It’s an entertainment precinct which is down on its luck. The most visible sign of that is, um, the signage. Barricaded shopfronts, peeling paint, old decaying signs. Not to say there aren’t some well-presented businesses; the Dome, Oliver’s Restaurant, The Elephant & Wheelbarrow, the Brass Monkey all have attractive street presentation. Yet well-established businesses like Kakulas Bros, the Greek Taverna, Nandos, Cinema Paradiso, The Re Store and Tony Barlow, have faded signs, missing letters and facades that signal neglect and indifference. To me, those businesses degrade the precinct; they have the capacity to lead and they don’t.

Without a strong commercial interest group or re-development authority there is only local government to rely on and the City of Perth probably have other planning priorities. Left to its own devices it will continue its slow decline as the City of Perth foreshore develops and the western suburbs snare all the stylish restauranteurs.

If you had a brief to market the area you would need the authority to compel businesses to conform to presentation standards. This would include making signage fit its surrounds. Ageing brick buildings can accommodate painted signage, but big tin signs just look crap.

From presentation standards you would progress to coherence and then ambience, events and promotion. Let me just deal with coherence. I’d create 4 destinations. The Backpacker’s Quarter, The Mediterranean Quarter, The Asian Quarter and the Arts Quarter (which would include fashion).

Now you have four identities you can build on, each in a defined area, each of which can be separately marketed. You’d theme each quarter; street furniture, signage, art and walk trails.

Yes, it’s possible. Yes, the government would need to spend some money. But without an intention to create a focus, the slow decline will continue.

The resignation of Foster’s CEO Trevor O’Hoy, previously their CFO, was accompanied by an admission that the company paid too much for Southcorp wines. The rise of the Australian dollar was also mentioned. But I believe the company’s woes have more to do with a lack of dynamism in wine marketing.

New world wine-makers like Australia re-defined the business 20 years ago when they introduced the economies of machine harvesting and scientific principles into wine making. Victims of their own success: they made cheap wines better. Yellow Tail and Jacobs Creek became big brands in the US and the UK, and the market went ‘great! I can get quality bottled wine for US$5 dollars’. But that’s not where the profit is for wine makers.

So explain to me now why I should pay $20 a bottle for a better wine. That’s a hard sell. Let’s explore a few scenarios:

Marketer: You should pay $20 because this is an older wine, with more fruit intensity.
Consumer: It looks the same as the $5 bottle, just has a different year on it. How do I know it’s better?

Marketer: You should pay $20 because this is a better brand than the $5 bottle.
Consumer 1: It’s the same brand I buy for $5 a bottle. It just has a different bin number on it.
Consumer 2: How do I know that’s a better brand? I’ve never heard of it.
Consumer 3: There are hundreds of brands here. How the hell do you expect me to know which ones are better?

Marketer: You should pay $20 because this wine won a Gold Medal
Consumer: I bought a $5 bottle the other day; that won a Gold Medal too. Get a life! Most of those bottles over $20 don’t have any stickers on them.

Marketer: You should pay $30 because this is a restaurant
Consumer: Thanks very much for charging me $30 – I spend $8 when I buy the same wine in my bottle shop. It certainly demonstrates that paying more money gets me a better product.

If Fosters were a marketing-orientated company they would have picked up these attitudes and altered their marketing. They haven’t.

They needed to address the confusion over quality. As the owner of a portfolio of brands they could have introduced an internal ranking system and promoted that. Yes, the Penfolds Bin 389 won a Gold Medal in 2003. But it is only the 9th best shiraz we made that year. And it’s only drinking at 23/100 compared to the 1964 Grange.

And when I go to a bottle shop, instead of the 20%-off per case, which seems to be the only marketing promotion these guys ever use, why can’t I buy a vertical pack of the same variety? 2001, 2003, 2005. Let me see for myself how good the 2001 is.

I can see no evidence that Foster’s have used any social software to increase involvement of wine drinkers. Why can’t their consumers use the web and mobile technology to communicate with each other and the company about wine? Is this not a social product? Why have they not developed an International Wine Wankers Game?

And where is the packaging innovation? Why can I not buy single serve wine? I’d love to be able to go on a picnic and take two sachets of sparkling, one chardonnay, one riesling and a dessert wine instead of being locked in to one big heavy bottle. You can treat wine like a commodity and you’ll get commodity prices or you can look for a deeper understanding of consumer’s attitudes and the nature of the product. They will lead to more profitable product differentiation.

From the Foster’s web site: “We believe in placing the consumer and the customer at the heart of everything we do”. *Rolls eyes*. *Reaches for a drink*.

I saw a great use of the Telstra Phone Words product this week. Phone Words is the add-on service that lets you use a 13 or 1300 number in conjunction with a word. Makes it easy to remember a phone number. It’s particularly useful in radio advertising because the listener has a good chance of remembering the number. Er, the number-name.

The one I liked was a Day Spa business called Blush. The Phone Word was sign-written all over their limosine, used as part of their premium packages. Nice touch.

