Do you know who I am?

Hello.

Have you all gone to sleep? Only asking, given lack of comment being left below these words of wisdom over past few weeks. Maybe we are not being provocative enough. Hopefully this week’s dose of enlightenment will change that.

Now as you know Cicero hates shopping and loathes shops with all the zealotry of a Taliban fundamentalist. But of course Cicero has to shop. He could not possibly be seen about town in last year’s toga and sandals.

To get round this wee problem he has taken to buying stuff from the World Wide Web. God bless, Tim Berners-Lee.

And in the interests of research of course so that Cicero might better advise Marketing Grand Fromages, he has in recent weeks been signing up with a variety of retailers so that they might keep him up to date with all the latest news from the fashion catwalks.

You will as fashion aficionados yourself be familiar with how this process works. You hand over a few bits of information about yourself so that the retailer in theory is able to send you information and offers relevant to you. And the more relevant the offer, the more likely you are to buy. It is really quite simple.
And yet Cicero cannot believe how so many retailers can get it so wrong. And when they get it wrong they undermine their brand, lose sales opportunities and increase the likelihood that any emails received will go from in-box to trash can without even touching the sides.

To give you one example.

A major retailer whose name rhymes with ‘text’ and who despite collecting enough information on me at the outset, have and continue to send me details of the latest fashions and fabrics......for women. Now they might know something that many of you may also think but it can be confirmed that Cicero has not, nor ever will have, any interest whatsoever in fashions for Distaffs. And should anyone think or know otherwise, beware the Super Injunction. It baffles that they should make an error of this magnitude but other cases are known of similar careless unthinking errors from these guys.

And then this week Cicero got an e-mail from another purveyor of togas and sandals. Talk about chalk and cheese. This was good.

It came from the owner of the business, not a faceless company apparatchik. It felt really 1-1. He even knew Cicero was a man. And this man’s passion and enthusiasm for his brand really shone from the page. Why can’t all brands behave in this way?

Cicero was thanked for being a customer. He was ‘delighted to have me as a customer’. He even described Cicero as ‘fantastic’ and as ‘one of their best customers’. Wow!

As a result he made this aged customer feel really special. And so you can bet your last sesterces that Cicero would buy from this man again. See, genuine customer engagement programmes really do have the power to work.

Effective customer engagement marketing is so simple-just show you recognise, know and understand me. Why do some businesses keep getting it so wrong? Even Abba understood this-it is all about ‘knowing me, knowing you’. Sorry couldn’t resist.

Is it only me..............but the earth isn’t moving for me.

Near to where I live, at a busy road junction, there are some road works which has meant that the traffic has needed to be controlled by temporary lights. And the result is chaos.

Now not being of Irish extraction I have no idea why the road is being dug up but the Council trained Navvies have dug up a foot wide trench for about 50 yards. To my untrained eye it is my guess that they are putting in some new pipes. They have been doing this for about 3 weeks now and given that their wee trench is still open to the elements, again I would surmise that we are still a wee while away from the wound in the road being sown up, sutured and traffic once again allowed to flow as nature intended.

In the meantime I am baffled why such a small tear in the highway has taken so long to be repaired. Of course, silly me, this is a State run project, why should I expect this to be done with anything other than great inefficiency and great disruption to the public such people are supposed to serve?

But consider this.

A few weeks back Japan was hit by a massive earthquake and tsunami causing untold disruption and mayhem, death and destruction. Far more than caused by the digging up of my local High St. And yet there they managed to have a 25 mile stretch of ripped up, torn up and seriously rippled motorway back up and running with Hondas, Toyotas and Nissans moving along it smoothly within 2 weeks. Let me repeat that-the Japanese restored to full working order a severely destroyed 25 mile stretch of motorway within 14 days. And they did this at the same time as nuclear power plants were threatening to do a Hiroshima; when much of their infrastructure was in tatters; and when the rice and sushi was unable to get to the shops for the road diggers packed lunches.

Now it might only be me but surely we have every right to expect that our Council Navvies should be able to replace and repair a 50 yard slit trench a lot quicker than the 3 weeks taken so far. Indeed if my maths are correct if they were Japanese the slit trench would have been dug up and repaired before lunch on the first day.

But then of course such working practices would put Council Navvies out of a job and we couldn’t have that, could we? Would that not infringe their human right of a job for life?

Have a great week.

Sis felix. Et sis fortunatus.