The SNEWS View has moved

The SNEWS® View has moved to www.snewsnet.com/thesnewsview.

Recent posts include:

"You’re not married until Facebook says so" --Despite the overwhelming evidence that I am, in fact, a happily married man, I just learned no one is married until Facebook says so.

and

"Being thankful for time is just the beginning" -- As the days and weeks tick by, there is so much to be grateful for, and not just at this time of year. For our blogger, time is a gift to be treasured, and she realized she has so much to be very grateful for.

Please bookmark www.snewsnet.com/thesnewsview to keep connected with humor and insight and observation as only the SNEWS editors can bring.

Halloween shopping experience is frighteningly good

Although Halloween is a time of horror, ghosts and trick-or-treat, one retail store turned a shopping expedition into a real eye-opening treat.

Performance Studios (www.performancestudiosinc.com), is a truly impressive costume shop in downtown Nashville, Tenn. It occupies a large building (more than 15,000 square feet) with high ceilings, and there are racks from the floor to the rafters holding every costume imaginable, from Elvis jumpsuits to stage-worthy Renaissance dresses. In addition to the huge rental inventory, a massive retail section includes wigs, masks, rubber body parts, pirate jewelry, plastic swords, you name it.

Like any retailer, Performance Studios is battling the recession, and it faces a situation where consumers are likely to cut back on Halloween spending, just as consumers are in general still limiting purchases...

To read the rest of the post for free, click here.

And why do you want to write about our product?

At the recent OutDoor show in Friedrichshafen, I wandered into the Outwell booth to ask about the company’s new “pop-up tent” it was pushing in, yes, press releases in the newsroom and on prominent displays in the booth. Outwell is a Danish company that distributes its family camping and outdoor gear in 30 countries.

Wearing my media badge displayed prominently, I took a couple of slow laps around the booth to see what the company had. I walked past a couple of Outwell employees…twice…as I circled, and they looked up at me a couple of times but quickly went back to their own conversation and coffee.

Finally I maneuvered over closer to their table and stood and stared at them.

“Yes?” one man looked up and finally asked, not exactly sounding welcoming.

“I’m interested in finding out more about the pop-up tent, a little about how it works, its technology, the patent and that kind of thing.”

He stared at me a moment. “Who are you?” he asked.

I apologized for not stating I was with the media; though I assumed my media badge sort of made it obvious. After I explained where I was from (speaking in German, mind you, so misunderstanding was not an issue) and that I wanted more information about the tent, he stared at me for a minute again, and then asked simply, “Why?”

Hmm, OK, I admit it is not often a journalist seeking to write about a product has to deal with someone wondering why…especially a representative of that company.

Well, it’s our job to cover this show and write about what we see, I said.

“We don’t sell in the United States,” he said.

I said that didn’t make a difference; we write about interesting things we see here for our trade audience back in the U.S. and also in Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, South America.

“Why?” was the question again.

I wanted to say, “You’re kidding me, right?” But, bit my tongue.

“I just want some information about your tent. That seems pretty simple,” I said, adding that I had seen in a German outdoor newsletter that it stemmed from an American patent.

Long pause with a penetrating glance….. “Just a minute,” he said.

At this point, they had to realize I wasn’t going to give up. I just hoped the tent went up far easier than my attempts at prying information from this company.

He ducked into the back behind a curtain. A moment later he came back out with a woman.

“Can I help you?” she said in English.

I decided to make the language switch from German to English too since maybe that would help with their apparent confusion. Anything to speed this along.

“I’d like to have your new tent shown to me. I am interested to hear about the technology and a little bit about the tent design,” I explained again.

“Why?” she asked.

Frankly, I was beginning to wonder why myself. But, I resolved to persevere though I am sure I did let more than just a casual tone of frustration enter my voice as I responded: “Look, this is so simple really. I am a journalist and I just want to see the tent and get some information that I might possibly want to include in a story. How hard can that be?”

“Calm down, you want some coffee?” the woman responded.

Coffee?? To calm down? It was all I could do just to keep myself from responding, "Why?"

Instead, I stated firmly, “No, I don’t not want any coffee, just information!”

She called over yet another man, a product manager, it seemed. I must have finally passed muster, worn them all down, or she needed backup -- I’m not sure which.

She then produced a press kit with a CD and the product guy showed me the tent, insisting it had nothing to do with an American patent but was in fact their own. I told him I only mentioned that since I saw it in some German press and in fact I knew there had been a U.S. patent 10 or 12 years ago on something similar, and that SNEWS had in fact seen the product at an Outdoor Retailer trade show, and just wanted to take a look. The product guy explained it well, showing the hinges and how it worked…finally.

