Of course I did not make it. My wife did since she had originally bought me the Kindle and had worked out the (now) 3 replacement Kindles. She spoke with them (although finding the right customer service number was a little bit tough) about the fact that my Kindle had simply died. They said no problem and sent a replacement Kindle to arrive THE NEXT DAY at Amazon’s expense. It was already loaded with my contact information such that as soon as I charged it up and turned it on it was easy to download the books that I had previously purchased into the replacement device from the content manager.

I am pleased, impressed and yes still a little perplexed. While I still hold that Amazon should send a replacement Kindle to any customer that complains their Kindle has stopped working (which they have done) as long as the customer sends back the old one (still at Amazon’s expense which is the case). But I have two questions.

1) Why don’t they publicize this feature? Possible answer – Amazon does not want to advertise that the device is somewhat fragile since that could undermine overall customer perception particularly in view of the new e-reader devices on the market. Anyone that calls will receive a replacement Kindle but one HAS to call.

2) Did anyone from Amazon actually read my blog post such that they decided to send me a replacement Kindle? I’m hardly one to be over-impressed with my own impact or self-importance so I highly doubt that.
Sales of e-books had reached just shy of $ 100 million as of August 2009 according to the Association of American Publishers. Additionally analysts are calling for sales to triple again over the next 13 months. And the Kindle is Amazon’s best selling item across ALL of its markets.

The Kindle aims to be the I-pod of e-readers. I think Amazon has a good shot there. However I do think they missed an opportunity with me to ‘buy’ up to the newer device the Kindle 2 or large screen tablet. I would have paid 50% (or less) of the purchase price of one of those newer devices. Instead I have a refurbished original Kindle – which I am grateful for but it was an opportunity lost as far as I am concerned.
Of course I could just be being greedy. Amazon continues to prove to be one of the leaders in customer service and satisfaction. And that’s high ground to hold.

There are some experts questioning the reporting data and how those numbers could be tabulated so quickly. I’m no expert but am questioning them too. Are they counting units shipped? If so, that should be pretty easy. The fervor is a demand creator. Clever don’t you think?

Extrapolating from the U.K. sales data and the approximate 2-to-1 relationship between Modern Warfare 2 and the previous U.K. record holder Grand Theft Auto IV, Schachter has estimated that Modern Warfare 2 has sold around 7 million units across the globe in its first 24 hours. For comparison purposes, GTA IV sold “only” 3.7 million units on its first day. The game costs U.S. $ 60 (or you can buy the Prestige edition for $ 160) – if you can get it at all. Analysts are saying that MW2 will sell over $ 1 billion dollars of the game in just a few months.

How many products do you know of that have the capacity to sell a billion dollars in as short a time frame as several months? My 20 year old son has obtained the game and rates it a WOW! (not World of Warcraft which is another HUGE franchise). He is not at all surprised the game is doing so well – it’s that good – or so he says since I have not seen nor played the game and likely will not ever do so.

My WOW was the speed and breadth of how MW2 caught the attention not just of gamers but business people (jealous ones no doubt). What it means to me is that if a company comes up with the right product, at the right price, for the right audience, amazing success is still possible.

In a constantly changing world some things won’t change so much. And that’s reassuring to me. Is it to you?

What got me thinking about the history of sleep was something I read not long ago about Ben Franklin and sleeping during the time of the American Revolution. Apparently there was a ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep’. Such that people would get up after sleeping for several hours in the middle of the night and be awake for some period of time prior to going back to sleep after sleep halftime.

From Wikipedia – Segmented sleep, divided sleep, bimodal sleep pattern and interrupted sleep are modern Western terms for a polyphasic or biphasic sleep pattern found in medieval and early modern Europe and many non-industrialized societies today, where the night’s sleep is divided by one or more periods of wakefulness. This is particularly common in the winter. Maybe they were talking about NFL coaches who seemingly sleep in their offices in season.

Because members of modern industrialized societies, with late hours facilitated by electric lighting, no longer have this sleep pattern, they may misinterpret and mistranslate references to it in literature. Common interpretations of the term ‘first sleep’ are ‘beauty sleep’ and ‘early slumber’. A reference to first sleep in the Odyssey was translated as such in the 17th century, but universally mistranslated in the 20th.

Far be it for me to get into things like REM (Rapid Eye Movement), Circadian rhythms, and dreams (I will leave that to Aristotle and Freud), but it is interesting to me that in all of human history only over the last 200 years (gas lighting came into practice in 1807) or so have humans sleep habits dramatically changed. It seems to me that many people do not value sleep as much as they should. The health benefits of a good night’s sleep are fairly well documented. It also helps make people less cranky (maybe President Obama should mandate sleep for Congress as they seem particularly cranky although it might be due to them getting too much sleep in House and Senate sessions).

