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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘corporate culture’
17.06.2014
In an age of social media, you would think it was the most stupid thing to try to shut down the biggest online community you have.
Ikea has done just that, on IP grounds, against Ikea Hackers, by getting their legal department to send Jules Yap, its founder, a cease-and-desist letter after her site had been going for eight years. In that time she had sent customers to Ikea, after they were inspired by the new ideas her community had on doing new things with Ikea furniture.
There are arguments that Ikea could have been liable for any injuries sustained from the “hacks”, but that’s daft. Are we really that litigious as a society, prepared to blame someone for something we ourselves freely chose to do? Ikea has instructions on how to build their furniture, and it’s your own choice if you are prepared to go against them.
And eight years is an awfully long time to bring a case against someone for trade mark usage, rendering this claim particularly weak.
There are other Ikea-hacking websites and Facebook pages as wellâso it’s even dumber that Ikea would go after one with such a huge community, a website that has an Alexa ranking currently in the 20,000s (in lay terms: it has a huge audience, potentially bigger than that of Ikea’s corporate site itself in Jules’s country, Malaysia).
Jules says that she has to take down the ads as part of her settlement for being able to retain the siteâads that simply paid for her hosting, which she might not be able to afford to do any more. (Some fans have offered to host for free or provide new domain names.)
The Ikea Hackers logo doesn’t look remotely like the Ikea one, which would readily imply there was no endorsement by the Swedish company.
Therefore, Ikea’s statement, on its Facebook, holds very little water.
Vi är glada fÜr det engagemang som finns fÜr IKEA och att det finns communities runt om i världen som älskar vüra produkter lika mycket som vi gÜr.
Vi känner ett stort ansvar mot vüra kunder och att de alltid kan lita pü IKEA. Det är viktigt fÜr oss att värna om hur IKEA namnet och varumärket används fÜr att kunna behülla trovärdigheten i varumärket. Vi vill inte skapa fÜrvirring fÜr vüra kunder om när IKEA stür bakom och när vi inte gÜr det. När andra fÜretag använder IKEA namnet i kommersiellt syfte, skapar det fÜrvirring och rättigheter gür fÜrlorade.
DärfÜr har Inter IKEA Systems, som äger rättigheterna till IKEA varumärket, kommit Üverens med IKEA Hackers om att siten frün slutet av juni 2014 fortsätter som en fan-baserad blog utan kommersiella inslag.
Essentially, it uses the standard arguments of confusion, safeguarding its trade mark, andâthe Google translation followsââWhen other companies use the IKEA name for commercial purposes, it creates confusion and rights are lost.’
This can be fought, but Jules elected not to, and her lawyer advised against it. It’s a pity, because I don’t think she received the best advice.
On Ikea’s Swedish Facebook page, some are on the attack. I wrote:
I would hardly call her activity âcommercialâ in that the ads merely paid for her web hosting. I doubt very much Jules profited. But I will tell you who did: Ikea. She introduced customers to you.
While your actions are not unprecedented, it seems to fly in the face of how one builds the social aspects of a modern brand.
The negative PR you have received from this far outweighs the brand equity she had helped you build. It was a short-sighted decision on the part of your legal department and has sullied the Ikea brand in my mind.
This won’t blow over. It’s not like politics where people are disinterested enough for all but the most impassioned to retain memory of a misdeed. (For example, does Oravida still mean anything to anyone out there?) Ikea is a strong brand, and mud sticks to them. Some years ago, I met a woman who still had a NestlĂŠ boycott in place after the company’s milk powder incidents of the 1960s. And all of a sudden, Ikea’s alleged tax fraud (see here for the SVT article, in Swedish) or the airbrushing of women out of its Saudi Arabian catalogue come to mind. They’re things most people forget, because they go against the generally positive image of an organization or Ingvar Kamprad himself, until there’s some misstep from within that shows that things are rotten in Denmarkâor in Sweden, as the case is here. Or is it the Netherlands, where its company registration is?
Brands are, in particular, fragile. I have maintained for over a decade that brand management is increasingly in the hands of the audience, not the company behind itâsomething underpinning my most recent academic paper for the Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing. We all know that there must be as much consistency between the views of the brand held by the organization and those held by the public. The greater the chasm, the weaker the brand equity. Here, Ikea is confirming the worst of its behaviour done in the name of its brand, all for the sake of some euros (I won’t say kronor here)âmeaning the consistent messages are not in clever Swedish design, but between what it’s doing in this case and what it allegedly does in Liechtenstein.
And since the foundation that controls Ikea is technically not for profit, then it’s a bit rich for this companyâaccused of tax avoidance by calling itself a charityâto be calling Jules’s activities ‘commercial’. It is hypocritical, especially when you bear this in mind:
In 2004, the last year that the INGKA Holding group filed accounts, the company reported profits of âŹ1.4 billion on sales of âŹ12.8 billion, a margin of nearly 11 percent. Because INGKA Holding is owned by the nonprofit INGKA Foundation, none of this profit is taxed. The foundation’s nonprofit status also means that the Kamprad family cannot reap these profits directly, but the Kamprads do collect a portion of IKEA sales profits through the franchising relationship between INGKA Holding and Inter IKEA Systems.
