E-commerce – Page 3 – CanooterValve

New Google Bike Slightly Less Horrible Than Previous One

Bikes, E-commerce Comments Off

Aug 312012

Google recently unveiled their newest bicycle, the winning design among several submitted to resupply the Mountain View, California behemoth’s stable of “getting around campus”-mobiles. I’m happy to report it’s awful.

That’s a good thing, though, given the various hip, high-fashion bikes they might have chosen, this crude, little chunk of bicycle shows some class by just being a bicycle. A really horrible, poorly-made, appallingly ugly bicycle.

I’m always a little amazed when engineers in one field seem to have a complete and utter lack of appreciation for engineering in another. Surely there are at least a few Googlers who find it difficult to use these, though, compared to the bike it replaces, these seem positively amazing.

I’ve been gently kicking Google in the their double-“o”s for a while now, driven largely by the fact that I think they could be doing really amazing things, and instead they can’t seem to even keep their own Google+ app working on their own Android operating system.

Credit where credit’s due, though. Sometime Wednesday night, Google Maps was updated to include turn by turn directions for bicycle routes.

That’s pretty wonderful.

It still doesn’t excuse those Google bicycles, but it’s pretty great, and should help guys like me, who read cue sheets about as well as we read tea leaves, and three times slower. You can check out the update here.

That’s all I got for today. Back to another really long day of work. Big news this weekend.

Spacial Public Relations

Bikes, E-commerce Comments Off

Aug 212012

Ahab had his whale. Me, I have the perfect box size for shipping bicycles. It’s something I never quite perfected in my previous life–at least not for reasonably shipping bikes under $1000. It’s a little easier to absorb $50-100 shipping on a $4000 bicycle. On a $500 bike, that’s not ideal.

Actually the analogy doesn’t hold. Ahab at least knew his white whale existed. Me, I strongly suspect the magical “sub-130 dimension, safe for 60cm cyclocross frames with minor disassembly required” box is a complete myth. So it’s a little like I’m sitting in a cold drizzle on Loch Ness, shaking my fist at shadows on the waves.

It’s come to that.

Some sort of form-fitting foam shell, maybe. Still processing.

I think it’s cool that for like $300 Competitive Cyclist will ship your bike in a coffin-sized slab of cardboard, delivered by tractor trailer, completely and utterly assembled so that you never have to meet anyone at your local bike shop–presumably until you flat three miles from home and are rendered utterly helpless, or you run into them on a group ride and are “savaged.”

In the interest of one-upping even that, admittedly posh delivery method, I’m considering offering a Rapha-designed 1,000 square-foot gold-plated shark tank bar signed by Lars Ulrich. Reinforced internally and externally with carbon fiber and lined with brushed smoking jackets and discarded facial hair of Bradley Wiggins, it will also incorporate a suspension system made from 200 custom 500tpi Dugast bouncy balls and recycled breast implants (keep it green, people), and will be delivered by a black helicopter with a single, pink landing gear rail. Or one of those elephants from Lord of the Rings, if it’s an Open O-1.0, because those guys think differently.

Writing this will probably cause Google to display those Competitive Cyclist ads that follow you around everywhere to appear in my sidebar. Using the phrase “Competitive Cyclist ads” will probably cause Google to blacklist me, steal my identity, rip out the stereo, take the wheels and burn what’s left.

Alas. Boxes. They haunt my dreams.

That, and the thing you see above. It was in the refrigerator when I opened the door tonight. I think my wife is going to turn it into food of some sort, but really, the severed head of a gremlin would’ve looked less out of place in the refrigerator. Assuming it isn’t the severed head of a gremlin, I mean. I didn’t touch it, but here’s what it looks like with glasses photoshopped onto it:

Ah, and the factory meetings are beginning for Project Danzig, wherein one person assures me that the factory being recommended by another is completely incapable of making anything more complex than an aluminum can. This is going to be interesting.

Brick and Mordor

E-commerce 1 Response »

Jul 022012

Pringles, trail mix AND $4.00 DVDs? I have no idea why Best Buy is losing share to online retailers.