I left the booth shaking my head. No coffee for me; I needed a stiff drink.

Another shining example of how customer service works -- or should

When I lived in Germany many moons ago, customers were not king. In fact, traditionally, you just shopped and cowered, begging for service and goodness gracious should you try to suggest to a cashier that something was mismarked. I made that mistake once as a college student, telling a cashier that she had overcharged me for an item. Her reaction? To sit back in her chair, cross her arms firmly across her chest and stare into space in front of her not acknowledging I even still existed. I got the message and wriggled away meekly.

But things are changing for the better as the German public is realizing it has rights, just as stores and employees realize they can actually be nice and offer service – in fact, that they have to do that in order to keep customers and stay in business.

Just this week, while in Germany covering a trade show, I happened into a pharmacy for a prescription. Now, pharmacies in Germany are a bit different. Pharmacists act a bit like doctors, listening to ailments and suggesting something you might have, standing behind a counter and fetching the appropriate meds from rows of shelves behind them. They are – or have been – pretty bureaucratic places.

I strolled in with my U.S. prescription and showed it to the young woman. She dove into “scurry mode,” searching her computer, looking up the med, suggesting she could get it delivered by that evening for me to pickup since they didn’t have it on hand (“Would that work for you?”). Then she added as an afterthought, “You know, there is this other medicine that is very similar here that is significantly less expensive. Do you want to try that one instead? I have it here and it would save you a lot of money.”

I was stunned. Well, sure, OK… She told me about it and it seemed correct so I got it (for nearly half the price), although they only had one small package of two tablets. She said if I wanted more, she had a friend who worked at the trade show and, if my schedule didn’t allow me to get back in during working hours, I could call her and she could figure out a way to have her friend deliver it to me there. Wow. Now that’s service.

So I paid for it and was out the door on the street when I heard a voice behind me: The woman had dashed out from behind the counter and waved me down on the street corner because she had just found another small package. “I am so silly,” she told me, as we went back inside. “I can’t believe I missed that. This should save you another trip.”

OK, I’ll be back to that pharmacy if I need anything!

SNEWS View: Industry needs to avoid finger-pointing, witch-hunting in treadmill tragedy

In the hours and days after Mike Tyson’s 4-year-old died tragically on May 26 by strangling on a cord hanging off a home treadmill, the industry seems to have decided that a frenzy of finger-pointing and witch-hunting is the best response.

Not only does this need to stop … now … the industry needs instead to use this accident as an impetus to band together and to educate the public about quality equipment, appropriate use and safety standards. It doesn’t matter whose machine it was. A child died on a treadmill. That singular fact affects everyone that sells treadmills unless we -- and by “we” SNEWS® means the collective fitness industry -- stand together to mourn a tragic loss, and find ways to ensure this kind of thing cannot happen again.

>> Forget finger-pointing. It does not matter what brand the treadmill in question was. It could have frankly happened on any brand. It was a fluke, a terribly tragic accident that could have occurred with any piece of equipment not appropriately locked-down to protect against curious kids. Any witch-hunting-like behavior is way below the industry. Let’s show we are more mature than that and work together to arrive at a solution that helps the industry....

>> To read the rest of this editorial on SNEWS, click here.
You will need to be a registered subscriber to SNEWS, which is easy.
Just click here to activate your free subscription today.

Know thy media…please?

PR is tough! And, it is one job we at SNEWS® can state unequivocally we would not want to undertake. To borrow a few lines from one of our SNEWS PR Awards articles from 2002, “A good PR contact is worth his or her weight in gold to a journalist, and, of course, to the company he or she represents. We media admire all the effort and energy that good PR communication requires, especially when you have to deal with so many whiny, self-centered, ‘I need it yesterday’ people like journalists -- yeah, we're talking about ourselves, the collective media. Of course, we just as quickly despise those who waste our time with worthless drivel and reams of meaningless paper or useless promotions.”

But just as a writer needs to know how to tailor an article to suit a particular magazine’s audience, subject matter or interests, the same holds true for PR: PR agents must know the media, its audiences and needs where they are pitching story ideas. It is not one-size-fits-all. Forgetting this leads to very bad experiences for the PR agent, the publication, and quite likely, the writer very often caught in the middle. And could also lead to less good press for a company.

Recently, the SNEWS team had a new freelancer take on a pretty basic short story, highlighting two to three new and innovative products that retailers might be interested in for the coming year. She was new, but the PR agent for one company she was dealing with was not. However that agent appears to have forgotten she was dealing with a trade magazine, not a consumer one. As a result, the story came in with one of the featured products actually being nearly five years old and not at all new. After a few back and forth communications with the writer, who was naturally frustrated that she might have wasted her time writing up a product that was clearly not new, we decided to contact the PR agent.

