How to Bring Innovations to Market

How Aha! Really Happens

Now, I am not providing these videos as a point where everything ends but rather where we start our journey to discover who we are. You will find many more thinkers who have devoted their lives to enhancing learning, education, creativity, thinking, and in general human capacity. Let us follow their lead and see where the journey takes us at the end of the semester.

As you can tell, I am a fan of Sir Ken Robinson, and for good reason. I hope you will watch the videos with care and attention they deserve, they are more about your future than my past. I also enjoyed reading the works of Edward De Bono who is a noted expert on thinking and teaching thinking. Here are a few more words and phrases that may lead you to other fertile grounds: “abductive reasoning”, “lateral thinking”, “divergent thinking”, “design thinking”.

Post comments if you like, take notes, open your mind, learn how to forget to learn more.

PhotoXpress.com Ad

Why do companies resort to questionable practices just to get a few customers? Marketing is not about getting customers at all cost; it is about offering the greatest satisfaction to them within the boundaries of societal norms, laws, and ethics. Otherwise, every marketer would be a con man, and some may think that it is already the case. As a professor of marketing, this is how I see the profession.

On the back cover of the last issue of Layers Magazine was an ad. The tagline caught my attention and I first applauded the company. They did the first thing right by getting my attention. It said “15,000 Photo Downloads Per Month for $9.99 /month“. That is a great offer, nay, a terrific one. Then it continued with “Rendezvous with 6.5 million images. Prices beyond words“. A nice photograph accompanied the words. I decided to check out their website and found an attractive Web site at photoXpress.com. You may want to check out their claim yourself. Realizing that I may send some people to their site despite my intention to the contrary, I am providing the Web address and the ad that I scanned for you to be the judge.

What I found on the site did not seem to have anything to do with their claim in the ad. If you paid $9.99 /month you would be entitled to 1 (one) download per day, amounting to 30 downloads per month, somewhat close to 15,000! The “Monthly 25″ plan gave you 25/month for $37.50/month. And so on. Clearly there was a mismatch between the ad and the reality. I wanted to find out more and I wrote a message to them from their Talk to us form and asked where might I find the advertised subscription plan. In a day or two, I got the following answer:

Your ticket “Subscriptions / 15,000 photo downloads per month for $9.99/month” has been answered.

Hi, Thank you for your e-mail. Please feel free to visit our new Subscription Plans section http://www.photoxpress.com/Info/Upgrade Note that our minimum plan is for $9,99 and currently we have over 15,000 photos available on the site. Kind regards, PhotoXpress C.S. Department Follow us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/PhotoXpressFree Join us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/PhotoXpress

Or read your answer by logging into your PhotoXpress account and clicking here:
http://admin.photoxpress.com/Member/Support/Questions

Best regards,
The PhotoXpress.com Team

I did not find the answer to my question and I was a bit more confused especially by the explanation of 15,000 photos. They have more, much more than 15,000 photos, so the use of that figure sounds a bit, well, arbitrary to me. (Their facebook page reports “Nearly 10 million Photos and Illustrations”) One category I clicked on, Food & Drink, yielded 889,917 hits. Truth be told, I did not count them! But defending the claim “15,000 photo downloads” by simply saying they have more than 15,000 photos is on shaky ground, don’t you think? Why stop there, go ahead and say “150,000 downloads per month” as there are more than that many on the site?

Not having an account there, I had no way of logging in to read the response. If there was more to it I could not see it. So, I replied to their feedback@photoxpress.com address in the mail footer and reminded them that they had not answered my question and I was primarily interested in the truthfulness of their claim. I also asked that they kindly replied to my e-mail rather than posting an answer I had no way of reading. Needless to say, I have not yet heard from them and I am not holding my breath.

Will I ever buy anything from them? Most likely not! I don’t know about you, but if someone talks in a confusing manner, even before the first rendezvous I get a bit uneasy! I wanted to learn a little more about the membership and started reading their FAQ, nicely organized with a TOC at the top. I clicked on number 7 “Daily quota and Downloading” which jumped to the relevant entry #7 where I found “7. [Intentionally deleted] ” (as of January 8, 2011). Come again!

They have a decent quality collection, images appear to be of good quality, the variety seems to be there. Why on earth did they use the obviously misleading claim? Could it be an overzelous ad agency? Maybe an intern came up with the idea and nobody thought of critically reading the short copy. Whatever the reason, I hope someone pays attention to this problem and takes corrective, and proactive action. An explanation of this ad will be a good start. Truth in advertising is not just an empty idea. It is the law and it needs to be upheld by everyone, buyer and seller, if we expect to benefit from marketing communications.

Now, let me share this with my colleagues to use in the marketing ethics discussions …

Watch the following video about Qualtrics survey software, then follow the instructions in another post to get yourself an account at Qualtrics. Once your account is activated, you will find many more useful, helpful, informative tutorial video programs on different parts of the software. Although there will be a general introduction to using Qualtrics in class, you need to work with it, experience how it works, and become sufficiently comfortable with it before you need to use it for your projects. If you try to learn it when you need to use it, you will find that to be far less efficient and effective in carrying out your responsibilities.