I had to use a Best Buy recently, which I think is the digital consumer equivalent of admitting you had to go to the doctor to have an ass boil lanced. Having read various articles predicting the demise of big box consumer electronics stores in the age of online retail, I was curious to see if the experience was any less horrible than my last trip. It wasn’t.

I’m pretty sure I’m well below the pay grade of any decision-makers in the Marketing and Merchandising division of Best Buy, but I think if my business were on the edge of extinction due to online retailers, I’d be inclined to move away from the “dimply lit yardsale filled with talking gnomes” model and toward something resembling a positive consumer experience. I know everyone goes on and on about how pricing is what’s killed the brick and mortar retailer, but I really don’t think that’s it.

I think they’re killing themselves.

And I’m not just talking about the new “retail walk of shame” Best Buy seems to have borrowed from Barnes and Noble–only without that fussy, English-professor-esque whiff of class and relevance. Instead of running the B&N gauntlet of tote bags, coffee mugs and bad post cards, trying to escape Best Buy, I was forced to walk though the silly maze of closeout crap you see above. At Best Buy, the merchandise on the RWOS isn’t even relevant to Best Buy, let alone my life, but I don’t think they mind. In fact, Best Buy doesn’t even try to hide that fact that they’re routing you away from the cash registers and then back toward them through a shit pile of bad merchandise on the off chance that you’d suddenly want some $3.00 headphones or potato chips. The impression is that you’re in a store that’s going out of business, which is, of course, the case.

But the store is the least of their problems.

More than any other store, Best Buy forces me to avoid “customer service” people, and while I’ve not had as appalling an experience as described in Larry Downes’ Forbes article from last December, few places cause as much sales agent anxiety as Best Buy due to the fear of what Downes aptly describes as “anti-service.” Simply put: you’re more likely to come away from any experience with a sales agent at Best Buy less satisfied than you would be if no one spoke to you during your visit.

Reasons for this are many. Unlike the thoughtful and reasoned analysis Downes offers, though, I can simply resort to crude short-hand: Best Buy is still acting like a big company, and there are no more “big companies.” They seem to have failed to grasp the most substantial change the Internet has caused: we expect personal service. With the exception of Wal-Mart, who’s done a masterful job of targeting the ever-shrinking base of consumers who don’t realize the Internet exists, there is no such thing as a corporate retail juggernaut any more–a place capable of winning sales and loyal customers without engaging with those customers are people.

Ironically, the sure sign that you’re about to be treated like cattle is the “greeter.” Both Wal-Mart and Best Buy have them, and they’re appalling. Does anyone under the age of 80 honestly feel more warmly welcomed just because a front door lurker offers a “hello”? It’s the biggest kind of phony bullshit service, and the post boy for where they’ve gone wrong. When logging into an e-commerce site posts a “Hello Chris” account link in the upper corner of my screen, it means my shopping history and preferences have been queued up, and that my records and info. are available for me to review or change. The Best Buy equivalent isn’t similarly “social” because it doesn’t actually involve knowledge of me or my shopping at all. In fact, the greeter invariably gets in the way of my shopping experience, if you want to call it that, at Best Buy. It tells me Best Buy values paying a kid to stand around saying hello all day more than it values paying salaries for employees willing to genuinely be helpful.

In other words, you can’t fake giving a shit about people, and when it comes to customer service–more than pricing or sales tax–online retailers are so far superior to companies like Best Buy that the contrast is almost shocking.

How it’s come to this, I don’t know, but Best Buy and other big box retailers have failed to turn their storefronts into assets, allowing them instead to become major liabilities. Wild pipe dream or not, imagine for a second what a positive, consumer-driven change would look like at Best Buy. Realizing you need a product, you’d be able to quickly and easily verify that your local store had what you needed in stock. If they did, you’d order, walk in to a pick up area, swipe your card for ID and be handed your order. If the nearest store didn’t have what you needed, an inventory transfer would put it there within a day or two and send you a text message to let you know it had arrived.

In both cases, gone is the greeter. In his place is a way to get the items you wanted and get the hell out of the abandoned airplane hanger that is your local Best Buy. Come to think of it, maybe a few extra light bulbs wouldn’t hurt, either.

