Category: Marketing

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Microsoft to admit Mac OS X is better?

According to MacRumors.com, Microsoft launched a new ad campaign targeting the price difference between Apple and MS Windows-based notebooks.

Advertising’s “unique selling proposition”  ?is: “pay less, get all you need”, thus prospect buyer are (supposed to be) lead to focus their attention on a sort of “second – third? – best” option. Who really need a better computer with a superior operating system? Ok, Windows is still far behind Mac OSX but for daily life activities, who cares?

Although Microsoft ad wizards did their best to hide this campaign’s secondary meaning, the “confession of inferiority” is blatant. It won’t change the future (and the present) of the operating system market, nevertheless this communication strategy is an interesting signal.

Time only will tell whether Microsoft choice will backfire or boost Windows sales.

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Kidnapped by your own (XEROX) printer

Marketing geniuses strike back. Buy a printer (expensive, BTW) bundled with a supplies agreement bundled, and, only after paid the device, discover that you need a password to have your own printer working. How do you get the password? Easy: subscribe the supplies agreement at a non-negotiable price, and “own” the printer as soon as you pay for the supplies agreement. The bottom line: you think you do own a printer, while actually don’t. That’s what happens – in short – if you purchase a Xerox printer with the PAGEPACK option.

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Intesa Sanpaolo Internet Banking’s Catch 22

It might happens for some odd and unpredictable reason (at least from the user perspective) that the Internet Banking stops granting you access to your account (incorrect userid or password, they say.) Then you have to call customer assistance by phone, and the automated system, before allowing to talk to a human being, asks for your userid, password and one-time-password.

But that information are incorrect (in fact you have no longer access to your account), and you can’t talk to anybody to fix the problem unless you have a working userid and password (that you have not). You just need to wait, and at the end of the day some human being will answer your call.

It would be better to answer first, isnt’it?

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Intesa Sanpaolo: when marketing meets security

Recently Intesa Sanpaolo (born after a merge between Banca Intesa e Istituto San Paolo) moved its Internet banking authentication system from a password-based to a one-time-password-based access.

They sell that “innovation” – ever happens in the ICT business – as a major increase in IT security and then as a benefit for the customer, but if you think for a while this is not entirely true. Or – better – this might be true from the perspective of a marketing manager. But it is not from the customer standpoint.

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