When I read 13DaySpa I imagined a Day Spa that lasted 13 days and I thought, that’s about how long I’d need. It cemented the name; here I am blogging about it.

Blush own the URL also, so clients who type in 13dayspa.com.au will be able to find them (it’s not set up yet though). This is an excellent integration of signwriting, phone and web marketing. Too often people treat their marketing channels as separate. I encourage clients to feature their phone number prominently on a web site. Web sites are a browse that needs to be turned into a sale. That’s much easier to do over the phone.

The fourth best thing about Japan, after Japanese ladies, Cupie Mayonnaise and the kotatsu is the attitude to customer service. Americans can give good service, but it’s different: it’s good because they want you to tip them. Not so much a service as a transaction. Australian service is better than it used to be, but people still confuse being of service with being subservient. Grudging niceness. Convict heritage.

The Japanese seem to understand better than most cultures that people like to be made to feel special. Attention to detail, extraordinary packaging and an unmatched willingness to correct any defect or problem in their product.

There is a tradition in Japanese retail of greeting the customer when they walk into your shop. The greeting Irrashaimase or its more casual form Irrashai rings out a million times a minute across the land. Such a simple thing to do. Acknowledge the customer the second they walk in your door. It carries more than one message: ‘I know you’re here. Thank you for coming. I’ll be with you as soon as I can’. Part of our unwillingness to do this in Western cultures I think stems from the ‘rude to shout’ value system – the staff are usually not next to the entrance. But if I had any retail clients, I’d be recommending public greetings as Standard Operating Procedure.

Businesses in Australia seem to be under the impression that once you’ve arrived in their store they’ve made a sale. Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean they’ve made you a customer. Every time I go to a coffee shop or restaurant I am re-assessing their worth; will I go back there or not? I think most people work on that principal.

Location is important, of course. But I don’t shop regularly for groceries at the closest supermarket. Nor do I regularly use the closest bottle shop. Because I don’t like those stores and I have a choice. My local coffee shop has my business because I am recognised when I go there. The little Indonesian girl sings out my name in greeting when I arrive and farewells me by name when I leave. And I have a rapport of some sort with the pretty girl that doesn’t smile enough and the shy ethnic ladies who work in food prep.

My third visit to a nearby Dome Coffee House earlier today will be my last. Blank-faced processing by the guy behind the counter. Not a single extra word taking my order or delivering my coffee. I realise there is a skills shortage but I don’t think it’s as serious as the training shortage.

I was interested to learn about the use of Adwords in testing potential names for books. Tim Ferriss found the name “Four Hour Workweek” the stand-out result in his Adwords testing and had a #1 bestseller. I guess he also tested “You Can Be Rich and Lazy If You Buy My Book”.

To be honest though, I was more impressed with the name Cathryn Jakobson Ramin chose for her book. It’s on the subject of memory loss in middle aged people. Come on! Guess what she called it!

Give up?

“That Memory Book”. Hahahaha. Here’s where you buy it.

There should be only two brands in Western Australian wine marketing. Margaret River and Western Australia. Although it is possible to market your wine as belonging to your local area (appellation/Geographic Indication/GI) this is a marketing blunder and wineries located outside Margaret River should follow a different path.

Margaret River has done a great job establishing a brand. The small number of pioneers who won international awards generated momentum and attracted a larger number of followers. These included well established West Australian companies, behemoths like BRL Hardy, a string of smaller cellar door operators and many entrepreneurs. All up, a great mix of different talents. That’s enough about Margaret River. Now I’m going to talk about ‘West Australia’, by which I mean, non-Margaret River.

West Australian wines are not going to cut it marketing themselves with their GIs. Although they make some extremely good wines, theirs are small and unknown GIs nationally and internationally. They just do not have a critical mass for marketing purposes. A different marketing strategy is needed that lets them market themselves as a coherent entity.

The Wine Industry Association of WA understands this problem and with the help of some state government funding and support from some corporates has established a brand as an export marketing tool. There are two problems with this. One: the positioning is not right. “Dominion of wine” says nothing about West Australia and frankly, is pompous. And don’t get me started on Australia-West.

Two: most of the WA wineries continue to market themselves on an appellation basis, calling themselves for example a ‘Great Southern’ wine, a ‘Swan Valley’ wine or wait for it, ‘Peel’.

These two problems have an overlapping solution. The great advantage Australia has as a wine-making culture is its willingness to innovate. The great advantage WA has as a wine-making region is terrific diversity of styles. It’s partly explained by being really old geologically and really big in area. A tremendous soil diversity exists and this has consequences for wine styles.

The ‘story’ of West Australian wines should be diversity and innovation, not life-style, beaches or natural environment. Here’s how this positioning overlaps the appellation issue: if you market yourself as ‘Western Australian’ you are allowed to blend wines from different regions and sub-regions in that wine. You can mix Swan Valley shiraz with cool climate shiraz from the Great Southern. This leads to a complexity you cannot get with a Swan Valley or Great Southern wine alone.