Big Dogs, Little Dogs and Long Tails

Bikes, E-commerce 2 Responses »

Jun 222012

Rick Vosper has published a really interesting post over at BicycleRetailer.com. Based on fresh data from the Gluskin-Townley group’s National Bicycle Dealer Association (NBDA) report, Vosper seems to pretty effectively dispel the myth of a “Big Three” stranglehold on independent bike dealers.

Except that maybe he doesn’t. As Vosper puts it:

Turns out there’s a total of 143 bike brands active in the US market (down from 150 last year). Moreover, in terms of which brands are tops in which shops and/or markets, it’s not Trek, Giant, or Specialized that leads the pack. Not Raleigh or Cannondale or Haro or Diamondback or Schwinn, or any of the top brands we’d all expect.

On a purely representative basis, the leading brand in the country is . . . ‘Other.’ And it has been for years.”

The suggestion is that smaller companies are, in aggregate, a serious force in the U.S. bicycle industry.

As much as I’d like to believe that, I just can’t. In the past, I did quite well with niche brands, and I wish others could too, but empirical data derived from something I call “walking into any bike shop in the U.S.” suggests neither Specialized nor Trek need fear any smaller companies.

A part of the disconnect might be the method used for gathering the data. According to Jay Townley, whose group conducted the research, the data was gathered “based on a survey of more than 300 independent bike shops,” where “the basic question” . . . “was to write in their bestselling bicycle brands, not numbers, but bestselling brands based on unit volume.”

Um, OK.

So the questioning was maybe a little subjective. Could that affect things? Poor Trek and Specialized tend to suffer from what I like to call the “Nickleback Syndrome”: they make shit-tons of money even while shop rats sometimes think it’s not cool to be a “Trek shop” or “Specialized shop.” That’s just the “freedom” twitch, wherein a dealer or shop rat doesn’t want to believe he’s bought and sold based on the whims of his vendor. No one admits to liking Nickleback. Yet they still come to your city and get suck all over it. Go figure.

But how accurate was the data? That’s the question. It’s possible the official Gluskin-Townley report describes how rigorously the data was checked against inventory management systems, etc. but, given my experience in bicycle retail, “rigorous” just isn’t a term that comes up all that often (come to think of it, “inventory management” doesn’t even come up very often).

I’m also not entirely clear how to square the notion that Specialized, Trek and Giant still likely dominate “in terms of total unit sales,” without being a “bestselling” brand. To me, then, this report raises more questions than it answers. Sure, we have Redline, Fuji and the QBP brands chipping away at market share, but if they’re effectively doing that, then how could it not be reflected in sales? As much as I want to believe in this report, taken at face value, it seems to suggest dealers are primarily flooring bike brands that don’t make them money.

What’s more, they’re flooring bikes that don’t make them money despite the pressures from their Big Three overlords to knock that shit off.

Seems wrong.

It’s possible the data is just skewed. We know “more than 300 independent bike shops” were used for this analysis. In the absence of hard data, we have to assume “more than 300” effectively means like “302.” If there are roughly 5000 IBDs in the U.S. that’d be about 6% of them that were polled. If we figure we’re down to 4500 IBDs and sort of put a thumb on the good news scale here, probably the most we can get is about 7-7.5% of dealers surveyed in this sample. Statistically, this should still be enough to give us a pretty accurate reading (low margin of error), but there tends to be wide variance between IDBs, meaning I could find 300 shops in the U.S. that don’t carry Trek or Specialized. Usually every larger town has one of those “also ran” shops that can’t get one of the Big Three (and may well be a better shop than those that can). This matters.

So I’m questioning how reliable this data can be–or even if it has any intrinsic value whatsoever. If you don’t sell Trek, you don’t represent them on your floor. If you polled 7% of the shops in the U.S., how many of those shops were selling Trek or Specialized? Wouldn’t that affect the results? When you can’t get the big brands, you represent the smaller brands. Call 300 shops that don’t sell Trek or Specialized, and you get a snap shot of what life is like at the bottom of the retail food chain, not how healthy the Big Three’s grip is around the neck of the U.S. bike dealer.

