The weird world of Vancouver real estate

Today I walked by this perfectly nice house. New (built in 2010), quite big (over 4000 square feet) and convenient (close to good schools, public transit, and major roads.)

So, if you were the real estate agent marketing this $3,388,000 house what would you focus on?

The old adage about real estate is the three most important things are, "location, location, location".

And what is important about the location of this house? According to this listing, this house offers a "potential development opportunity in the Cambie Corridor plan!"

Yes, this big new house is being sold as a tear down. "City proposed FSR of 2.0 to build 4-storey low-rise apts."

So the whole house, including the brand new kitchen that probably cost $100,000, will be torn down for some tatty condominiums that will probably start leaking in the first heavy rains. The Vancouver real estate market is irredeemably weird.

Branding and Religion

1925 saw one of the great Canadian rebrandings. Three formerly independent protestant denominations merged together to form the United Church of Canada. (A similar process took place in 1977 place in Australia where the merged churches formed the Uniting Church of Australia.)

This merger and the subsequent rebranding was a response to small market share of the individual churches and the high fixed costs of clergy and buildings. A reduced number of larger congregations, especially in small towns where all three denominations had buildings and clergy, would result in more vibrant religious communities and a more sustainable business model.

So; the Methodists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians merged and formed the United Church of Canada. You still see evidence of the rebranding and merger on the cornerstones of some of the churches.

I think that there are some interesting lessons from the merger. I think one of the most important one is that the merged entity cannot really share a name with one of the predecessor organizations. In the case of the founding denominations of the United Church, none of the churches would accept using one of the existing names. It had to be presented to the congregations as a "merger of equals" and the name of the new church had to represent that fact.

Keep the posters up to date

I took this photo on January 21, 2012. So what!

The poster is part of a series of monthly posters put up on transit shelters around Vancouver showing historic events that took place in and around the city on dates in each month. But this poster, for December 2011, was still up on January 11, 2012.

The fact that this poster was still up 11 days after the end of the preceding month sends an interesting message to advertisers. It seems that CBS Decaux, the firm that manages the transit shelter posters, would rather have an out-of-date poster on display that remove the poster and have a blank space.

Continuing to display out-of-date posters does not increase the value of the display spaces. If I were an advertiser I think that I might be willing to take a chance that CBS Decauz would not sell all of their space and my posters might remain on display even after my display run was over.

Ignorance is no excuse

I was at the library yesterday and saw this label on the fold-down change table in the "family bathroom".

Change tables are wonderful thing, and they are increasingly found in men's bathrooms. (But for some reason, a man in the "family bathroom" is still all too rare.)

So, what is my problem?

Well, two problems actually.

1) A koala is not a bear. Koalas are not even remotely related to bears. Koalas are marsupials, and are related to kangaroos and wallabies.

2) That is NOT how you spell "care". I know, it is a cute little alliterative branding affectation, but have some pity for the poor parent who has to explain all of the branding-induced misspellings to their child.

I'm now doing an elegant dismount from my high horse.

When do "free" and "all" not mean "free" and "all"?

I live in Canada. The companies that I deal with, especially the ones that ship to me, must know that I live in Canada. (Let's not get into depressing detail about the amount of personal information that our IP addresses reveal about us.)

So, this company knows that I only use Canadian IP addresses when I use the website, that I live in Canada, and that if I order anything I have it shipped to Canada.

So why would this company tell me that it is offering free shipping this week? My first reaction, for a split-second, was "great, if I order anything I can save some money". But even before I followed the asterisk to the fine print I realized that this offer was not for me.

Now perhaps I may order a gift and have it shipped to a "continental US" address, but better segmentation and customization of the email would go a long way towards ensuring happier customers.

This teasing is just annoying.

The perils of paying for piecework

When I teach Sales Management, I tell my students that salespeople are rational beings, and they will engage in the course of action that yields them the greatest benefit.

If you pay a bonus to land new customers, the reps may be tempted to ignore the old customers. If you give a bonus based on the number of orders, the reps will split up the big order to make a bunch of little orders etc.

A few nights ago I saw a guy delivering copies of the new Yellow Pages book. I saw him put the book in front of this door. Nothing odd about that. Except, as you can see, the door he put the book in front of is actually a display window for the local drug store.

But the door does have a number above it, so it does have an address, and I'm sure the guy delivering the Yellow Pages books is getting paid per book, and is under strict instructions to deliver a book to every address. If I was a Yellow Pages advertiser I might wonder what benefit I get from delivering a book to a display window. (Especially since I am paying for every book delivered.)

How do you flush?

When you flush the toilet do you push the lever up or down?

It may sound like a very silly question, but there is some logic behind the question.

Like most public institutions, the local recreation centre is always looking for ways to save resources. The toilets have a dual flush mechanism. Push the handle one way for liquid waste (#1) and the the other way for solid waste (#2).

