyers employed by Pandora.com (or hired by Pandora.com for advising them) to read, print, copy and redistribute as you wish in its entirety. However, any Pandora.com lawyer or any RIAA lawyer who subsequently reads, receives or prints out any copy of this email, either in part or in whole, shall be liable to pay the sum of $10,000 to InvestorBlogger.com within 30 days because of their spinelessness in allowing this decision to be made.