In other words, “representation” is a bullshit made-up term. More usable data would seem to be what revenue each brand is generating for that representative sample of retailers across the country. Ask each shop: what are your top ten bike lines, in terms of revenue? If your shop is filled with Raleighs because you can’t get Trek or Specialized, then way to go for you and Raleigh, but good luck breaking the $1.5M sales mark. What really matters is this: are you able to compete with the shop that has Trek or Specialized? That’s the real question. The report suggests an interesting variation based on total sales revenue: “At $300,000 or less, Trek is #7; Redline is #1. At $3000-5000, Trek is #2,Raleighis [sic] #1. Where Trek has its hold is in the million-plus-dollar retailers. Trek is not #1 in all regions of the country, nor are they #1 in all size stores. It varies.”

Well, yeah. Your store’s revenue varies based on whether or not you sell Specialized, Trek or Giant. If you can’t get those lines, good fucking luck making more than $300k a year. Wouldn’t that seem to be the opposite of Vosper’s point? To suggest this is evidence of some kind of “representational” pattern, I submit to you, is the worst kind of tail wagging dog argument. “Where Trek has its hold is in the million-plus-dollar retailers.” Yes, the ones making money.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Vosper has written a fascinating article, I love what he’s clearly wishing and hoping for here (even if I can’t believe in it), and I have a great deal of respect for what the Gluskin-Townley group tries to do (gathering data in this industry is like bailing out a leaking canoe with a spork), but don’t let’s get to dreaming up scenarios where the little guys can compete based on some mystical “representation” number. Vosper’s evocation of the Long-tail theory is apt here, but maybe not for the reasons he suggests. The vast majority of small shops cater to a smaller and more eclectic segment of the industry because that’s the only brand real estate left to them. Those smaller shops aren’t successful because they don’t have any of the Big Three brands–they’re successful despite not having them. It’s a testament to how hard most of those shops work to take care of customers.

Lost Weekends and Guess the Product

Bikes, E-commerce 4 Responses »

Jun 112012

This is what Syncline trail would’ve looked like on Sunday. I’m pretty sure. Sadly, I spent most of the weekend working on a 2013 product catalog, writing copy for Cyclocross.com, and doing laundry. Had to get a head start on some office work I’ll need to leave hanging while I drive across the country again next week. So this is what Sunday looked like for me:

I’m a rockstar.

Yes, I have two monitors, which is actually pretty modest here. My goal is to eventually have six or seven. I’d like to be the Terry Bozzio of office hardware.

Needs More Cowbell, But Yes, He Plays Them All

On the monitor to my right you can see a little of Cyclocross.com, by the way. Can’t wait for the launch. Still a lot of work to do first, though, and before I can get back to it, there’s that whole driving across the country again thing. I love my country, but I hate driving across it. I always liked taking everyone’s word for it that Nebraska existed.

Starting tomorrow, I expect I’ll be back to posting shorter, “on the road” pieces, if I can post at all. Last time I did my best to lower everyone’s expectations and prepare you for even less meaningful content than usual, then proceeded to immediately punch a hole through the window of my Subaru with a Jones bike. I’ll have all my family’s possessions with me this time around, so imagine the damage I’ll be able to do.

Before I go near radio silence on you, I wanted to offer a report on the voting for best wheel size. “Banana” is definitely taking the win on this one (are you catching that, Google), but otherwise it’s a tight contest between 650b and 29er. I think we had two votes for 26″ wheels. Sadly now, they will be kicked off the island.

I’m also writing a lot of product descriptions for right now. As you might imagine, sometimes the product copy I write tends to be a little different, so I thought I might post some snippets of new content from Cyclocross.com up here, and see if anyone can guess what product–or even kind of product–I’m describing. So while I get ready to head to the airport, I’ll leave you with today’s product. See if you can guess the product I’m describing (or even figure out what the hell I’m talking about).

Cyclocross framesets divide themselves nicely into two categories. First there are the frames that really—truly—are only for cyclocross racing. These have a framebuilder’s name on the downtube, no water bottle bosses, and a fourteen month waiting period. And then there are the ‘cross racing frames one would grab in the event of zombie apocalypse, the kind with all the tire clearance and quality construction of a dedicated racing frameset, but with concessions for things like water bottles and fenders (because you do not want to be riding through zombie apocalypse streets without fenders). ______________ is a zombie apocalypse bike that can also race—and win—’cross races.”