Understandably, the "liquid waste" flush uses less water than the "solid waste" flush. You activate the "liquid waste" flush by pulling the handle up, and activate the "solid waste" flush by pushing the handle down.

For me the problem with this design is that my default action is to push the handle down, which is the action that uses the most water. Does this not defeat the benefit of have a dual flush mechanism?

I know what you are thinking. He's a guy. If he's in the stall, he needs the big flush. Well, not if I'm in there with my daughter, or if all of the urinals are in use.

This may seem like a stupid little detail, but if the picture is correct and the "solid waste" flush uses three times the water of the "liquid waste" flush then that is potentially a tremendous amount of water that is being wasted.

But it comes with a warranty!

Coming back from the library this morning I walked past a house under construction. According to the real estate agent's website the house comes with a, "FULL 2 - 5 - 10 New Home Warranty with registered builder".

What does this photo tell me? Someone can't read the plans, and moreover they don't care enough to correct their mistakes. The wooden post should be centred in the metal bracket, and the metal bracket should be centred on the poured concrete pillar.

This sort of sloppiness should make any prospective purchaser seriously consider the quality of all of the stuff that they can't see. It is workmanship like this ensures that Mike Holmes is never short of raw material for his television shows.

And what does this say about the usefulness of the "FULL 2 - 5 - 10 New Home Warranty" or the value of having your house built by a "registered builder"? As a prospective house purchaser it makes me think that the "New Home Warranty" is pretty useless. Either that or the warranty is just about fixing problems after the fact, rather than making sure that the problems do not occur in the first place.

What purpose does Integrated Marketing Communciations serve?

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) is the term used to describe all of the efforts that marketers use to try change buyers' behaviour.

IMC includes, according to some sources; Advertising, Direct Marketing, eMarketing, Personal Selling, Publicity & Public Relations, and Sales Promotion. (I've seen other lists of the elements that break out trade shows, social marketing etc., but let's just use these six elements for now.)

So, these IMC elements are all designed to have an effect on consumer behaviour. I think that one way to look at the intended behaviour is to look at the continuum of engagement between the marketer and the customer. I call it Aw-At-T-P-RP.

The first stage is Awareness. Until the customer has an awareness of your product or service they are not in a position to act.

The second stage is Attitude. Once the customer has developed an awareness, they will form an attitude. If this attitude is positive then may move on to the next stage, if not, then either the product/service is not right for the customer, or the IMC has failed in some way.

The third stage is Trial. The customer is aware, they have formed a positive attitude about the marketer's offering, and now they are ready to try it.

The obvious fourth stage is Purchase. If the trial went well and the product/service performed according to the customer's expectations then they may be ready to buy.

And if the customer was happy with their purchase, then stage five is Repeat Purchase.

However, even though different types of IMC have different audiences, every time a marketer communicates with a customer, or potential customer, they must try to keep pushing that customer along the continuum from Awareness to Repeat Purchase.

Searching for a customer's information

In an earlier post I talked about my experiences with the telephone company.

Here is a little part of their system that may make sense to someone inside the company, but does not make a lot of sense to this customer.

If I was going to build a system to keep track of individual customer's information I would need a way to bring up customer's files. This should be some unique customer identifier.

The obvious ones that spring to mind are telephone number, name (perhaps in combination with birth date), or maybe address.

But no. How does my telephone company keep track of customer accounts? Driving License number.

What a bizarre way to do it.

One day someone will be able to explain it to me. I eagerly await that day.

The telephone company and a complete lack of service (And some redeption)

The telecommunications market in Canada, and most industrialized countries, is increasingly competitive. (I'll leave a discussion of Canada's ridiculously high mobile telephone rates for another day.)

Providers have high fixed costs for infrastructure, but once that is paid for the incremental cost to service each additional subscriber is pretty close to zero.

The one high and unavoidable cost is in-home installation. And while the underlying telecom technology is generally automated and pretty reliable, the human side of the installation process is what drives people crazy.

For the price I was paying to the cable company for television and Internet service I can get Internet, television and telephone from the telephone company. (I know, landlines are redundant and can be eliminated by using Skype and mobile phones. Unfortunately the Skype adoption rate for aged mother's in law is pretty low, so we're stuck with a landline.)

I went into one of the telephone company's stores to sign up and get everything ordered and the installation appointment booked. No problem, Wednesday January 4th at 10:00.

Wednesday rolls around and at 11:30 the service guy calls me to say that he is 15 to 20 minutes away from getting to my apartment. That would be great, except I had an appointment to donate blood at 1:00 pm, and the installation would take two to three hours. (Evidently the time I was given, 10:00 am, was not the time the technician would arrive, but the start of the two hour windows during which the technician could arrive to start his work.) Well, I have a nurse with a needle waiting for me, so this particular Wednesday won't work. I call the office to rebook. Tuesday, the 10th between 8:00 and 10:00 am. I figure that since 8:00 is the first appointment of the day, the technician might actually turn up on time.