When we asked her why she pitched an older product to our writer when she was asked for fresh information – and she of course must know who we were and what we’d want anyway -- we enjoyed the following exchange:

1. Instead of apologizing, she decided her best tact would be to defend her position by telling us, “I'm certain the X Product falls under this requirement…” Let’s see… We request a new and innovative product and we are a trade magazine that seeks details and technical information. So, you decide that a five-year-old product fits our requirements of delivering information retailers might care about as new and innovative? We were truly perplexed trying to figure this out.
2. Then, she raised the ante by deciding we as media clearly don’t know what we ourselves wanted and that we obviously had no idea about other media outlets. So she decided to lecture us a bit by emailing, “To remind you, these are the X that were just featured in USA Today, which is one of the leading news publications in the country.” Gosh, golly, bumpkins that we are, guess she thought we’d never heard of USA Today. And as for using that plug by USA Today to justify why that product should be important to us and our readers, we refer you to our April 24, 2009, editorial in SNEWS -- SNEWS View: But the New York Times gave it a great review…

End result? We have cut the product from the article. We paid the writer for work she completed, but basically we paid her for work that won’t be published. So we wasted our time and money too. None of that is great for the writer, ourselves or the company. But the kicker is, we will now avoid dealing with this PR person as much as possible. She obviously doesn’t understand our needs, nor has she tried. And we’ll just be forced to go around her anytime we need any sort of information from the company that is accurate, believable, and appropriate for our audience. Now that just isn’t good PR for anyone.

Happy as a bug in the rug with the way retail's always been...

We had a conversation recently with a fitness retailer who had been in a touch with a long-time equipment supplier (Note: not one of the Big Gun retailer types with lists of stores and arrays of treads and ellipticals). This particular, relatively new retailer was interested in carrying the product of this particular supplier. Seems the supplier couldn’t be bothered to even hear about the retailer, its audience, its goals, and why it was different or appropriate for that supplier’s products.

We were told said supplier remarked, in so many words, “I’m happy with my business the way it’s always been.” Hmm. Considering that specialty fitness isn’t exactly the strongest player on the retail court right now, we wonder what supplier wouldn’t want to at least look at or consider something different or new.

And while we understand wanting to control distribution and not allow just any warm body to set up shop and hawk your product, who doesn’t want to sell more product to consumers at the end of the day? And what supplier shouldn’t always be looking around to consider additional distribution and considering additional retailers? Maybe that’s somebody who wants to write his or her own eulogy.

These aren’t the times to think small and think status quo. These are the times to think broadly, think differently and think out-of-the-box. Indeed, SNEWS believes in specialty fitness – emphasis on specialty. To remain special, specialty fitness must always think special and be special. And that may mean a few changes.

Just because, as a supplier or as a store, you have always done things one way or another, or sold only to one retailer or customer or another does not mean that is the best way to be conducting business now. And not being open to new ideas, or possibly new retailers, is just, in our view, letting your business fruit die on the vine.

When does tweeting become noise?

An interesting Tweet from a follow Twitterer (is that a word?) this week asked "Is there such a thing as too many tweets? When is it just noise?"

As we were pondering this question -- and for the record, we love Twitter now as it is a great source of ideas and leads (thank goodness for TweetDeck) -- the answer appeared:


Too many Tweets occurs when too many people are Twittering rather than engaging in work, real conversation, spending time in thought without distraction, or simply doing nothing at all, resulting in Twitter collapsing under the weight like so much fence between gossiping neighbors who have leaned on it one too many times.

Oh yeah...this says branding to me

An alert reader emailed us a scan of a newspaper ad that is running in every town there is an Ocean State Job Lot. Note the lovely juxtaposition of boats from a "Famous New England Maker" (gee, wonder who that is...ummmmm...well, Old Town maybe?) and candle jars, ladies silk sportswear and, yes fertilizers.


We can hear the shopping buzz now: "Honey...look at this ad! Let's nip down to Job Lot and get one of those boats, and some fertilizer, oooo, and some seed. It'll make a great planter!"

And this is supposed to make it good for specialty retailers selling Old Town kayaks currently at full price how?

I spy getting out of hand at trade shows

Everyone wants to know what their competitors are doing -- it's a natural curiosity at the very least, and trying to gain any edge in business at the other end of the spectrum.

