Tag Archives: Marketing

March 23, 2015 · 8:00 am

Open letter to Europcar

In the year through November 2014 I had rented cars 24 times with Europcar. I don’t have the exact figure for the last 4 years but it must have exceeded ~60 times.

A few days ago I received the email below from Europcar Loyalty Programs announcing me that I had been granted the Privilege Elite VIP card (the highest in the scale, see below).

Europcar's email

Europcar’s email with the news of being granted the Privilege Elite VIP card.

See below the different cards in the Loyalty Program:

Europcar's fidelity program cards.

Europcar’s fidelity program cards.

See my response to that offer:

My response to Europcar's email.

My response to Europcar’s email.

I am pretty sure this letter will not trigger any change in Europcar’s commercial policy. But I wanted to show them how much I value their commercial policy.

Side note: since November I moved houses. I have not cared about notifying Europcar about the change. That card will be lost somewhere. I don’t care. That is my fidelity and loyalty to Europcar.

On the other hand, I am also fairly sure that at some point Sixt will charge me a similar stupid concept, I will then move to another company, no problem.

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December 28, 2010 · 6:02 pm

Impact of an AdWords campaign (cont.)

After my previous post was published, I had a conversation about it and received some comments. These made me think that it could be interesting to comment on the other 2 campaigns to gain more insight about how AdWords works and how useful it can or cannot be. First, let me share some data of the 3 campaigns:

  • Al Andalus club (Rota, Cadiz): had a cost of 29.68€ for 250 clicks, thus 0.12€ per click (CPC). It appeared in the screens 208,520 times. It used 72 words or combination of words, restricted to a circular area about 90km around Rota.
  • Standing Ovation club (Madrid): had a cost of 16.56€ for 59 clicks, thus 0.28€ per click (CPC). It appeared in the screens 166,291 times. It used 49 words or combination of words and was restricted to Madrid region.
  • Blog: had a cost of 51.96€ for 1,410 clicks, thus 0.04€ per click (CPC). It appeared in the screens 3,685,521 times. It used 41 words or combination of words and was not geographically restricted.

Even though I am not an expert in AdWords, from what I have experienced and as you can see above:

  • The more clicks it has the lower the price per click will be.
  • You may set a maximum amount of money you want to spend per day (I normally didn’t spend more than 1.5€ euro per day per campaign), this means that once that amount is reached your campaign is de-activated until the next day (ads won’t appear for some hours).
  • Using more words does not necessarily translate into more clicks. You need to find adequate words, related to the website, so it appears and appears high enough in the web. Also, some words are more expensive than others, though the price varies with the number of clicks.
  • The ads themselves need to be attractive, as it may appear many times but still needs to make people click on it. In that sense, the most successful one was that of Al Andalus (people clicked on it 0.12% of the times it appeared; 3 times more effective than the other 2 campaigns).
  • You need to focus the campaign in the segment you want to target. E.g., I first centered the area for Al Andalus campaign, until I found out that some clicks (consuming campaign money) came from Tanger and other Moroccan cities… I had to move the target area, as no one from Morocco would go to the club on a weekly basis.

I didn’t measure any kind of conversion rate as I am not selling anything through my blog nor could I check how many guests went to Al Andalus or Standing Ovation meetings thanks to ads (I was not attending those clubs); and that would be an extremely interesting indicator for any business.

Finally, my friend got the 75€ from a special offer from Google. In the Iberia in-flight magazine (“Ronda”), I have also seen some months ago codes for 50€ to be used in AdWords campaigns. So, be aware of possible next opportunities and give it a try (and you can always spend some little money as a learning experience – everything is very well explained inside AdWords tool).

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December 18, 2010 · 11:00 am

Commercial aircraft market size after discounts (update)

In an older post I already made an analysis of the aircraft discounts related to the published list prices (by the way, Boeing just raised its list prices 5.2% a couple of days ago). In that case, I used the revenues and deliveries of Boeing in the previous 3 years (38% discount was the result!).