The tax haven secret trust the companies use is legal, says Ikea, which is why it pays 3¡5 per cent tax. I have little doubt that the complex structure takes advantage of laws without breaking them, and Kamprad was famous for departing Sweden for Switzerland because of his home country’s high taxes. The cease-and-desist letter probably is legal, too. And they show you what mentality must exist within the organization: forget the Swedishness and the charitable aspects, it’s all about the euros.
Tags: 2014, brand equity, branding, business, corporate abuse, corporate culture, ethics, Facebook, Ikea, Ingvar Kamprad, intellectual property, Kuala Lumpur, law, Liechtenstein, Malaysia, Netherlands, PR, public relations, social media, Sverige, Sweden, tax, trade mark, website
Posted in branding, business, culture, internet, marketing, Sweden | No Comments »
05.02.2014
This came up today at Victoria University where an old client of ours asked about my 2013 campaign. I remembered there was something about education that I wanted to address at the time.
One of the stranger emails during 2013 came from a former classmate of mine at Rongotai College. A brilliant guy at his sporting code, and from memory, a fair dinkum bloke. Unfortunately, he gave a fake return address, so I was unable to get my email to him (even though I wrote one of those ‘Hey, great to hear from you after all these years’ replies). He’s not on Facebook, either.
His message went along the lines of why I never mention Rongotai College in my biographies, and criticized me of snobbery and being ashamed of the place.
Those who know me know that I have little time for snobbery.
It was odd since in my publicity during both elections, Rongotai College is mentionedâno more and no less than the two private schools I attended. You only had to go as far as the third line in the bullet points in my bio to find Rongotai there. That was the case with all my 2010 brochures and in my 2013 Vote.co.nz profile. (My 2013 fliers had less room and my schoolingâanywhereâwas omitted.) And it regularly came up in speeches, especially at my fund-raisers, which were held at Soi, co-owned by an old boy.
I admit that sometimes I say, in conversation, that I was ‘Dux at St Mark’s and Proxime Accessit at Scots,’ simply because ‘School Certificate at Rongotai’ doesn’t say a heck of a lot about me. It’s normal just to talk about where you finished each stage of your education.
For the same reason, I skip my Bachelor of Commerce degree since I did honours and then a Master of Commerce and Administration. I also skip Man Kee Kindergarten in Kowloon, Hong Kong, where I won the tidiness award at age three.
I’m sure I wouldn’t find his fifth form sporting achievements on his CV.
I assume he didn’t check the footer to this website, under ‘Connected organizations’, since he didn’t make it to the third line in my bio. There, I only mention St Mark’s and Scotsâfor the simple reason that these are schools I still work with: I serve on the alumni associations of both. My hands are full now with two upcoming centenaries, but: Rongotai College has simply never asked me.
I’m wondering whether the writer himself has a bit of a chip on his shoulder about the place. Might he have reason to believe it was inferior if the other two were “ĂŠlite”?
Rongotai College did, let’s face it, have some issues in those days.
On the plus side, the sporting record is decent. The fact that opera singer Ben Makisi came out of there during that time is another proud moment.
Rongotai College showed me the importance of being my own man, and understanding peer pressure, to which it is unnecessary to succumb. I never did.
The first guys to help me out in business were my mates at Rongotai, such as Matthew Breen and Andrew Bridgeâand Andrew and I have stayed in touch.
Rongotai College also showed that for every racist dickwad there was a rugby-playing Samoan or Tongan student capable of metering out justice.
However, and I hate to say this, it also demonstrated leadership dysfunction in those days. There were serious senior management problems that filtered down to the rest of the place, which I witnessed, though some teachers thankfully remained steadfast.
During that era, Rongotai was less than nurturing despite the best efforts of some of its teachers, such as Will Meehan (who helped shape my writing style in my fifth form when I began thinking about working in media, and endured my extra practice in my exercise books) and Dave Reynolds.
So when I was offered a half-scholarship on the strength of my School Certificate marks, I took it.
However, the ĂŠlitist tag, for either St Mark’s or Scots, is inaccurate.
While I enjoyed St Mark’s and Scots more than my time at Rongotai, it’s daft to call either ĂŠlite. There were many parents, who did not come from money, who worked hard to send us there. At any of the private schools I attended, none of my contemporaries felt they were above the others. I did, interestingly, encounter this behaviour at Rongotai, where being in the A-stream went to a few lads’ heads.
My time at Scots was better for me, since there was a culture where each student should seek out his own path and excel at the things they loved the most. That’s not a function of money, it’s a function of leadership and education. There was also greater camaraderie,.
Headmaster Keith Laws may have his criticsâhe hinted as much at the leavers’ assembly to meâbut these aspects of Scots remained firm. Perhaps it was cultural, or perhaps he engendered them. Regardless, I thank him for his decisionâthe buck stopped at the head’s officeâfor granting me that scholarship.