Frankly, the dance has gotten downright entertaining. We've personally witnessed the sneaky snap of a photo on the way out of a hall or during a booth fly-by with cell phone or camera in hand. At the just-completed IHRSA show, we heard about engineers from one company loitering in competitors' booths, then trying to video or photograph products when they weren't looking -- even trying to come back several times like a bad cold after being asked to leave.

At Outdoor Retailer, competitors have been caught red-faced in booths, some even with video cameras and notebooks in hand, crouching before the show opens behind drawn curtains in a booth. The excuse is always the same: "Gee, I didn't know it would be a problem." Riiiiight. So, a drawn curtain and barrier around a booth says, "Hey, come on in and photograph me?"

Thing is, most of these competitors would welcome another into their booth for a casual look or chat about a new product -- no deep prying, no photos, no video, just a professional sharing of information. It's not as if the industry won't see the product soon anyway.

Most photo-takers are quick on the draw, but sometimes they don't see somebody watching them, and as a result, they get caught on film. Like the two shown here, one from the 2009 IHRSA show (taken by a competitor of a competitor) and the other from a recent Health & Fitness Business Show (taken by a SNEWS® editor).

Here's a novel idea for everyone. How about you show your competitor some respect and you'll all get respect back? It's simply too bad when a show shrivels or disappears behind fortressed booth walls because exhibitors are afraid to display their new products for fear of photo taking and knock-offs. In the end, this behavior isn't good for anybody. Oh, and that person photographing you photographing a competitor's product? If SNEWS sees it, you can bet, we'll publish it. That's called giving you the respect you are due.

More layoff spin -- sigh

A recent press release from Nike is an absolute award-winner for the utilization of hyperbole and spin in an attempt, it appears, to soft-pedal hard truth -- as many as 1,400 people may be out of a job by year's end.

"NIKE, Inc. (NYSE:NKE) today announced the next stage of its category business model execution, which includes the restructuring of its business to further enhance its consumer focus and drive innovation more quickly to market. This realignment will drive greater efficiencies throughout the organization and may result in an overall reduction of up to four percent of the company’s workforce. NIKE, Inc. employs nearly 35,000 people worldwide."

It might be useful, here, to provide a "keeping it real" translation by SNEWS® of the above soft-shoe dance around the word "'layoff:"

"...includes the restructuring of its business to further enhance its consumer focus..." = "We are not selling enough product "

"...drive innovation more quickly to market..." = "We need to quickly come up with more expensive gizmoes and gadgets to sell."

"This realignment will drive greater efficiencies throughout the organization..." = "We will find more ways than you could possibly imagine to get fewer people to do the same work for no extra pay. And yes, we're going to need you all to come in on Saturday to complete those TPS reports."

"...and may result in an overall reduction of up to four percent of the company’s workforce." = "We expect to layoff people."

This press release could have been a whole lot cleaner if Nike had simply stated, "Due to a challenging economy, we are taking a close look at our current business model with an eye to reducing jobs and costs that in our analysis do not directly contribute to selling more Nike product to more people." Yeah, we know, that would not be PC , but the challenging economy isn't exactly a secret.

Can we just call a layoff for what it is -- a layoff?

When did the word "layoff" become such a dirty word? Downsizing, rightsizing, headcount adjustment, reduction in force, realignment of resources, optimizing -- we've heard all the euphemisms from CEOs, CFOs, and other company executives, all seeking to duck the obvious simple fact -- someone lost a job.

One CEO recently told us that the reason the company didn't want to call the loss of jobs a layoff is the employees weren't really laid off. The company just eliminated their jobs due to -- plug in your euphemism of choice here, such as optimizing the business structure, streamlining the workforce, realigning our resources, or rightsizing the company. Give us a break! If there were no layoffs, then are these "employees" now simply wandering around the building looking for a job that is now lost and hopefully will be found sometime in the future? No. Their butts are out the door.

A layoff is not a bad word. It is an uncomfortable one, that we will grant you, simply because when you are talking layoff, human lives and livelihoods are being affected. Families are affected. Futures are affected. There is nothing fun about job loss -- even when it is being done with dignity, compassion and for the right business reasons.

By definition, a layoff is a suspension or termination of employment (with or without notice) by the employer or management. It is that simple. And terminations hurt. We doubt anyone so affected is referring to his or her job loss by saying to friends and to SNEWS, "Hey, it's OK.... I was just rightsized you know. No big deal.... The company was optimizing its job structure and I was realigned." Nah, we don't think you'd hear that. So, for the rest of 2009 and into the future, let's talk straight about a topic that deserves straight talk. If an employee loses a job because of company restructuring, it's a layoff, OK?