Crisis and saving

I started a new project aiming at helping people to save money and go through this times of financial crisis.

The website is called www.ahorroayuda.com and by writing articles and using social media (twitter @AhorroAyuda) I hope I can create a useful platform.

Any comments on interesting things to write about are welcome :)

Not selling when the customer wants to buy

I decided to do some shopping in the last few days and I was surprised to find how much the sales people in different shops across Cardiff really didn't want to sell to me.

While looking for trekking shoes I spent 5 minutes waiting for someone to ask for some shoes that I liked on my size, when nobody came I went all the way to the till and asked there. I’m sure all of this is reflecting a high level of interest in buying trekking shoes, so I was a bit frustrated when they came back to tell me they didn't have the shoes on my size and the when away to the till. Their opportunity to make a more valuable interaction with me was lost, it would have been easy for them to tell me something more engaging, for example: sorry Sir we don’t have those shoes on your size now, they will arrive on Monday; or can I suggest these shoes? They have similar features and price to the ones you were looking for. Any of these answers would have made me come back or buy something else from them, now I will never go back.

A couple of days after that I was thinking about changing my mobile phone and a similar thing happened to me, basically if I wanted to change my phone I needed to upgrade my plan through a phone call first, very big turn-off.

Is it really too hard to provide good service to your clients? Are you really trying to sell what your customers want to buy?

How does weather affect your business?

In Britain one of the most talked about topics must be the weather. We are at the beginning of summer and gray wet days are more common than sunny days, when I asked a local about a possible reason for this I was told that worm masses of air from the Atlantic crush with cold masses of air from the Nordic area, and all of this happens just on top of the UK. Who knows it may be true.

Relating the weather topic to business, the other day a taxi driver started complaining about a sunny week in May (rare event) saying that people stop using taxis in Cardiff when the weather is nice. At the same time I look at the touristic area of Cardiff Bay and I see empty restaurants on rainy days and the same places full of life and people in sunny days.

I think it is interesting to measure the effect of external events, such as weather, in your business and see if you can take advantage of this, for example if you are a retailer and you see certain products sell more in rainy days, then you would be careful to have enough stock in winter time. How does weather affect your business?

Predictability

I heard a radio ad saying that it would be nice if life was predictable and you could always select the shortest line at the supermarket or always avoid rain.

Besides the fact that I think it wouldn't work (if everyone selects the shortest line at the supermarket it will stop being the shortest line), life would be very boring, wouldn't it?

Conducting a survey part 1

Different projects in the MBA were related to market research, so I would just llike to share some learnings when designing and implementing a survey.

Think and define what results you want to get. Do you want to define preferences, patters, trade-off? Why will this help you with the project you are working on? These questions will help you define and justify the survey.

Design the survey to obtain those results. Once you define what is it that you want to get out of the survey, then you will need to ask the right questions thinking on the answers and how you will interpret them.

Make sure you will be ale to get a big enough sample size. This is necessary to obtain representative results.

Get the people who will help you launch on board. You will need your people and negotiation skills not only to sell your idea and get the survey authorised (let's admit that surveys are not the favourite things clients want to do in their free time), but to get support in implementing it. People will have to go out of their day to day activities to help you so you need to make them part of what you are researching.

If you want to offer incentives (like a prize draw) find out legal requirements in the country you will launch the survey. I have learnt that countries using the Latin legal system usually need to write the prize draw rules and have them legalise with a notary, which can take time and can be costly. Countries with Anglo Saxon system are much more straight forward.

Possible distorted results and how to fix it. Think of extreme cases where people will not answer the questions properly so you can identify them and clean the answers.

These are some key points I have thought of so far in order to make your life easier when designing and conducting market research.

Cultural activities in Manchester

When you get sunny days in Manchester like the one we are having now I feel like writing about the different activities you can do in Manchester:

MOSI: One of my favourites is the Museum of Science and Industry, which shows why Manchester was one of the places where the Industrial Revolution originated in.

Imperial War Museum: Impressive museum where the history of different wars is displayed in a chronological order.

Art Gallery: Art galleries in the UK are amazing and the one in Manchester is no exception.

Football: With 2 world class football teams in the city is always fun to go and watch a game. If it is not a game day you can visit The Old Trafford or Etihad Stadiums anyway.

Classic concerts at the Bridgewater hall: I have been lucky enough to go to this beautiful place a couple of times. It has been especially built to obtain perfect acoustic.

Take advantage of student discounts and please feel free to add more activities in the comments.

Aldi and cost strategy

When you go shopping to Aldi you will not find too much variety, you will not find a fancy place and you will not find a relaxed atmosphere. You will find fairly good products at very good prices.

Aldi has a cost saving strategy that is reflected on aspects such as the products being displayed on the pallets (they use the floor as part of the warehousing), and the staff being cross trained in order to work on the tills, clean or bring out more pallets with products. Other interesting activities are the fact that you need a pound to use the trolley and then you get it back when you put the trolley back where you found it, the incredible speed of the tills (which means that you put all your stuff in the trolley and then pack them in a big table behind the tills) and the charge for plastic bags (even though this is a more common practice by other supermarkets as well).

I imagine Aldi is able to negotiate good prices with its suppliers by buying big volumes for all its stores in Europe. This, and the fact that the operational costs must be very low, enables Aldi to have such cheap prices.

I guess I'm happy by saving money and getting out of the place as soon as possible, but probably is not a shopping experience that will suit everyone, but is the cost saving shopping experience.