Using that information, now that the latest market forecasts both from Airbus (Global Market Forecast) and Boeing (Current Market Outlook) are available, we can say that the real market size in the next 20 years will be in the order of 2,100bn$ (average of both forecasts in 2010 dollars).

Flow of airplanes

Another very interesting feature that Airbus published in last year’s GMF (it is not yet in this year’s publication) and Boeing used for this year’s CMO is a graphic showing the dynamics of aircraft. In it you may understand how from today’s fleet, adding new deliveries, retiring old aircraft, converting some from passenger to freight transport they arrive to the forecasted fleet in 2029.

I include below both graphics.

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February 23, 2010 · 2:12 am

Nothing like a good red wine…

The recent Tweet from Freakonomics http://bit.ly/9jsc3r, in which they tell how American supposedly fine wine aficionados could not tell the difference between the wine they were given and the one they were looking (and paying) for, reminds me of 3 different cases to point how we can be influenced in our perceptions:

  • The first is a personal anecdote. I have always preferred Coca-Cola over Pepsi, one of these people who had never bought a Pepsi in a supermarket. In 2007-2008 I did a test at home to see whether I was able to distinguish one from the other. I did the test with my partner. I was blind-folded while she poured same amount of Cola and Pepsi in two identical glasses. She left them for some couple minutes in the fridge so they would get same temperature, etc, etc. Then I tasted them. After trying the first glass I said “Pepsi, I don’t even need to try the other”. Then I thought it twice. I tried the second glass. Thought for some seconds. Then again the first. Then… then… I mixed everything in my mind and couldn’t distinguish one from the other, to the point of changing my initial choice and being wrong.

Whenever I tell this story to my friends, they tell me “I can distinguish them”: I challenge you to do so. Find a helper and take the test. Please let me know the result.

If you thought my test is not representative, here is another story:

  • This is a TED talk by Benjamin Wallace on the price of happiness. Benjamin goes exploring different luxury articles and finding that they don’t bring him or those close to him any special feeling. He indeed does a similar test to the one I did, this time with luxury oil, with more varieties to distinguish and more people to try them, the result… guess it.

 

After having read the case of the fake Pinot Noir, having suffered the non-distinguish ability of  Pepsi and hearing to the TED talk cases… we might wonder: why are we mislead so much by perceptions? Why do we pay more for something that doesn’t bring us any enhanced customer experience except for being able to tell that we paid that amount for this?

Last case I wanted to point…

  • The Dutch are well known for being a very pragmatic nation. Here you have a case, again, for wines (just to close the loop). What do you care about the brand of a wine? Let’s remove it. What do you appreciate in it? Is it the grape type? Is it the fruit flavour, the tannins? So that’s what you need to know!! The rest… better to call it “4. Red Wine” and remembering that it comes in a blue bottle… check it: http://94wines.com.

Prost!

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February 18, 2010 · 2:42 am

New marketing

Some weeks ago I attended the presentation of a book at EOI business school, “Claves del Nuevo marketing” (which can be downloaded in pdf freely).

At the moment of writing this post I have not yet read the book, though it seemed quite interesting: Eighteen different authors just gathered to write different chapters on their area of expertise.

The conference itself was quite entertaining. Two of the authors were commenting their views on metrics and on viral marketing.

They quoted some articles, videos and examples that I want to quickly refer here:

  • Article from Marshall Sponder & Cecilia Pineda Feret in Customer Intelligence, discussing the possible entry of Google on Social Media monitoring and what could this mean.
  • On viral marketing it was interesting the questioning of whether it really reaches that many people. We tend to think so, but does it really do so? Check out this funny video (in Spanish).
  • Another very interesting video: “Redes Sociales – ¿Revolución o Moda?” (the video is in English, “Social Networks – Revolution or Fashion?).

I’m just referring to these topics as discussing them at length would need many different posts. I hope you enjoy them.

That day, EOI was distributing the latest issue of the marketing magazine “Yorokobu”. I will comment in a near future different things I read there (e.g. 94wines…).

One last thing I wanted to share with you: my Lego. I had seen advertisements about cartoonfying yourself, but I found this one in the Yorokobu magazine even funnier. This is as close as I could get to myself.

Lego of myself

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