I’m pretty sure both guys who read this blog work at bike companies or distributors anyway, but feel free to post any guesses on the Cyclocross.com Facebook page, and I’ll figure out some sort of grand prize for an eventual winner. Probably won’t be a Cyclocross.com jersey, but something rad.

The jerseys are in the works now, by the way, and are gonna look like something Steve McQueen would’ve worn to a Shia LaBeouf beating.

And why is it so tough to convince any custom jersey manufacturers to create a proper, moisture-wicking luchador mask?

Metaphysical Tags

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Jun 062012

Absolutely no beer in this park. Except maybe a little beer. Or a lot, depending.

Responses to my question, “Would you move to an 11-tooth mountain cassette that let you go single ring up front if it meant having to buy a new rear hub or entire rear wheel, new derailleur and new shifter?” continue to arrive in my email, and all I can say is that we’re all wafflers. We hate that system, unless it’s cool, in which case we like it. Or vice versa. To be fair, a few of you have gone bold and declared SRAM’s 1×11 system utterly undesirable. Very few have felt they must have it at all costs. But most of you just sort of might use it, if the price is right. You could go either way on 11-speed mountain.

I sympathize. There are a lot of things about which I’ve gone back and forth over and over again and always feel like I just need more information. One of those things for me is advertising. Unless Google went out of business, you’re probably seeing some form of add there on the right. Maybe it’s a group of ads and maybe it’s a single animated one. I have no idea, because Google tailors whatever ad is over there not just to the content in my post (which should be pretty interesting), but also to you–to all the other data Google has on you. It occurred to me the other day that I should mess around with that. Particularly if there’s a chance I can generate about $8 a week, which is the approximate cost of the beer that makes this blog possible. Mostly, though, I just wanted to see what Google would put there.

I’ve set up some AdWords accounts in my day and was recently asked about setting up another. Retailers all have to contend with AdWords as a necessity, but for a lot of manufacturing and distribution businesses, AdWords is still just some mysterious way Google generates greater income than a majority of the countries in the world. The whole point of AdWords is driving people to your ecommerce site with a single mission: buy. Buy that widget you just searched for. You know you want it, and now we know you want it, and Google sent you to us, so let’s just do this thing already.

But brands without any direct call to action–like Coca Cola–what’s in it for them? Go ahead and Google “coca cola,” and I promise Coke’s paying mad money to show up at the very top of a list of organic search results that are all about their company anyway. If the whole page is results that point to your product anyway, why the hell pay to compete with yourself?

The prevailing theory here seems to be that companies like to control their message. They like to own their content. When people search for Coke, Coke wants to get in front of that search result, instead of, say, “Coke Plus Mentos Makes Boy’s Stomach Explode.”

But by all accounts Google’s algorithms also factor in what I guess we’d call “gravity.” Spend a million bucks on ads to get people to your site, and your site is going to have residual life to it even after you stop paying. Just like having money makes money, having traffic makes traffic. But frankly there’s a lot of weird shit about how Google does stuff that I know absolutely nothing about. There are a lot of people who’ll tell you they do, and that they can make you buckets of money based on this great Search Engine Optimization system they’ve developed.

It’s been my experience that few of these people have divine knowledge, and the majority of them are engaged in business practices that are “ambitious” at best, “fraudulent” at worst. I just can’t bare to listen to SEO wonks prattle on about “synergizing” this and “value adding” that, and “creating multi-platform relationship” and stuff. These are basically all the things that anyone who isn’t a complete asshole does to grow a business anyway. Give people a reason to find you, and once they do, make it so they want to come back.

So few articles about SEO I find to read online are of any real value. Usually I just want to find the douchebag who wrote the article and beat him to death with his own leg. Hence my experiment. Based on the stuff I write about here, what ads will Google deliver to this page.

So far, I’ve seen one for ESPN’s coverage of the NBA Playoffs. What in the hell made Google place that here, I don’t know, given that I’ve never mentioned basketball . . . until now. Damn, you’re good, Google.

