Blog Assignment 3

Idea for the Topic:

After some long and serious thinking about m paper topic, I believe chances are I’ll be tackling the issue of digital books, perhaps even concentrating on e-reading software itself.

The part I am most interested in researching is why some people choose to switch to e-books and why some resist doing so. Also, I would like to go into the limitations I have found in current E-reading programs and see if these have any influence in people’s decision to start reading e-books or stay with paper.

Why is this topic interesting to you?

Two years ago I was very reluctant to the idea of digital books. I loved paper, I still love paper actually, but since I started the MBA program and had to share a small living space with other people I have noticed there is a big problem with physical books, and that is that they take space. It may not seem as much to some people, but if you are a pack rat like me who likes to drive all the way to Half-Price book stores and buying anything that has an interesting description in the back, or just an awesome cover, your living space starts to get taken away by piles of unread books.

Not the only pile I have, just the most presentable.

Another thing related to the MBA program that moved me to buy an iPad is the number of readings we have to do for each class. Usually I printed out the articles and carried them around in the back up and did the readings at school, and then the articles remained in my backup for a few weeks, until I did some cleanup. Said cleanup of course was just taking out the bunch of papers out and leaving them in a pile. The pile is still here in my room, and I have no idea from what class most of those articles and cases cam from, I have no idea where I am going to put it and I think I will end up throwing them out even if that means losing my notes on them or losing the whole article if I never had a digital back up in my computer.

On one hand I don't want to get rid of these papers, especially if they came in a really expensive packet. But I don't know what to do with them.

 With an iPad, I can keep all the articles and cases I want in one place, well ordered in folders and subfolders with highlights and even annotation in the margins.   

Even though e-readers have made my life a lot easier in some ways, I have found several limitations in the most popular programs. For instance, the Kindle iPad app offers almost no options to organize the books in your iPad. The software tries to capture the feeling of a book rack, but sadly it also has the functionality of one. The functionality I ask for may be, possibly, something the common reader might not want or need since they might at best carry five books with them at any given time. But if you are in an academic setting or you need to have and peruse through several text books for reference then better organization is a must. Another thing that would greatly benefit my interaction with digital books would be the ability to have bookmarks with tags. Back when I worked developing software, I used to put tags in my language books so I could easily find how to do certain things with each language. So far I have not been able to find anything similar in digital documents or books.

My big interest here is to find a way to improve the experience and see if my ideas on how to make it better would have any value to people other than myself.

What is the connection to the gathering and identification of customer insights and/or the design of valuable customer experiences?

The connection is that my focus is finding why people switch, why they believe it is a better experience than paper books. An interesting article I read the other day said that reading books in Kindle or iPad is replacing watching TV in some people’s lives as the activity they do most nights. This is interesting because it means these people were not reading paper books before. I would like to know why they are reading books now.

My secondary focus would be to find a way to improve the customer experience if I can detect certain needs that are not being addressed by the current readers.

Cite and briefly describe at least one article that is related to your topic.

I have found two academic articles so far.

One comes from Mintel and it is about the current book industry. It has a section on e-books and it explains some of the benefits people have found in reading free e-books over going to the library.

The other one is called Social Cognitive Theory and Adoption of E-Book Devices. As the abstract says “The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors that will lead to a person adopting an e-book device. In this paper, a social cognitive theoretical framework is utilized to understand an individual’s intention to adopt an e-book device like the Kindle, Nook or iPad. A conceptual model is proposed, which focuses on the antecedents to a person’s adoption behavior and is empirically tested through a survey of Australian youth.” Sounds like fun.

I would like to find more articles focused on functionality rather than correlations on purchase habits, though. 

Blog Assignment 2

The customer experience I have chosen for this blog entry spans a few decades and starts even before I was born, but bear with me. Now, when you are a comic book fan you can be a huge fan of DC Comics (Batman, Superman) or a big Marvel Comics fan (Spider-Man, Iron Man). Personally, I prefer to read DC Comics but I have to say Marvel provided a much better and more personal experience. It’s a shame that most of their comics during the 80s and 90s were written by badly paid interns and other illiterate scum instead of actual writers, though.  