Finally, if I was trying to bury my Rongotai connection, I certainly wouldn’t have been seeking out a lot of the lads on social networks over the years. Or attended the funeral of the father of one of the old boys in 2013.
So, for the record, no, I’m not ashamed of my past.
Tags: 1980s, 1990, Aotearoa, corporate culture, dysfunction, education, history, Jack Yan, leadership, management, mayoralty, New Zealand, politics, Rongotai, Scots College, St Markâs Church School, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara
Posted in business, culture, leadership, New Zealand, politics, Wellington | No Comments »
22.01.2014
My dislike of Google is no secret, and, as a precaution, I have every known Google tracking setting turned off. I even block the Doubleclick and YouTube cookies. However, I have to manage a page at Google Plusâand Google cleverly tracks you through its Plus service.
It doesn’t lie about it:
When you use our services or view content provided by Google, we may automatically collect and store certain information in server logs. This may include:
details of how you used our service, such as your search queries.
But you wonder why they bother having a web history page. My web history is turned off, but it needn’t matter: Google is still tracking me and giving me useless information.
How do I know? Its friendly Google Plus suggestion, asking me if I know a Senger Ralf:
I don’t. I run a few Facebook groups, and as most Facebook users know, the site is plagued by fake accounts. It’s not uncommon for me to need to block a dozen a day. Senger Ralf was one of the borderline cases, so after searching on DuckDuckGo, I tried Google.
It also claims that I have downloaded 39 apps. This is BS. I logged into Google Play recently and without any move on my part, 30-plus apps started coming down. Thank goodness none of them got installed, but Google now inaccurately thinks I am into a whole bunch of useless games. A blessing in disguise, then: the less accurate the data on me, the better.
The documentary, Terms and Conditions May Apply, is great to watch if you ever come across it. Google’s spying is revealed there, along with that of others. The documentary maker even reveals that Google covered up its original privacy policy on its site, deceptively passing off that its earliest dated from 2000, when there were ones before that. The 1999 policies, which are now on the site (Google has a habit of stopping dodgy behaviour when it is busted), included terms such as:
Googleâs policy on our wholly controlled and operated Internet sites is to respect and protect the privacy of our users.
and:
From time to time, there may be situations where Google asks you for personal information. When we intend to use your personal information, we tell you up front. This way you can decide whether you want to give us the information or not. In case you change your mind or some personal information changes, we will endeavor to provide a way to correct, update or remove the personal data you give us.
Upon your first visit to Google, Google sends a âcookieâ to your computer. A cookie is a file that identifies you as a unique user. It can also store personal preferences and user data. A cookie can tell us, âThis is the same individual who visited Google two days agoâ but it cannot tell us, âThis person is Joe Smithâ or even, âThis person lives in the United States.â
How times have changed. (In 1999, I was a Google fan. Understandable if that was their privacy policy.) Now it tracks you when you have turned off your web history, which gives you the false impression that Google no longer looks at your searches, and it uses your name and avatar for advertising purposes, even when you have turned off Google Plus endorsements.
It pays to be extremely wary of this firm, because it never says what it means.
Finally, if you are a Wordpress user, and you have Google concerns, then be aware that the big G is tracking you there, too. The Wordpress dashboard uses Google fonts. The way to fix this is to download a very small plug-in called Disable Google Fonts (hat tip to Fontfeed). If you like the look of the fonts, just install them on to your own hard driveâthey are open source.
Tags: corporate culture, culture, deception, Facebook, Google, law, privacy, trading, USA, Web 2¡0
Posted in business, culture, internet, technology, USA | 8 Comments »
05.01.2014
 I’ve been reading this Grauniad interview with Rory Stewart, MP, referred by Jordan McCluskey. I’m told that Stewart, and Labour’s Frank Field are the two worth listening to these days in British politics. On Stewart, someone who can speak with a Scots accent and has lived in Hong Kong must be a good bloke.
Two quotations resonated from this interview, which I posted on Tumblr this morning.
Our entire conceptual framework was mad. All these theoriesâcounterinsurgency warfare, state buildingâwere actually complete abstract madness. They were like very weird religious systems, because they always break down into three principles, 10 functions, seven this or that. So theyâre reminiscent of Buddhists who say: âThese are the four paths,â or of Christians who say: âThese are the seven deadly sins.â Theyâre sort of theologies, essentially, made by people like Buddhist monks in the eighth centuryâpeople who have a fundamental faith, which is probably, in the end, itself completely delusional.
And:
We have to create a thousand little city states, and give the power right down to all the bright, energetic people everywhere who just feel superďŹuous.
The second is familiar to anyone who follows this blog: my belief that people are connected to their cities and their communities, probably as a counterpoint to how easily we can reach all corners of the world through the internet. We want that local fix and to make a contribution. Power should be decentralizing in the early 21st centuryâwhich is why I thought it odd that the majority of my opponents in the mayoral election took the line of, ‘We should cosy up and further the cause of statism,’ even if they did not express it quite that way. In every speech. Yes, a city should work with central government, but we do different things and, being closer to the action, we can find ways of doing it more effectively and quickly. With statism being an aim, then the regular entrepreneursâor even as Stewart says, ‘bright, energetic people’âcame further down the list. For me, they were always at the top.