But the interesting part for a guy who’s about to build yet another AdWords campaign is to go back to my older posts and see what Google thinks they should be selling. The SRAM post I’d written on 1×11 seems to’ve gotten Google infatuated with “Needle Valves” and no fewer than two ads for needle vales are showing up for me on that page. One of the many joys of having a blog called “canootervalve” is all the plumbers my ads are bound to attract. There’s also an ad for AdWords (oh, Google, you are so meta). Oh, and there’s a Zoosk ad asking if you want to “meet a real girl for free.” Google’s ability to tailor ads to you, my audience of five guys, is uncanny.

As someone who’s always been on the other side of Google advertising, though–making ads and trying to generate return on investment through them–I’m fascinated to see how long it takes Google to figure out what it is I’m really writing about.

Then, ideally, they can tell me.

The Reason We Celebrate This Day

Bikes, E-commerce Comments Off

May 222012

I’ve been so focused on bikes that I’ve been completely ignoring most of the nerd stuff that I pretend to like as a healthy distraction. For the most part, I even managed to stay blissfully ignorant of Facebook’s IPO, which–given the 11% drop the stock took today–was apparently the correct financial position to take.

What I couldn’t ignore, though, was the news today that Google’s Chrome browser had surpassed Internet Explorer and is now the number one browser in the world. Browser usage stats mean almost nothing to the majority of people in the world, but for anyone who’s done time as a web developer or designer–or worst of all, both–the end of IE’s long reign of terror has a significance that can’t really be explained with words.

But I’ll try: the whole world agreed to a standard for how the Internet should work, and then Microsoft did something completely different.

Some believe they were trying to claim the entire Internet by forcing everyone to live by their broken and poorly conceived standards, and others believe it was just dumb decisions and general incompetence, but either way, even Microsoft ended up sort of apologizing to the world with the countdown clock you see above.

So sure the victory’s muted a bit because even they ended up feeling bad about having made it, and the current versions of IE are apparently better (or so I’ve read), but there are things a man can be put through the he’s simply unable to forget, and Internet Explorer 6 is one of those things. In fact, for anyone who’s ever tried to make a web site work with all the various simultaneous incarnations of Internet Explorer, the only thing worse than IE6 was IE7, which took one tiny step toward working like every other browser out there, and then stopped. I didn’t really make the leap, leaving it stranded somewhere between IE6 and every other browser, which was so much worse than just having one jacked up rogue browser. Let me tell you what this meant in terms anyone can understand.

This meant the IT-something guy who wears the same Ramones t-shirt to work every casual Friday and doesn’t make eye contact when he talks–that guy you sort of laugh at behind his back because you’ve caught him talking to himself? Well, he had to write all these little exceptions just for IE6–and by that I mean like three-thousand or so lines of code–so that all the dumbasses still using IE6 would actually see something like your company’s web site and not an Atari Pong screen filled with random pieces of Times New Roman scattered around like body parts.

That time you caught him talking to himself? That was IE6. Or IE7. Or both.

I am not shitting you.

Say you built a really simple web site that displayed a few bits of navigation and a photo of Puscifer’s Maynard James Keenan exactly like this in all versions of Mozilla’s Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari on both Mac and PC, and even Opera:

This is how it would look in Internet Explorer 6:

Can you see the difference?

Well, once IE7 came along, you still had to deal with all the IE6 workarounds–shitty patched together CSS fixes and bits of crap conditional code–and once you got your pages to render the same in both IE6 and everything else, you’d check IE7 and everything would be shifted all the way to the right so that it was mostly off the screen.

It was like you woke up in hell one morning, and the dude in charge of running the belt sander on your skull was out sick, but his cousin was around with a nail gun, and then the next morning Belt Sander was back but Nail Gun had stuck around, too, and you were like What? That is literally and exactly how unfair it was. Exactly.

By the time IE8 came around, it was just like a small guy with a pair of pliers or something but you really weren’t paying attention anymore, and then IE9 was actually like someone with ice cream but by then you lacked the ability to relate to others at all so you just swung blindly at the ice cream and knocked it out of his hands and ran off, asking to have your skull sanded and nail gunned.