CEO of Qualtrics speaks on the software

Edit Survey Tab

My Surveys Tab in Qualtrics

Are you looking for instructions on how to create your own account on Qualtrics? Here they are.

Turkish American Cultural Society of RI

Atlantic RI (GoFaucet.com) on its own domain

International Business Development Association (IMDA) (visible soon)

St. Pierre’s Shoes (visible soon)

One of these sites has already gone live under its own domain and the others will be ported to their respective domains soon. Congratulations to all for a job well done, I am proud of your work and so should you be.

[Show as slideshow]

I hope all is going well.  I was a student in your class back in 2004 (Marketing on the Internet).  I went through the motions of the course but didn’t really fully understand or apply the course to the real world.  I didn’t have ambition and lacked motivation.  This was a huge mistake on my part.  The major project of the course was to create a website for an established business.  Our group chose my father’s company – JJ’s Appliance Repair.  We constructed a very well made website but I never registered the website or secured an address for it and the computer I used in College is no longer.

I was wondering if you still had this site saved in the Providence College database, or have a draft of it saved in your files.  If you do not have this I plan to create a website from scratch for my father’s business.  I realize now that the Internet is an integral piece of marketing/advertising your business properly and am seeking to help my father achieve this goal for his business.  I need to make up for what I already had at my fingertips.

Please let me know if you can help.

Sincerely,

Joe Student

To which I replied:

I remember you and your father’s business being your project. Good to hear from you, I hope everything is going your way. It is also interesting to hear your hind-sight take on the course. If you do not mind, I would like to share your message with my students this semester, I will suppress your name.

I do not have a copy of your Web site. However, in those days you kept your projects on the StudentWeb server and with some amount of luck you may be able to find it. First, remember whether it was saved under your account or one of your team mates’ account. Then check the studentweb.providence.edu to see if it is still there. It may not be. Then, you may contact the administrator of StudentWeb and see if they have a backup copy that they can resurrect. If none of this works, then you are back on square one.

Starting this semester, I am teaching the course using a freely available blog/CMS (content management system) software called WordPress ( www.wordpress.org ). I suggest that you look into that. It will make your life significantly simpler. My academic and photography Web sites both run on WordPress platform. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of “themes” that allow you to give the look you want and the content is very easy to update. Take a look at my syllabus for MOTI and read the blog section for a couple of entries on WordPress that I posted for my students. There are a couple of recommended books which you may find helpful. If you decide to take on this and try WordPress and occasionally stumble, write to me and I will try to help you out; I still have a chance to make you learn the material, better late than never!

Take care and keep in touch.

Cemal Ekin

A little after sending the above message, I heard from “Joe” who enthusiastically told me to share this story and added:

You can definitely share my message with your students. Out of embarrassment for myself please do suppress my name. I was very naïve in college and definitely took some of my courses and studies for granted. I am doing very well …
…
<snip some text>
…
Here is another story if you would like to use it:

I distinctly remember arguing with you about my grade at the end of the year – I think I received a C or C– or something. I completed all of the coursework and our team received a really good grade on the website and presentation. If you took into account the projects and coursework that I completed and calculated it based strictly on my grades I probably should have ended up with a strong B if not an A-. I was pretty upset to see that I had been given such a low grade. Looking back now, I think the C was gratuitous because you probably should have failed me for being stupid enough not to take the final/easiest step of getting the website on the Internet and taking advantage of the online platform for my father’s business. Looking back on my College career, all I cared about was the grade and not so much learning and understanding the work behind the grade. I guess it’s never too late – I am sure you will be hearing from me about WordPress. Thanks again.

Sincerely,

Joe

I am grateful that “Joe” wrote to me and gave me an opportunity to share his experiences during and after his college years.

Thank you Joe.

Here is the list:

• Firefox, the latest version, get it from its source
• Must-have Firefox add-ons
  • FireBug, excellent debugging tool for HTML and CSS
  • ColorZilla to pick colors from anywhere on the screen, it will provide the HEX code for the color
  • MeasureIt, helps determine the pixel sizes of screen elements and areas
• Useful Firefox add-ons
  • Screen Grab, it will capture the entire screen or the entire document, including the parts that are below the viewport, and save it as an image
  • IE Tab, will run Internet Explorer engine in a Firefox window or tab; useful for quickly looking at a page for IE rendering.
  • ZOTERO, it will make keeping a record of your bibliography notes very easy, along with auto insertion of citations in proper format and automatic creation of bibliographies; this is installed on college lab computers but you may enjoy it more on your own computer (Go to their site after installing it and follow the directions for MS Word Integration)
• Other software
  • Notepad++, a very good all purpose text editor with HTML and CSS savvy
  • FastStone Image Viewer, a very good image viewer and quick editor; it can resize and make simple adjustments
  • TopStyle Lite, an able CSS editor; look for it at the bottom of the page you will visit when you follow the link
  • FileZilla, an FTP client (download the “client” version not the “server”)

You may bring your laptop computer to class if you like, I will use most of these from my notebook computer and show you what they do. They will make your Web development efforts easier, smoother, and less painful (yes! it can be painful!)