Niko Herzeg Marketing

So Bol.com (dutch type of amazon) mails me with the above…

till 23nd no delivery cost on any purchase..

Yet I buy at www.bookdepository.co.uk and get no delivery cost, standard. No emails about it, no buy-by-date.. Same goes for other stuff I buy from local food/clothes shops who even deliver in the evening, when it suits me..free of charge..

Sure Bol could/will argue they focus on dutch consumers and in Holland it is someting extra. I could care less. World flattening and all..

Marketing can’t live in a vacuum of internal assumptions. It will cost them business, if not today (which it has, me and at least 6 people i told about the english competitor), but certainly tomorrow, when people who buy other stuff online already experience the free of charge transport and other service perks.

In order to survive and stay competitive, we have move up/down from the category level to the most basic level of money, behaviour, use and human lives in general (I would use culture but that word seems to be losing value at BP’s rate). Cause customers are not comparing you to just the best in the category. they just compare you to the best they had.

Hence Virgin’s remarkable boutique of various businesses, and Apple’s move from computers to software to media.. Again, nothing new, but since marketeers like to reinvent the wheel, a lesson worth repeating..