For the past two months, I’ve had a @Fido account and it is driving me crazy. Don’t get me wrong.  The service works.  It’s when you need customer service that the proverbial shit hits the fan. Online, it’s easy to add services. I’ve found it impossible to remove them, however, when no longer needed. This…

From time to time, for reasons of practicality, I end up flying an airline other than Singapore Airlines. Generally, as on this occasion, I wish I had been traveling by SQ.  Here’s the story. I arrived at Heathrow and made my way to the Emirates counter in terminal 3, to check in just a little…

We live in the age of brand experience. Yet, again and again I find that brands the world over fail to create a strongly differentiated and positive brand experience. Three back-to-back brand experience failures makes me write this today. The first experience was on December 3rd morning.  We were in Bangkok, where I had been…

Watching the test match between India and England on TV in India I was staggered at the level of advertising repetition that I experienced. During one hour, I decided to keep track of the commercials aired. The brands and the number of times they advertised during the hour period are below. As one can see,…

A recent article in Lift Cannabis News Magazine entitled Cannabis Brand Wars got me thinking about the challenges of building a brand in a stigmatized or “underground” product category such as recreational cannabis.  While recreational cannabis use may have become legal in several US states (e.g., Colorado and Washington), and Canada maybe considering making recreational…

I watched the movie “Short It” last night on my flight back to Singapore and was reminded about the self-centered and corrupt nature of banks and banking executives. Why do I say banks and bankers are corrupt? Both personal experience and research suggests that banks and and, on average, bankers are liars and cheaters! Let’s…

  The movie theater business offers insights as to how firms can find new opportunities for turning around dying businesses by understanding consumers and their needs better. For movie theaters in the US and Western Europe, viewership peaked in the late 1940s and has since slid by 80% or more, depending on the market. Television…

The last fortnight saw the second quarter announcements of performance from both the Coca Cola Company and PepsiCo. Although PepsiCo significantly outperformed Coca Cola’s negative 1% growth in net sales (and a 3% decline in profits) by reporting a top line growth of 4% (and a higher profit rate), they both seriously underperformed when compared…

A Times of India article on July 29, 2014, reporting on the launch of the Mi 3 smartphone by Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone manufacturer, said that “Xiaomi has claimed that its Mi 3 smartphone went out of stock in just 5 seconds, … when it was put up on sale on Flipkart today. Last week,…

An internet cancellation horror story has gone viral and is causing Comcast a heartburn! According to the BBC, Ryan Block, a technology journalist, wanted to cancel his Comcast internet service. The call to cancel his service turned into a 20-minute ordeal. The Comcast “retention specialist” who handled the call refused to accept his request and…