But the notion of a true ‘first sleep’ with an ‘awake’ period in between and a ‘second sleep’ is foreign to me and, I would imagine, most people. I wonder how Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan ‘slept’. Did they get their 8 hours? Rampaging and pillages is very tiring after all. Maybe it is that since there was so much less to do at night before the advent of electricity, sleep was valued more as a pastime? After all, until recently people did not have Facebook to keep them up at night.

How about you – do you have a nightly targeted sleep amount? And are you cranky when you don’t get it?

Though credit is being cut back, the data shows that the number of debit card mail offers nearly doubled from Q408 to Q109, while checking account solicitations grew by 29%.

But that’s merely on part of the story. The days of doing the heavy lifting of holiday catalogs in your home also appear to be over. Even though I watch and keep close tabs on the industry I still am shocked at how few catalogs we receive at home. And we (ok maybe my wife and daughter) have a history of buying via catalogs.

Marketing strategists interested in reducing expenditures have seemingly won out here, convincing many traditional catalogers to not mail at all or substantially reduce the volume and page counts of their catalog mailings. While this can make the bottom line look better in the short term in the long term this tactic will likely backfire and in a big way. Catalogs drive online sales. And retail sales. As much progress as has been made in tracking the ability to track online and retail sales driven from the receipt of a catalog or mailing still leaves a lot to be desired.

And what of the relationship (companies love to think they have relationships with their customers) with customers? Sure customers and prospects can be sent emails (provided they have given their permission) but the customer ‘experience’ is vastly different to that of receiving a physical catalog.

Customers will forget about companies that do not mail any more. Out of sight, out of mind has not changed even in a wobbly economy. Better tracking or catalog recipients will aid in offering an understanding of exactly how the customer wants to engage with a brand. If cross channel data cannot be tied together, then it’s possible, even likely, the wrong conclusion can be reached.

I’m not advocating wantonly sending catalogs the way it was done five or even ten years ago. But the drastic reduction in this channel offers great opportunity for a smart marketer to gain share of voice and more importantly increased sales, better relationships with customers and conduits to new customers.
I enjoy receiving and flipping through a nice catalog that contains things in which I am interested. Don’t you?

When it comes to pricing the big box supermarket cannot be beaten. So for basic staples the big box is where I do my shopping. The clerks are quite pleasant, the store is clean and bright and there are many choices. But for things like fresh produce, a butcher that grinds meat on the premises, (unlike the supermarket), and overall higher quality ingredients, we go to the local grocery. The people there are even more pleasant and they go out of their way to pack your bags and even help take them to the car if that’s what you need. They have a better salad bar, better fresh soups and their selection of fish is also better than the supermarket.

And to no one’s surprise the local grocery is of course more expensive than the supermarket, at times substantially so. It is bothersome since to get the best deal and the best quality products, you actually need to go to two markets that are well within walking distance of one another (almost nobody ever actually does this however). The parking lot is much easier to navigate at the local grocery although it does tend to get quite full (it is solely dedicated to the grocery), whereas the supermarket has a vast parking lot that is seemingly never full since it shares space with a number of stores.

The owner of the grocery is quite visible in town, donating food to many causes and helping out residents in a number of ways. And while I am certain that the grocery is quite a profitable enterprise I don’t begrudge its success since it continually delivers on the promise of ‘being large enough to have what you want – small enough to get to know you.’

I don’t know what would be the ‘promise’ of the large supermarket, other than we have a lot of stuff and we are low-priced and we have cool scanning so you can check yourself out.

But what I am most happy about is that we actually have a choice and they are so dramatically different. I like having choices don’t you? – Especially when the choices are so easy to contrast and compare.

Out of warranty (this one was more than a year old) apparently I am out of luck. So now I have several titles in my account that I cannot view unless I purchase a new Kindle or I guess return my Kindle to Amazon (at my cost) and hope that they can somehow repair it for less than the cost of the now reduced price of $ 259. I paid $ 399 for mine and it does thrill me that not once did Amazon offer me some sort of discount on purchasing the latest version which apparently is superior to the one that I have. Of course mine now does not work at all so a book with no printing is on a par.

A little history – the first one I received did not work and I had to send it back. Amazon had me check a bunch of things prior to agreeing to replace it which they did with no questions asked. Then I had another one which after several months also went dead. Again through the checklist that Amazon has you do on the phone (a half hour or so) with their tech person before they assented to my sending it back for yet a third which I received and has been working fine for more than a year.

