Jay Meydad's Life Mashup

A few days ago, my wife asked me to create a new brochure for her birth doula business. A quick search in my gmail inbox took me to VistaPrint’s website where I quickly completed the design process and ordered new brochures.

The last time we used VistaPrint was two or three years ago. My wife created business cards using their service and I remembered a fair experience. Since then, for a couple of years, VistaPrint has been sending me all sorts of promotional emails several times a week. Most people think that these folks are pretty good at spamming their customers, but I think differently. Probably because at my previous role as VP of Products at Spark Networks one of my team’s responsibilities was email marketing, and I know how complex email marketing campaigns and systems could become. And so, when I look at these types of things it is not from a regular users prespective.

In a nutshell, VistaPrints email marketing efforts are great for:

• They have dozens of campaigns running simultaneously. There is an offer for everyone.
• There is a clear connection between the offer received via email and the website experience. Emails are always tied to promotion codes.
• Emails are being sent several times every week. VistaPrint never drops the ball and ensures they are always on your mind. Or at least in your inbox.
• VistaPrint also offers personalized emails with dynamic content based on customers status. For example, if you start a project and then leave in the middle without completing it, within less than 24 hours you will get an email, that contains a preview of your current work and an additional discount. Just come back and complete the project. This is not that trivial when done at large scale.

I think that what VistaPrint is doing is pretty impressive for an eMarketer, and anyone who has an email marketing component in his marketing activities should look into them and learn.

The only negetive thing I could say is that as a customer you have to pay for everything on their site (very good for their business though), including for a PDF version of the file designed. So, I just waited for the shipping to arrive and last night I scanned the brochure and uploaded it.

My wife likes the result and so do I. And so, if you live in the greater Los Angeles area, San Fernando valley or Ventura county and looking for a birth doula or a private prenatal yoga instructor, you should check her brochure (below) and website – BirthSpeak

Consumers are consumers no matter what online service or product they use. Once we use a product and like it, we are emotionally attached to it and become very passionate about it. This has not changed for years, but in current days, we (the consumers) have powerful tools such as blogs, twitter and facebook, to express ourselves quicker, louder in order to make a change.

Seeing companies make a (stupid) decision and then revert back as a result of users protesting against it using all sorts of social media applications is a pretty common thing in the online world. The last example was Facebook and its T&C fiasco. Seeing more an more big offline companies acting the same way is a nice surprise for me.

Take these two sentences:

“We underestimated the deep emotional bond they had with the original packaging. Those consumers are very important to us, so we responded.”

“I feel it’s the right thing to do, to innovate as a company. I wouldn’t want to stop innovating as a result of this. At the same time, if consumers are speaking, you have to listen.”

If you think they were told by Mark Zuckerberg or another executive of some popular web company you are wrong. They were said by Neil Campbell, president at Tropicana North America, who is about to announce today, according to the NYTimes, that Tropicana is going to scrap the new packaging and return to the old one. Why? Because we , including myself on this blog, complained about the new design and asked for the old one.

So, I applaud to PepsiCo for listening to its loyal customers and acting fast. I can’t wait to see the good old carton, with orange & straw, in stores.

I was buying groceries the other day when I noticed cartons of a new orange juice brand on the shelves. Well, it took me about 5 seconds and a much closer look at the package to realize that that was not a new orange juice brand. That was the re-branded Tropicana.

So, if it took me that long to recognize a juice that I have been buying for a few years, something was not done right. Let’s take a closer look.

The old cartons used to have a large Tropicana logo, in a thick and bold “tropical island” font. The logo was horizontally displayed above a strong visual element – a picture of a large, juicy, fresh orange with a straw stuck right into it. White was a dominant background color which helped bringing the logo and the image to the front. The combination was very powerful. Cartons were easy to recognize on the shelves from 20 ft away. The entire design screamed freshness and it felt like you are buying a product that was made from oranges that were picked moments ago.

In the new design, the Tropicana logo uses a much smaller and narrower font. It is also displayed vertically which makes it really difficult to read. The slogan “100% Orange” is what is displayed horizontally and feels as the brand name. In addition, the main visual element was changed to a photo of a partial glass (visual illusion?), full with orange juice. There is also very little white area, so less contrast and more blur of visual elements. And when you actually look at the juice, it looks as someone spent hours in Photoshop trying to remove any sign of pulp and freshness. Overall, the box looks synthetic and of a no-brand orange juice made out of concentrate.

And there is more. The pulp levels labels in the new design are so small and hard to read compared to the old design.