Tuesday the 10th rolls around and by 9:30 I'm getting a bit concerned. I call to see what is happening. The telephone company has no record of my reboooked appointment, and the guy I speak to is a complete jerk. They can see me on the 13th. No good as I have an appointment. After much back and forth I get another appointment for the 17th at 8:00 am.

At 9:30 on the 17th I call the telephone company to enquire about the estimated ETA for my technician. The woman I speak to, Sam, looks me up on the computer and tells me that no one will be coming today to install the Internet and telephone. She then comments that my file looks, "really screwed up" in their system.

The remarkable thing about this is that Sam, who delivered another piece of bad news about the rotten service that her employer was delivering to me, actually seemed like a nice person. She was also the first telephone company employee that I encountered who seemed to care about my experience. What a refreshing change! I asked to speak to Sam's boss and got Leah on the phone. I told Leah that despite the horrible service that I'd had so far, Sam was a bloody marvel and was delivering great service. Leah thanked me for taking the time to let her know. (By a fluke of timing Sam was having her annual performance review that day. I hoped I got her a good pay raise.)

And what is the telephone company doing to make things right? Credits against the bill, a few months of free service and a reduction in price.

The remarkable thing is that if things had be done right in the first place then Sam would not have felt the need to provide the credits and price reductions to keep me happy. And if the people that I'd dealt with earlier had not been such jerks then I would have been a much happier customer.

So, what do I learn from this particular experience.

1) Women give better service than men. (At least among employees at the telephone company's call centre.)

2) Confirmed appointments mean nothing. Until the technician is actually at your place complaining about the crappy job the last technician did, nothing is happening.

3) In this very competitive market, the telephone company does not really understand that the most important part of the interaction with the customer is getting them hooked up quickly and efficiently.

My next appointment is for January 24th at 8:00 am. It will be almost a month since I ordered my service. I wonder what will happen next Tuesday?

Postal Confusion

Canada Post Community Mail Boxes (Source: http://o.canada.com/2012/06/23/can-canada-post-survive/)

I live on an island off the west coast of British Columbia and don’t have door-to-door mail delivery.

Canada Post recently changed the mailboxes where I live. Gone were the battered old green boxes and in their place were new “Superboxes”. The “Superboxes” do have a couple of advantages. Packages that are too big for the individual box can be left in an adjacent larger box with the key left in your mailbox. Thus, you could have one fewer trip to the mailbox to pick up a package. And the boxes are new and shiny.

The problem that I have with the new mail boxes is the required change in how my mail must be addressed. I have a street address, let’s say 123 Main Street. And I have, or rather had a mailing
address. For me, and everyone else on the island, it was comprised of a site letter, a compartment (NOT a box) number, and RR (Rural Route) number. So my mailing address was K44, RR1. Over time I managed to get all of my correspondents to add the K44, RR1 to my mailing address. In some cases they dropped the street address, but that was fine, Canada Post kept telling me that I needed to make sure that my address included the site letter, and compartment and route numbers.

The introduction of the Superboxes means that all mail now needs to be addressed to the street address. One silly and slightly annoying problem is that many people’s new box location is not the same as their compartment location. You could pick an empty compartment and just needed to tell the post mistress the number. I picked a compartment that, while not at the site closest to my house, was between my house and the village. So, I would pass the box on every trip I made from home. Very convenient. But now all of the mail for the five houses on my short street are all delivered to the same set of boxes.

Now my mail is being delivered to the former site “L”. A bit closer to home, but that is not the problem. Canada Post no longer identifies this location as “Site L”, but rather “1633”. And the box
assigned to me is in the 5th set of boxes and is box number 10. So, for ease of use by the post office, my mailing address should be “1633, 5-10”. And in fact that is what has been hand written on some mail that was addressed to the old K44 address.

The implementation of the new mail box system was a bit chaotic with many people ending up with
the wrong keys. (I had the keys for my neighbour’s box.) The changeover was delayed more than once, but eventually many of the bugs were ironed out and we all started getting mail in our new “Superboxes”. But Canada Post didn’t anticipate many problems. There is now one box per address, but what is there are two households sharing one address. Not uncommon on an island with many suites, both legal and “unauthorized”. In addition, there are many people sharing houses. Do they really want their roommates to see all their mail? (Especially since under the old system this could be avoided.)

Many people’s first reaction to change is negative. All they see is the disruption and chaos. In this case Canada Post didn’t do a good job of understanding its customers’ requirements and how they were using the existing system. In addition, there seemed to be limited consultation with the local postal workers.

Much is made of consulting with “stakeholders”, but in this case the obvious need to talk to everyone seems obvious. Unfortunately people in head office thinking they know best, is far too common a situation.