Firstly there are only two real places you can buy a new book (other than the discount end of line retailers) and that is at Waterstones or WH Smith – who are a retailer of sorts.

Before I went out, I looked on Amazon for  target price. £7.49. Now that sounds like good value to me. £5.50 off list price but none in stock and my customers want this book NOW!

The Clean and Lean Diet 14 Days to Your Best-ever Body from Amazon.co.uk

So it was off to WH Smith, the confused retailer that seems to have ‘buy one get one half price’ on almost everything. Isn’t that what Thresher did before they went bust too? Well, they had the book in stock, but only one of them, so the deal wasn’t that effective. They had a price of £8.44 online. If I had managed to buy the two of them in the store each book would have cost £9.75, so not far off a decent price.

The Clean and Lean Diet 14 Days to Your Best-ever Body - from WHSmith.co.uk

And then onto Waterstones. The only decent sized book store in Nottingham. I was greeted by a friendly young man as I entered and asked him where on the four floors I would find this book. He confirmed they had five in stock at the full price of £12.99 on the third floor.

So I asked the kller questions.

Why could I buy the same book from them online for much less?

The Clean and Lean Diet 14 Days to Your Best ever Body from Waterstones.com

The answer?

Apparently, and I quote “Because they’re on the Internet, they don’t have the overheads we do.”

Oh, that’s it then, they’re not part of the same group or anything simple, or even based on exactly the same central distribution depot.

I wrote a piece a few weeks ago saying that their new logo was a bit silly and pointless, but did give them the get out clause that a new logo can be worthwhile if it marks a change in behaviour.

You judge for yourself whether this traditional retailer is behaving any different now it has an online presence, or if it is still making the same mistakes as Borders and all the other smaller book stores that have folded before them.

If you offer the same price online and offline (like Tesco and Asda and Sainsbury’s and everyone else with any retailing skill does) you may find that people still buy from your stores rather than looking at you as a showroom or a place of last resort.

So if something breaks, I always start from the position of seeing if I can repair it. We all know this is a more environmental route don’t we?

But when my almost new Morphy Richards slow cooker crockpot broke (because you can’t use it on the hob to get it going – doh!!), I thought it would be a simple case of buying a new crockpot and that would be that.

So I stumbled around the Morphy Richards site and spares are listed as accessories there. It’s a ceramic pot. They break. Surely they should describe it as a replacement? I did eventually find one at £15.86 with the benefit of free delivery.

Buying spares and accessories from Morphy Richards

Spares 2 Go had one at the bargain price of £42.63

Buying one from Spares 2 Go will cost you twice as much as a new unit

And Buy Spares had one at the rather more attractive price of £15.99, but by the time you added £4.98 shipping, this came to a less attractive £21.97

Getting closer. This part only costs a bit more than a whole new unit

And then we come to Amazon. A new one, from stock with free delivery for £19.99.

Amazon come in with a bargain price of £19.99

How do they do it?

For an extra £4.13 over the cost of the cheapest delivered replacement spare part, I get the whole of the rest of the unit in a shiny box with a new warranty all delivered to home within 3 days. So where is my incentive to repair?

I don’t want to turn this into a rant, but for any brand owner, it has to be a better long term proposition to make us stay with them by incentivising a repair.

I could just have easily gone away and bought another brand and all of the retailers have some stupidly priced products in the run up to the winter months.

If the price of the biggest and most breakable part was around half of the lowest price you could by the whole unit from scratch, there would be no debate, you’d get on and stick with it. But when it is virtually the same price, however well intentioned your repair/environmental principles, you’d be silly not to take a new one.

The end of an era as my Filofax is replaced by a Moleskine diary

It’s a bit of momentous day for me today as I have just been out and bought a Moleskine diary. This probably isn’t that momentous for most people, but it is an indication for me of a structural change in the way I work.

I bought a Filofax years ago – when I was still at college in fact – and have kept all of my diaries dating back over 20 years. I’ve seen off a few covers, but the format of the inners have remained broadly the same.

Over this 20 year period, I have now switched almost completely to a shared online diary – as most of us who work in groups have done too. Google Calendar is our calendar of choice and it works brilliantly. It allows others in the team to make appointments for me and then invite me along. When I get those invites, I add them to my Filofax diary, so the two should correspond perfectly.

But they never do.

Because I never carry my Filofax anymore.

It’s not that it has become any chunkier, it’s just that I now only carry a laptop bag with me 90% of the time, and this doesn’t have room in it for a big chunky Filofax. It does however have room for my new best friend the Moleskine notebook.

On my trip the US recently, I carried it everywhere and it is full of little notes and reminders of that trip as wel as ideas and notes for blog posts. It has quickly become a very treasured little possession. I liked it so much, that I have been out and bought the matching Moleskine diary. Week to view, with a detachable address book section in the back. On Amazon at a bit under £8.00. You too can be a bit like Hemingway yourself, by buying some of his heritage here.

I completely understand that this isn’t significant in any way to most people, but to me it shows that they way I buy and the way I behave is now different.

Filofax have changed and are doing lots of cool things with Twitter, Facebook and limited edition books, but they can’t really influence the size of the bag we carry and this alone has changed my behaviour.

I look at the branding work we do at Purple Circle. Yes it’s still branding. But it isn’t branding like we were doing 20 years ago. I’m looking at our own industry and wondering where the next structural change is going to come from. I suggest you do the same.

The new and rather honest ads by Dixons

This is some very brave advertising by Dixons and you can see the copywriter has had great fun in constructing it. Its beautifully written, there’s no doubt about that, but is it good for the long term health of the Dixons brand?

For me, ever since Dixons profits showed that they made more money selling warranties that we didn’t need than they did from the products themselves, they showed their true colours as sales charlatans. Their brad values were short term opportunistic profits. They became the brand that people loved to hate. John Lewis, with their sensible people offering sensible prices in sensible locations became the choice of sensible people and they filed that void left behind by the Dixons customers who deserted them. They became a better than viable alternative.

But just recently, I’ve started falling out of love with John Lewis. I don’t believe their people are that nice. I don’t actually believe they are never knowingly undersold as I can always find cheaper (they don’t want or allow you to compare their prices with online prices you see!) and I began to doubt the value of their brand promise when I (over)heard people being knocked back when they were trying to return things a few days out of warranty.

So after I’ve walked through the hallowed halls of John Lewis, played with their docking stations, left funny messages on the screens of their laptops, logged them into things they shouldn’t be and and had their sensible staff come along and offer to help me, will I go to Dixons last?

No. Actually I won’t. I’ll go home and buy it online from Amazon, or another online retailer where I know where I stand, I know where and when it will be delivered and where I know that, at the moment at least, I’m a valued customer.

Good try Dixons, but I still think you’re too shady to get my custom in the near future. Keep this up though and I’ll certainly come back into store to look.

Updated

Another brilliant written and crafted ad from Dixons. I’m starting to think they actually deserve some success in what they are doing as they have captured most of our thoughts and more importantly, our actions, pretty damn well.

Another brave ad from Dixons capturing the spirit of what we're actually doing!