This should be the positioning of West Australian wines: Adventures in winemaking. A willingness to introduce complexity through regional diversity and a willingness to innovate with winemaking. That positioning works as well in domestic marketing as it does in export. It’s an easy-to-understand story and it gives people a reason to buy a West Australian wine.

Leslie Nassar: I spoke to him after the Perth Podcamp. He was instrumental in Radio National’s wonderfully successful podcasting effort. Their average user is 40 plus plus, supposedly well over the technology hill. Yet on a pro-rata basis they get THREE times as much email feedback from a podcast as they do from the same show when it’s broadcast. Why is that?

Leslie cites two reasons. Firstly, people are listening at their computer so the email client is within easy reach. Secondly, they have made a choice to subscribe so they have a higher level of commitment and a higher level of involvement. Hold that thought.

Also discussed during the day was the Crikey success story and I wanted to mention Stilgherrian‘s thoughts on this. He said it works because it’s made easy; all the articles are bundled up in a single email that arrives without you having to do anything. Late enough in the day to have commentary on the morning papers and perhaps a little morning news. Filling a niche vacated by afternoon papers.

You can’t explain the two successes in terms of technology alone or even content alone. Here is the similarity. They are both delivered/collected in a suitable context. We are so used to consuming media ourselves that we forget a media campaign – even a media program – must consider the context in which it is consumed.

As Marshall McLuhan so beautifully put it: people don’t read a morning newspaper, they slip into it like a warm bath.

But then again, younger consumers don’t read morning newspapers and they have showers, not baths. What is the context for new media?

Melbourne IT is a dreadful business. The leading Australian domain name registrar charge substantially more than their international competitors. More for domains. More for hosting. More for promotion. Pay SEVEN times as much for a .com or a .com.au through Melbourne IT. That would be easier to swallow if their service was better than their competitors.

The following piece of advice appears on the Melbourne IT Delegation page: ‘Please enter either only hostnames (e.g. ns1.melbourneit.com.au) for each nameserver.’ Just a little confused I rang their “24/7 Customer Support”. After listening to a fair number of advertising messages I hit all the right buttons and waited. And waited. “I’m sorry there was no answer… If you know the extension of the person you are dialling… ”

Held on for half an hour, gave up, went home. Transferring the domain to GoDaddy or Name Scout at the next opportunity.

Fingerfood Catering wanted to increase business in both the domestic and corporate markets. The site I’ve developed allows people to nominate the number of guests and the style of food, then generates a priced menu and images of the dishes. We photographed their entire product range to do this. Three days of food photography.

The menu generates dishes based on food groups so you don’t end up with six pasta dishes. NICE though pasta is. But where it gets sexy, due to some Ajaxy programming by UK based Presence Labs, is the ability to then add/subtract dishes or search for dishes by ingredient.

The site is very simple to use and deliberately collects very little information from the window-shopper. The role of the web site is to generate phone inquiries and web forms frighten them off.

I read a book by Seth Godin called the Purple Cow. The Purple Cow being a metaphor for doing something bold in your marketing. It’s a few years old now and I learned some valuable facts (Shaquille O’Neil spent $100,000 on a motor cycle. Boy did he go up in my estimation!) but really, the most important thing I learned was how to sell marketing books.

1. Find out the names of some businesses that are outstandingly successful. This is not tricky; you can look in business magazines. Get lots of names because that way you can keep each article to about two pages. A whole book about one company will be too boring.

2. Invent a magic word. One is best, two is okay but three is probably too many for people to remember. Seth used “Purple Cow”. Put the magic word(s) in the title of the book.

3. Analyse the SUCCESS of the businesses. Note that there is only ever ONE reason for a company being successful. More than one reason would take too long to explain. You need to cover it in two paragraphs. Some examples from the book: Volvo were successful because they deliberately made their cars ugly. Linux was successful because it was hard to use. Buddy Hackett was successful because he swore a lot. The Blair Witch Project was successful because the movie makers deliberately launched it with no promotional budget. A restaurant near Seth hired a CLOWN. “The results were remarkable”.

4. Describe the SUCCESS as coming about because of your magic word. Some examples from the book: The Aeron Chair was a Purple Cow. Curad bandaids with cartoon characters on them were Purple Cows. Bob Dylan is Seth’s favourite Purple Cow. Krispy Kreme understands how to manage the Cow. Starbucks, Linux, MP3s; all Purple Cows. Success only happened because of your magic word. If people use your magic word, they will be successful too.

5. Use your magic word about twelve times on every page. This will help people to remember it. Also use the word “insanely”. It just impresses people a lot.

That just about nails it but here are some other valuable things I learned from Seth. I think he may have sourced these from desk calendars:

“A camel is a horse put together by a committee”
“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle”

But there are a couple that Seth made up himself:

“It’s not an accident that some products catch on and some others don’t”. I made a note about that one.

“Companies with Otaku are the sneezers you seek”. It’s become like a mantra for me.

And how about this for a thought starter: “What if one member of every family in China sent you a nickel?” Goddammit I’d be rich! I’d have BILLIONS of Chinese nickels! This marketing stuff is INSANELY GREAT!