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Computing, Libraries, Tennis, India & other interests of Vikas Kamat
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| Feature-Tease |  | ||
| Feature-Tease is Bad for Business What is Feature-Tease? These days it has become very common for service providers to entice customers by giving glimpses of features (also called premier versions) that the customers don't have, in the hope that customers would want them, and would pay for them. This is called Feature-tease. First, a story from India (that's where I learnt most of my lessons): In our family shop where we sell clothes, if a customer comes in to buy a product, say under ten bucks, he is never shown products that cost more than twelve bucks. The idea is that if the customer likes a product that he cannot afford, then he is not going to be satisfied with the product he eventually buys. I think it is very true. What is worse is that the customer might not buy anything today. Now enter consumerism,where every product is available to anyone who wishes to try a hand on it. The critics review them, magazines compare them, and people with bigger wallets buy better products. That's a given, and we understand how it works. Feature-tease comes in when the vendor tries to seduce the buyer into buying something in the nick of time, or into something that the consumer wouldn't have bought otherwise. It's like selling life insurance at airport check-in counter, or Hotmail asking you to upgrade when your mailbox becomes full, with "See what you are Missing" messages. It has become so rampant that we don't even think about it. Imagine the car telling you at a stop light, "If you spent $5000 and upgrade your engine you can reach 60 mph in four seconds, instead of the eight it takes right now", or the wife telling "I should have married Dave". That's feature-tease. It is a reminder of what you don't have. IMO, feature-tease is very offensive and hence very bad for business. Most strategists don't realize this and engage in aggressive feature-teasing. Feature teasing is different from impulse-selling. Catering to impulse-buying habits is indirect marketing; feature-teasing is a direct approach, and a lousy one at that. More business advice from the trenches:
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| Out of Stock Items on Sale | | ||
| Business Wisdom from the Trenches
A businessman has written a thank you letter (yes, a letter, as in with paper and pen!) for the business tip I gave on how to handle more customers than you can, and asked for more such tips. So here it goes: When you don't sell something, sell it for a song My family has sold clothes for over a hundred years now, and it is mandatory for boys of the family to serve an apprenticeship in the shop. This happened when I was twelve years old - One villager bartered very hard to bring down the price of a saree. He claimed that the same saree was being sold for a lower price in a competitor's shop. The Customer -- "Can you reduce the price of the saree to 30 bucks please? That's the price in the other shop on the next street". My uncle --"No Sir, they may appear same, but our product is of higher quality. We sell it for 45 bucks to others, but since you are a regular customer, I discounted it to 40" Customer --"Can you reduce the price of the saree to 30 bucks please? That's the price in the other shop on the next street". My uncle -- "Why don't you buy it there then?" Customer -- "He is out of stock today". My uncle -- "Oh! When we are out of stock, we sell this saree for ten bucks!!"
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| Why Open-source is Better | | ||
| A Story and Why OpenSource Rocks I grew up knowing very little about the stock market. My father had raised me with a strong prejudice against investing in stocks, equating it with gambling. Some years ago, after I had my own company, a friend of mine, who worked at Cisco visited me. Cisco stock was a very hot then, and I asked him why should I invest in Cisco when I can invest in my own company. His one line reply awakened and educated me -- "Vikas, your talent pool has three engineers; Cisco's has 30,000 !". This is the same reason why OpenSource software (free software that people can enhance) is superior to any properietary software. Microsoft, with all its wealth can commit, say a thousand programmers to enhance their operating system. But OpenSource has a million people enhancing Linux!! Get it?! There is just no way a few brilliant men can compete against the collective ideas of a few thousand billiant men/women. In my comparisons of Apache with IIS, PHP with ASP, or Linux with Windows NT, the OpenSource software certainly comes out the winner -- feature to feature.
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