But the first quotation is more interesting. In my work, especially in brand consulting, I’ve harboured a dislike for the manuals that get done but are never referred to. Better that a lot of work goes into a 15 pp. report than scant work going into a 150 pp. one. The former might not look impressive but if every word in there is filled with substance, then it can help get an organization into high gear. And the shorter one is usually harder to write because more preparation goes into it.
In short: take out the wank.
Strip out the wank and you can see the truths for what they are. And if they don’t apply, then try to find ones that do.
Yet to make ourselves look smartâremember, I did law, and that area is filled with a lot of itâwe bury things in jargon so that we keep everything a closed shop. Every profession has such a tendency. However, when things are actually revealed in plain language, does it make the specialist look superfluous? On the contrary, it makes them able to connect with an audience who come to appreciate their expertise. (On a side note, in terms of car repair, this is why I go to That Car Place.)
So when we start dealing in international geopolitics, we want to keep the power among a closed shop. The words that Stewart used served to highlight the gulf of the occident in its dealings in Afghanistanâthat is the context of his remarkâand it connects with a story I remember about a certain US policy institute when I was studying law. Our lecturer said the failure of the institute in the countries it went to was its expectation that a US solution could be imposed, whereby everything would then be all right. Use enough jargon to make it all sound legitimate to the casual observer. The consequence of this (whether this was his conclusion or mine, I do not recall): blame them when it doesn’t work.
Without understanding the cultural context of why things are the way they are in a given systemâand lacking the knowledge to analyse it and quickly localizing your knowledge and gaining the contextâmake for a disadvantage. It must be said that even some within a system don’t realize the context! But you can strip away the mystery by simplifying the language, removing the jargon, and understanding things the way they are. Progress comes from understanding, not from creating mysteriesâand Stewart is wise to have come to the conclusions he has, thanks in no small part from a global, well travelled context.
Tags: Afghanistan, Aotearoa, branding, Conservative, consulting, corporate culture, culture, England, globalism, globalization, Hong Kong, Labour, language, law, London, mayoralty, media, New Zealand, newspaper, policy, politics, public policy, Rory Stewart, Scotland, statism, The Guardian, UK, USA, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara
Posted in branding, business, culture, globalization, Hong Kong, leadership, New Zealand, politics, UK, USA, Wellington | No Comments »
20.11.2013
When surfing, there are precious few people who, like me, de-Googled their lives. There’s the odd blog post here and there, but, overall, those of us who took the plunge are few and far between. It still puzzles me, given the regular privacy problems that I find on Google Dashboard (Google supporters will argue that at least they have a dashboardâFacebook doesn’t).
But it appears various states’ attorneys-general (or ‘attorney-generals’ according to USA Today) in the US are concerned about Google’s privacy breaches, too. Two years ago, I uncovered how Google’s lied about its opt-out procedure: Google may well have tracked people, who believe they had opted out from its Ads Preferences Manager, for years. More recently, it was busted, by the Murdoch Press, for tracking people using Apple’s Safari browser. (The day they were busted, they stopped doing it.)
The Ohio Attorney-General’s office summed up the case:
Google generates revenue primarily through advertising. Through its DoubleClick advertising platform it sets third-party cookies â small files in consumersâ Web browsers â that enable third-party advertisers to gather information about those consumers, including their Web surfing habits.
By default, Appleâs Safari Web browser is set to block third-party cookies, but from June 1, 2011 to February 15, 2012, Google circumvented Safariâs default privacy settings and set third-party cookies on Safari Web browsers. Google disabled the circumvention method in February 2012 after the practice was widely reported on the Internet and in the media.
The attorneys general allege that Googleâs circumvention of the default privacy settings violated state consumer protection laws and related computer privacy laws. The states claim that Google failed to inform Safari users that it was circumventing their privacy settings and gave them the false impression that their default privacy settings would block third-party cookies. In turn, usersâ Web surfing habits could be tracked without the usersâ knowledge.
My blogging about something and going to the Network Advertising Initiative is nothing compared to when the US media gets hold of it. Maybe I could have gone to the US media at the time, but chose not to. I still believe it shows a pattern here about Google’s corporate culture, and that the company will do anything when it comes to its profitable, multi-milliard-dollar advertising business.
However, the pay-out, of US$17 million, is around four hours’ worth of Google Adwords’ earnings. So really, we’re not talking about a huge amount here. Maybe Apple Safari users just aren’t worth that much?
On that note, I’m wondering whether we should wind down our Feedburner subscriptions in favour of the default one on Wordpress. It’s much uglier, but it’s not Google. As Google still refuses to resolve the problem about holding on to my old blog data without my permission, the only recourse may be to kill my entire Google account. I’ve now removed my membership of one Analytics account (it only took Google a few years to get that sortedâbut less than the four years it took to get my confidential information off Adsense), and there are a few other work things still tied to it, including the Lucire Google Plus page.
