The world around us

Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo Inc. will be taking over as CEO, but what changes will that bring for the company? According to James Okamura of J.C. Williams Group, a consulting firm specializing in multi channel retailers, the move is not likely to impact retailer iniatives for the current year and changes are likely to take place next year onwards. The key question that is on everyone’s mind is how Yahoo will compete with an ever increasing Google? Will it merge with companies such as Microsoft or eBay, that are competing with Google as well?

“The reviews of Panama have been positive, but not overwhelmingly so,” says Stefan Tornquist, research director at online research firm MarketingSherpa Inc. “It’s not the kind of sea change that’s going to flip-flop budgets.” Still, Tornquist says advertisers will continue to invest some of their budget dollars with Yahoo if only to keep Google from becoming too dominant.

Panama is a crucial initiative, but the technology is new and advertisers are still getting comfortable using it, says David Card, lead media analyst at research and consulting firm JupiterResearch. “They need to make Panama work or get rid of it,” he says, “but it would be crazy not to give Panama a chance at working.”

I love the fact that technology these days is making so many things simpler for us to handle. Today I found a program that enhances the entire copy and paste function. As a writer and researcher, I am constantly going back and forth over text and need a program that will give me greater choice and freedom in my work in terms of formatting and editing. Flashpaste is one of the new breed of text copying utilities that enhances the complete writing experience. While it is really very useful for coders and developers, writers will find it very handy as well and that’s why I’m keen to get it myself.

Flashpaste’s two main features are its smart text insertion and clipboard history. If you’re doing any work that requires repetitive typing, this program is perfect for you. How it works is that you can enter in frequently used phrases, codes, paragraphs and when you need to use one of them, all you have to do is to insert them using a hotkey, finding the right one and inerting it. These features will end up saving me a lot of time and reduce the monotony of typing in the same stuff again and again. There is a free 30-day trial version of Flashpaste available if you want to see exactly how it works.

What ever your product or service, its success lies in being able to customize it for a specific audience and follow through with everything to build on its uniqueness to this niche audience. Earlier we used to have companies that did a bit of everything but they really weren’t experts at any one thing, now customers expect any product or service that they use to be targeted specifically to them. This trend is in tandem with customers creating and personalizing their own space online, designing products just for themselves or their specific neighborhood, like T-Shirts that proclaim where the wearer is from, etc. As a retailer of any consumer product, now is not the time to be a generalist, but to focus very specifically on your niche audience.

Online marketers and advertisers are getting choosier and more specific about where they place their ads these days. This strategy is called behavioral targeting and relies on analyzing online activities of customers to see which visitors will be interested in the product and only then place the ads on those sites that these consumers visit. Pepsi used this approach to market its Aquafina Alive to only those consumers who were health conscious and likely to be interested in the product already. Using this method, Pepsi saw a threefold increase in consumers clicking on their ads, as compared to some of their earlier campaigns.

Tacoda, the company that did the Pepsi campaign, is working with several other leading companies on such projects. Tacoda itself has a huge network of sites where these ads are inserted and will be adding 6 new sites to its kitty this week.

“The future of digital media is less about distribution and more about understanding the audience’s interests and being able to project that anywhere,” says Bill Gossman, president and chief executive officer of independently owned behavioral-targeting firm Revenue Science.

The intense competition is leading to some retailers coming up with innovative ways to compete with large branded stores. Several small jewelry stores have banded together to create an umbrella brand that will have a common market strategy so that they can compete more effectively with branded jewelry stores that have a large marketing and advertising budget. Earlier, mom & pop kirana stores had used a similar strategy to compete with supermarkets and hypermarkets. Traditionally, Indian consumers have preferred to buy jewelry from their local family jewelers, but the entry of branded jewelry with guarantees on quality of gold and marketing has led to many consumers to switch to branded stores. Most of the customers at the branded jewelry stores are younger customers who are more easily influenced by advertising and marketing campaigns, and these are the customers that small jewelers are trying to win over, so that they remain loyal to them over the years as well.

Several private companies based in the Gulf region are making plans to enter India’s booming retail sector. Most comapanies are following up cautiously as yet, even though there are lots of opportunities, the infrastructure and other operational and logistical issues have not been smoothed out as yet. Other major reasons why international companies hesitate is the enormous size of the country, with each area being almost completely different than the other, language problems and a sver shortage of professionally trained staff at all levels.

Yoga sessions are still continuing and getting a bit tougher now, in the sense that our instructor is pushing us a bit more, for each exercise and also for the total time of the class. It definitely is rejuvinating for the rest of the day, but the past two days have been tough. I myself am a bit exhausted from working and barely sleeping 4-5 hours, which makes it harder as well.

I used to be! J.Crew used to be one of my favorite stores to shop in when I was in college. Back then it was only an online store and it was the most popular catalog for all college students. I stopped my catalog once I graduated from college, although I did get some semi formal shirts from them just before discontinuing the catalog. Over the years, the company seemed to have stagnated into being a bit boring, but I was glad to know that online sales for J.Crew have risen from last year’s figures by 50%, as compared to an increase of 23.5% for total revenue.