Arnold Beekes

The other day I was wandering about the high-tech content of ecommerce. Every day there are new online stores being opened, where you can buy anything from tennis rackets, to books, to diapers. Placing the order on the website and planning the delivery is most of the high tech activity. Then a large part of the ecommerce business is done offline, i.e. the physical delivery of the goods to your doorstep by couriers. This is actually the high-touch component of ecommerce. Every day there are a number of delivery vans (from TNT, PostNL, UPS etc) cruising through my neighborhood. And these couriers know everything about what the people buy in that neighborhood.   We always have the same man, he is very nice and polite and knows the names of the people in my street, where they live (the number), what they buy, how much and when. He knows my buying behavior across different ecommerce platforms. He knows that about ma and about any person in the neighborhood. It looks ...

In retail there is a battle for survival. Bricks and mortar stores are having huge problems to deal with the competition from E-commerce. Most players are rather creative in trying to capture the attention of potential customers. Last week I did buy a Sonos loudspeaker. These are rather pricey, so I had just put it on my wish list. By coincidence I saw that Sonos now had a special offer. This offer includes a full year free service from a streaming music service called Deezer. The regular price of this service is €9,99 per month and I now have free access for a year. That seems like a great deal for me. But who will benefit from this deal , is it Sonos or Deezer.? Probably Sonos has to pay a certain amount to Deezer to include this offer. After one year, I can cancel my subscription to Deezer and do a market scan for the right offer, This can be Deezer, but also one of their competitors like Spotify. Then Deezer runs the risk that they will loose me as a customer. For Sonos, ...

Last week I did go to Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. It was a costly trip by train and the admission fee was also much too high. Oh yeah and it rained cats and dogs, so that sets the scene! Basically (former) students are sharing their work in various places. However I did not see anything that I would consider to be useful, with the exception of a good-looking bike. The intent was to allow the manufacturing to happen here, rather than in China. The rest of the pots, carpets, lights and sites was not making me enthusiastic. I might be mistaken, but isn’t the goal of good design to make a connection between the product and me, the customer?   And it was not only my experience; I did hear the same reaction from more people, that the show was very disappointing. It looks like something is wrong with the way we are educating students. They should learn to design with the customer in mind, right from the start! Also I did ask the Design Academy whether they were focus...

Especially in retail, small business owners make very long hours, each week. During daytime and part of the evening they are open to serve customers and when the shop is closed they have to do the admin, ordering and replenishing the stock. They are in this routine, 6 days per week. That is quite challenging, physical as well as mental. The risk is that they have no time and energy left to scan and research the market. The only newness they bring are new products, which they got delivered from their distribution channel. This means that they might be up for a big surprise, and it is likely not a nice surprise. E.g. a retailer of organic foods might be very satisfied with a steady growth in sales. What they are missing is that the large supermarkets are also very aware of this trend. These supermarkets are thus adding much more organic products to their collection. And that means that the niche retailers for organic products are loosing more market share than they initially...

Last week I wanted to buy an album from Ana Tijoux, as a MP3 file. So, I did go to the Apple iTunes store in The Netherlands. However that album was not available there. Then I did go to the iTunes store in the US. They did have the album, but I couldn’t buy it because I have no bank account in the US. That was also the limitation while trying to use my credit card. Then I did go to Amazon in the US and there was the same story. The album was available but I could only buy it with a US based bank account. A year ago, I did read about the fact that you could use your American Express membership rewards points to get books from Amazon. I thought that was a super deal, so I immediately tried to use my points and exchange them for books. I won’t bother you with the nuisance; but is took me and their customer service staff several weeks, to find out that this program was only available in the US. This shows that even these well-known global companies are not truly global in thei...