On a similar note, I see some people are upset this month about being forced to get a Google Plus account just to comment on YouTube, including YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim (though probably not upset enough to de-Google in most cases). My advice: you really won’t miss commenting on YouTube, since I refused to link my basic Google account with my YouTube several years ago. Get a blog and write your own entry if you want to comment publicly, or write a Tweet or Facebook status update with the YouTube video link, and get things off your chest that way. It’s worked for me and I don’t have to engage some of the daft things that appear among YouTube comments.
As to the YouTube commenting petition, I have a feeling Google won’t care, unless you’re prepared to fight them for years, which is what I had to do to get some basic private data off their systems.
Tags: Apple, California, corporate culture, Google, law, Ohio, privacy, social networking, USA, Wordpress, YouTube
Posted in business, culture, internet, media, technology, USA | 11 Comments »
27.05.2013
I’ve known of this for some time through Medinge: the globalizing of The New York Times. This has meant the retirement of The International HeraldâTribune name, one which brand experts are divided on.
On the one hand, the NYT doesn’t have it wrong. There are global newspaper brands already, namely those that have taken the opportunity of the internet, viewing it was a chance to build their goodwill, rather than as a threat. The Guardian comes to mind, and even the Daily Mail has become a well known international news source. The snobs must hate it. It’s obviously worked out that The New York Times‘ brand is stronger than The International HeraldâTribuneâs, and in this globalized era, it wants to push only one.
Others, meanwhile, seem to have regressed. The Timesâs momentum has been lost, thanks to its paywall experiment, at the precise time others went on a growth spurt. The Daily Telegraph, which for the 1990s and a part of the 2000s was the source for online news, has fallen behind other dailies.
What this century has shown us is the realization of global businesses, regardless of how large or small you are. If you don’t capitalize on things at an international level, you risk becoming an also-ran. Everything you do potentially reaches the whole planet, so why not build on that as part of your strategy at the very beginning?
I may be affected by talks with my father at a young age about how foreign exchange worked, and my godfather first introduced me to the currency conversion tables in the newspaper each day when he wondered about my converting prices of cars from Motor into what they could cost in New Zealand. I must have been around seven at the time. From there, you get the inevitable idea that exports are good, just as valuable as selling to a loyal domestic market.
As of today, as the image above shows, The New York Times is advertising its global edition to New Zealanders. That’s a Kiwi-targeted ad in the pic above from one of our advertising providers on Lucire. Yes, it is selling its tablet and smartphone accessâand why not? Again, it makes perfect sense to capitalize on the available technology.
The numbers say that portable devices outnumber traditional desktop ones. My feeling that things will converge even further, and later this decade, the ĂŚsthetic will be such that you won’t be able to tell the difference between the app and a traditional print publication in terms of the look.
If older businesses hadn’t begun down this route earlier, then it will take a massive corporate cultural change to make it happen. Newer ones may well be at an advantage. The message remains clear: if you don’t treat all people, regardless of nationality, as someone connected to you, then you’re missing out.
Tags: business, corporate culture, export, foreign exchange, globalization, Jack Yan, Lucire, media, Medinge Group, publishing, The International HeraldâTribune, The New York Times
Posted in branding, business, culture, globalization, internet, marketing, media, publishing, technology, USA | No Comments »
29.09.2012
I recently posted this apt quotation on my Tumblr:
Itâs marketing 101â[Vodafone New Zealand] seem to breach the rules quite regularly and youâd have to hope that these signiďŹcant ďŹnes are a signal to them that they canât continue to do that.
It’s from Sue Chetwin, CEO, Consumer New Zealand, on how Vodafone is cavalier about staying within the letter of the law in the Fair Trading Act.
I can believe it. Because Vodafone sent me an invoice for 22¢ on September 7:
And it is the principle: because since 2006, I have not been a Vodafone customer. And since 2009, one of my companies has not been a Vodafone customer. In fact, since March 2009, I have no ties with Vodafone whatsoever, either personally or as a director of a company that uses Vodafone.
On the same invoice is an ‘Opening balance from last statement’ for $4¡21, which they debited from my credit card on February 25, 2011. But that time, I received no invoiceâthey just went ahead and did it.
When I called Vodafone, I was told that the charges were made on a calling card that was still valid. Problem: I have never had a calling card with Vodafone.
And now, today, they revealed that they took $24 in 2010.
But as Vodafone is guilty of 21 breaches of consumer law in a July case aloneâand was found guilty of misleading customers over Vodafone Live and its $1 a day services the year beforeâyou can summarize that something is very rotten there.
I’d swore I’d never go backânek minnit, they’ve acquired TelstraClear. Oligopoly much?
At Vodafone’s request via Twitter, I have emailed them the following. It does contain the usual pleasantries at the beginning and the end, omitted here for brevity. This summarizes the entire case so far.
This is further to SS’s request on Twitter that I send you these details. I will note that two customer services’ officers on the call care centre have also been investigating.
Attached you’ll find a bill that I was sent via email on September 7. You’ll see it’s for 22¢, and that in April 2011, another $4 was debited from my credit card. A phone call to Vodafone today revealed that over $20 was taken in 2010.
The problem with all of this is that I have not been a Vodafone customer since March 2009. If you want to split hairs, I actually haven’t been one since 2006, I believe, but one of my companies was between 2006 and 2009.
Here’s what I recall.
⢠Became an Ihug customer in 1998, but left Ihug for Saturn in 2000. I kept some toll calls with Ihug but switched back to TelstraClear some time during that decade. Your records show the account was closed in 2006âalthough I was also told a contradictory statement that the account was not closed.
⢠Lucire Ltd. was a Vodafone customer on a three-year contract between March 2006 and March 2009. I am a director of that company.
Here’s what I understand from Vodafone (gleaned from conversations on September 8, 9 [I think] and 29).
⢠In 2010, Vodafone debited over $20 (I believe $24) from my credit card. In 2011, it debited $4. In 2012, I get a bill for 22¢. (Note: I’ve never received a bill from you since I left except for the 22¢ charge.)
⢠I have been told various things. On September 8â9, I was told that the 2011 and 2012 charges were due to a calling card. (Note: I have never had a Vodafone calling card.)
⢠Today I was told that the charges were due to toll calls. (Note: TelstraClear has handled all my toll calls since 2006, if not before.)
I was promised a refund of the $4 in one of the early September phone calls. My credit card statement shows no such refund. I have confirmed that the credit card details you hold are correct. Worryingly, they are also currentâwhich they cannot be if I left you in 2009 and my credit card originally expired that year.
I also began receiving spam from you this week for a cellphone number that was with you, but has not been with you since 2009.
Here’s what I don’t get if I was still a customer:
⢠I don’t hear from you guys for three years. All of a sudden I start getting spam from you;
⢠I’ve never received a single invoice from you for the money you’ve takenâat least not till September 7, 2012.
So I’m pretty sure you know that I’m not a customer of yours.
Now, I’m willing to take my share of the blame. I should be reading every line of my credit card statement. But, I’d also like you guys to refund what you’ve charged since I ceased being a customer.
There’s also the buggy Air New Zealand site where they shifted the blame to me for not clearing the cookies or understanding how the back end of their website works, but I’ll leave that for another day. What they didn’t figure was my taking screen shots of what I did.
PS. (October 15): Vodafone has just emailed me asking that my credit card details be updated. So much for ‘We have made sure your account is cancelled.’ But since they updated them unilaterally in 2009, I imagine they will just do it again. Air New Zealand, meanwhile, sorted out its bug and apologized, so there will be no post about that.âJY
P.PS. (October 15): I’ve been on the phone with Vodafone. Now I’m told that in June 2009, I was charged $116¡30; in July 2009, $43¡43; in August 2009, $63¡51. All for toll calls. All while not being a Vodafone customer. The amounts appear to have been debited from my credit card each time. No invoice was ever received this end though Vodafone claims that they sent them to me via email. This is dodgy already since I have never opted for emailed invoices, and that they had always come in the post prior. Lucire Ltd. was a Vodafone cellphone customer till, I recall, March 2009, and up till then, I had invoices mailed to me. I was an Ihug customer (allegedly till 2006) and also had invoices mailed. So why the change? I still find this very, very hard to believeâit’s as though Vodafone cheekily took money knowing that I was not a customer and is using email as an excuseâjust as it originally claimed that I had a ‘calling card’ and that that was the reason I received my 22¢ bill.âJY
P.P.PS. (October 15): TelstraClear says I have been with them for tolls since May 6, 2008, which is later than I thought, and also later than the 2006 date Vodafone gave in the last September phone call. It doesn’t change the core argument though, but it does give us a precise date on which to start any inquiry.âJY
P.P.P.PS. (October 16): Chris from Vodafone calls and can find charges almost every month from May 2009, a few in 2010, and one in 2011. He’s promised to get them refunded. It really sounds like I’ve paid for tolls twice. He’s as puzzled as I am why I have never been posted bills since that was how Vodafone always did it while I was a customer till March 2009. Apparently the 2011 refund was never done.âJY
P.P.P.P.PS. (October 27): No sign of any refunds on my credit card statement.âJY
P.P.P.P.P.PS. (October 27): AimĂŠe says she has organized a refund of NZ$433¡11, which appears to be the total debited from me without notice between May 2009 and April 2011. (More disturbing is that my previous credit card expired in November 2009, so how they managed to continue billing without my updating my details is beyond me.)âJY
P.P.P.P.P.P.PS. (November 3): Vodafone emails me a PDF credit note for $433¡11. Is it over? I hope so!âJY
Tags: antitrust, business, corporate culture, customer service, ethics, law, New Zealand, telecommunications, Vodafone
Posted in business, culture, New Zealand | 3 Comments »
22.07.2011
Bob Cringely wrote (found via Stowe Boyd):
Facebook is a huge success. You canât argue with 750 million users and growing. And I donât see Google+ making a big dent in that. What I see instead is more properly the fading of the entire social media category, the victim of an ever-shortening event horizon.
Each era of computing seems to run for about a decade of total dominance by a given platform. Mainframes (1960â1970), minicomputers (1970â1980), character-based PCs (1980â1990), graphical PCs (1990â2000), notebooks (2000â2010), smart phones and tablets (2010â2020?). We could look at this in different ways like how these devices are connected but I donât think it would make a huge difference.
Now look at the dominant players in each successionâIBM (1960â1985), DEC (1965â1980), Microsoft (1987â2003), Google (2000â2010), Facebook (2007â?). Thatâs 25 years, 15 years, 15 years, 10 years, and how long will Facebook reign supreme? Not 15 years and I donât think even 10. I give Facebook seven years or until 2014 to peak.
Iâve said it for a while based on the opaque corporate culture at the company and its apparent disregard for privacy (the opposite to what it was like in 2006). Arrogant cultures like that donât last long. Iâve similarly said nothing is forever, with Altavista as my example.
Itâs likely that the social phenomenon passes, not because it is invalid, but because most occidentals will have found their tribe of 150 and interact with it. Or, an economic change or a collaboration tool brings people into connection with others that sees their daily routines change.
Facebook is a social tool, one which surfaced as a recession loomed, and grew as people desperately tried to define their networks or retreated from hardships. Once either task is done, then it loses its appeal. It loses further appealâhence the embrace of Google Plus by the Google Kool-Aid drinkersâwhen networks get to a certain size and undesirable elements kick in, either people you donât like (or have come to dislike through contact) or the need for too much maintenance. (See emailâs loss of utility through spam, Wikipediaâs loss of accuracy through power-hungry editors and incompetent additions, or Google Blog Searchâs loss of decent results through splogs and its own Adsense programme.)
Facebookâs culture will likely give it seven years as it will deem itself invincible and fail to adopt to shifting consumer needs.
Tags: 2010s, Beyond Branding, collaboration, computing, consumer behaviour, corporate culture, Facebook, future, history, social networking, USA
Posted in business, culture, internet, leadership, technology, USA | 2 Comments »
16.07.2011
Above is Rupert Murdoch’s apology for the actions of the News of the World, to run in the UK in the wake of the resignations of Rebekah Brooks and Les Hinton.
They’re great words, and they’re straight out of the PR 101 playbook.
Some might say they’re a trifle too late, as was Mr Murdoch’s meeting with the parents and sister of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.
Some might question whether this apology would even have been issued if the Murdoch Press could have kept a lid on the scandal, if the Metropolitan Police had not rediscovered its bottle, and if The Guardian had not been persistent.
More telling about this apology’s sincerity is whether real steps will be taken to change the culture within the Murdoch Press.
We still have an organization with nearly half a century’s worth of bullying tactics, skirting the boundaries of the law and allegedly breaking them, and a culture of the ends justify the means.
Shifting that culture is going to be a tough call, not while so much of the behaviour has been institutionalized.
It is going to take some effort on Rupert Murdoch’s own behalf, because, like all organizations where the boss’s personality is so strong, it’s going to rest on him to lead a cultural change. Allowing an insider who has always tolerated such behaviour to take the helm is not going to do an awful lot: you don’t get change by reinventing the past.
I remain sceptical when I think back to all the scandals that the Murdoch Press not only uncovered, but had a hand in generating.
I remain sceptical when I think back to the victories Murdoch has had over earlier controversies, and whether he believes he can weather this one simply with the passage of time.
The world is a different place, and he may just be compelled to see this out.
He may be 80, but he still has young kids by his third wife. Let’s hope he understands that he needs to do right by the 21st century, when people in the occident are more alert to corporate moves and their unsavoury hand in our daily lives. Given that his youngest children won’t have him around for as long as his oldest ones, what he has is his legacyâand unlike Prudence, Elisabeth, Lachlan and James, Grace and Chloe will spend more of their lives hearing about their Dad second-hand than first-hand.
I think back to when we wrote Beyond Branding, and how we forecast that consumers would drive integrity and transparency through their demand. It looks like this is being played out now.
The question I have is this: is this merely the first salvo in everyday people taking back their power, and will we sink back into disinterest in a month or two?
Rupert Murdoch would not be in this position if we didn’t have a love of the gossip in The Sun and News of the World. We, the people, made this man rich.
If the Murdoch that critics write about is the real man, he’s betting the farm on disinterest being the order of the day come the autumn.
In my own world, I recall that last September, when the Fairfax Press reported on the possibility of the resurrection of the Wellywood sign, the silence on even the anti-sign Facebook group was deafening. One person even said he would vote for my rival and eventual winner, Celia Wade-Brown, because I did not do enough to fight the sign.
All it took was five months for one man to forget that I was the only mayoral candidate who actively fought it. I am not picking on him alone, because I don’t believe he was the only one to suffer from a short memory. We all do it.
Instead, this one issue alone, trivial by the standards of the Murdoch story, took 14 months before anger subsided enough for it to resurface in force with a new news report.
This is the defence of the bully boss and the pompous politician: the hope people forget, thanks to our lives being harder during a recession. The tougher the economy gets, the more they think they can get away with, since they hope our attention will be swayed. Without a comfortable life, will we have the luxury of monitoring those in power?
It’s up to us to get wiser and realize there’s more important news than what the tabloid press tells us is interesting.
It’s up to us to realize that celebrity news really does not affect us, unless it’s truly inspirational. And 99 per cent of it isn’t.
It’s up to us to understand that ‘sources close to’ do not constitute the truth, nor are those sources capable of the mind-reading of their subjects.
And it’s up to us to remember the past, rather than look fondly on it with rose-coloured glasses.
Corporate misbehaviour alone can fill a newspaper, as can the incompetence of our leaders. Yet we see little of either since advertising is affected by blowing the lid on the first, and a power base is affected by blowing the lid on the second.
The first is what killed the News of the World, not a sudden crisis of confidence by James Murdoch, who put his name to the announcement of its closure.
The second contributed to the delay in a Murdoch apology, in the hope that the Murdoch Press’s close ties to the Conservative government would be sufficient to weather it through the scandal.
Look around, especially in this election year in New Zealand, and you see very similar forces at work.
Regardless of what Murdoch does, real change starts with us.
Tags: 2011, advertisement, Aotearoa, Beyond Branding, corporate culture, culture, England, ethics, Facebook, Fairfax Press, globalization, integrity, journalism, London, mayoralty, media, Murdoch Press, New Zealand, newspapers, people power, politics, power, power structure, public relations, transparency, UK
Posted in business, culture, leadership, marketing, media, New Zealand, politics, publishing, UK, USA, Wellington | No Comments »
08.07.2011
So James Murdoch has announced the end of the News of the World. It’s no biggie: as others have discovered, a domain name for The Sun on Sunday has been registered, and if this is by an agent of News International, it simply makes sense for the Murdoch Press to consolidate its tabloid brands and raise the circulation of The Sun.
Chatting about it here at work today, my view was that the problems plaguing the Murdoch Press were cultural, and shuttering one paper really wouldn’t make much difference. I described Rupert’s former hands-on style and, like him or not, the man was the master of his craft for years. He knew the sort of headlines that would shock and get sales. Whether one admires the craft is another matter, though, it should be noted, it made the guy a multimillionaire.
It’s easy to forecast that News will allow the shock of the death of the 168-year-old newspaper brand to set in, push through with the BSkyB deal, and relaunch the paper under its new name, hiring some of the 200 staff back.
It’s not the first time Murdochs have rejigged or renamed a newspaper. Already I can envisage a ‘Reach for your new Sunâ headline being proclaimed in a Saturday edition, apeing what happened in the 1960s.
Interestingly, another writer also believes in the cultural explanation. Simon Dumenco points to how News behaves in the US, seemingly operating in a fantasy-land.
In Britain, on Wednesday morning, every newspaper carried the hacking scandal on the front pageâwith the notable exception of The Sun, which led with a pregnant Victoria Beckham. (The Guardian had all 10 papers, but The Sunâs page one has since disappeared, presumably due to a copyright complaint. I have put that front page below.) The hacking scandal appeared on p. 6. Dumenco points out that when gay marriage became legal in New York, everyone there carried that news prominently, except for the Murdoch Press, which relegated it to a bottom-of-page headline in its New York Post, and a second ‘What’s News’ in-brief item in The Wall Street Journal.
Dumenco predicts that the public will tire of it, though, as I blogged earlier this week, in 1997 a lot of people swore off tabloids. Not a lot changed in the immediate years after that. But we can only hope: one of our predictions in Beyond Branding was that consumers would demand greater transparency and integrity. That certainly has held true for a lot of sectors. They are true, even of media, but the cycle is longer thanks in no small part to the habits some people have with news providers. Nevertheless, it is happening.
As news consumers move onlineâand there is plenty of evidence of this shiftâit’s possible that the audience will shift to media that are perceived to be fairer. Those wanting confirmation of various biases can find them in niche media or blogs. There are more people analysing the media, so it may be easier for people to discover critical thinking behind the stories.
There’ll always be a mob mentality (people have banded together since they began socializing) and tabloid journalism will not disappear (there’s a sense of Schadenfreude, especially of celebrity stories, while there’s inequality in society). But this week’s example of the fairly rapid withdrawals of advertising accounts from the News of the WorldâFord, Reckitt Benckiser and Renault come to mindâshows that the public has a line that shouldn’t be crossed. The internet has allowed people to group together to make their viewpoints known, and it’s refreshing to note that, more often than not, we do so for good causes and a sense of justice, rather than for divisiveness or harm.
Tags: 2011, advertising, blogosphere, branding, corporate culture, England, history, internet, Jack Yan, London, media, Murdoch Press, New York, newspaper, NY, people power, rebranding, social networking, social responsibility, UK, USA
Posted in branding, business, culture, internet, marketing, media, publishing, UK, USA | No Comments »
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