There was a big countdown party to the extinction of IE6 and stuff, but really, I’m a believer in the free market when it comes to that Darwinian stuff, and the only real cure is something entirely different. So Chrome’s rise to the top marks, for me, the real and actual end of our long, dark international nightmare, and probably the start of a much faster, richer and more secure international nightmare experience.

Yes, Microsoft’s IE6 experiment taught us all that nothing leads to progress like monopolies and the complete and utter breakdown of standards.

I told you I wasn’t writing about the bike industry today, so any parallels drawn would be completely without merit, by the way, and the fact that the post is even categorized “Bikes” makes no sense at all. That must be a mistake.

Fresh Pairs

E-commerce, Swine Comments Off

May 032012

What are you trying to tell me, underwear stalkers?

The march of interweb technology definitely seems to be detouring through some dark alleys these days.

Given the twenty or so odd hours I spend immersed in the bike industry, my various browsers roll past an endless string of e-commerce bike sites, which these days means I have something like ten thousand ads for cranksets and carbon 29er frames perpetually following me around. Since the whole Backcountry acquisition, Competitive Cyclist is particularly intense. They have some funky-ass ad functionality that compiles lists of anything you’ve looked at on their sites (applies to all the Backcountry properties) and keeps pushing it in front of you. It makes for a weirdly invasive and pushy vibe compared to the graceful homage to product and “come hither” bit that got them where there are today, and even the image quality on the little ads that follow you around everywhere you go seems out of place and below their standards. But if you need Amazon-like reminders that you looked at shit your life won’t be complete until you purchase, these ads are probably very effective.

Still, they creep me out.

They’re light years better, however, than the mysterious ads that cause you to question your life.

Case in point: why are ads for underwear from a company called “Fresh Pair” now following me everywhere I go? Yes, I’m living in a basement right now, and yes, there’s a bit of an ant problem, but I’m pretty anal retentive (literally) about keeping my clothes clean, thanks. And while I refuse on principle to visit their site, I have the impression that Fresh Pairs is marketed to a group of ultra-achieving males so busy reshaping the corporate world in their chiseled image that they need to schedule replenishment supplies of high-fashion, overpriced underwear.

Anyway, whatever system targeted me as an ideal candidate for underwear replenishment must have been using a complex underwear-condition-sensing algorithm that considers factors like:

Phone GPS – He’s a long way from home and has been there more than two weeks.
Purchase history – He seems to have purchased underwear at some point in the past.
Complex text crawling and processing – He’s living in a basement and rides bikes and stuff.
Government records – He appears to have at least one and possibly more jobs right now–likely ones that involve interacting with other people.
Demographic analysis – Based on age and gender, we suspect he is unable to take care of his own basic apparel needs without assistance.

So thanks, Fresh Pair. I appreciate all the attention, really, but the thing is, I would never spend on designer underwear. Nice try and all, but your data set is fatally incomplete. In addition to all those criteria causing your evil perma-cookies to annoy the hell out of me, I am also married, have children, and long ago gave up on impressing anybody–least of all myself. You are stalking the wrong cowboy, guys, and it’s doing neither of us any good.

If a company offering Subaru body shop work where to start stalking me with ads, then we might be getting somewhere.

How I Spend My Life

Bikes, E-commerce 1 Response »

Mar 282012

Image courtesy of my daughter, Riley, the most cynical 11-year-old ever. And of course she built her own blog, too.

Contrary to the whole point of many blogs, this one has always tried to be about something. I mean more than what I ate for breakfast or what crap I just bought. Mostly, that’s because I have no life and frequently get all pissed off about various marketing, e-comm and bike industry stuff. Lately, a few of you have noticed I’ve seemed almost prolific, posting a blog a day, five days a week–and yes, that’s what I’ve been doing. Pretty cathartic, this stuff.

Thing is, I find myself about to be working two fairly significant jobs pretty soon, in addition to trying to develop prototypes for my full-suspension design and occasionally sending some of my charming snark Dirt Rag’s way for Manic Mechanic and various other magazine locations they’re hoping to see shed some readership. Obviously, the plate’s kind of full, and here’s this Canootervalve.com thing that doesn’t pay any bills. That’s a tough one.

