My team and I were recently travelling to mainland Europe on a business trip, as you do. Shortly after crossing the Channel an operator message started to pop up on my (personal) mobile phone:

“Don’t forget, using data on your iPhone while abroad for things like web browsing, Google maps, and Apps can use 1MB/min. To monitor how much you use, go to Settings/General/Usage. It’s £3/MB in the EU and £6/MB outside the EU.”

Not only was the message persistent, it was also missing a trick. What a wasted opportunity to make me happy and get some money off me at the same time – I thought. European Commission regulation states that customers travelling to another Member State must receive an automated message of the charges that apply for data roaming services.

All fine, except, in their eagerness to satisfy the authorities, the operators, in this case O2, forgot that their primary objective should be to satisfy their customers and please their shareholders. Is it really that difficult to dream up a bolt-on data plan for a one day trip and put a ‘YES PLEASE’ link / button at the end of this horrible and mildly threatening message? I think not.

Customers demand nothing less than seamless experiences these days, particularly if they are prepared to shell out on their all-singing, all-dancing smartphones. One would think this should particularly be the case if those same customers are travelling within the integrated market of the European Union. This looks to me like a big wasted opportunity not only to create positive outcome for the customer but also to make the operators some money. The irony is that we were travelling on a project that addresses customer experiences and ways of making them more joined-up, more satisfying and more profitable.

Staying in touch with the ever-changing kids market is one of the most difficult challenges facing marketers who have an interest in this audience. That why we’ve created a quarterly report called Kidscan which details what’s currently hot in the kids market, provides highlights of any recent research and summarises any relevant news features in the consumer and marketing media.

Today we have released our latest edition and anyone who is interested in receiving a copy should contact Dave Lawrence or call on +44 (0)1494 680999.

• “What can be measured and manipulated statistically is not only seen as real; it comes to be seen as the only or whole reality” – David Boyle: The Tyranny of Numbers
• “We look – however uneasily – for ways to quantify quality” – Jeremy Bullmore
• “When you are a bear of very little brain, and think of Things, you sometimes find that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out in the open and has other people looking at it” – Winnie the Pooh
• “Too often we measure everything and understand nothing. The three most important things you need to measure in a business are customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and cash flow” – Jack Welch
•  ”The rise of word-of-mouth and buzz marketing couldn’t come at a better time – or a worse one…it is enormously difficult to quantify return on investment from this most ephemeral of media” – Catharine Taylor

Borrowed with pride from all over the place