Still, I have to give credit where credit is due: Marvel from the 60s and all the way to the mid-90s was really good at creating an experience for its fans, and it’s all thanks to one man. This man here:

Stan “The Man” Lee

Stan Lee is the co-creator of Spider-Man, Hulk, Fantastic Four, X-Men, Iron Man and he worked as Editor in Chief of Marvel Comics for many years; but even if he had never written anything he would still be remembered as the best huckster who ever lived.

Stan Lee became Marvel’s living mascot, motivational speaker and spokesman; he excelled at these functions by exploiting some of the Strategic Experiential Modules in ways that are downright genius.

The SEM that I can identify as the pillar of Stan Lee’s contribution to the Marvel brand is Feel. Stan Lee had his own column which appeared in every comic published by Marvel where Stan talked about what projects Marvel was doing at the time, but he didn’t just talk like a salesperson spewing about new products; Stan talked like a man with a mission, like he was part of something greater than just a publishing company and everybody who read the comics was invited.

One of the greatest things Stan Lee ever did for Marvel fans was to make them feel as something more than customers or even fans. In fact, when Stan Lee speaks to Marvel fans he doesn’t even call them that, what he calls them is “True Believers.” He made fans believe they were part of something greater and not just consumers of a product. They were not just Marvel fans; they were card carrying members of The Merry Marvel Marching Society. They actually had honest to God cards saying that. For one dollar you could join the society a get a card, official MMMS documents, a record with Stan Lee’s voice welcoming you to the society, pins, buttons and other stuff.

The most fascinating aspect of this character Stan Lee plays in public is that I can’t recall one single instant where he has broken out of character. Not one! Stan Lee is always smiling, always has a positive attitude and he would always finish his speeches with either one of his two catch phrases “Nuff said!” and “Excelsior!” He still does this today with his twitter account. Here is a good example of Stan Lee being Stan Lee, an interview with Conan O’Brian from 1995.

Another SEM Stan Lee liked to use was Think. Back in the 60s Stan was writing several comics every month and he had a lot of problems keeping his stories straight, which lead to some inconsistencies and plot holes once in a while. For this Stan Lee created the famous Marvel No-Prize. In case a fan… sorry, excuse me. I meant in case a True Believer found a plot hole in one of his comics, he was encouraged not to complain, whine and moan about it but to come up with his own explanation of why that happened. So, for instance, if Spider-Man suddenly forgot he could use his web to make a parachute for himself, a True Believe had to come up with a rational or semi-rational explanation of why Spider-Man suffered from temporal amnesia (maybe Doctor Octopus hit him really hard in the head a few pages back?) The True Believer with the most creative explanation would win a No-Prize, which as the name implies is no prize at all. Well, not unless you count the Stan Lee’s approval of your ability to come up with silly solutions for his bad writing.

The last SEM that relates to Stan Lee’s work is (no pun intended) Relate. One of the things Stan Lee had noticed in the 60s was that not only little kids were reading comics back then, but also high school and college kids and yet there were no heroes they could relate to. Superheroes back then were millionaire playboys, super smart scientists or god-like aliens and suddenly Stan Lee creates this superhero who is just this geeky high school kid called Spider-Man. It sold like hot cakes because it was the superhero they would be if they got bitten by radioactive spiders.

It’s hard to argue with the success Stan had, especially with the kind of loyalty he managed to cultivate in his legion of true believers. There was even a point when they were buying every magazine published by Marvel whether they liked it or not. It didn’t matter if it was any good or not, as long as Marvel published it they would buy it. This led to the creation of the term Marvel Zombie, although I guess they prefer to stick with True Believers.

Well, I guess there is only one way to finish this blog assignment, and this is how: