Many organizations use PowerPoint slides for their presentations. There has been much debate saying that too much information is presented on each slide for the brain to cope with. Cliff Atkinson says that there are 5 solutions to this problem:
Write a clear headline that explains the main idea of each slide
Break up your story into digestible bites in the slide sorter view
Reduce visual load by moving text off-screen and narrating the content
Use visual with your words instead of words alone
Rigorously remove every element that does not support the main idea
Tonight I attended a seminar by Dr. Pierre Chenet founder of Deep Insight, who provide audit systems that maximize customer retention. They also classify customers as:
Ambassadors:
Most valuable, strongly identify with the company and will recommend it
Have a sense of a unique relationship with the company
Price not an issue because of the quality of the relationship
Rationals:
Rate the relationship quality highly but not see anything unique in it
May look at other options if they come along
Ambivalents:
Not very valuable, very difficult to manage.
Two types, those pleased with what you do but hate the way you do it and those you kill with kindness but you don’t solve their problem
Stalkers:
Mostly only interested in price looking for special offers and discounts
Don’t seek uniqueness but often have high service requirements
Play different competitors off each other
Opponents:
Negative relationship with the company, generate negative value
Can be won back if problem areas are addressed properly
The Direct Marketing Association (UK) today published the results of a survey that they carried out to find out the consumer experience of direct marketing. The main results were:
1) overall the picture is encouraging for the UK direct marketing industry
2) Although 65% of people feel overwhelmed by the number of marketing communications that they are exposed to (on average 5 per day) nearly two thirds of the group had responded to at least one communication in the past year.
3) 35% of respondents claim that personal contact is the most important factor when dealing with companies, examples include telemarketing, in store demonstrations and charity street canvassers.
According to Wikipedia (free encyclopaedia) an ebook is an electronic or digital version of a book. Because university presses have a duty to disseminate information as widely as possible under proper economic constraints then ebooks can form part of its distribution strategy. An interesting article on university presses and ebooks by Mary Summerfield of the University of Chicago Press was given at the Illinois Academic Libraries Conference in March 2005. You can download the power point presentation here.
E-journals are now a common resource for scholars in their research. However, a new study from Stanford shows that some publishers are now pricing out personal subscribers to their journals. The result is that users will have to rely on the library or other institutional subscription. The article feels that publishers are shooting themselves in the foot with this policy as the individual subscribers represent an important revenue stream.
As you know the amount of email coming into our inboxes each day seems to increase each year. If you do not deal with your email in a systematic way then it can become a real drain on your productivity. Mark Hurst has produced a useful guide called Managing Incoming Email. This guide is 38 pages and includes information on spam and using filters.
Hot spots are pages in your catalogue where any product will sell better. These pages are:
outside front cover
outside back cover
first inside page
inside back page
the middle pages (if the catalogue is stapled)
opposite the order form
Always include your best selling products in hot spots and they must reflect and reinforce your brand and its positioning. A possible exception to this is that many publishers reserve their front cover for branding.
Waterstones, who are one of the major bookshop players in the UK and Irish markets with over 200 shops, have made changes to its core stock grading system. There will now be 12 grades from A to M and 6 grades for the Scottish and Irish shops. The reason for the change is to adjust the store grades more precisely based on their sell through and space. To give you examples of how many shops are in each grade there are 140 shops in grade B, 85 shops in grade G and 10 shops in grade M.
Like many university presses we publish trade titles such as cookery or music books so that sales from these can support the academic titles. In September 2005 we will publish Beautiful Day: 40 years of Irish Rock by Sean Campbell and Gerry Smyth. It tells the story of modern Ireland from the perspective of the music produced across the island during a period of rapid, decisive change. The book starts with Gloria by Them (1964) and ends with Chocolate by Snow Patrol (2004). An idea was to include a CD with the book but there were problems licensing the music. So I looked at Apple iTunes and found 17 of the 40 tracks, these can be viewed in the iTunes store for Ireland in the iMix section (search for Beautiful Day). I have asked iTunes if they can try and load the rest of the music.