I’m thinking the most sensible solution is probably to roll this space into one or more of my actual jobs. I’d like it to always be a place for news about Project Danzig, the suspension project, but I’m starting to think it might make sense to roll this whole blog into my new job, a bike+web startup project that should start making some noise around the end of April. I have a lot riding on it, like moving my whole family 3,000 miles in order to make it happen, and I’m thinking I should make any really early announcements about it here.

But what do I know? My life is rarely entertaining to me, let alone any of you, so how about we test this form thing I just added, and you let me know what you think I should do with this blog.

Own It

Bikes, E-commerce Comments Off

Mar 272012

A while back I was on a kick about small retailers making and owning their own content. I never read my own posts (too many typos, and I hardly ever agree with myself in retrospect), but I’m pretty sure I’d been talking about independent bike dealers getting their shops on the Internet–however they can–and leveraging the great content they already have. Almost every shop is filled with people who race, and many of them also have interesting hobbies. The percentage of bike shop employees and hangers-on who dabble in music, film or writing tends to be considerably higher than that of the local bank or accounting firm, and, even if your particular crew seems to have little talent–maybe, particularly if you have little talent (have you seen what goes viral these days)–you should be creating content to identify your brand.

And your patron saint in this endeavor should be Red Bull, a company that seems to’ve spent five dollars creating a beverage and millions upon millions in marketing it. Consider this recent FastCompany article about Red Bull’s Media House. Media House is the content production wing of Red Bull, a 100,000-square foot building in Santa Monica, California that lets Red Bull basically bypass traditional marketing channels and go directly to their end users. Media House represents one of the first and most significant changes social media and direct contact has wrought on the world of conventional marketing. Why buy an ad during the Superbowl or blanket billboards when you can spend a reported $2-million creating your own film, The Art of Flight and use it to market your product directly to your users?

Oh, and you can also get them to pay for it.

According to FastCompany, The Art of Flight has topped more than one of iTunes’s sales charts for a week, selling for $10.

That’s right. Red Bull is actually selling us their advertising. And we’re buying it.

This isn’t because we’re stupid (though I guess that’s debatable), but because it’s really pretty amazing. If you’re in the bike industry, you know what I’m talking about: mind-blowing, downright inspirational acts of skill with everything from rally cars to trials bikes, captured on film and expertly pieced together into something amazing.

And they didn’t just happen to accumulate this content. Realizing they were basically selling a new, even nastier kind of soda, Red Bull and other “energy drink” companies started hoarding content immediately. Dietrich Mateschitz, who started Red Bull reportedly saw marketing as equally important to the product. If not more important.

Media House managing director Werner Brell is quoted in the article:

Whenever we did any event, or signed an athlete or executed a project, everything has been put on film or photographed. Stories have been told. It’s part of the DNA of the brand.”

Red Bull is likely to be a $500-million dollar company this year. On the scale at which a company of that size operates, their in-house marketing department poses a unique threat to conventional marketing companies. Mostly because it’s so much better.

I’ve been unfortunate enough to sit through multiple marketing, web-development, and countless other “creatives” meetings, and the standard method for dealing with a brand’s content usually goes something like this:

Marketing Guy: So then you provide us with the deliverables, your content, and we will turn it into something incredible, blah, blah, trust us.

Brand X: But what does that mean exactly? We’re struggling to make the content ourselves?

Marketing Guy: Partially that’s because you lack our Shitwad 4000 CMS system, which is based on hot new Photoshop-like web app technology that most hardcore programmers wet themselves laughing at and will be obsolete by the end of the year.

Brand X:: What?

Marketing Guy: Did I just say that out loud?

Brand X: Yes.

Marketing Guy: Ha, ha. I was just making sure you’re listening. Let me show you the work we did for Pepsi creating that awesome sans-serif custom font again, and then let’s critique that logo you drew yourself one last time.

Brand X: Uh, OK.

Marketing companies aren’t in the content game. They’re in the content container game. You know who’s always ultimately responsible for the content-driven success of a company? The company.

Any small business in existence should be capturing all the content it can and making as much of it available to end users as possible. I think bike shops are uniquely positioned to make this happen. Unlike Red Bull, you don’t even have the added inconvenience of a product nobody actually needs. You sell bicycles. Bicycles kick ass. Own your content.

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