The last funny thing is the website portion. When you visit the Tropicana website, the new box is displayed only on the home page, while the “Juice Finder” page shows boxes in the goold old design (see image below in gallery). Even the PepsiCo site still shows boxes in their old design!

I find it hard to believe that a company as big as PepsiCo, which spends millions of dollars on branding and marketing, would  execute so poorly. How can you throw away years of brand & identity recognition among millions of customers and replace it with such a lame design? And how can you release a product and start a multi-million dollars marketing campaign without updating your website?

Update (Feb 23, 2009): The new design is gone. The good old design is back. More here.

Tropicana Juice - Old vs New Design

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I just came across these holiday icons that appear on SERP pages for holiday related terms.

I wonder if that’s a way for Google to boost holiday sales grabbing people’s attention and pointing them to the sponsored results rail on the right.

Menorah (kw=Hanukkah)

Candy cane (kw=Christmas)

Candy cane (kw=Kawanzaa gifts)

I saw this Chevron ad for the “I will use less energy” campaign. Check it out. Doesn’t it sound really good?

Well, to me, despite the cool domain name, the sleek website and the fancy energy saving calculators you can find there, this campaign suffers from a serious advertising credibility issue. After all, just 3 days ago Chevron posted their best ever quarterly earnings…

Thanks Jason

Earlier today I upgraded the version of the Nullriver Installer that is installed on my iPhone. The biggest improvement in the new version, numbered 3.1, is search which makes it easier to find applications. In addition to that, the “Featured” page was updated to include a few additional applications, among them Kate, a commercial package of tools and toys.

This made me thinking about the economics of the “Featured” page and the Search results pages. After all, VC are investing and companies are raising money to develop iPhone applications and so distribution is going to be critical to succeed. So far, everyone has expected Apple to be the one selling applications via iTunes but I think that there is a secondary market that is already bubbling called the Nullriver Installer.

The thing with the Installer that makes it unique compared to popular software download web sites is that currently the Installer is the single entry point to get 3rd party applications for iPhone and iPod Touch. Hundreds of thousand and maybe even millions of jailbreaked iPhone users around the world access the Installer every day in order to search, install, upgrade or uninstall applications, games, utilities, themes and all kinds of tweaks for their iPhone. Every time these users start the Installer, the first thing they see is the list of featured applications, and from today they are also going to start using the search capabilities.

So, what should a company/developer do in order to get his app featured? I did some research but could not find an answer. So, for now, I am assuming that the list is compiled by an editor with some exceptions (my guess – Kate which charges users and therefore can pay for distribution). The search function is also very primitive and seems broken (a search for “Wiki” returned zero results).

But I think that this is just the first step in what is going to become an active marketplace (probably PPI – Pay Per Install) that is going to be developed around the Installer. Both the “Featured” page and the search result pages are too valuable to be kept as they are today. And seeing how fast the Installer has evolved so far, I expect this to happen sooner than you expect.

As I blogged in the past, the fact that the website of Apple’s reps in Israel is not apple.co.il but iDigital.co.il is a big disadvantage for them, since they do not get free traffic from search queries such as “apple.co.il”, “apple in Israel” or “Apple Israel”. Instead, other sites, including this blog, which is ranked at the top of the result set on Google for these queries, are seeing an increase in traffic as the popularity of Apple products in Israel increases over time.

Well, it looks like something is cooking and soon a new home page will be launched. The question I asked myself is, by who: iDigital or Rami Prashove, the current owner of the domain? and what is going to happen to this blog’s traffic?

So, you have decided to present at a conference, spent thousands of dollars on the booth space, renting or shipping equipment, ordering schwags to give away to people, staffing the booth and more. How do you make sure you will get something back? Well, first you need people to talk to and present your product. So, how do you get those?

First, I will start with what you should not do. For that, I am going to use a photo I took last week at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco. I have nothing personal against this guy but no wonder his booth is empty. So, never, never, never have a high chair, sit on it and wait for people to approach you.

Instead, stand up, face the people who walk the halls, be proactive and approach them with lines that would get their interest.

At Snap, our director of marketing came with a very simple line: “You need a pen!”. The typical answer is “ha?!” because this is the last thing people expect to hear. But then we pull the trick and show them that our pen also has a very cool flashlight that displays the Snap Shots icon. And once people see the flash light, they walk into the booth just like bees who get attracted to the light.

Which company uses this image as the primary home page image? hint – a web one…

Leave your guesses/answers in comments, I will post the answer tomorrow.

UPDATE: The correct answer is Skype and not IKEA – although it looks like a living room from one of their catalogs. Guy Malachi was the first to answer.