I have been (and remain) a fan of Amazon in general. Jeff Bezos is a smart guy and has defied his critics in managing a company that has a stellar reputation for customer service and intuitive product offerings. But I really don’t understand the idea of not offering a replacement for a broken Kindle ANY TIME a customer asks. After all aren’t I going to use that platform to purchase e-books for the foreseeable future? And I buy a fair amount of books. I can ‘return’ those titles that I downloaded but have not read for some sort of rebate but that really does not solve my problem. I love e-readers (as well as traditional books) and think they will only get better (how about color folks and a back-lighted screen option?).

So now I have to reconsider my entire relationship with Amazon’s Kindle. Maybe the Sony Reader, or the new device from Plastic Logic, or maybe even the new Barnes & Noble device. What a shame, the Kindle had me at hello.

Today’s consumer has many ‘channel choices’ when it comes to information. While there remain a substantial number of people that actually watch infomercials, (c’mon you know who you are) Gen Y’ers and Millennials look at infomercials with bemusement and at times with condescension. Those groups are the future of commerce. The real question is will people still respond to being shouted at?

Audience relevancy, offer, and interesting creative continue to rule the day when it comes to direct marketing and as far as I am concerned MARKETING in general. I can safely opine that this will not change. But in a world where the laws of attraction have taken hold in the advertising world is there still room for shouting out the message in order to be heard?

Today more than ever consumers need to be drawn to a brand and its message. We all talk about higher levels customer engagement, about creating a better and more enjoyable (even fun) customer experience. Personally when I am shouted at I shut down and really don’t hear the message.

Billy Mays was phenomenally successful and a true marketing legend. Here’s hoping that with his passing we see the beginning of the end of the shouting of advertising messages. We all deserve much better. Don’t you think so?

OK so we all get it – smart phones are the future – and actually the present. But how many times have you tried to access a site on your smart phone and waited, and waited and waited for the pages to load? This is because the site you are accessing is not optimized for viewing on a mobile device.

100% of .mobi sites must be optimized for viewing on a mobile phone, the main advantage of .mobi, from the users’ perspective, is that they are theoretically guaranteed a site optimized for usage on the go. This means the website can be optimized for hard factors such as smaller screens, device form/size, device input/output options, existence of embedded sensors (acceleration, location, touch, etc.), as well as soft factors such as expectations of immediacy of results, context awareness under a shortened attention span (compared to home use of the Internet). Although a .com or any other extension can technically employ the same optimizations for mobile phones as .mobi sites, in practice, only a fraction of them are, thus necessitating content adaptation solutions.

3G transmission speeds are pretty fast, but nowhere near what people have become accustomed to when we use super fast 100MPS+ connections via cable or fiber optic networks. Personally when I have to wait more than, oh let’s say 2 seconds for a page to load I begin to get impatient and even a bit annoyed. (I bet I am far from alone here). .Mobi sites address this far better than any increase in transmission speed can – at this point. It won’t be long before smart phone transmission speed rivals that of cable and fiber optic wired connections –of course for me that day cannot come soon enough.

People will have to become more familiar with going to the .mobi sites but many sites when accessed on a smart phone give the option to go to a mobile version that is optimized. The experience and interfaces are so much better – check it out for yourself and let me know what you think.

My thoughts as I headed out to San Diego centered a testy proxy fight between a DMA board members and the DMA board itself. Many of our clients and my colleagues decided not to attend this year for various reasons, expense being the primary reason given. I think that those folks should regret their decision not to attend.

The DMA still has its feet firmly implanted in direct mail and old habits die hard. But the leadership of the DMA has recognized the move to new marketing channels and has made strides in making information and learning on new marketing channel a focus. The proxy fight was settled and I for one was happy with the points brought up and the resolution. The DMA is an organization that can well use some pot stirring. And the exhibit hall while a nice place to see old friends and associates but walking around the floor makes me feel like I am caught in my own ground-hog day moment. It’s not working and feels outdated.

We direct marketing folks like to cite the measurability of the direct marketing process. We are even a bit smug about it. For what reason I do not know as the rest of the advertising world has always considered direct marketers red-headed stepchildren as long as I have been involved. But I did hear a lot of honest talk (particularly at the DMA Global Leaders Forum held on Monday) questioning if direct marketers are measuring the right things when it comes to web analytics and e-commerce in general.

It’s fine to have all these cool tools but if the wrong things are being measured or the measurements are not indicative of what is really happening we are drinking our own Kool-Aid. I think it is great that these kinds of questions are asked and answered – or at least they are trying to be answered.

I read Ad Age, Adweek, DM News, and occasionally Brandweek, and more and more the stories are similar. All marketers and marketing agencies direct and otherwise are trying to do the same things for their clients –help acquire and retain more customers. The marketing world has been turned on its head in the past nearly two years. Lower marketing budgets, higher accountability and demand for better ROI have changed the landscape for ever more. I am more optimistic that the DMA is heading on the right path and can and will remain a relevant organization.